Disgraced general to far-right hero: Michael Flynn rides the next wave
The sun has already set outside the white-walled church as Michael Flynn walks onstage. The crowd inside the 1,100-capacity auditorium has thinned some after 10 hours of speeches and prayers and performances, but the closing speaker seems raring to go.
Lieutenant General Flynn, a former Army intelligence officer who served, briefly, as President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, wears a blue palm-tree print blazer over a gray camouflage T-shirt with an eagle across the chest. Once described by Gen. Stanley McChrystal as “spring-loaded,” he radiates latent energy as he paces the stage in his brown boots.
It’s Mr. Flynn’s second speaking slot of the day at Reawaken America, the Christian-themed, MAGA-infused roadshow that he headlines. Since his morning pep talk, the audience has heard from anti-vaccine activists, election-fraud proponents, a gold-bar salesman, various GOP candidates, an assortment of pastors, and Eric Trump.
Now it’s evening in Southern California. Mr. Flynn tells the crowd of mostly white, middle-aged men and women that they’re living “in an incredible moment in U.S. history.” But not in a positive sense: America, he says, is under threat from within.
“The people that are in charge of our government right now, they are intentionally trying to destroy our country,” he rasps into a microphone decorated in the colors of the flag. “These people, they’re not incompetent. They’re not stupid. They’re evil!”
For most senior military officers, retirement from active duty tees up a comfortable life of after-dinner speeches, seminars at military academies, and consulting gigs. Mr. Flynn is on a different circuit – one that taps into the combative politics of the president he served and is now a brand-building, cash-generating tour that’s taken on a life of its own.
Nearly six decades ago, historian Richard Hofstader published his famous essay, “.” In it, he described the extreme right of the Republican Party as driven by a sense that America had been “largely taken away from them and their kind.” That paranoid wing gained unusual strength in the 1950s and ’60s with McCarthyism and the John Birch Society, which held that communist conspirators had permeated the highest levels of the
