Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certification

[admin]

Need A Domestic Terrorist? Dial 9-1-1
by Michael Moore
Rumble podcast, Ep. 156
Premiered Jan 17, 2021

[admin]

Unpacking The Capitol Riot & Four Years of Trump’s Bulls**t
by Trevor Noah
The Daily Social Distancing Show
Jan 19, 2021



A look at new info coming out of the Capitol riot, at the major figures who waited for a catastrophe to take a stand against Trump, and at the hypocrisy of Republican calls for “unity” in the aftermath. #DailyShow #TrevorNoah #DonaldTrump

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Rioter planned attack, wanted to trap lawmakers and 'turn on gas': Prosecutors
by Luke Barr
ABC eyewitness news
Tuesday, January 19, 2021 4:45PM

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Federal authorities are continuing to charge rioters who took part in the siege on Capitol Hill.

These are the most recent charges:

1st conspiracy charges filed against Virginia man

The Justice Department has filed its first conspiracy charges from the Capitol riot against a Virginia man who they allege was an apparent leader of a group of militia members who were part of the mob that stormed the building.

Thomas Edward Caldwell is identified in an FBI affidavit as a member of the Oath Keepers. An agent alleges that he helped organize a group of eight to 10 of his fellow members to storm the Capitol with the intention of disrupting the counting of the Electoral College vote.

The group can be seen in video walking uniformly through a crowd of rioters trying to gain entrance to the Capitol.

Those members included co-conspirators Jessica Watkins and Donovan Crowl, who were charged for their role in the riots earlier this week. In social media posts, both Crowl and Watkins referred to Caldwell as "Commander," according to the court documents.

While inside the Capitol, Caldwell allegedly received Facebook messages telling him to "seal" in lawmakers in the tunnels under the Capitol and to "turn on gas." Other messages appeared to be trying to give him updates on the locations of lawmakers, the affidavit states.

Other texts reveal the extensive planning and even potential attacks that he and other members of the Oath Keepers were mounting leading up to the riots.

On Jan. 1, Caldwell allegedly messaged an individual recommending a room at the Comfort Inn Ballston in Arlington, Virginia, saying, "This is a good location and would allow us to hunt at night if we wanted to."

After the riot, Caldwell allegedly posted a Facebook message stating, "Us storming the castle. Please share. Sharon was right with me! I am such an instigator!" the affidavit states. He later wrote, "We need to do this at the local level. Lets storm the capitol in Ohio. Tell me when!"

Man seen wearing 'Murder the Media' shirt

A rioter who posed in front of the U.S. Capitol while wearing a shirt with the words "Murder the Media" emblazoned on it has been charged with illegally entering the Capitol. The phrase had also been etched onto a door inside the building, according to federal court documents.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Nicholas DeCarlo admitted that he entered the Capitol, but said he did so as a "journalist."

The charging documents against DeCarlo state that he is not on record as a credited journalist.

Rioter seen attacking police with a bat

A man who was captured on surveillance video attacking law enforcement with a bat at the entrance of the Capitol turned himself in to the Metropolitan Police Department on Monday.

Emanuel Jackson is allegedly the rioter seen in photos the FBI released to the public, according to federal court documents.

On the surveillance video, Jackson is allegedly seen making a fist and repeatedly striking a Capitol police officer while attempting to force himself into the building, his arrest affidavit states.

Later, he is "clearly observed" with a metal baseball bat striking a group of both Capitol and D.C. police officers, according to the court document.

It is unclear whether Jackson has retained an attorney.

Houston police officer

A longtime Houston Police officer who resigned after he participated in the riot has been federally changed.

Tam Dinh Pham initially denied his involvement in the siege when he was interviewed at his home in Richmond on Jan. 12, according to court documents.

After the interview, Pham agreed to hand over his cellphone, which investigators noticed had no photos from Jan. 6, the affidavit states. However, the "Deleted Items" folder contained photos and images of him inside the Capitol building.

When agents advised Pham that it is illegal to lie to the FBI, he admitted that he was part of the crowd that stormed into the Capitol but denied taking part in any violence, according to the court documents.

Woman in Louis Vuitton sweater

A woman has been charged for participating in the riot after at least six people identified her by the Louis Vuitton sweater she was wearing that day.

In one video, Gina Bisignano allegedly was seen taking part in a skirmish with police trying to protect the Capitol building, according to an FBI affidavit.

Bisignano was allegedly part of a crowd that crushed a screaming police officer while a rioter grabbed his gas mask. At one point, Bisignano allegedly told the officer, "You hurt my f------ leg," the court documents state.

In a separate video, Bisignano is allegedly seen feet away from police, telling them to stand down.

"We the people are not going to take it any more," she could be heard saying in another video, according to the affidavit. "You are not going to take away our votes. And our freedom, and I thank God for it. This is 1776, and we the people will never give up. We will never let our country go to the globalists."

After entering the Capitol, Bisignano was allegedly heard telling other rioters, "We need Americans. Come on guys. We needs patriots! You guys, it's the way in. We need some people."

2 Texas rioters, including a former Marine, accused of violence

Two Texas men have both been arrested over their roles in the violence at the Capitol, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.

Ryan Nichols and Alex Harkrider were identified from photos they posted to their social media accounts, along with several threatening messages calling for a violent overthrow of the government, according to an arrest affidavit.

In one video posted online, Nichols, a former Marine, can allegedly be seen yelling into a bullhorn in the direction of a large crowd, saying, "If you have a weapon, you need to get your weapon!" the federal court document states.

Nichols also allegedly said "This is the second revolution right here folks!" and "This is not a peaceful protest," according to the affidavit.

Both Nichols, 30, and Harkrider, 33, are seen in videos trying to force entry into the building, with Nichols allegedly spraying what appears to be a large canister of pepper spray in the direction of officers. Nichols was also allegedly in possession of a crowbar, the court document states.

The FBI also noted several other social posts from Nichols, including one on Dec. 24 that showed a bullet and stated, "By Bullet or Ballot, Restoration of the Republic is Coming," according to the affidavit. Another post on Dec. 28 stated, "Pence better do the right thing, or we're going to MAKE you do the right thing."

Nichols was once featured on "The Ellen Degeneres Show" in 2018 after he drove 18 hours to rescue dogs before Hurricane Florence made landfall in North Carolina.

It is unclear whether Nichols and Harkrider have retained attorneys.

Member of extremist group Three Percenters

Robert Gieswein -- part of the Oath-keepers, an extremist group related to The Three Percenters -- was charged with assaulting a federal officer with bear spray and a baseball bat.

According to court documents, Gieswein "encouraged other rioters as they broke a window of the Capitol building; entered ... and then charged through the Capitol building."

An FBI affidavit confirmed that Gieswein runs a private paramilitary training group called the Woodland Wild Dogs and that he was identified from a patch for that group that was visible on a tactical vest he wore during the attack on Congress.

The affidavit said Gieswein gave a media interview echoing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and that Congress needs "to get the corrupt politicians out of office. Pelosi, the Clintons ... every single one of them, Biden, Kamala."

Retired NYFD firefighter

Freeport, New York, resident Thomas Fee surrendered to the FBI Tuesday morning at the bureau's resident agency on Long Island.

Fee, a retired NYFD firefighter, allegedly sent a relative of his girlfriend a selfie of himself inside the Capitol, prosecutors said. He's been charged by authorities.

In the text message, Fee, 53, allegedly wrote that he was "at the tip of the spear," a reference to the Capitol rotunda, according to the court documents.

Fee drove to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5, and a license plate reader in New York picked up the Chevy Tahoe he was driving upon his return on Jan. 7, the court documents state.

At his court appearance Tuesday, a judge ordered Fee to avoid all political gatherings and to avoid the U.S. Capitol and all state capitols upon his release. He must also surrender his two guns -- a pistol grip shotgun and an antique rifle.

Federal prosecutors also recommended evaluation and treatment for substance abuse and mental health treatment.

Fee posted his home as collateral for her $100,000 bond.

It is unclear whether Fee has retained an attorney.

Former FIT student

Nicholas Moncada, a 20-year-old former student at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, was taken into custody at his Staten Island home Monday. He allegedly livestreamed his "storming" of the Capitol on Jan. 6, prosecutors said.

Moncada allegedly also posted a selfie of himself inside the Capitol, captioning it, "Outside Pelosi's office."

He was recognized by fellow FIT students, who then alerted the FBI to his involvement, according to the court documents.

During an appearance in a Brooklyn federal court Tuesday, Moncada was ordered to stay away from potentially antagonizing political events and speech after his release on $250,000 bond. His travel is also restricted to New York and Washington, D.C.

"There's obviously troubling conduct here," Assistant U.S. Attorney David Kessler said, though he noted the government did not object to Moncada's release on bond.

The bond was signed by Moncada's mother, grandmother and aunt.

Moncada was an illustration major, but had not been enrolled at the school since May 2020 and did not receive a degree, a spokesperson for FIT told ABC News.

In a statement to ABC News Monday, Moncada's attorney, Mario Gallucci, said he is not facing any violent charges.

"Mr. Moncada was taken into custody this morning by the FBI and has been charged with various sections of the United States Code for trespassing inside a restricted building and trying to disrupt or impeded the conduct of Government business, as well as, trespassing on the floor of various Government rooms including the House of Congress, the lobby adjacent to the floor and the Rayburn Room of the House of Congress," Galluci said. "I do not believe he is being charged with committing any acts of violence. Mr. Moncada denies any participation in the effort to overthrow the Government, and he looks forward to defending his good name."

Dozens of rioters who participated in the siege have already been taken into custody.

Last week, the man seen wearing a "Camp Auschwitz" hoodie, Olympic gold medalist swimmer Klete Keller and several members of law enforcement were arrested in connection to the riot.

[admin]

Trump bids farewell to Washington: 'We will be back in some form'
by Jill Colvin
Associated Press
JAN 20, 2021 5:28 AM

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Only a few hundred people showed up to see him depart.

-- As Trump Exits Washington, He Tells Modest Crowd "We Will be Back in Some Form", by Washington Post

WASHINGTON — WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — His presidency over, Donald Trump said farewell to Washington on Wednesday but also hinted about a comeback despite a legacy of chaos, tumult and bitter divisions in the country he led for four years.

“So just a goodbye. We love you,” Trump told supporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland where he walked across a red carpet and boarded Air Force One to head to Florida. “We will be back in some form.”

Trump departed office as the only president ever impeached twice, and with millions more out of work than when he was sworn in and 400,000 dead from the coronavirus. Under his watch, Republicans lost the presidency and both chambers of Congress. He will be forever remembered for inciting an insurrection, two weeks before Democrat Joe Biden moved into the White House, at the Capitol that left five dead, including a Capitol Police officer, and horrified the nation. It was on Trump’s on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2017, that he had painted a dire picture of “American carnage.”

The first president in modern history to boycott his successor’s inauguration, Trump is still stewing about his loss and maintains that election won by Biden was stolen from him. Republican officials in several critical states, members of his own administration and a wide swath of judges, including those appointed by Trump, have rejected those arguments.

Trump refused to participate in any of the symbolic passing-of-the-torch traditions surrounding the peaceful transition of power, including inviting the Joe and Jill Biden to the White House for a get-to-know-you visit.

He did follow at least one tradition: The White House said Trump left behind a note for Biden. A Trump spokesman, Judd Deere, declined to say what Trump wrote or characterize the sentiment in the note, citing privacy for communication between presidents.

Members of Trump’s family gathered for the send-off on the military base along with the president’s loyalists, who chanted “We love you!” “Thank you, Trump” and “U.S.A.” Four Army cannons fired a 21-gun salute.

Speaking without notes, Trump said his presidency was an “incredible four years.” He told the crowd that he and first lady Melania Trump loved them and praised his family for its hard work, saying they could have chosen to have an easier life.

“It’s been something very special. We’ve accomplished a lot,” Trump said, citing the installation of conservative judges, creation of the space force, development of coronavirus vaccines and management of a robust pre-pandemic economy. “I hope they don’t raise your taxes, but if they do, I told you so,” he said of the incoming Biden administration.

He acknowledged that his was not a “regular administration” and told his backers that he would be returning in some form. He said the Trump campaign had worked so hard: “We’ve left it all on the field,” he said.

Without mention’s Biden’s name, Trump wished the new administration great luck and success, which he said would made easier because he had laid “a foundation.”

“I will always fight for you,” he told the crowd. “I will be watching. I will be listening.”

Before arriving at the airport, Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House that being president had been the honor of his lifetime.

“We love the American people, and again, it has been something very special,” he said over the sound of the Marine One helicopter. “And I just want to say goodbye but hopefully it’s not a long-term goodbye. We’ll see each other again.”

Trump and first lady Melania Trump landed in Florida a more than an hour before Biden was to be sworn in as the 46th U.S. president. Air Force One flew low along the Florida coast as Biden’s inauguration ceremony flashed across televisions on board. A loud cheer went up from the crowd awaiting his arrival when the plane made a low approach to Palm Beach International Airport as the “Star-Spangled Banner” played over loudspeakers.

Several hundred supporters lined his limousine route to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. It had a party atmosphere. Trump and American flags waved, with many supporters wearing red, white and blue clothing.

Shari Ackerly parked her three-wheeled motorcycle along the road, painted with red, white and blue stripes and “Trump - Make America Great.” A Trump-Pence campaign sign laid against the headrest, the vice president’s name crossed out.

Ackerly said she wanted to show her support for Trump, saying she supported him since he gave Sen. Ted Cruz the nickname “Lyin’ Ted” in the 2016 Republican debates. “He told it like it is,” she said.

In Florida, he will face an uncertain future.

Aides had urged Trump to spend his final days in office trying to salvage his legacy by highlighting his administration’s achievements — tax cuts, scaled-back federal regulations, normalizing relations in the Middle East. But Trump largely refused, taking a single trip to the Texas border and releasing a video in which he pledged to his supporters that “the movement we started is only just beginning.” In his final hours, Trump issued pardons for more than 140 people, including his former strategist, rap performers, ex-members of Congress and other allies of him and his family.

Trump will be in Florida with a small group of former White House aides as he charts a political future that looks very different now from just two weeks ago.

Before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, Trump had been expected to remain his party’s de facto leader, wielding enormous power as he served as a kingmaker and mulled a 2024 presidential run. But now he appears more powerless than ever — shunned by so many in his party, impeached twice, denied the Twitter bullhorn he had intended to use as his weapon and even facing the prospect that, if he is convicted in his Senate trial, he could be barred from seeking a second term.

For now, Trump remains angry and embarrassed, consumed with rage and grievance. He spent the week after the election sinking deeper and deeper into a world of conspiracy, and those who have spoken with him say he continues to believe he won in November. He has lashed out at Republicans for perceived disloyalty and has threatened, both publicly and privately, to spend the coming years backing primary challenges against those he feel betrayed him.

Some expect him to eventually turn completely on the Republican Party, perhaps by flirting with a run as a third-party candidate as an act of revenge.

