General QAnon

This Huffington Post piece on Michael Flynn is just chilling:

… In early 2017, Flynn was one of the most powerful men in the world. After decades in military intelligence, the former three-star lieutenant general had landed the role of Trump’s national security adviser. Four years later, he would appear on conspiracy theorist podcasts with hosts who claim vaccines contain Communist microchips and who interview men that say they’ve had sex with space aliens. In that world, Flynn is something between a saint and a folk hero ― a key figure in the QAnon movement, which believes a secret cabal of international pedophiles controls the country and an anonymous insider known as “Q” is sending out secret instructions to bring the cabal down. 

QAnon believers and far-right militias came to believe that Flynn would help them take control. Days after the Dec. 12 rally, the Three Percenters militia threatened action to overturn the election results. “We are ready to enter into battle with General Flynn leading the charge,” one of the largest Three Percenters groups said in a statement on Dec. 16. Multiple Three Percenters would later be charged in connection with the Capitol riot, including a 48-year-old man who allegedly threatened to kill his family if they contacted law enforcement.

Even as Flynn became a symbolic military leader for these extremists, he retained close ties to the president. After his brief stint as national security adviser ended in disgrace, Trump reportedly floated naming him chief of staff or FBI director and hosted him in the Oval Office. 

And when Trump pardoned Flynn late last year, he set the former general loose to indulge in QAnon fanfare and promote the same falsehoods that insurrectionists took to the Capitol building.

Personally, I think there was something wrong with Flynn long before he hooked up with Trump. When the Obama administration fired him from the top Pentagon Intelligence job it was clear that he had gone off the rails and was turning into some kind of Jack D. Ripper. But there’s no doubt that he really lost it over the last few years. What I didn’t realize is that he’s now considered the de facto leader of the QAnon movement:

After initially agreeing to help prosecutors, Flynn in December 2018 hired Sidney Powell, soon to be infamous nationwide for her wild election theories, to handle his case. His brother Joseph Flynn and sister Barbara Redgate also began making inroads on Flynn’s behalf into QAnon communities and other extremist spaces, apparently as a fundraising gambit. Court records show that as of 2019 Flynn owed around $4.6 million in unpaid legal fees.

His siblings set up a legal defense fund for him in 2017 that actively courted far-right conspiracists. A 2018 benefit for the fund featured speakers including a prominent anti-vaccine activist-turned-QAnon influencer and the founder of the anti-government Oath Keepers militia. 

When Flynn emerged with Powell by his side, the two began claiming that he was the victim of injustice and “deep state” plots. Flynn’s new martyr status helped gain him the affection of QAnon believers, whom he increasingly encouraged. 

“I wonder to this day whether it is cynical fundraising, trying to crowdsource his legal bill, or how much of this QAnon stuff he actually believes,” said Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

There is no reason it can’t be both and I think it is. He’s been a genuinely, paranoid weirdo for a long time. There’s no reason he can’t turn a profit at it:

On the Fourth of July last year, Flynn posted video of himself performing an apparent “oath” to QAnon and using one of its most notorious slogans. “Where we go one, we go all,” he said, standing in front of a backyard fire pit with five others who repeated after him.

Trump pardoned Flynn on Nov. 25, by which time Flynn was a full-fledged MAGA star and a central part of QAnon’s apocalyptic myth-making.

“As much as a folk hero that he is to the pro-Trump movement, he’s like a deity to QAnon believers. Mike Flynn is apparently clued in to the secret plan to save the world,” Holt said.

QAnon supporters dubbed themselves “Digital Soldiers” after a line in one of his speeches, they held signs proclaiming his innocence at rallies, and a QAnon influencer released an album “inspired by General Mike Flynn” with songs like “ThanQ for the Pain.” Each development in his legal troubles also became part of the movement’s constantly shifting lore, more moves in the chess game that believers saw Trump and Flynn secretly playing.

Trump’s pardon freed Flynn to capitalize on his celebrity status among extremists, including selling QAnon merchandise and launching a Digital Soldiers media company. Following the pardon, Flynn immediately went on a victory lap of pro-Trump and QAnon podcasts to laud their efforts to clear him of the charges he’d pleaded guilty to and to share their conspiratorial beliefs. 

“Once he gets his pardon, it’s like he’s been unleashed and he runs straight toward these conspiracy theory outlets,” Holt said. “It almost seems like he’s trying to make himself some sort of media figure, he’s trying to fulfill this role that all these conspiracy theorists think he will fulfill.”

Flynn’s first post-pardon interview was with the fringe online show Worldview Weekend, where he spread baseless claims of election fraud and insisted that Trump actually won “by a massive landslide and he’ll be inaugurated this January.” Describing the election as “probably the greatest fraud our country has experienced in our history,” Flynn pushed the narrative that the fate of the United States rested on Trump’s ultimate victory.

There’s much more and it’s very disturbing. He has recently made noises indicating that there won’t be any last minute Q victory (duh) and it “devastated” the Q believers. But he said something vague in passing that gave them something to hang on to. You never know when he might need a cash injection.

The fact that Trump actually hired this freakshow as his national security adviser, pardoned him and brought him back into the White House in the waning days of the administration as he was plotting his insurrection doesn’t seem to bother any of the Republicans in Washington and it certainly doesn’t bother the Trump voters. But it should. Trump put a crazy man in charge of US national security. That alone should disqualify him from ever having a voice in politics again. Sadly, because of the mass brainwashing of nearly half the American public, it’s actually a selling point.