Another tidbit in the inevitable saga of the Trump presidency

[Gen. Mike Flynn] was one of the most extreme voices in Mr. Trump’s 77-day push to overturn the election, a campaign that will be under scrutiny as the former president’s second impeachment trial gets underway next week. Mr. Flynn went so far as to suggest using the military to rerun the vote in crucial battleground states. At one point, Mr. Trump even floated the idea of bringing Mr. Flynn back into the administration, as chief of staff or possibly F.B.I. director.

[...]

And now, safely pardoned and free to speak his mind, Mr. Flynn has emerged from the Trump presidency much as he entered it — as the angry outsider who pushes fringe ideas, talks of shadowy conspiracies and is positioning himself as a voice of a far right that, in the wake of the Capitol riot, appears newly, and violently, emboldened.

[...]

Mr. Flynn’s dark view of Islam and eagerness to cultivate President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia have given way to an embrace of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory, and a readiness to question the very fabric of American democracy. He has swapped a government job and an obsessive focus on “radical Islamic terrorism” for selling QAnon-branded T-shirts and a new media partnership with conspiracy theorists called Digital Soldiers.

  NYT

Is there a brain virus unleashed by Putin on America?

“This country is awake,” he declared at the pro-Trump rally in Washington last month. “We will not stand for a lie.”

It was the night before a mob attacked the Capitol, and the crowd on hand in Washington’s Freedom Plaza — some of whom would take part in the coming violence — left little doubt about where Mr. Flynn stood.

“We love you, we love you, we love you,” they chanted. None of the other speakers at the rally — a boldface-name collection of Trumpworld characters like Roger Stone and Alex Jones — got as enthusiastic a reception.

MAGAts love them some military affect. They're warriors in a death cult.

With Mr. Trump now in his post-presidency at Mar-a-Lago, a loose coalition that draws together militia members and conspiracy theorists along with evangelical Christians and suburban Trump supporters is searching for direction. Call it the alt-truth movement, and if it is to coalesce into something more permanent, it may well be, at least in part, because figures like Mr. Flynn continue to push false claims of how a deep-state cabal stole the election.

And let's not forget about Eric Prince's early designs to provide Trump with a personal army.

It was the story of the Russia investigation as a malevolent plot that first began priming tens of millions of Americans to believe Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories about the deep state. As one of the heroes of that narrative, Mr. Flynn became an ideal messenger when it was refashioned into the demonstrably false claim that Democrats and their deep-state allies had rigged the election.

Within days of being pardoned on Nov. 27, Mr. Flynn began sharing those views in the right-wing media.

In some appearances, he described himself as a marked man. “I gotta make sure I’m a moving target, because these son-of-a-guns, they’re after me, in a literal and a figurative sense,” he told listeners of “The Matrixxx Groove Show,” a QAnon podcast.

MAGAts love to pretend victimhood. Very much akin to the right-wing "Christian" movement that grasps onto the part where Jesus promises his followers reward for doing nothing...

In the final Beatitude, Jesus said, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). This is a promise of blessing for those who suffer for doing the right thing. Jesus warned that His followers would face persecution since, “If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20).

They HAVE to be persecuted; therefore, they believe they are. Or at least they claim they are.

In an interview with Newsmax, the conservative channel, [Flynn] suggested Mr. Trump could impose martial law in swing states he had lost and rerun the elections.

“People out there talk about martial law like it’s something that we’ve never done,” Mr. Flynn said. He noted that the military had taken over for civilian authorities dozens of times in American history, though he did not mention that it had never done so to help decide an election.

[...]

Throughout his military career, in fact, all most of Mr. Flynn’s fellow soldiers had known about his politics was that he was a registered Democrat. Then came 2016, and the sight of a retired general leading chants for the imprisonment of Hillary Clinton, a former senator and secretary of state.

I had no idea he was a Democrat.

Mr. Flynn has described his family as “definitely lower middle class,” and he joined the military without the West Point pedigree of many of his peers. He graduated instead from the Army’s Reserve Officer Training Program at the University of Rhode Island, a short drive from the town where he was raised.

Yet he rose to be a lieutenant general, among the most respected military officers of his generation. He helped reshape the Joint Special Operations Command at the height of the war in Iraq, and ran military intelligence in Afghanistan during the Obama administration’s troop surge. In 2012, President Barack Obama named him director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Then his career unraveled. After only two years, he was forced out when his attempt to reform the sprawling agency left subordinates squabbling and his superiors alarmed.

Mr. Flynn, though, claimed that he had been fired for refusing to toe the Obama administration’s line that Islamist militants were in retreat. His position was vindicated with the rise of the Islamic State, and Mr. Flynn quickly became something of a cult figure among conservatives for what they saw as his brave stand against the Obama administration’s perfidy.

As his relentless focus on Islamist militancy intensified, his views veered hard to the right. He argued that militants posed a threat to the very existence of the United States, and at times crossed the line into outright Islamophobia, tweeting “fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”

In Mr. Trump, he found a presidential candidate who shared his dark and conspiratorial view of Islam.

[...]

When Mr. Flynn ran the D.I.A., his dubious assertions were so common that subordinates came up with a name for them: “Flynn facts.” (In January, he was among those banned from Twitter with Mr. Trump.)

So it was no great stretch to see Mr. Flynn hurling conspiracy theories about an election that federal election-security experts considered among the best run on record, and for Mr. Trump to listen.

[...]

[Flynn's]plan for paying [legal debts he amassed fighting off the Russia investigation] appears to rely on leveraging his public persona into cold, hard cash. There are the T-shirts and other merchandise, which he is selling through a company called Shirt Show USA. The website features shirts emblazoned with #FightLikeAFlynn and camo trucker hats with the emblem “WWG1WGA,” a reference to a popular QAnon motto, “Where we go one, we go all.”

Then there is his new media venture, Digital Soldiers, which will publish reader-submitted stories. Mr. Flynn is building it with UncoverDC, a website that has pushed QAnon and conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 pandemic and President Biden.

The tenor of Digital Soldiers is unmistakably QAnon, a movement centered on the claim that Mr. Trump, secretly aided by the military, was elected to smash a cabal of Democrats, international financiers and deep-state bureaucrats who worship Satan and abuse children.

This past summer, Mr. Flynn posted a video of himself taking QAnon’s “digital soldier” oath. To many of the movement’s followers, Mr. Flynn ranks just below Mr. Trump. Some have speculated that he is the mysterious figure known as “Q,” the purported government insider with a high-level security clearance who began posting cryptic messages in 2017 about the deep state trying to destroy the president.

[...]

The phrase “digital soldiers” is drawn from a speech Mr. Flynn gave shortly after the 2016 election during which he inadvertently laid the groundwork for the conspiracy theory. He compared the Trump campaign to an insurgency — a theme that QAnon adherents would later adopt for themselves — with “an army of digital soldiers.”

[...]

As one QAnon devotee noted in an IRC channel, a relatively dated online chat room technology favored by those particularly suspicious of possible surveillance, “If they kill or capture Trump, Flynn can still carry out the mission.”

Nuts.  Dangerous nuts.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.