For all the chaos and drama and bending the world to his will, Trump ended his term as he began it: largely alone. The Republican Party he co-opted finally appeared to have had enough after Trump’s supporters violently stormed the Capitol, hunting for lawmakers who refused to go along with Trump’s unconstitutional efforts to overturn the results of a democratic election.

White House cleaning crews worked overnight Wednesday and were still going as the sun rose to get the building cleaned and ready for its new occupants. Most walls were stripped down to the hooks that once held photographs, and offices were devoid of the clutter and trinkets that gave them life.

While Trump has left the White House, he retains his grip on the Republican base, with the support of millions of loyal voters, along with allies still helming the Republican National Committee and many state party organizations.

The city he leaves will not miss him. Trump rarely left the confines of the White House, except to visit his own hotel. He and his wife never once ate dinner at any other local restaurant and never ventured out to shop in its stores or see the sites. When he did leave, it was almost always to one of his properties: his golf course in Virginia, his golf course in New Jersey, his private club and nearby golf course in Palm Beach, Florida.

The city overwhelmingly supported Biden, with 93% of the vote. Trump received just 5.4% of the vote — or fewer than 18,600 ballots — not enough to fill the Washington Capitals hockey arena.

Associated Press writer Darlene Superville and Deb Riechmann in Washington and Terry Spencer in West Palm Beach, Florida contributed to this report.

First Published January 20, 2021, 5:28am

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CNN describes crowd at Trump's departure as 'the smallest' of his presidency
by John L. Dorman
Business Insider
1/20/21



• President Donald Trump was met with a small farewell crowd at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday.
• CNN's Jim Acosta said it was "definitely the smallest crowd size of the Trump presidency."
• Trump boasted throughout his presidency of crowd sizes at his rallies.

After departing the White House for his last time in office, President Donald Trump gave a farewell speech at Joint Base Andrews that conspicuously lacked one thing he has long craved: large crowds.

The small crowd greeting the president and the first lady was a far cry from the raucous rallies that defined his turbulent presidency.

Those who attended the brief event, including many of Trump's family members, waved flags and cheered as Trump spoke.

CNN's Jim Acosta described it as "definitely the smallest crowd size of the Trump presidency," a remark that could be seen as a dig at Trump's constant attention to crowd size.

The tone for his presidency was set in part by a combative news conference in which his first press secretary, Sean Spicer, made false claims about the size of the crowd at Trump's inauguration.

Trump inauguration crowd photos were edited after he intervened: documents released to Guardian reveal government photographer cropped space ‘where crowd ended’
by Jon Swaine in New York @jonswaine
The Guardian
Thu 6 Sep 2018 06.00 EDT


A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies of Donald Trump, left, and Barack Obama. These pictures were taken by Reuters, and were not the edited NPS images. Photograph: Staff/Reuters

A government photographer edited official pictures of Donald Trump’s inauguration to make the crowd appear bigger following a personal intervention from the president, according to newly released documents.

The photographer cropped out empty space “where the crowd ended” for a new set of pictures requested by Trump on the first morning of his presidency, after he was angered by images showing his audience was smaller than Barack Obama’s in 2009.

The detail was revealed in investigative reports released to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act by the inspector general of the US interior department. They shed new light on the first self-inflicted crisis of Trump’s presidency, when his White House falsely claimed he had attracted the biggest ever inauguration audience.

The records detail a scramble within the National Park Service (NPS) on 21 January 2017 after an early-morning phone call between Trump and the acting NPS director, Michael Reynolds. They also state that Sean Spicer, then White House press secretary, called NPS officials repeatedly that day in pursuit of the more flattering photographs.

It was not clear from the records which photographs were edited and whether they were released publicly.

The newly disclosed details were not included in the inspector general’s office’s final report on its inquiry into the saga, which was published in June last year and gave a different account of the NPS photographer’s actions.

By the time Trump spoke on the telephone with Reynolds on the morning after the inauguration, then-and-now pictures of the national mall were circulating online showing that Trump’s crowd fell short of Obama’s. A reporter’s tweet containing one such pair of images was retweeted by the official NPS Twitter account.

An NPS communications official, whose name was redacted in the released files, told investigators that Reynolds called her after speaking with the president and said Trump wanted pictures from the inauguration. She said “she got the impression that President Trump wanted to see pictures that appeared to depict more spectators in the crowd”, and that the images released so far showed “a lot of empty areas”.


Sean Spicer delivers a statement on 21 January 2017 while a television screen shows a picture of Trump’s inauguration. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

The communications official said she “assumed” the photographs Trump was requesting “needed to be cropped”, but that Reynolds did not ask for this specifically. She then contacted the NPS photographer who had covered the event the day before.

A second official, from the NPS public affairs department, told investigators that Spicer called her office on the morning of 21 January and asked for pictures that “accurately represented the inauguration crowd size”.

In this official’s view, Spicer’s request amounted to “a request for NPS to provide photographs in which it appeared the inauguration crowd filled the majority of the space in the photograph”. She told investigators that she, too, contacted the NPS photographer to ask for additional shots.

The NPS photographer, whose name was also redacted, told investigators he was contacted by an unidentified official who asked for “any photographs that showed the inauguration crowd sizes”. Having filed 25 photographs on inauguration day, he was asked to go back to his office and “edit a few more” for a second submission.

“He said he edited the inauguration photographs to make them look more symmetrical by cropping out the sky and cropping out the bottom where the crowd ended,” the investigators reported, adding: “He said he did so to show that there had been more of a crowd.”

The investigators said the photographer believed the cropping was what the official “had wanted him to do”, but that the official “had not specifically asked him to crop the photographs to show more of a crowd”.

A summary in the inspector general’s final report said the photographer told investigators “he selected a number of photos, based on his professional judgment, that concentrated on the area of the national mall where most of the crowd was standing”.

Asked to account for the discrepancy, Nancy DiPaolo, a spokeswoman for the inspector general, said the cropping was not mentioned in the final report because the photographer told investigators this was his “standard artistic practice”. But investigators did not note this in the write-up of their interview.

The newly released files said Spicer was closely involved in the effort to obtain more favourable photographs. He called Reynolds immediately after the acting director spoke with Trump and then again at 3pm shortly before the new set of photographs was sent to the White House, investigators heard. Another official reported being called by Spicer.

At about 5.40pm that day, Spicer began a now notorious press briefing at the White House in which he falsely stated: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period.” A spokeswoman for Spicer did not respond to a request for comment.

The inspector general’s inquiry was prompted by a February 2017 complaint through the office’s website, alleging NPS officials tried to undermine Trump and leaked details of Trump’s call with Reynolds to the Washington Post, where it was first reported. The inspector general found no evidence to substantiate the allegations.

The Guardian asked in its June 2017 freedom of information request for the identity of the complainant who sparked the inspector general’s inquiry. But this, and the entire complaint, was redacted in the released documents.

Jim Acosta
@Acosta
Definitely the smallest crowd size of the Trump presidency at the departure ceremony.
6:44 AM Jan 20, 2021

[admin]

‘We All Got Played’: QAnon Followers Implode After Big Moment Never Comes
by Jack Brewster
Forbes Staff, Business
Updated Jan 20, 2021, 03:06pm EST

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"Q" Archive

TOPLINE

As Joe Biden was sworn in as president, QAnon followers finally saw their hope for the “storm”—when President Donald Trump would bring down the “deep state” and expose a far-reaching child-sex-trafficking ring—disappear, leaving followers of the unhinged conspiracy theory in despair and searching for answers, while one of the most prominent adherents gave up.


Baying at the moon? Protesters confront Capitol Police inside the U.S. Capitol Building on January ... [+] WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

KEY FACTS

• QAnon adherents appeared to have fractured into two groups on popular far-right message boards Wednesday, with some realizing their crackpot conspiracy theory was a fraud, while others tried to somehow keep the flame of the Crazy Candle alive.

• Ron Watkins, the founder of 8chan who is one of several people suspected of being the anonymous poster “Q” who spawned the conspiracy theory, conceded shortly after Biden was sworn in, telling his supporters it was time for believers to keep their “chins up” and “go back to our lives.”

• Up until the final minute of Trump’s presidency, some QAnon adherents were cheering for Trump to do something spectacular, with one instructing fellow followers Wednesday morning to “pray” because the next five hours would “determine the fate of the world.” They got that part right.

• That optimism unraveled for some as the day wore on, especially after Trump gave no hints of a plan to take over the U.S. in his final speech at Joint Base Andrews, with one user lamenting on Telegram that “it simply doesn’t make sense that we all got played.”

• Moderators of some pro-QAnon message boards warned followers who turned their backs on the conspiracy theory after the inauguration would be banned:

Ben Collins
@oneunderscore_
Moderators on the biggest QAnon forum now banning people who don't keep the faith after Inauguration. They're having a hard time enforcing it.
"Can someone explain how this is not over" reads the top response

Q FREE BANS FOR ANY NEGATIVE POSTS, PLEASE don't clog the site up ... this IS NOT over HAVE patience
1 hour ago by God_Bless_America1 [M] stickied +654 / -6
FREE BANS FOR ANY NEGATIVE POSTS, PLEASE don't clog the site up ... this IS NOT over HAVE patience

12:09 PM Jan 20, 2021

• Others sought to move the goalposts, picking out passages from Trump’s speech and Eric Trump’s farewell post on Twitter as signs of hope.

• By midday, a new spin to the conspiracy theory gripped the far-right message boards: Biden has been their savior all along, a twist multiple QAnon influencers threw their support behind.

• “Biden is Q” a post on the donald.win read, while others brushed aside that theory and urged believers to stick with Trump.

KEY BACKGROUND

At high noon on Wednesday, QAnon followers believed that Trump would announce through the emergency broadcast system that “the storm” had come, so goes the wacky conspiracy theory. Democrats and other members of the deep state would be arrested, and Trump would continue being president.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

After the clock struck noon and Biden officially became president, some message boards turned increasingly vitriolic. “It’s over and nothing makes sense . . . absolutely nothing,” one user said. “He sold us out,” another believer wrote. “It’s revolution time.” Some of the big-name QAnon influencers were unswayed, however. “We have just witness the biggest crime ever committed in the history of the United States all on live television,” @MajorPatriot, a prominent QAnon influencer whom Trump retweeted multiple times before his account was suspended by Twitter, said on Gab, moments after Biden was sworn in.

CRUCIAL QUOTE

“So far, Q believers seem to be in shock over Joe Biden actually being sworn in and becoming president,” Mike Rothschild, who recently published a book about conspiracy theories and tracks the QAnon conspiracy online, told Forbes Wednesday. “This type of failure was something that most of them never allowed to penetrate their minds, so to see it happening—and them rendered powerless to stop it—is truly jarring.”

TANGENT

Some QAnon followers believed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was part of the “plan.” When Trump opted not to pardon Assange before leaving office Wednesday, many QAnon adherents were disappointed.

SURPRISING FACT

QAnon message boards lit up during Trump’s farewell speech after some believers noticed there were 17 flags around the stage. The number 17 is code for QAnon followers, as the letter “Q” is the seventeenth letter of the alphabet.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website. Send me a secure tip.
Jack Brewster
I cover national politics for Forbes. Previously, I've written for TIME, Newsweek, the New York Daily News and VICE News. I also launched my own startup, Newsreel, a politics news platform for a young audience.

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Biden Inherits the Mess of a Lying Madman
by Jimmy Kimmel
Jan 21, 2021

[admin]

Army falsely denied Flynn’s brother was involved in key part of military response to Capitol riot
by Dan Lamothe, Paul Sonne, Carol D. Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis
Washington Post
Jan. 20, 2021 at 8:42 p.m. MST

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Lt. Gen. Charles A. Flynn is the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, plans and training. (Lisa Ferdinando/DOD)

The Army falsely denied for days that Lt. Gen. Charles A. Flynn, the brother of disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, was involved in a key meeting during its heavily scrutinized response to the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Michael Flynn Official portrait, 2012

[Michael] Flynn served as the assistant chief of staff, G2, XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, from June 2001 and the director of intelligence at the Joint Task Force 180 in Afghanistan until July 2002. He commanded the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade from June 2002 to June 2004 and was the director of intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command from July 2004 to June 2007, with service in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) and the Iraq War (Operation Iraqi Freedom). He and his superior, General McChrystal, streamlined all intelligence so as to increase the tempo of operations and degrade the networks of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.:24 He served as the director of intelligence of the United States Central Command from June 2007 to July 2008, as the director of intelligence of the Joint Staff from July 2008 to June 2009, then the director of intelligence of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan from June 2009 to October 2010. Flynn was reprimanded for sharing classified U.S. intelligence information on the Haqqani network to Pakistani officials in 2009 or 2010. The network, which had been accused of attacking American troops, was a proxy ally of Pakistan.

-- Michael Flynn, by Wikipedia

Charles Flynn confirmed in a statement issued to The Washington Post on Wednesday that he was in the room for a tense Jan. 6 phone call during which the Capitol Police and D.C. officials pleaded with the Pentagon to dispatch the National Guard urgently, but top Army officials expressed concern about having the Guard at the Capitol.

Flynn left the room before the meeting was over, anticipating that then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who was in another meeting, would soon take action to deploy more guard members, he said.

“I entered the room after the call began and departed prior to the call ending as I believed a decision was imminent from the Secretary and I needed to be in my office to assist in executing the decision,” Flynn said.

The general’s presence during the call — which has not previously been reported — came weeks after his brother publicly suggested that President Donald Trump declare martial law and have the U.S. military oversee a redo of the election. There is no indication that Charles Flynn shares his brother’s extreme views or discharged his duties at the Pentagon on Jan. 6 in any manner that was influenced by his brother.

It makes sense that Flynn, as the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, plans and training, would have been involved in the Pentagon response. The D.C. Guard answers to the president, but the president delegates control over the force to the defense secretary and the Army secretary, essentially leaving it to top Army officials to make critical decisions regarding the District’s military force. Flynn, however, is not in the chain of command.

The Army’s initial denial of Flynn’s participation in the critical Jan. 6 meeting, despite multiple inquiries on the matter, comes as lawmakers demand transparency from the Defense Department in the aftermath of one of Washington’s gravest national security failures, which left one police officer and four rioters dead, the Capitol desecrated and the lives of Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress endangered.

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Capitol building breached by pro-Trump mob. Supporters of President Trump crossed barricades and began marching toward the back of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (The Washington Post)

The episode highlights the challenge for the Army in having an influential senior officer whose brother has become a central figure in QAnon, the extreme ideology that alleges Trump was waging a battle with Satan-worshiping Democrats who traffic children. Michael Flynn, who previously ran the Defense Intelligence Agency and left the Army as a three-star general, has espoused QAnon messages, and QAnon adherents are among those who have been charged in connection with the attempted insurrection. In November, Trump announced he had pardoned Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

The night before the Capitol siege, Michael Flynn addressed a crowd of Trump supporters at Freedom Plaza near the White House, saying: “This country is awake tomorrow. . . . The members, the members of Congress, the members of the House of Representatives, the members of the United States Senate, those of you who are feeling weak tonight . . . we the people are going to be here, and we want you to know that we will not stand for a lie.”

McCarthy, who left office as the Trump administration concluded Wednesday, said in a Jan. 12 interview with The Post that he was not on the call, implying he could not address whether Flynn was. But he defended Flynn’s character, saying he has known him for years.

“Charlie Flynn is an officer of an incredibly high integrity,” McCarthy said. “Multiple combat tours. He has buried a lot of people. This guy has given a lot to this country. It is incredibly awkward for this officer every day for what is going on with him and his brother, but he puts his head down in, and he is locked in to serve the Constitution.”

Army officials, before and after that interview, denied that Flynn appeared during the call.

“HE WAS NOT IN ANY OF THE MEETINGS!” one Army official said on Jan. 12 in an email to The Post.

Like several others interviewed, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

After being approached with the accounts of multiple officials on the call, the Army sent a statement confirming Flynn participated.

The teleconference, organized by D.C. officials after authorities already had declared a riot at the Capitol, focused on what actions the military could take in response to the violence, with the Capitol Police chief pleading for help and the acting D.C. police chief growing incredulous at the Army’s reluctance to engage. The call included senior Army officials at the urging of Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, according to one person with direct knowledge of the situation.

Five officials who were on the call shared similar stories in which Army officials on the line said they were concerned about the visuals of sending National Guard members to the Capitol.

Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who has since resigned in the wake of the security failure, and acting D.C. police chief Robert J. Contee III were flabbergasted by the Army’s reaction, according to four people on the call. Sund had stressed that the Capitol had been breached by protesters and told those on the call that he had reports of shots being fired on the scene.

Sund, in an interview with The Post, previously said that another general on the call — Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, the director of the Army Staff — raised concerns about guard members appearing at the Capitol.

“I don’t like the visual of the National Guard standing a police line with the Capitol in the background,” Piatt said, according to Sund and others on the call.

Piatt denied those remarks in a statement last week.

“I did not make the statement or any comments similar to what was attributed to me by Chief Sund in The Washington Post article — but would note that even in his telling he makes it clear that neither I, nor anyone else from [the Department of Defense], denied the deployment of requested personnel,” Piatt said.

It was at times difficult for the participants of the call to discern which top Army official was speaking. Officials on the call recalled hearing two Army leaders discussing the “optics” and “visual” of having National Guard members respond at the Capitol. One of the Army leaders described the protesters as “peaceful,” and Contee responded that “they’re not peaceful anymore,” two of the officials said.

U.S. defense officials have emphasized that federal law enforcement was better placed to clear the Capitol of rioters than members of the D.C. Guard, the entirety of which was ultimately activated by the Pentagon. Guard members arrived within hours of the call to help establish a perimeter around the Capitol grounds.

If you ever cleared buildings with people that don’t do it for a living, you could have some very challenging types of things happen,” a senior U.S. defense official said in an interview.

Army officials declined to answer several questions about Flynn’s statement, including how long he was in the room during the call, whether he said anything, and if he was the one who described the crowd at the Capitol as mostly peaceful.

The Army also declined to answer why it falsely said for days that Flynn, who already has been confirmed by the Senate for a promotion to four-star general, was not involved.

“Thank you for the opportunity to comment, however we have nothing further to add,” the Army said in response to questions posed by The Post through email.

One official directly familiar with the situation said there was concern in both the Army and National Guard about possible political fallout if it was discovered that Flynn was involved in the Army’s deliberations. That is despite it being commonplace that the person in Flynn’s role would have been involved.

Defense officials have repeatedly defended their response to the assault on the Capitol, noting that D.C. officials sought a limited mission for the National Guard that day after thousands of guard members were deployed in the District in June during protests for racial justice. The D.C. National Guard activated 340 guard members in consultation with D.C. officials, with a limited, unarmed mission to staff traffic barriers and Metro stations so additional police officers would be available to deal with crowds.

Sund also did not seek National Guard assistance ahead of time — a reflection, he later said, of senior House and Senate security officials turning down his request to do so.

McCarthy said in his interview with The Post that without a plan to assist Capitol Police, it was “very challenging to understand” what was happening at the Capitol. Military officials said they didn’t want to send the Guard into a combustible situation without any planning that could have made matters worse.

“We were trying to get a handle on this,” McCarthy said. “And when we got moving, we moved as fast as we could from a cold start, not configured to take a reaction.”

Missy Ryan contributed to this report.

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Trump’s Team Could Bring 9/11 Mindset Back to the White House: From restoring torture to expanding surveillance, the president-elect’s picks for national security advisor, CIA director, and attorney general favor a no-holds-barred approach to Islamist extremists at home and abroad.
by Dan de Luce, Elias Groll, Molly O'Toole, Lara Jakes
ForeignPolicy.com
November 18, 2016, 7:36 PM

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-- Army falsely denied Flynn’s brother was involved in key part of military response to Capitol riot, by Dan Lamothe, Paul Sonne, Carol D. Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis

-- Another View on 9/11, by Altruistic World Online Library

-- Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, A Report of The Project for the New American Century--

NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 17: Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn gestures as he arrives at Trump Tower, November 17, 2016 in New York City. President-elect Donald Trump and his transition team are in the process of filling cabinet and high level positions for the new administration. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

President-elect Donald Trump’s choices for his national security team would return 9/11-era policies to the White House and back an all-out war on Islamist terrorists that will alarm U.S. allies, raise the risk of confrontation with Iran, and potentially jeopardize civil liberties at home.

The appointments unveiled Friday — with retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security advisor, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) as attorney general, and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) as CIA director — represent a sharp U-turn to the mentality that prevailed after the 9/11 attacks. George W. Bush’s administration declared a no-holds-barred “war on terror” to justify expanded presidential powers — including the use of torture and unilateral military action. Trump’s new team offers plenty of echoes: Pompeo has defended the use of waterboarding, Sessions has argued federal agents’ shouldn’t be limited in their use of other “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and Flynn has decried military rules designed to avoid civilian deaths as limitations that are crippling U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Although Flynn’s appointment does not require confirmation from the Senate, the nominees for attorney general and CIA director will have to win approval from fellow lawmakers, and swift confirmation is by no means assured in the current fraught political climate following Trump’s upset victory last week. The president-elect ran against the Republican establishment and cannot count on unconditional support from the GOP majority in Congress, and Democrats have already vowed to block the Trump administration if it endangers civil rights enshrined in the Constitution.

Sessions’s nomination will come under close scrutiny due to confirmation controversies in the senator’s past over his racially tinged comments and over fears that he might make good on Trump’s threats to prosecute his Democratic opponent in the election, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Flynn displays a single-minded focus on the danger he claims is posed by “radical Islam” — a threat he compares to that represented by Nazi Germany in World War II. He argues that the United States must fully commit to combating and defeating the Islamic State, and other extremists backed by anti-U.S. regimes, and has accused President Barack Obama of tying the hands of the military in the field, appeasing Iran, and failing to recognize the magnitude of the danger facing the country.

“We’re in a world war, but very few Americans recognize it,” Flynn wrote in his book released this year, The Field of Fight. “[W]e have to energize every element of national power in a cohesive synchronized manner—similar to the effort during World War II or the Cold War—to effectively resource what will likely be a multigenerational struggle.”

Flynn’s visceral response to the threat of terrorism recalls the Bush administration’s answer to 9/11 — the invasion of Iraq, the embrace of torture and unlawful detention, the curtailment of civil liberties — that deeply damaged America’s standing in the world and hamstrung U.S. efforts to fight terrorism. Obama, who won the 2008 election vowing to restore America’s tarnished reputation and who pledged to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and end torture, said in his first inaugural address: “Our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.”

The new administration’s apparent monolithic focus on countering terrorism, to the near-exclusion of other security challenges facing the United States, threatens to inflict additional lasting damage. The Trump team’s close ties with and affinity for Russia, in particular, coupled with a narrow focus on the fight against Islamist terrorists, could give Moscow a free hand as it redraws the map in Europe and seeks to restore its lost Soviet-era great-power status. Likewise, the new administration’s narrow focus risks pulling the plug on the already wheezing U.S. pivot to Asia, potentially ceding to China economic and diplomatic — even, perhaps, military — dominance in Asia.

Russia and strongmen in, Iran out

In describing a global war against a network of extremists, Flynn has blasted the Obama administration for failing to embrace “friendly tyrannies” like the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak — ousted in 2011 — that oppose Islamist extremists. And Flynn has cheered Egypt’s new strongman, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who as a general took power after toppling the country’s elected president.

Flynn has described Russia as a partner in the fight against terrorism — he’s worked for a Kremlin-backed news outlet and sat next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a gala — and portrayed the struggle as a life-and-death battle reminiscent of Bush’s famous warning to governments after 9/11: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”

Some Democrats in Congress expressed grave concern over Friday’s appointments and said Flynn had shown a readiness to overlook Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine and its provocative intervention in Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Flynn has “demonstrated the same fondness for the autocratic and belligerent Kremlin which animate President-elect Trump’s praise of Vladimir Putin,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. Schiff added the next president would be better served by an advisor with a “healthy skepticism” about Moscow.

As friendly as they are toward Russia, Flynn and other Trump national security nominees talk tough on Iran, in particular with what they see as Tehran’s role in underwriting Islamist terrorism around the world.

In his book, Flynn wrote: “[W]e must decisively confront the state and non-state supporters and enablers of this violent Islamist ideology and compel them to end their support to our enemies or be prepared to remove their capacity to do so.” His co-author, conservative commentator Michael Ledeen, has long advocated regime change in Tehran and traces virtually all terrorist threats back to Iran.

Flynn has excoriated the Iran nuclear deal, inked in 2015, as “wishful thinking,” and he shares the view of Republican lawmakers that the United States needs to take a more assertive stance with Tehran, rather than pursue a diplomatic thaw.

The Trump team’s rhetoric on Iran, coupled with comments by Republicans in Congress, has dismayed European allies that worked on the nuclear deal, which imposed constraints on Tehran’s nuclear program in return for easing some economic sanctions. European diplomats told Foreign Policy they are worried that an aggressive approach to Iran could backfire, prompting Tehran to redouble its bid for nuclear weapons.

James Jeffrey, a deputy national security advisor under George W. Bush and later an ambassador to Iraq and Turkey in the Obama administration, said Pompeo and Sessions share a “classic Republican, Bush administration worldview” that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But Flynn, Jeffrey said, “goes beyond that by seeing essentially no threat to the United States beyond this quote ‘Islamic terror.'”

Flynn “inflates that threat from a serious problem to an existential danger to the country and a conflict that we will be in for generations, as if it were the Cold War,” said Jeffrey, also a frequent Obama critic since leaving government and an FP contributor. “This is totally wrong, and it undercuts any rational discussion of the arguably more significant threats to the global order that Russia, China, and to some degree Iran are posing.”

A return to torture

Obama’s disavowal of torture early in his administration served as an important symbolic repudiation of Bush-era abuses in the aftermath of 9/11. Trump’s new national security team has flirted with turning back the clock on those reforms, moves that would damage America’s moral standing in the world.

In an interview with Yahoo News in July, Flynn refused to rule out a possible return to waterboarding and other tactics widely condemned as torture.

As a senator, Sessions voted against a measure to ban the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” that included beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and exposure to extreme temperatures.

Trump’s pick to run the CIA, Pompeo, has linked Obama’s torture reforms with what he believes is a weak approach to the war on terror. “President Obama has continually refused to take the war on radical Islamic terrorism seriously — from ending our interrogation program in 2009 to trying to close Guantánamo Bay,” Pompeo said in 2014.

Congress later enacted legislation reinforcing the prohibition on the use of torture signed by Obama as an executive order in 2009. Former intelligence, military, and law enforcement officers have insisted the harsh tactics are not effective, as detainees become desperate to say anything to stop the torture.

War on terror — or war on Islam?

Flynn, Sessions, and Pompeo will go to work for a president-elect who defined his campaign by xenophobic outbursts. Two of the appointees have said Islam itself — rather than a perversion of the religion’s teachings — is the source of extremist violence. That has lawmakers and civil rights groups worried that the next administration could jeopardize the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, fuel a rising trend in hate crimes, and endanger American security. Flynn himself tweeted this year: “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”

“The most devastating terrorist attacks on America in the last 20 years come overwhelmingly from people of a single faith and are performed in the name of that faith,” Pompeo said in his 2013 congressional remarks calling on Muslim spiritual leaders to repudiate Islamist terrorism.

While Sessions has described Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the country as treading on “dangerous ground,” the Alabama Republican also said many Muslim immigrants have committed acts of terrorism and that “a lot of them believe it’s commanded by their religion.”

Flynn has accused the Obama administration of timidity when faced with jihadis he claims are inside U.S. borders plotting to impose sharia, or Islamic law, though he has cited no specific evidence. “If we cannot criticize the radical Muslims in our own country, we cannot fight them either in America or overseas,” Flynn wrote in his book.

Trump’s strident Islamophobic rhetoric stands in stark contrast with that of the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush administration went out of its way to clarify that America had no conflict with Islam itself. The rhetoric embraced by Trump and his lieutenants risks alienating Muslim countries aligned with Washington.

Counterterrorism experts warn that Trump and his planned national security team are playing into the hands of Islamic State propaganda, which seeks to portray its cause as a struggle for Islam. Talk of banning Muslim immigrants, maintaining the Guantánamo military prison, and returning to torture all fuel Islamic State recruitment efforts, as Trump’s campaign itself did before the election.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called Flynn’s appointment “alarming” and said the retired general’s statements about Muslims are “profoundly un-American, as well as damaging to the fight against terrorism and national security.”

Fair winds for Guantánamo

To better combat terrorism, Pompeo, a three-term congressman from Kansas and former Army captain tapped by Trump to lead the CIA, has called for a “fundamental upgrade to America’s surveillance capabilities” that would roll back the modest reforms of such programs championed by Obama.

Pompeo has spoken in vague terms about an electronic dragnet that would collect a vast amount of information on its targets. “Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database,” Pompeo wrote in the Wall Street Journal this year. “Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.”

In that effort, Pompeo may find an ally in Sessions. When the New York Times revealed in 2005 the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program, Sessions defended the program. “It is not a warrantless wiretapping of the American people,” he said. “And I don’t think this action is nearly as troublesome as being made out here.”

Both Pompeo and Sessions support keeping open the most maligned symbol of Bush’s war on terror — the detention center at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo. Sessions has even defended the prison because it provides its detainees with “tropical breezes” they’d miss in the United States. He has also said he supports trying terrorist suspects in military courts.

In an April interview with the Topeka Capital-Journal, Pompeo defended the island prison as an essential tool for the intelligence community. “They need a place where they can interrogate those terrorists,” he said. “That is not the federal district courthouse or federal penitentiary — lawyers, constitutional rights, Miranda rights — no go. They need to have a place. Guantanamo Bay is a perfect facility to accomplish the intelligence collection.”

A shared hostility for the Obama administration

All three men picked by Trump — even the general who worked for the current administration — are united by a deep hostility toward Obama and Clinton, portraying them as undermining America’s interests and kowtowing to the country’s adversaries.

Flynn’s appointment by Trump marks a remarkable trajectory for a career military officer who spent two years working in Obama’s administration as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Flynn was forced out of the DIA after his ambitious reorganization rubbed many subordinates the wrong way and put him at loggerheads with other spy agencies. Flynn says he was fired for telling lawmakers that al Qaeda was gaining strength and for ignoring administration talking points in order to deliver what he considered a more accurate assessment of the threats facing the country.

The White House job will prove to be a very different assignment for someone who made his reputation as a deadly effective counterterrorism hand. His experiences at the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his time at the DIA, underscore that résumé, and it is unclear how that will translate to managing a large staff at the White House and shaping the country’s military and diplomatic strategy.

Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA and NSA under George W. Bush and briefly under Obama, calls Flynn “hard-working.” But he notes that his expertise has been mostly at the “tactical level” on the battlefield, and successfully taking on the job of national security advisor “is going to demand that he up his game.” Although his two-year tenure at the DIA was marked by a turf war with rivals inside the administration, Flynn was in front of the rest of Washington officialdom in describing the threat posed by the Islamic State — once dismissed by Obama as al Qaeda’s “[junior varsity] team” — by issuing warnings to the White House and lawmakers.

Sarah Chayes, a civilian special advisor to two commanders of U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan who worked with Flynn, told FP the former officer is “energetic and incredibly hard-working — there’s always something happening around him.”

But as a manager, he was “unbelievably chaotic. No follow-through at all.”

Flynn has come under fire over his overseas consulting work, including reports that he sat in on classified briefings with Trump while continuing to work for foreign clients.

Pompeo rose to prominence after just a few years in Washington thanks to his outsized criticism of Clinton during the long and politicized investigation of the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. The Kansas Republican repeatedly subjected Clinton to aggressive questioning before a House panel investigating the attack.

But after two years of investigation, at the cost of $7 million, the House panel found no evidence of wrongdoing at the State Department or by Clinton in handling the attack, which left four Americans dead. Nonetheless, Pompeo released an addendum to that report claiming a cover-up.

Critics of the Republican-led investigation argue it was a partisan witch hunt intended to tarnish Clinton. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly used the events in Benghazi and the Obama administration’s shifting explanations for the attack as a way to batter Clinton. Pompeo’s appointment could install one of her principal congressional tormentors in the country’s most powerful intelligence post.

Though his hard-line views generally align with Trump’s, Pompeo, with degrees from West Point and Harvard, is generally described as bright and a student of national security issues.

“While we have had our share of strong differences — principally on the politicization of the tragedy in Benghazi — I know that he is someone who is willing to listen and engage,” said Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Hayden, who has harshly criticized Trump, said he was “heartened” by the pick. “This is a serious man who takes these questions seriously and who has studied these questions,” he said at a breakfast event for reporters at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank.

Sessions came out early for Trump, when most of his colleagues were keeping their distance or dismissing the former reality television host, and the president-elect has rewarded him with a job the Republican senator and former attorney has long coveted.

“He is a world-class legal mind,” Trump said Friday, hours before he spent $25 million to settle a suit against his private university facing allegations of fraud.

Photo credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

[admin]

The mystery of Mike Flynn
by Peter Bergen
CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 2:07 PM EST, Tue December 18, 2018

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Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the author of “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad.”

(CNN) — Retired Lieutenant General Michael (“Mike”) Flynn’s fall from grace has been precipitous. Flynn was once an admired Army Special Operations officer who went on to hold one of the most powerful jobs in the world as President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser.

On Tuesday Flynn appeared in federal court in Washington DC to be sentenced for lying to the FBI. According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sentencing memo filed earlier this month, because of his extensive cooperation with investigators as well as his more than three decades of public service, prosecutors are requesting a minimal sentence, including the possibility of no jail time for Flynn. On Tuesday Flynn’s sentencing was delayed so he can continue cooperating with the Mueller investigation.

An intensely hard-working officer and effective leader

Flynn has spoken to prosecutors 19 times as part of his plea agreement, which underlines his value to Mueller as a witness because of his early involvement in the Trump campaign and the key role he played in the transition, all of which gives him important insights into the campaign’s precise involvement with the Russians.

How did Flynn’s long fall from grace happen? This story is based on interviews with multiple former colleagues of Flynn’s in the military, as well as with his colleagues in the Trump White House. (I have also interviewed Flynn in the past, although he has not spoken to the media while awaiting sentencing.)

During his military career few could have predicted the path that Flynn would eventually take. As a colonel in charge of intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Flynn was a well-loved, effective team leader and an intensely hard-working officer who was constantly deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. Flynn used to joke that he lived at the JSOC base in Balad, Iraq, and took his vacations at the JSOC base in Bagram, Afghanistan.

The hours working for JSOC were brutal, 17-hour days every day of the week, but the mission was clear. Flynn and his boss, General Stanley McChrystal, understood by 2005 that the United States was losing the war in Iraq and that JSOC wasn’t configured well enough to destroy the industrial strength insurgency it was facing, which was led by al Qaeda in Iraq.

Al Qaeda in Iraq wasn’t a traditional military opponent operating with a top-down bureaucratic hierarchy, but rather a loose network of like-minded jihadists. McChrystal’s mantra became “it takes a network to defeat a network.”

To become a network, JSOC would have to get flatter and more agile. McChrystal and Flynn reconfigured JSOC so it communicated more seamlessly with all the components of the intelligence community and more quickly processed the intelligence gathered on raids so other raids could be immediately launched based on what was gleaned from the initial operation.

The results were startling; JSOC went from doing only four or five raids a month to doing hundreds every month, and al Qaeda in Iraq took a huge beating.

In 2012 Flynn, now promoted to lieutenant general, was appointed to run the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Flynn wanted to turn DIA into something more like JSOC with more analysts deployed “forward” in the war zones.

This was an excellent idea. After all, if you are supposed to be providing intelligence on a war, it helps if you are not working in an office 6,000 miles from where the conflict is actually happening. But DIA is a bureaucratic behemoth of some 17,000 employees, most of whom are quite happy living in the Washington, DC, area as opposed to, say, working for a year at Bagram Air Base in the windswept, mountainous deserts of Afghanistan.

The DIA desk jockeys pushed back against Flynn and his plans to deploy many of them to the war zones. Flynn had never commanded a giant organization like DIA. The first rule of bureaucratic politics is if you want to make big changes you need to enlist folks to help, Flynn didn’t make much of an effort to do this at DIA, which ruffled bureaucratic feathers and irritated his bosses at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community.

’Flynn facts’ and conflicts with Obama team

At DIA, Flynn also began developing some eccentric notions. Flynn became convinced that the jihadist attack against the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 was orchestrated by Iran, which on the face of it made little sense since the Shia regime in Iran rarely cooperates with Sunni militants. There was also no evidence for this fanciful notion, but Flynn pushed his analysts at DIA to find a link that didn’t exist.

It was Flynn’s failures to distinguish between conjecture and truth that led analysts at DIA to coin the term “Flynn facts.”

When Flynn was running DIA, the Obama administration’s view of the terrorism threat was best encapsulated by President Obama’s statement to New Yorker editor David Remnick in January 2014 that the group that would evolve into ISIS was merely a “jay-vee” team.

Flynn had a far less sanguine view, warning that the global jihadist movement was not waning in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, as was then the conventional analysis. Flynn made this case publicly in congressional testimony on February 11, 2014, when Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, asked him if al Qaeda was indeed on the run, as the Obama administration was claiming.

“They are not,” testified Flynn.

A few months later, Flynn made a similar public statement at the Aspen Security Forum, an annual conference held in July in Aspen, Colorado, that attracts top US national security officials and the journalists who cover them.

CNN’s Evan Perez asked Flynn, “Are we safer today than we were two years, five years, ten years ago?”

“My quick answer is we’re not,” Flynn replied.

Flynn went on to say that focusing only on the declining fortunes of “core” al Qaeda, the group that had attacked the United States on 9/11, was to gloss over the fact that jihadist ideology was in fact “exponentially growing.”

As ISIS conquered much of Iraq during the summer of 2014 and imposed its brutal, totalitarian rule, it was clear that Obama and his national security team had underestimated the strength of ISIS, while Flynn had understood the threat far better than many of his peers. But Flynn had angered his two bosses, Michael Vickers, the overall head of intelligence at the Pentagon, as well as James Clapper, the director of national intelligence.

Vickers and Clapper thought that Flynn trying to shake things up at DIA was actually sabotaging morale at the agency, according to Clapper’s autobiography, “Facts and Fears.” They decided to force Flynn out of office a year early.

Flynn in the civilian world

Flynn seems to have been both bitter and embarrassed about the way he had been fired. In his own mind he was forced out because he wasn’t playing along with the Obama administration line that the war on terror was largely over, according to his autobiography, “The Field of Fight.” For Vickers and Clapper, it was much simpler: They fired him because he was a bad manager.

Either way Flynn, a highly decorated officer with 33 years service in the army, much of it in Special Operations, at the age of 55 had his career abruptly ended – and in an inglorious manner to boot.

Perhaps by way of compensation, once he was out in the civilian world, Flynn wanted to show that he was a rainmaker. Flynn set up Flynn Intel Group, which took on all manner of clients, a number of them with links to foreign governments.

Out of some combination of naiveté and arrogance Flynn, the maverick who came out of the “special” insular world of Joint Special Operation Command, did not play by the rules when it came to the lobbying work he did for some of his foreign clients, for which he was supposed to register officially as an agent of a foreign government. In Flynn’s sentencing memo, the Special Counsel says that Flynn misrepresented his work on behalf of the Turkish government for which he and his company were paid more than half a million dollars.

Flynn also began dipping his toe into politics. After meeting with Donald Trump in August 2015 Flynn came away deeply impressed. Trump was a good listener; he asked smart questions and he seemed truly worried about the direction that the country was heading, according to an interview Flynn gave to The Washington Post.

Flynn became a prominent presence on the Trump campaign and a vocal critic of Obama’s supposedly “weak” policies on ISIS. This, of course, dovetailed very neatly with what Trump was saying.

Flynn’s support of Trump was all the more important because he was the only person on Trump’s campaign team with any experience of America’s post-9/11 wars that continued to grind on at various levels of intensity in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

Like Trump, Flynn thought that the United States could work with Putin and even sat next to the Russian president at a gala dinner in Moscow in December 2015 that celebrated the 10th anniversary of Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin-sponsored TV network, an appearance for which Flynn was handsomely paid. The Russians, through his speaking agency, gave Flynn $33,750.

Flynn later told a Washington Post reporter that this wasn’t a big deal, as RT was similar to CNN, a bizarre claim given that RT is effectively an arm of the Kremlin.

In the spring of 2016, Trump started to seriously consider Flynn as a possible candidate to be his running mate. The three-star general would certainly help on the commander in chief issue. At the time, the leading candidates to be Trump’s running mate were former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Flynn. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence was seen as only a distant possibility for the number two-slot on the ticket, according to a senior Trump campaign official.

Flynn made his first, big appearance on the public stage when he made a fiery speech of support for Trump at the Republican convention in Cleveland on July 19, 2016. Flynn angrily charged Obama and Clinton with endangering the United States and even lying about the nature of the terrorist threat: “Tonight, Americans stand as one with strength and confidence to overcome the last eight years of the Obama-Clinton failures such as bumbling indecisiveness, willful ignorance, and total incompetence…Because Obama chose to conceal the actions of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and groups like ISIS, and the role of Iran in the rise of radical Islam, Americans are at a loss to fully understand the enormous threat they pose against us.”

As he spoke, Flynn led the crowd in chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and incited them, “Get fired up! This is about this country!”

Flynn declared, “I have called on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race because she put our nation’s security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private email server.”

The crowd started chanting, “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

Hesitating only slightly, Flynn added his voice to the chants declaring, “Lock her up, that’s right! Damn right, exactly right. And you know why we’re saying that? We’re saying that because, if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth of what [Clinton] did, I would be in jail today.”

Officers who had served with Flynn were dismayed and puzzled by this performance, which went against their code not to take such clearly partisan positions, even in retirement. The angry man on stage didn’t seem like the Mike Flynn they knew.

Growing enamored of neoconservatives and right-wing ideologues

Some of his peers felt Flynn had succumbed to a case of “Obama Derangement Syndrome” after he was fired from running the Defense Intelligence Agency. That might be a partial explanation for Flynn’s impassioned rhetoric against Obama and Clinton, but in the years after he was pushed out of the military Flynn had also became enamored of leading neoconservatives and right-wing ideologues.

Flynn coauthored a book, “Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and its Allies,” with Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative academic who was a longtime, bitter critic of the Iranian regime. In “Field of Fight,” which was published just before the Republican convention, Flynn claimed the United States was in a world war with “radical Islam,” which it was losing. Flynn also claimed that American Islamists were trying to create “an Islamic state right here at home.” This is a common conspiracy theory of the far right.

Osama bin Laden's "Mountain Fortress", shown to the US public by the corporate media, and like Saddam's nuclear weapons, never actually existed.

This hoax fell apart fast when it was pointed out that Iraq has a great deal of uranium ore inside their own borders and no need to import any from Niger or anywhere else. The I.A.E.A. then blew the cover off the fraud by announcing that the documents Bush had used were not only forgeries, but too obvious to believe that anyone in the Bush administration did not know they were forgeries! The forged documents were reported as being "discovered" in Italy by SISMI, the Italian Security Service. Shortly before the "discovery" the head of SISMI had been paid a visit by Michael Ledeen, Manucher Ghorbanifar, and two officials from OSP, one of whom was Larry Franklin, the Israeli spy operating inside the OSP.

In July, 2005, the Italian Parliament concluded their own investigation and named four men as suspects in the creation of the forged documents. Michael Ledeen, Dewey Clarridge, Ahmed Chalabi and Francis Brookes. This report has been included in Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame, and Paul McNulty, the prosecutor of the AIPAC spy case.

A recently declassified memo proves that the State Department reported the fact that the NIger documents were forgeries to the CIA 11 days before President Bush made the claim about the Niger uranium based on those documents.

In the end, the real proof that we were lied to about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. That means that every single piece of paper that purported to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was by default a fraud, a hoax, and a lie. There could be no evidence that supported the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In a way, the existence of any faked documents about Iraq's WMDs is actually an admission of guilt. If one is taking the time to create fake documents, the implication is that the faker is already aware that there are no genuine documents.

What the US Government had, ALL that they had, were copied student papers, forged "Yellow Cake" documents, balloon inflators posing as bioweapons labs, and photos with misleading labels on them. And somewhere along the line, someone decided to put those misleading labels on those photos, to pretend that balloon inflators are portable bioweapons labs, and to pass off stolen student papers as contemporary analysis.

-- The Lie of the (Last) Century, by Michael Rivero

At the root of the Valerie Plame affair was the role of her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in refuting the baseless claim that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger. This fake story was buttressed by documents which turned out to be forged. Of interest in this regard was the neocon ideologue Ledeen, because the faked documents first surfaced in Rome, where Ledeen possessed extensive contacts. A federal grand jury was formed to investigate this matter. Ledeen, like so many Bush officials, was an alumnus of the 1980s George H. W. Bush-Poindexter-Abrams-Oliver North Iran-contra gun-running and drug-running scandal, and mobilized these networks as part of the post 9/11 assault on Iraq. In December 2001, Ledeen moved to revive the Iran connection, setting up a meeting between two Pentagon civilian neo-cons and Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer whom the CIA called a criminal and liar...

-- 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA, by Webster Griffin Tarpley

In order to achieve the most noble achievements the leader may have to enter into evil. This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired and challenging.

-- Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, by Michael Ledeen

Flynn also wrote for the New York Post about a supposed “enemy alliance” that included Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela as well as al Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban. This was George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” on steroids and scarcely more convincing since ISIS and Iran were at war, as were al Qaeda and ISIS, and none of these terrorist groups had any relationship with the North Koreans or with leftist regimes in Latin America.

At the same time Flynn became increasingly gripped by rightist conspiracy theories. In August 2016 Flynn claimed in a speech that Democratic members of the Florida legislature were trying to install Sharia law in their state. This was, of course, nonsense.

Flynn also tweeted that fear of Muslims was “rational” and publicly said that Islam was really a “political ideology” rather than a religion. When he was in uniform, Flynn had never made these kinds of assertions about Muslims and Islam.

Flynn’s inability to distinguish easily between facts and obvious falsehoods seemed to worsen as the presidential campaign continued. Flynn claimed in an interview with Breitbart News that there were Arabic signs along the United States-Mexico border to guide potential terrorists into the States and that he had seen evidence of these signs. Flynn said, “I have personally seen the photos of the signage along those paths that are in Arabic. They’re like waypoints along that path as you come in. Primarily, in this case the one that I saw was in Texas and it’s literally, it’s like signs, that say, in Arabic, ‘This way, move to this point.’ It’s unbelievable.” It was unbelievable because it was completely false.

Unexpected victory

That Flynn seemed to have never really expected Trump to win the election was underlined by an article written by Flynn that appeared in The Hill newspaper on Election Day 2016 that compared Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric living in in exile in Pennsylvania, to Ayatollah Khomeini.

For the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Gulen was an obsession. It had fingered Gulen for purportedly masterminding a botched military coup in Turkey in the summer of 2016.

Flynn’s article suggested that Gulen, who had very good reasons to fear for his safety if he ever returned to Turkey, should not be allowed to remain in the United States.

No one who really thought he would be the next US national security adviser would have published such a provocative piece in a relatively obscure publication the very same day that his candidate was elected to the most powerful job in the world.

The article also risked drawing attention to the fact that Flynn’s consulting firm had been paid more than half a million dollars by a company close to the Erdogan government, despite the fact that Flynn hadn’t registered as an agent of a foreign government as is required by law.

Flynn’s positions and actions during the campaign and the transition were not those of the typical national security adviser, but then nor were the president-elect’s.

Two days after Trump was elected president, Obama sat down with Trump in the Oval Office and, among other matters, warned Trump against hiring Flynn in any senior role.

A week after meeting with Obama, though, Trump offered Flynn the key job of national security adviser. Flynn’s loyalty to Trump and early support for him trumped questions about his temperament as well as his lack of experience managing the complex national security bureaucracy – and the fact that he had never worked at the White House.

Mike Flynn was only 24 days in his job when he was forced to resign. The reason given: that he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him that during the transition he hadn’t discussed lifting Obama-era sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador to the United States, when in fact he had. This lie appears to have been an effort to cover up the fact that Flynn was conducting substantive American foreign policy before he was ever in office. The United States operates on the principle that there is only one president at a time.

Flynn repeated the lies about the Russian ambassador to the FBI and compounded his legal jeopardy by lying about his links to the Turkish government in documents filed with the U.S. government, according to Tuesday’s sentencing memo.

Those actions completed Flynn’s fall from grace. No American National Security Adviser has served as briefly as Mike Flynn.

[admin]

How Mike Flynn Became America’s Angriest General: He was one of the most respected intelligence officers of his generation. Now he's Donald Trump’s national security alter ego, goading a crowd to lock Hillary Clinton up. What happened?
by James Kitfield
Politico
October 16, 2016

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James Kitfield is senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress. He is a former senior correspondent for National Journal and has written about defense, national security and foreign policy issues from Washington, D.C., for more than two decades. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Twilight Warriors: The Soldiers, Spies and Special Agents Who Are Revolutionizing the American Way of War” (Basic Books).

On August 7, 2014, clusters of well-dressed men and women filed into the gleaming metal and glass superstructure of the Defense Intelligence Agency at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, just across the river from Reagan National Airport, for the retirement ceremony of Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, the agency's director. Among those present to honor Flynn were James Clapper, the nation’s top intelligence officer—who was a master of ceremonies for the event—and Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

It wasn’t an easy moment. Together, Clapper and Vickers had forced Flynn out as the head of DIA.

The Defense Intelligence Agency is the Pentagon’s version of the CIA, a vast intelligence organization focused on providing senior officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and senior uniformed leaders, with the intelligence necessary to develop strategy and make scores of difficult decisions each day. During the ceremony, Flynn would be extolled by Admiral Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, as “the best intelligence officer of the past 20 years.” But given the nature of the intelligence business that united them, many of the attendees also knew that Flynn’s retirement at age 56 was premature. A well-known maverick, Flynn had been asked to “shake things up” at the 17,000-person agency. He brought a more wartime mind-set and ethos to a sleepy Washington bureaucracy, until the bureaucracy pushed back and Flynn’s gung-ho style was deemed too “disruptive” for an administration determined to put the unpleasant memories of Iraq and Afghanistan in the rearview mirror.

Taking the podium, Flynn, dark-haired with an aquiline face and a surfer’s wiry build, waved to his many family members in the crowd. He acknowledged the many senior officials in attendance, including his nemeses, Clapper and Vickers. He also made special note of retired General Stanley McChrystal, with whom Flynn had transformed the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) into history’s most lethal terrorist hunting network. “If there is any one individual in this country who changed the way America fights its wars, it was Stan,” Flynn told the capacity crowd. Of course, everyone there knew that McChrystal, too, had been ousted from his job, after an article in Rolling Stone titled “Runaway General” quoted unnamed members of his staff making disrespectful comments about the White House. Inside military and intelligence circles it was understood that McChrystal, along with another ousted former general, David Petraeus, were the preeminent generals and wartime field commanders of their generation of officers, and the manner of their dismissal struck many as insulting. As did the treatment of Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn.

As a longtime national security correspondent, I had wrangled an invitation to the retirement ceremony after Flynn granted me his final on-the-record interview as DIA director. In it, Flynn warned that the United States was actually less safe from the threat of terrorism in 2014 than it was prior to the 9/11 attacks. In remarkably blunt comments for a general still in uniform, Flynn admitted to feeling like a lone voice inside an Obama administration that seemed to believe that the 2011 death of Osama bin Laden had signaled the end of radical Islamist terrorism as a seminal threat. Just months earlier, President Barack Obama had referred to the ascendant Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, as a “JV,” or junior varsity, team of terror.

One other senior commander had been scheduled to speak at Flynn’s retirement ceremony but canceled at the last minute: General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Later that same day, August 7, 2014, the reason for Dempsey’s absence became clear. Obama announced that U.S. warplanes had begun bombing ISIS targets, and U.S. troops would soon be dispatched back to Iraq. So Flynn had been right all along: The global war against radical Islamist terrorists was far from over.

I wondered at the time whether confirmation of the fact on the day of his forced retirement might make Flynn bitter.

***

“Lock her up! Yes, that’s right, lock her up!” Flynn shouted, his visage amplified to colossus dimensions by the huge video screen behind the podium at the Republican National Convention, where he was calling for the imprisonment of his former colleague, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Before millions of television viewers, Flynn led the chants of a raucous crowd during his speech endorsing Donald Trump. “Lock her up! Lock her up! Damn right! Exactly right!” Flynn encouraged the chanting crowd. “There is nothing wrong with that!”

In many respects, his July 18 speech at the Republican Convention was quintessential Flynn, a full-throated defense of “American exceptionalism” and strong and unapologetic U.S. leadership; a warning that the threat from radical Islamists is growing and a rejection of “political correctness” that keeps officials from accurately identifying the enemy; and an insistence that winning wars is about never “drawing red lines and then retreating." In each case, Flynn has significant evidence backing his argument. Yet some of the people close to Flynn have been alarmed both by the candidate he has chosen to embrace, and by the uncharacteristic vitriol in the way Flynn has been talking, both in that speech and subsequent comments. Flynn has emerged as Trump’s national security alter ego, accompanying him on intelligence briefings and serving as his chief adviser on military issues.

Those who've known Flynn for years wonder how a kid from an Irish Catholic family of blue-collar Democrats who went on to be a dedicated, much-admired soldier ended up being a top national-security adviser to a man widely viewed as a demagogue, friendly to Russia and widely seen as ignorant of foreign policy. They worry that in his political naivete and innate loyalty Flynn is being used—and will be branded as a radical himself. And some of them are concerned that Flynn, who believes he was pressed into early retirement for appearing to question the Obama administration’s public narrative that Al Qaeda was close to defeat, is being handed a national stage to play out his personal frustrations.

In Flynn’s speech, Obama has been a “weak and spineless” leader who “coddles” terrorists and has brought mayhem to our streets with his “fumbling indecisiveness,” “willful ignorance” and “total incompetence.” Clinton should not only be locked up for her careless handling of classified emails, he has repeatedly said, but she is also “somebody who will leave Americans behind on the battlefield.”

In a recent exclusive interview, Flynn was unapologetic about his harsh rhetoric. In his mind, Clinton “did real damage to the country” and has dodged all accountability with her use of an unclassified email server to conduct government business, and the Obama administration perpetrated a “big lie” in insisting that the enemy, Islamist terrorists, is on the run. “So when Republican presidential candidates reached out and asked for my advice and help, I thought I had something to offer because of my strong belief that the country is going in the wrong direction.”

Yet a number of Flynn’s old bosses and some of the most respected leaders among the generally collegial fraternity of retired general and flag officers have been unsparing in their criticism. For months, retired Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had reached out privately to Flynn trying to get him to tone down his rhetoric on the public airwaves. For Mullen, the Republican Convention speech was a final straw. “For retired senior officers to take leading and vocal roles as clearly partisan figures is a violation of the ethos and professionalism of apolitical military service,” Mullen wrote recently to the Washington Post. “This is not about the right to speak out, it is about the disappointing lack of judgment in doing so for crass partisan purposes. This is made worse by using hyperbolic language all the while leveraging the respected title of ‘general.’”

There is precedent for retired generals endorsing candidates in presidential elections, but it is discouraged in a military culture that demands strict nonpartisanship from those in uniform, and encourages even retired general officers to stay above the political fray. To have a respected and fairly recently retired general excoriate his former wartime commander in chief before millions of Americans on television was jarring in the extreme. Some of Flynn’s former bosses worried that it would drag the military into the kind of hyperpartisan mudslinging contest from which the uniform rarely emerges unsullied. When retired four-star Marine Corps General John Allen spoke in support of Clinton at the Democratic National Convention, the previous chairman of the Joint Chiefs cried foul on him as well.

In a letter to the Washington Post, former chairman Martin Dempsey also noted that Flynn and Allen "weren't introduced at the Democratic and Republican conventions, respectively, as 'John' and 'Mike.' They were introduced as generals. As generals, they have an obligation to uphold our apolitical traditions … they have just made the task of their successors—who continue to serve in uniform and are accountable for our security—more complicated."

Even more egregious in the eyes of many national security experts and former colleagues is Flynn’s bestowing legitimacy on the particular Republican presidential nominee this year. Trump has trampled on, or simply ignored, many of the fundamental tenets and doctrines that have defined U.S. national security and foreign policy for decades. In Trump’s America, terrorism suspects would be tortured and their families killed in clear war crimes, even as the country instituted a ban on Muslim immigrants. The U.S. nuclear umbrella would fold over South Korea and Japan, possibly provoking them to develop their own nuclear weapons arsenals and risking a long-feared breakout in nuclear proliferation. NATO allies could no longer assume American support if attacked by Russia.

In Trump’s worldview, Vladimir Putin is praise-worthy as a strong leader despite his penchant for dismembering neighboring states and brutally silencing critics and journalists. Trump even invited the Russian strongman to hack into Clinton’s email (he later claimed it was a joke) after U.S. intelligence officials said Russia was behind a recent hack of the Democratic National Committee. He has claimed that Obama created ISIS, and darkly insinuated that he may be sympathetic to its murderous attacks. Trump has also denigrated U.S. prisoners of war, engaged in a public spat with a Gold Star family who lost their son in Iraq; and claimed that current U.S. military leaders have been “reduced to rubble” and are “embarrassing for our country.”

Such demagoguery helps explain why more than 100 Republican national security experts signed a letter denouncing Trump last spring, citing a vision of American power that is “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle”; and why last month 50 Republicans, including former Cabinet officials and two former heads of the Department of Homeland Security, signed a letter predicting that Trump would be “the most reckless president in American history.” Those sentiments were recently seconded by lifelong Republican Robert Gates, the former secretary of defense and director of the CIA, who in a scathing Wall Street Journal op-ed called Trump “beyond repair” and someone who would be a “thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief” and “too great a risk for America.”

In private emails hacked and leaked to the press, Colin Powell, former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called Trump a "national disgrace and an international pariah" and Flynn “right-wing nutty” for empowering him. "Flynn got fired as head of DIA. … I asked why Flynn got fired. Abusive with staff, didn't listen, worked against policy, bad management, etc. He has been and was right-wing nutty every [sic] since,” Powell wrote, later wondering "how [Flynn] got that far in the Army?"

To counter that withering criticism from Republican ranks, the Trump campaign released a letter signed by 88 former generals and admirals supporting his candidacy and arguing that it represents a “long-overdue course correction in our national security posture and policy.” Many see the hand of Flynn, who was earlier vetted as a possible vice president on the Trump ticket.

In interviews, Flynn admits he and Trump don't agree on everything, but he remains unapologetic in his service to the candidate. “To my old colleagues who disagree with my speaking out, my question to them is: ‘When did we stop being American citizens?’” Flynn said. Former colleagues may criticize him for using the title of ‘general’ before his name in speaking on behalf of the Trump campaign, “but I earned that title. I worked my ass off for it. I guarantee that many of my critics used that title of ‘general’ or ‘admiral’ to get lucrative positions on corporate boards.”

After spending years in Iraq and Afghanistan witnessing the expenditure of vast national resources, including the loss of many American lives, Flynn said he began to “wonder why we weren’t fixing how we fight these wars? So I’m very passionate about this country that I just finished spending my entire adult life trying to defend. And if I have to pay a personal price for my views, and Colin Powell wants to call me a jerk, I don’t have any problem with that. I know the truth and what I believe in.”

At his retirement ceremony, it had occurred to me that Flynn’s story was part of a larger narrative that stretched beyond his own career. He talked movingly about his late father, Francis Flynn, a career Army sergeant who fought in World War II and later Korea. He described how Francis taught his sons how to be a good leader, and what it meant to win a war that defeated tyranny and liberated the world. When Mike and later his brother Charlie told their father that they, too, were joining the Army, he didn’t hide his pleasure at the news. Francis Flynn told his sons, both of whom would improbably rise to the rank of general, “the name of ‘soldier’ is the proudest name anyone can bear.”

When the time came, Mike and Charlie Flynn went off to fight their wars. Only Afghanistan and Iraq would join Vietnam in the pantheon of the longest, most unpopular and unsatisfactory wars in American history. Their generation of officers received no parades or homecoming in victory, without which any soldier is adrift. In the long education of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, it’s possible to detect a silent but continuing conversation between a cherished father and a prodigal soldier and son, still searching for an elusive victory in a life-defining conflict.

***

To Flynn, it didn’t always seem elusive. It was in Iraq that he experienced his first epiphany about the nature of the enemy. In 2006, Mike Flynn was the chief intelligence officer for Joint Special Operations Command, and he often spent his evenings sitting at an interrogation table, speaking to Iraqi men of roughly comparable age and education, trying to grasp their seemingly unfathomable worldview. At the time, JSOC’s Task Force in Iraq was in a race against time with Al Qaeda in Iraq, and its bloodthirsty leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi. Zarqawi’s strategy of slaughtering Shiite Muslims as a way to ignite a sectarian civil war that would drive U.S. forces out of the country was working. Sunni AQI’s attacks and reprisals by Shiite death squads routinely claimed the lives of more than 3,000 Iraqis each month, many of them civilians.

Then one of JSOC’s Special Forces strike teams raided an AQI safe house and captured 12 men who were unlike the typical brutish Al Qaeda thugs. These older men were the senior managers and vice presidents of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The network they had established was sophisticated far beyond the early reckoning of U.S. commanders, with interlinked logistics, transportation, information, money management and strike operations, all of it worthy of a multinational conglomerate.

As JSOC’s director of intelligence, Flynn interrogated the senior Al Qaeda commanders at length. Sitting across from them at the detainee screening facility at Balad Air Base, Iraq, Flynn wondered why such obviously educated and intelligent people were devoting themselves to tearing their country apart, regardless of the horrendous toll in innocent lives. Some of the men had electrical engineering and other advanced degrees, but instead of building a bridge or helping establish a functioning government, they applied their talents to attacking vulnerable governing institutions in order to terrorize and intimidate civilians. He could understand their hatred of American interlopers, but the vast majority of their tens of thousands of victims were fellow Iraqis.

During the course of those interrogations and hundreds of others in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Flynn concluded that what united the terrorist warlords was a common ideology, specifically the extremely conservative and fundamentalist Salafi strain of Islam. Salafis believe the only true Islam is that version practiced by the Prophet Muhammad and his followers in the seventh and eighth centuries. They reject any separation of church and state in favor of puritanical interpretation of Islamic Sharia law. They are intolerant of other religions or sects, and at least in terms of Salafi Jihadists, their ideology is violent and expansionist by its very nature. The terrorist leaders he interrogated on a regular basis—whether they marched under the banner of Al Qaeda, the Taliban or ISIS—were true believers, every bit as committed to their ideology and skewed moral universe as Flynn was to his own.

“Over the course of all those interrogations, I concluded that ‘core Al Qaeda’ wasn’t actually comprised of human beings, but rather it was an ideology with a particular version of Islam at its center,” Flynn said in the recent interview. “More than a religion, this ideology encompasses a political belief system, because its adherents want to rule things—whether it’s a village, a city, a region or an entire ‘caliphate.’ And to achieve that goal, they are willing to use extreme violence. The religious nature of that threat makes it very hard for Americans to come to grips with.”

With Joe Biden just days away from his inauguration as the nation's president, Pastor Darryl Knappen was still denying reality and even declaring himself willing to take up arms to keep Donald Trump in office.

"It was pastors who led the way in colonial times to encourage our country to shake off the totalitarian regime of the king of England," Knappen said in a Jan. 9 Facebook message to his Minnesota congregation. He was referring to the "Black Robed Regiment," a name given to those ministers who supported the Revolutionary War effort.

"I was tempted to wear my black robe today and cover up my AR-15 beneath it," Knappen said from his Cornerstone Church sanctuary in Alexandria, Minn., "but I thought that would be way too graphic for all of you and for Facebook to allow. But I would be part of that movement back then, and I may be part of that movement today."

Conservative evangelical Christians have been among Donald Trump's most fervent and loyal supporters. While few have gone as far as Knappen and endorsed armed struggle on his behalf, the rhetoric of some evangelical leaders has been notably militant.

In a conversation with conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Dec. 9, the right-wing Christian author and radio host Eric Metaxas said he did not care about the overwhelming odds against any effort to overturn the election of Joe Biden.

"What's right is right," Metaxas said. "That is so wrong. We need to do absolutely everything we can. What's going to happen is going to happen. But we need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it's worth it."

Three days later, Metaxas was the emcee at the Jericho March in Washington, where he and others implored God to keep Trump in office.

"We are here because we know he is the God who does real miracles when his remnant cries out to him in humility and love," Metaxas said. "We are here to cry out to the God of heaven to ask him to have mercy on the greatest nation in the history of the world."

A rally organizer, Robert Weaver, told the assembled crowd that God had appeared to him in a vision after Biden's election victory and told him, "It's not over."

-- Militant Christian Nationalists Remain A Potent Force, Even After The Capitol Riot, by Tom Gjelten, NPR

***

Another milestone in the education of Mike Flynn occurred in 2009, when General Stanley McChrystal was named the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Newly elected President Barack Obama had run for president calling Afghanistan the “right battlefield” and promising to “finish the job” there.

By then, McChrystal was one of the U.S. military’s most celebrated unconventional warriors, known for JSOC’s largely successful campaign against Al Qaeda in Iraq and the 2006 killing of its leader, Zarqawi. There were those in the White House, reportedly including Vice President Joe Biden, who hoped that McChrystal would embrace a similar, limited counterterrorism strategy of pinpoint strikes and night raids in Afghanistan. Such an approach would require far fewer U.S. ground forces.

In reassembling his JSOC brain trust, McChrystal chose Flynn as his chief intelligence officer and asked for an assessment of the situation in Afghanistan. Somewhat unexpectedly to many of his cohorts in the intelligence community, Flynn concluded that U.S. and allied forces were overly focused on killing terrorists and insurgents. He published his findings publicly in a think tank report without clearing it with his superiors, revealing a deep maverick streak. In that report, Flynn and his co-author concluded that “eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy. Having focused the overwhelming majority of its collection efforts and analytical brain-power on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate.”

Meanwhile, McChrystal’s months-long review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was badly straining the relationship between his team and the White House. Obama’s inner circle worried that the U.S. military was trying to maneuver a new president into a Vietnam-like quagmire. McChrystal’s strategic assessment laying out potential options and troop numbers was leaked to the press by someone, convincing the White House team that the military was trying to pressure the president and limit his options.

Obama ultimately approved McChrystal’s more manpower-intensive counterinsurgency strategy and gave him 30,000 extra U.S. troops to implement it, while also setting a deadline for withdrawing the extra troops in 18 months. McChrystal was gratified that his campaign plan won the day, but he worried that the process leading up to that decision had left a lot of bruised feelings and distrust between his team and the White House. When Rolling Stone published its article “Runaway General” months later, quoting unnamed members of his staff criticizing Obama and Biden, those concerns were borne out. McChrystal was called back to Washington and relieved of command.

“It’s fair to say that McChrystal’s firing did leave a bad taste in my mouth,” Flynn said in our recent conversation. “Of course I felt bad for Stan, who had more combat experience than anyone else in the U.S. military at that time. But I also felt a lot of good work on the war effort and strong relationships with the Afghans that we had built were suddenly put in jeopardy. That’s also when I first began to think that the White House actually looks down on the military. I believe that to this day.”

***

In May 2013, President Obama delivered a seminal counterterrorism speech designed to break decisively with the post-9/11 past. The White House clearly wanted to capitalize on the killing of bin Laden, the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, and the approaching end to the war in Afghanistan to focus on his oft-stated priority of “nation-building here at home.” The president was also determined to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay as a stain on America’s international reputation, and he was understandably concerned about the impact of the nation’s longest wars on civil liberties.

“Today, Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants. There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure. Fewer of our troops are in harm’s way, and over the next 19 months they will continue to come home,” Obama said. “So, America is at a crossroads. We must define this struggle, or else it will define us. We have to be mindful of James Madison’s warning that ‘No nation could preserve its freedoms in the midst of continual warfare.”

For Mike Flynn, by then the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, that narrative of a rapidly declining terrorism threat did not comport with the intelligence that routinely crossed his desk. In 2012, the National Intelligence Council had even crafted a draft National Intelligence Estimate that was supposed to represent the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community, which reportedly concluded that Al Qaeda was no longer a threat to the United States. Flynn and a number of other senior intelligence officials had successfully pushed back hard against that conclusion as grossly premature.

Al Qaeda’s core leadership might have been decimated in Pakistan, but its close affiliates were drawing strength from instability spreading across the Middle East and Africa in the wake of the Arab Spring upheavals that began in 2011. That dynamic had worrisome parallels to the conditions in Afghanistan in the 1990s that originally spawned Al Qaeda. Flynn had DIA analysts distill that intelligence into a PowerPoint slide that showed that the number of radical Islamist terrorist groups had nearly doubled between 2004 and 2013, and occupied a far larger global footprint.

In the White House’s argument that the killing of bin Laden and many of his lieutenants had sounded the death knell for Al Qaeda, Flynn also once again sensed a misplaced belief that a tactic of “decapitation” of terrorist leaders was a war-winning strategy. Al Qaeda in Iraq had survived the death of Zarqawi in 2006; Al Qaeda core persevered after Bin Laden was killed in 2011; and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Yemen) remained a threat long after the U.S. killed its American-born leader Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011. Another true believer always appeared from the ranks to take their place, revealing the enduring power of their radical ideology. Killing leaders was an important tactic for keeping these groups back on their heels, but Flynn had learned the hard way that as a war-winning strategy, it was a proven failure.

Worst of all from Flynn’s bird's-eye perch at the DIA, intelligence reports of a growing threat from radical Islamist terrorism were often expunged as the intelligence stream worked its way up to the president’s desk. Flynn suspected part of the problem was National Security Adviser Susan Rice, who chaired many of the NSC deputies meetings and seemed uninterested in reports out of Iraq. But other intelligence bottlenecks have also come to light. After more than 50 intelligence analysts at U.S. Central Command complained to the Pentagon inspector general that their intelligence reports on the war against ISIS were consistently watered down, a recent House Republican task force report—written by members of the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees—concluded that intelligence on the ISIS threat was systematically altered by senior U.S. Central Command officials to give it a more positive spin.

“I read the Presidential Daily Briefs and the minutes of the National Security Council’s deputies meetings, and it was very, very clear to me that reporting on the terrorism threat that came up the intelligence community’s chain of command was very different from what was being presented at the top levels of government,” Flynn told me. “That intelligence made it very clear that Al Qaeda and its affiliates were not on the run, but were in fact rapidly expanding. The number of terrorist attacks were on the rise, and Iraq was starting to burn again. So that was Obama’s big lie—that the enemy was on the run, and we were beating these guys.”

***

After his retirement, Flynn didn’t run immediately to Trump. His regular appearances on Fox News led no fewer than five Republican presidential candidates to reach out for advice—Ben Carson, Scott Walker, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz and Trump. An op-ed he co-wrote with Fiorina gave him the idea for his new book, “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.” But by the end of the primaries, Trump was the last Republican standing, and Flynn was standing prominently alongside him.

“If someone had asked me five years ago if I would be surprised to find myself where I’m standing today, absolutely I would have been surprised,” Flynn conceded.

Flynn’s perception of an expanding and evil ideology of Islamist extremism aligns with Trump’s dystopian view. Yet at times Flynn still struggles to reconcile his views with some of Trump’s most extreme positions, including his persistent praise of Putin.

“Putin is a totalitarian dictator and a thug who does not have our interests in mind. So I think Trump calling him a strong leader has been overstated, I’ll give you that,” Flynn said. “But Putin is smart and savvy, and he has taken actions in Ukraine and elsewhere that have limited our options, and the U.S. and NATO response has been timid. I think Trump’s strength lies in being a master negotiator, and he wants as many options as possible in dealing with Russia.” (Still, Flynn himself may have image problems here, since he appeared with Putin last year at an anniversary party for the Kremlin-controlled RT television network in Moscow.)

On Trump’s desire to return to “waterboarding” terrorism suspects and “worse,” Flynn is also equivocal, having seen how harsh interrogation techniques were counterproductive at JSOC and besmirched the reputation of the U.S. military. “I would not want to return to ‘enhanced techniques,’ because I helped rewrite the manual for interrogations,” he said. “Having said that, if the nation was in grave danger from a terrorist attack involving weapons of mass destruction, and we had certain individuals in our custody with information that might avoid it, then I would probably OK enhanced interrogation techniques within certain limits.”

Similarly, Flynn does not believe all Muslims should be temporarily banned from the United States, as Trump once suggested, but he supports the idea of a halt in immigration from war zones where the terrorist threat is centered. “When you talk about bringing in people from war zones in large numbers, it’s very difficult to vet these people adequately,” he said. The refugee crisis and multiple terrorist attacks inside Europe, he noted, are tearing at the fabric of the continent and threatening European unity. “I think Trump is right to call for stopping immigration from these places and assessing how to respond, because we can’t just keep sending them to places inside the United States that don’t want them. And while Islam writ large may not be the problem, the Obama administration refuses to state that this extremist ideology is even a problem. It’s a cancer within Islam.”

On the issue of Clinton and her use of a private email server to conduct government business, Flynn himself is perhaps her greatest critic. “I spent 10 years as an electronic warfare and signals intelligence officer, so I know the damage she did as secretary of State by using an unclassified server to conduct official business. I think Clinton is smart, she knows a lot of world leaders, and she has a skill set. But I don’t see how anyone who ever held a classified clearance can support her. Where’s the accountability?”

***

In the education of Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, some of those who know and admire him see one more cautionary tale about the effects of endless war on democratic societies. Important principles such as the nonpartisan ethos of the warrior elite begin to crumble, the politics and mood of the country darken, and former brothers in arms take sides opposing one another.

Retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey is a Vietnam veteran and one of the most decorated officers of his generation. He is also among the prominent retired officers who have taken a public “Never Trump” stand, arguing in an op-ed that the New York developer is “a willful and abusive braggart” who is “remarkably ignorant and uneducated about the world we face and the means we may use to defend ourselves.” And yet when asked about the controversy surrounding Flynn’s support of Trump, McCaffrey can relate.

“Mike Flynn is the best intelligence officer of his generation, and he and Stan McChrystal are the principle reason we have not suffered a half-dozen 9/11-type attacks since 2001,” he wrote in an email to the author. “Mike has an informed viewpoint, he’s honest and brutally frank, and he’s given a huge chunk of his life to this war against terrorists that has claimed tens of thousands of U.S. killed and wounded. That makes it very personal to senior war fighters like Flynn. Mostly the Obama team has been cautious and sensible on national security, but they ignored Flynn’s input on the nature of the threat because it stepped on their narrative, and he got fired. Now Mike is filled with anger. I find the situation very sad.”

For his part, Mike Flynn admits to a sense of deep frustration as he walks through airports these days and sees soldiers patted on the back by an American public and politicians who long ago abandoned the fight. He’s still shouting that the war is not over, and the only way Flynn knows to bring those soldiers all the way home, and keep faith with those who never made it back, is to find a way to win it.

[admin]

Militant Christian Nationalists Remain A Potent Force, Even After The Capitol Riot
by Tom Gjelten
NPR
January 19, 20219:59 AM ET

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The Trump Prophecy

Witness the incredible true story of one man’s personal journey to healing that led to an international prayer movement. Retired firefighter Mark Taylor finds himself in a crisis of faith as he struggles with a diagnosis of PTSD. But, in 2011, everything changes when he experiences a revelation from God about change in leadership in our nation prior to the 2016 Presidential Election. As he works to understand his remarkable experience, he shares his hopeful vision and it spreads across the globe.

"JESUS SAVES" banners were among those carried during a rally on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington before rioters stormed the Capitol. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

With Joe Biden just days away from his inauguration as the nation's president, Pastor Darryl Knappen was still denying reality and even declaring himself willing to take up arms to keep Donald Trump in office.

"It was pastors who led the way in colonial times to encourage our country to shake off the totalitarian regime of the king of England," Knappen said in a Jan. 9 Facebook message to his Minnesota congregation. He was referring to the "Black Robed Regiment," a name given to those ministers who supported the Revolutionary War effort.

"I was tempted to wear my black robe today and cover up my AR-15 beneath it," Knappen said from his Cornerstone Church sanctuary in Alexandria, Minn., "but I thought that would be way too graphic for all of you and for Facebook to allow. But I would be part of that movement back then, and I may be part of that movement today."

Conservative evangelical Christians have been among Donald Trump's most fervent and loyal supporters. While few have gone as far as Knappen and endorsed armed struggle on his behalf, the rhetoric of some evangelical leaders has been notably militant.

In a conversation with conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Dec. 9, the right-wing Christian author and radio host Eric Metaxas said he did not care about the overwhelming odds against any effort to overturn the election of Joe Biden.

"What's right is right," Metaxas said. "That is so wrong. We need to do absolutely everything we can. What's going to happen is going to happen. But we need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it's worth it."

Three days later, Metaxas was the emcee at the Jericho March in Washington, where he and others implored God to keep Trump in office.

"We are here because we know he is the God who does real miracles when his remnant cries out to him in humility and love," Metaxas said. "We are here to cry out to the God of heaven to ask him to have mercy on the greatest nation in the history of the world."

A rally organizer, Robert Weaver, told the assembled crowd that God had appeared to him in a vision after Biden's election victory and told him, "It's not over."

The notion that God would take direct interest in a U.S. election is an expression of the ideology of Christian nationalism, says Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Indiana University-Purdue University and co-author of Taking America Back For God.

"It's the idea that God has a plan for this nation, that God wants a particular outcome," Whitehead says. Such convictions, Whitehead says, gave extra potency to efforts in support of Trump's attempts to overturn his clear election defeat.

"Religion is such a strongly and closely held system of beliefs and values," Whitehead says. "So if God has said, 'This is the way I want this nation run, and this is the person that I want leading it,' why would you brook any opposition, no matter what?"

Taken to an extreme, Whitehead says, that viewpoint can even be seen as justifying violence.

"Among Americans who see a fusion between their religious identities and their national identity," he argues, "it tends to draw on a framework of conquering outsiders and taking violent hold of what is rightfully yours."

Speaking at last month's Jericho March prayer rally, the founder of the OathKeepers militia group, Stewart Rhodes, told the crowd he hoped Trump would use the Insurrection Act to "drop the hammer" on his opponents.

"He needs to know from you that you are with him," Rhodes said, "and that if he does not do it now, we're going to have to do it ourselves later, in a much more desperate, much more bloody war."

Among the flags at the rally was a big yellow banner that said "JESUS SAVES." The same banner was seen again in the crowd that assaulted the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, among other examples of Christian imagery.

One of the leaders of the invasion of the Senate chamber, Jacob Chansley, actually asked the rioters to pause in their rampage and join him for a moment of prayer to God.

"Thank you for allowing the United States to be reborn," Chansley said, standing on the dais occupied a few hours earlier by Vice President Pence.

"We love you and we thank you. In Christ's holy name, we pray," Chansley said, as recorded in a video by Luke Mogelson, a writer at The New Yorker. The rioters, many of whom had quietly removed their hats, erupted in a cry of "Amen!"

The post-election expressions of right wing Christian protest suggest that Christian militancy on occasion can lead to political extremism.

"Inherent in the idea of Christian nationalism is the idea that America is representative of God's truth, and for that reason it needs to be defended. It needs to be protected," says Kristin du Mez, a historian at Calvin University and author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted A Faith and Fractured A Nation.

"Because the dangers are so great and the stakes are so high, that often will require violence. It's violence for the sake of righteousness, violence to achieve order, violence to bring peace and security," du Mez says. "There's a willingness to do what needs to be done."

Since the Jan. 6 assault on the on the Capitol, pro-Trump Christian activists have generally kept a low profile. After an article on the Jericho March was published by The Atlantic, a spokesperson for the organizers wrote to say the March "denounces any and all acts of violence and destruction, including any that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021."

But not all Christian militants have been chastened. In his Jan. 9 Facebook message, Knappen issued a call to arms.

"There is a need in every one of our localities to have individuals, patriots, who are ready to arm up and be part of a citizen militia to protect our freedoms," he said, noting that he was in church, speaking in front of the cross.

For Andrew Whitehead, the protests led by Christian militants in the aftermath of Trump's election defeat show that Christian nationalism can be a dangerous phenomenon when it calls into question the idea of sharing power with an adversary, and one not likely to disappear any time soon.

"It really is a threat to a pluralistic, democratic society," Whitehead says. "It should be taken very seriously."

***************************

How QAnon uses religion to lure unsuspecting Christians
by Daniel Burke
CNN Religion Editor
Updated 1:05 PM ET, Thu October 15, 2020

(CNN) Parker Neff was scrolling through conservative posts on Facebook when he saw an unfamiliar hashtag: #WWG1WGA.

Recently retired after serving as a Southern Baptist pastor for more than 20 years, his time was free and curiosity piqued.

"I started looking into it online," Neff said. "Doing some research."

And with that, the 66-year-old retiree, and soon his wife, Sharon, fell down one of the internet's most dangerous rabbit holes.

It didn't take long for Neff to find the hashtag's meaning. "Where We Go One We Go All" is one of several mottoes of QAnon, a collective of online conspiracists.

The pastor and his wife, who live in Arcola, Mississippi, began watching the vast collection of QAnon videos posted online by "researchers" who decipher the cryptic messages of "Q," an anonymous online persona who claims to have access to classified military and intelligence operations.

Since its inception in 2017 QAnon has quickly metastasized, infiltrating American politics, internet culture and now -- religion.


A woman holds up a QAnon sign at a President Trump campaign rally on September 22, 2020, in Moon Township, Pennsylvania.

According to QAnon, President Donald Trump is secretly working to stop a child sex cabal run by Hollywood and political elites who will one day be revealed during an apocalyptic event known as The Storm.

During the pandemic, QAnon-related content has exploded online, growing nearly 175% on Facebook and nearly 63% on Twitter, according to a British think tank.

Although QAnon's conspiracy theories are baseless -- they allege that a famous actor is a secret sex trafficker and a leading Democrat participated in Satanic rituals -- the dangers the movement poses are very real.

The FBI has called QAnon a domestic terror threat and an internal FBI memo warned that "fringe conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity."

Facebook finally pledged to ban QAnon content earlier this month. And YouTube announced Thursday that it is "removing more conspiracy theory content used to justify real-world violence," including QAnon videos.

Still, some Christian conservatives are falling for QAnon's unhinged conspiracies.

"Right now QAnon is still on the fringes of evangelicalism," said Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and dean at Wheaton College in Illinois who wrote a recent column warning Christians about QAnon. "But we have a pretty big fringe.

"Pastors need to be more aware of the danger and they need tools to address it," he told CNN. "People are being misled by social media."

Pastors who preach QAnon-aligned ideas

Some Christian pastors are actually leading their followers to QAnon, or at least introducing them to its dubious conspiracy theories.

To cite a few examples:

• During services in July, Rock Urban Church in Grandville, Michigan, played a discredited video that supports QAnon conspiracy theories. "The country is being torn apart by the biggest political hoax and coordinated mass media disinformation campaign in living history — you may know it as COVID-19," the video says. The church did not answer requests for comment and has removed the video from its YouTube channel.

• Danny Silk, a leader at Bethel Church, a Pentecostal megachurch in Redding, California, has posted QAnon-related ideas and hashtags on his Instagram account. Silk did not respond to requests for comment.


Bethel Church in Redding, California. One of its leaders has shared QAnon ideas on social media.

• Pastor John MacArthur of California, an influential evangelical who is battling county officials over the right to continue indoor services at his Grace Community Church, espoused a theme popular in QAnon circles when he misinterpreted CDC data and informed his congregation that "there is no pandemic." MacArthur declined CNN's request for comment.

• There's even a movement, led by the Indiana-based Omega Kingdom Ministry, to merge QAnon and Christianity -- with texts from both the Bible and Q read at church services.

"If you are just learning about QAnon and The Great Awakening, this is the right spot for you," reads the ministry's website. Representatives from the ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Paul Anleitner, an evangelical pastor in Minneapolis, said he's seen worrying examples of conservative Christians preaching from QAnon's bible: Pastors warning about the "Deep State," congregants trading conspiracy theories during Bible studies, and, most concerning to him, unsuspecting Christians lured to QAnon through respected church leaders.

"I see this circulating through conservative and Charismatic churches and it breaks my heart," said Anleitner, who spent time in Pentecostal churches, where he says QAnon's influence is distressingly pervasive.

"It's pulling families apart, pulling people away from the gospel and creating distrust among people searching for the truth."


Pastor John MacArthur speaking at his California church in August. CNN has blurred a portion of this image to protect a child's identity.

Earlier this year a young Christian friend of his recirculated QAnon ideas posted online by a national Christian leader, Anleitner said. (He declined to name the pastor on the record).

"I reached out to my friend and told him the stuff he posted came directly from QAnon," said Anleitner. "He had no idea."

And that, Christian leaders say, is a big part of the problem.

Some followers see QAnon messages as sacred texts

QAnon is complex, said Brian Friedberg, a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who has studied the movement.

It churns out an almost endless stream of content, from memes to anti-Semitic tropes to Christian Scripture. From its anonymous message board, the dubious ideas circulate through social media, sometimes finding their way into the Twitter feed of Trump and his allies, who have repeatedly boosted QAnon accounts.

Q himself (or herself, or themselves for that matter -- no one quite knows who Q is) has posted nearly 5,000 messages since 2017.

In QAnon, some observers see a mass delusion, others see a political cult, and still others claim to see the sprouts of a new faith.

According to the religious view of QAnon, Q is a postmodern prophet, "Q drops" (aka his messages) are sacred texts and Trump is a messianic figure who will conjure "The Storm," an apocalyptic revelation exposing evildoers.


A QAnon flag is flown during a rally in support of President Trump on October 11, 2020 in Ronkonkoma, New York.

If QAnon is a new religion, it bears the birthmarks of our truth-deprived time: Born on an obscure internet image board, it spreads through social media, preaches a perverted form of populism and is amplified by a president who has demonstrated little regard for facts.

But in Mississippi, the Neffs said they see QAnon as a source of "behind the scenes" information -- not as a religion.

"It's kind of like checking Fox News or CNN," -- that is, a place to find the latest news, said Park Neff, who has a master's in divinity and a doctorate from New Orleans Baptist Seminary. "It just seemed to be good, solid conservative thought."

Like her husband, Sharon Neff said she saw no contradictions between QAnon and Christianity. Instead, she saw important connections, as did many of her friends and fellow church members.

"What resonated with me is the idea of moving toward a global government," she said, "and that actually goes along with the Christian belief about the End Times."

QAnon's 'red pill'

In some ways, QAnon echoes the concerns of politically engaged, ultra-conservative evangelicals.

It interprets world events through the lens of Scripture or Q posts. It's obsessed with a grand, apocalyptic reckoning that will separate good from evil, deeply distrusts the media and finds an unlikely champion -- and hero -- in President Trump.

Neff also said she likes that Q quotes Christian scripture extensively and claims to be exposing child trafficking, a problem that she said she and other Southern Baptist women have been fighting for years.

That's no accident, say experts who have studied QAnon. The group intentionally uses emotionally fraught topics, like suffering children, to draw Christians to their movement.

"That's a recruiting tactic," said Travis View, a host of "QAnon Anonymous," a podcast that seeks to explain the movement. "It's their red pill." (Travis View is a pseudonym he uses for safety. )


A man wears a QAnon sweatshirt during a pro-Trump rally on October 3, 2020 in the borough of Staten Island in New York City. The event was held to encourage supporters to pray for Trump's health after he contracted Covid-19.

View compared it to a religion that proselytizes by offering potential converts seemingly mundane services before laying the hard sell on them.

"The 'Save the Children' messaging is very effective, because everyone wants to protect children."

It's also tailor-made for evangelicals, View said.

Lately, he added, QAnon has been holding "Save the Children" rallies, while carefully concealing its involvement.

The tactic has been effective, said Anleitner.

"People who start with 'saving the children' don't stay there -- and that's the problem," he said. "It's like Alice in Wonderland. They follow the rabbit and enter a totally different framework for reality."

Ready for the Great Awakening

Friedberg said he sees elements of his experience as a young evangelical in the QAnon movement: Its seamless blend of Christianity and nationalism, its promise of spiritual knowledge and the primacy of scripture, and, finally, the desire to evangelize to friends and family.

But Friedberg said he doesn't see QAnon itself as a religion.

"This is an information operation that has gotten out of the direct control of whoever started it," he said. It's an operation, he added, that likely would not exist in a less polarized, confusing and frightening time.

Under somewhat similar strains, a group of 1840s Baptists called the Millerites predicted the Second Coming of Jesus.

When Jesus didn't arrive, the Millerites were greatly disappointed, but they adjusted their apocalyptic timetables and soldiered on, eventually becoming the Seventh Day Adventist Church.


A QAnon supporter at Mount Rushmore National Monument on July 1, 2020 in Keystone, South Dakota.

Travis View said he sees echoes of the Millerites in QAnon. Numerous QAnon "prophecies" have proven false. Hillary Clinton was not arrested in 2017, Republicans didn't rout Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections and Trump has not imprisoned his political enemies at Guantanamo Bay.

These days, Q shies away from giving specific dates, View noted, suggesting a shift in tactics. Even so, believers attempt to explain away any contradictions between QAnon and reality, just as the Millerites did centuries ago.

Park Neff, the Baptist pastor, said the failed prophecies are all part of QAnon's master plan.

"Some of it seems like deliberate misinformation to throw off the other side," Neff said, "as should be apparent to anyone who watches the news. Sometimes he (Q) does it to rattle their cages, sometimes to keep them guessing. It seems to work."

Meanwhile, Neff, like many interested in QAnon, looks forward to the Great Awakening. The pastor said it won't be like the other Great Awakenings, the religious revivals that torched through early America.

This one, he said, will concern the state, not the church.

It will start when the prevailing evil in our government is finally revealed, he said, and end with Trump validated and all the bad people jailed on an island far, far away.

*******************************

How QAnon Conspiracy Is Spreading In Christian Communities Across The U.S.
NPR: All Things Considered
August 21, 2020 3:47 PM ET

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with journalist Katelyn Beaty about the spread of the QAnon conspiracy theory in Christian communities in the United States.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The false conspiracy theory known as QAnon is moving from fringe Internet chatrooms into mainstream politics. A Republican congressional candidate in Georgia is a supporter. The Texas Republican Party has used a QAnon slogan in campaign messaging. President Trump himself has retweeted QAnon followers at least 200 times and described them as, quote, "people that love our country." To be clear, this is a group the FBI has labeled a potential domestic terrorist threat. Its followers believe that President Trump is saving the world from a cult of cannibalistic pedophiles.

Reporter Katelyn Beaty writes for the Religion News Service about how this belief is taking hold in white evangelical churches. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

KATELYN BEATY: Thanks so much for having me.

SHAPIRO: Your piece is called "QAnon: The Alternative Religion That's Coming To Your Church." Do the people you interviewed really see it as a belief system comparable to organized religion?

BEATY: They do. They are picking up on the overt spiritual language that Q, whoever that is, is using in his messages on the Internet, and they see that as connecting directly to the Bible, to the God of Christianity and to God's hand at work in the world. So they see the QAnon messages as revealing truth in the world and that they are supposed to take up a spiritual battle to reveal truth.

SHAPIRO: And your reporting suggests that there's something about this moment that makes it spread that much faster.

BEATY: Yeah. So a lot of pastors I spoke with noted the fact that, you know, their churches are having to continue to do virtual church. They're not meeting in person as much due to the coronavirus and restrictions on worship. And in that time, the pastors I spoke with sense that there is this isolation and loneliness that their members are experiencing. You know, the pastors only get one hour a week with people in their church. The people in their church are probably spending hours on Facebook, on other social media forums, taking in this information. And the pastors I spoke with just felt like they couldn't do enough to counter the false messages that some of their church members were receiving through the Internet.

SHAPIRO: One pastor who you spoke with in rural Missouri named Mark Fugitt told you he's trying to get at this in his sermons, and one way he's doing it is talking about the theme of dehumanization.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MARK FUGITT: When our enemy becomes - when they're not human, when they're Satan, you know, working for the devil, then we get into - you know, it's the whole - you know, I can't hate a - you know, another person. But, boy, if I can make them less than human, that's the crusade that's Jewish persecution throughout history, that's racial issues. And I think we're starting to see some of that. And, I mean, I've heard it. I've heard people literally say, you know, hey, this certain political figure, you know, I don't think they're human.

SHAPIRO: Besides speaking at the pulpit, what other strategies are these pastors trying?

BEATY: So the pastors I spoke with talked a lot about drawing on tried-and-true Christian principles - for example, the biblical teaching that Christians are not to bear false witness against their neighbors. They're supposed to be people who speak truth and not falsehood. They're people who are supposed to create peace instead of division. They're people who are supposed to speak words of love instead of hate. And so rather than directly take on the truth or falsity of specific QAnon claims, the pastors that I spoke with felt that it was better to really draw people in their church to principles that could then be applied in their daily lives, including in how they conduct themselves online.

SHAPIRO: Many pastors you spoke to are clearly very concerned about this. Let's hear from Jeb Barr, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Elm Mott, Texas.

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JEB BARR: As a Christian, as a church, we're going to be spreading the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ because that's the most important message in the world. So if the people spreading that message are also spreading easily debunked, crazy lies, why would the message be believed, right? Why would we listen to my friend Joe, who says he's a Christian and who's telling me about Jesus, if he also thinks that Communists are taking over America and operating a pedophile ring out of some pizza restaurant?

SHAPIRO: I guess one question is, if these pastors are the voices of authority within the church community, why aren't they able to talk their parishioners out of this false belief?

BEATY: The pastors that I spoke with talked about a crisis of authority that they feel acutely as spiritual leaders. They perceive that we're in this time when traditional forms of credibility, of verifying truth, of looking at authoritative figures as holding truth - we're in a time when there's a lot of mistrust of traditional sources of authority and truth. And they feel that themselves as church leaders. So they're concerned that if they try to take on QAnon directly and speak truth instead of falsehood, that they just - they won't be trusted. They won't be believed.

And, also, if they try to point their church members to credible news sources, to mainstream media, that none of that will come through because, of course, according to the QAnon conspiracy theory, the mainstream media is part of the cover-up. So I think a lot of the pastors felt that their hands are tied in this time, and they're concerned that members of their church are not only accepting falsehood and kind of believing in these falsehoods but also spreading falsehood to other people in the church. And that's especially problematic when QAnon is being espoused by other pastors in a denomination or by leaders in a particular church.

SHAPIRO: Do you think we would find a growing belief in QAnon in any community that includes a lot of Trump supporters, or is there something specific to the white evangelical church that makes it susceptible to these messages?

BEATY: That's a great question. I think about a poll conducted by the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical institution in the Chicago suburbs. This was a poll conducted in 2018 that found that over half of evangelicals, as defined by belief, are strongly convinced that the mainstream media produced fake news. And Ed Stetzer, the executive director of the Billy Graham Center, noted that that distrust in mainstream media and that willingness to write off mainstream media information as fake news opens the door for a lot of evangelicals to turn to alternative and fringe news sources, including those that traffic in conspiracy theories. So I certainly think there's a connection there.

But, also, again, it's that QAnon uses this explicitly spiritual language that sounds Christian. You know, there's a clear battle between good and evil. There's the promise of this great awakening. More people are going to wake up to these prophecies, if you will, that's coming from Q. And so it's easy for many white evangelicals to read their Bibles and connect the dots between what they read there and what they're hearing from QAnon sources.

SHAPIRO: Katelyn Beaty is a journalist who wrote about QAnon and the evangelical church for the Religion News Service. Thank you for your time today.

BEATY: Thanks so much for having me.

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QAnon: The alternative religion that’s coming to your church: Teaching susceptible Christians media literacy won’t counteract their sudden, widespread adherence to conspiracy theories because these Christians thrive on a narrative of media cover-up.
by Katelyn Beaty
August 17, 2020


In this Aug. 2, 2018, file photo, David Reinert holds a Q sign while waiting in line with others to enter a campaign rally with President Donald Trump in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory forged in a dark corner of the internet has come into the mainstream political arena. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

(RNS) — It’s a rough time to be a pastor. An election year, national racial unrest and a global pandemic each challenged the usual methods of ministry. Taken together, many church leaders are facing the traditional post-vacation ingathering season with a serious case of burnout.

But there’s another challenge that pastors I spoke with say is on the rise in their flocks. It is taking on the power of a new religion that’s dividing churches and hurting Christian witness.

Mark Fugitt, senior pastor of Round Grove Baptist Church in Miller, Missouri, recently sat down to count the conspiracy theories that people in his church are sharing on Facebook. The list was long. It included claims that 5G radio waves are used for mind control; that George Floyd’s murder is a hoax; that Bill Gates is related to the devil; that masks can kill you; that the germ theory isn’t real; and that there might be something to Pizzagate after all.

“You don’t just see it once,” said Fugitt. “If there’s ever anything posted, you’ll see it five to 10 times. It’s escalating for sure.”

Conspiracy theories — grand narratives that seek to prove that powerful actors are secretly controlling events and institutions for evil purposes — are nothing new in the U.S. But since 2017, a sort of ur-conspiracy theory, QAnon, has coalesced in online forums and created millions of believers. “To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion,” wrote Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic in June.

Named after “Q,” who posts anonymously on the online bulletin board 4chan, QAnon alleges that President Donald Trump and military officials are working to expose a “deep state” pedophile ring with links to Hollywood, the media and the Democratic Party. Since its first mention some three years ago, the theory has drawn adherents looking for a clear way to explain recent disorienting global events.

Once the fascination of far-right commentators and their followers, QAnon is no longer fringe. With support from Trump and other elected officials, it has gained credibility both on the web and in the offline world: In Georgia, a candidate for Congress has praised Q as “a mythical hero,” and at least five other congressional hopefuls from Illinois to Oregon have voiced support.

One scholar found a 71% increase in QAnon content on Twitter and a 651% increase on Facebook since March.

Jon Thorngate is the pastor at LifeBridge, a nondenominational church of about 300 in a Milwaukee suburb. In recent months, he said, his members have shared “Plandemic,” a half-hour film that presents COVID-19 as a moneymaking scheme by government officials and others, on Facebook. Members have also passed around a now-banned Breitbart video that promotes hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus.

Thorngate, one of the few pastors who would go on the record among those who called QAnon a real problem in their churches, said that only five to 10 members are actually posting the videos online. But in conversations with other members, he’s realized many more are open to conspiracy theories than those who post.

Thorngate attributes the phenomenon in part to the “death of expertise” — a distrust of authority figures that leads some Americans to undervalue long-established measures of competency and wisdom. Among some church members, he said, the attitude is, “I’m going to use church for the things I like, ignore it for the things I don’t and find my own truth.

“That part for us is concerning, that nothing feels authoritative right now.”


A demonstrator holds a QAnon sign as he walks at a protest April 19, 2020, in Olympia, Washington, opposing the state’s stay-at-home order to slow the coronavirus outbreak. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has blasted President Donald Trump’s calls to “liberate” parts of the country from stay-at-home and other orders designed to combat the spread of the coronavirus. Inslee said Trump is fomenting a potentially deadly insubordination among his followers before the pandemic is contained. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

For years in the 1980s and ’90s, U.S. evangelicals, above nearly any other group, warned what will happen when people abandon absolute truth (which they located in the Bible), saying the idea of relative truth would lead to people believing whatever confirms their own inward hunches. But suspicion of big government, questioning of scientific consensus (on evolution, for example) and a rejection of the morals of Hollywood and liberal elites took hold among millennial Christians, many of whom feel politically alienated and beat up by mainstream media. They are natural targets for QAnon.

There’s no hard data on how many Christians espouse QAnon. But Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, noted that distrust of mainstream news sources “can feed a penchant for conspiracy theories.”

A 2018 poll from BGC found that 46% of self-identified evangelicals and 52% of those whose beliefs tagged them as evangelical “strongly agreed that the mainstream media produced fake news.” It also found that regular church attendance (at least once a month) correlated to believing that mainstream media promulgates fake news (77% compared with 68% of those who attend less regularly).

Jared Stacy said the spread of conspiracy theories in his church is particularly affecting young members. The college and young adult pastor of Spotswood Baptist Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Stacy said some older members are sharing Facebook content that links the coronavirus to Jeffrey Epstein and secret pedophile rings. He says his and other pastors’ job is to teach that conspiracy theories are not where Christians should find a basis for reality.

“My fear … is that Jesus would not be co-opted by conspiracy theories in a way that leads the next generation to throw Jesus out with the bathwater,” Stacy said, “that we’re not able to separate the narrative of taking back our country from Jesus’ kingdom narrative.”

Others are concerned the theories will become grounds for more mistrust. “Young people are exiting the church because they see their parents and mentors and pastors and Sunday school teachers spreading things that even at a young age they can see through,” said Jeb Barr, the senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Elm Mott outside Waco, Texas. He said conspiracy theories are “extremely widespread and getting worse” among his online church networks.

“Why would we listen to my friend Joe … who’s telling me about Jesus who also thinks that Communists are taking over America and operating a pedophile ring out of a pizza restaurant? … Why would we be believed?”

But Barr and other pastors I spoke with are reticent to police church members’ social media conduct. Instead, they try to teach broader principles. “Christians are meant to be agents of hope, to be peacemakers; the Bible says we’re not to be quarrelsome,” said Barr. “We’re not to be the ones spreading fear and division and anger.”

Barr also teaches critical thinking skills and encourages his members to read “boring news.” He will recommend news sources that are credible.

But teaching media literacy isn’t enough, precisely because QAnon thrives on a narrative of media cover-up.

Fugitt said it’s not effective to tell conspiracy spreaders that what they are sharing online is false. “Nobody joins a cult. I don’t think anybody shares a conspiracy theory either because they believe it’s truth.” Rather, he tries to address the dehumanizing language of QAnon theories that equate certain people with evil. History is replete with examples of where such language can lead.

“I can’t hate another person, but boy if I can make them less than human, that’s the Crusades, that’s Jewish persecution throughout history, that’s racial issues hand over fist there.”

In a fraught political moment, the pastors I spoke with worried that taking on QAnon, by addressing politics directly, would divide the church.

But QAnon is more than a political ideology. It’s a spiritual worldview that co-opts many Christian-sounding ideas to promote verifiably false claims about actual human beings.

QAnon has features akin to syncretism — the practice of blending traditional Christian beliefs with other spiritual systems, such as Santeria. Q explicitly uses Bible verses to urge adherents to stand firm against evil elites. One charismatic church based in Indiana hosts two-hour Sunday services showing how Bible prophecies confirm Q’s messages. Its leaders tell the congregation to stop watching mainstream media (even conservative media) in favor of QAnon YouTube channels and the Qmap website.

And it’s having life-and-death effects: It’s hampering the work of anti-sex trafficking organizations. The FBI has linked it to violence and threats of violence. And its adherents are downplaying the threat of COVID and thus putting others’ lives at risk.

The earliest Christians contended with syncretism in the form of Gnosticism, which blended elements of Greek philosophy and Zoroastrianism with Christianity, emphasizing the good-evil spirit-flesh divide as well as secret divine knowledge (Greek: gnosis is “knowledge”). Early church fathers such as Irenaeus and Tertullian battled Gnostic ideas, rejecting them as heresy.

At a time when church leaders are having to host digital church and try to meet members’ needs virtually, the idea of adding “fight heresy” to their to-do list might sound exhausting. But a core calling of church leaders is to speak the truth in love. It’s not loving to allow impressionable people to be taken in by falsehood. Nor is it loving to allow them to spread falsehood and slander to others.

“Conspiracy theories thrive on a sort of cynicism that says, ‘We see a different reality that no one else sees,’” said Stacy. “Paul says to take every thought captive — addressing conspiracy theories is part of that work.”

(Katelyn Beaty is a former managing editor of Christianity Today and the author of “A Woman’s Place.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of Religion News Service.)