Tag: military
Michael Flynn

Mike Flynn Says He's Been An Alex Jones Conspiracy Fanboy Since 2008

Retired Gen. Mike Flynn appeared on the December 27, 2023, edition of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show to praise the host, saying that when he “had first seen him in 2008 and 2009” he had said, “That guy's absolutely right on the money.” In the years since, Flynn has served as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and White House national security adviser, and could potentially return to government under a second Trump administration.

Jones is one of the country’s leading conspiracy theorists. He has pushed false claims about a variety of tragedies, including the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School; the Boston Marathon bombing; and 9/11. In November, Jones aired a report questioning the Holocaust death toll.

The families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims successfully sued Jones for his lies about the tragedy.

Despite Jones’ long history of toxicity, right-wing media figures and Republican politicians — including former President Donald Trump — have embraced him over the years.

Among Jones’ admirers is Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI before being pardoned by Trump. Prior to that, Flynn also served as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under then-President Barack Obama, but was fired in 2014.

Trump has suggested that Flynn will be involved in his potential second administration, telling him at an event last year: “We’re going to bring you back.”

Flynn has also acted as a far-right media commentator and has repeatedly made toxic remarks. In 2021, he warned his audience that “we're being marched” to Nazi death camps but that, unlike Holocaust victims, he “would never get on that train.” He also seemed to call for a Myanmar-style coup in the United States (which he later denied); encouraged Trump to invoke martial law in order to redo the 2020 election; and tweeted that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.” Flynn also previously supported the QAnon movement.

Along with Clay Clark, Flynn co-founded the pro-Trump ReAwaken America tour. Those events, which feature Eric Trump and other Trump allies, have repeatedly featured Hitler-promoting antisemites. (The tour has dropped those speakers after facing criticism.)

On the December 27, 2023, edition of The Alex Jones Show, Flynn appeared in-studio for a significant amount of time and praised his host. Clark also appeared on the program as a guest.

During a commentary about trusting the right people, Flynn spoke directly to Jones’ audience: “Alex has been bashed over the head for the better part of really 30 years, and I told Alex a couple of years ago when we met that I had first seen him in 2008 and 2009. I said, ‘That guy's absolutely right on the money.’ And here we are sitting here today in 2023, we're talking about the same issues — although they have exacerbated. So we have to really dig in. Do the research, listen to the right people.”

Shortly after Flynn’s endorsement, Jones characteristically argued that government-aligned entities are planning to stage false flags in order to spark a civil war: “They're going to stage false flags — unless we expose them and stop them — to blame us and trigger this. And they're going to make moves that they believe will elicit a civil war. This isn't coming. It's here. They are going to try this.”

Following Jones’ “false flags” warning, Flynn replied: “This is absolutely right.”

During the show, as Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights Executive Director Devin Burghart noted, Flynn also invoked violent imagery to prepare viewers for bloody conflict.

MIKE FLYNN: I don't raise my voice that much, but when I do, it means that we are moving to — as Alex just said — we're moving towards the sound of the guns here, folks. And the sound of the guns is freedom. We are going to move towards freedom.

In a December 2018 Washington Post profile about Flynn, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer said that when Flynn was leading the agency, he “started doing weird things, like bring[ing] his unsecured BlackBerry into the secure space.” Flynn “became unabashed about his beliefs,” the officer said, “In meetings, he sounded like he was reading Breitbart and Alex Jones and random bloggers, alt-right stuff, and he’d just say, ‘Well, I heard this . . .’ ”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Chip Roy

Republicans Sink Defense Spending Bill As Shutdown Deadline Approaches

Republicans in the United States House of Representatives on Wednesday "failed to move forward on a procedural vote advancing a bill to fund the Defense Department after it became clear they did not have enough votes to secure its passage," adding to concerns that Congress will miss the September 30th deadline to fund the federal government and prevent a shutdown, The Washington Post's Mariama Sotomayor reports.

The latest impasse "offered an example of just how difficult it will be for [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy (R-CA) and the ideologically fractured Republican majority to find consensus, keep the government open, and avert blame if a shutdown is triggered," Sotomayor explains.

"A handful of staunchly conservative lawmakers announced they would not vote to move the defense funding bill forward because of an unmet demand they made of leadership months ago," Sotomayor writes. "Several members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus said they have yet to receive a top-line number for how much all 12 appropriations bills would cost once passed, and where offsets to curtail spending would be made across the 11 proposals the House has yet to consider on the floor."

Sotomayor continues, "The House Appropriations Committee already has not been able to overcome competing demands between moderate and far-right Republicans on the labor and justice appropriation bills, which have historically been the most controversial proposals to complete. As a result, fulfilling the Freedom Caucus' demands — including passing all 12 appropriation bills individually — may be impossible."

Sotomayor notes that "it remains unclear when the House will consider the defense funding bill — or any appropriation bill. Given the myriad requests and leadership's inability thus far to provide a top-line budget number, lawmakers had little insight into how Republicans break themselves from the logjam before the House leaves Washington for the weekend Thursday."

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), a member of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, said that "there currently is not an appetite to just, I would call it, blindly move forward with any one piece of the puzzle until we can actually look at the picture of the puzzle that we’re actually trying to assemble. I have no interest in grabbing a piece and just sticking it on a board and hoping."

Sotomayor adds that "several absences within the conference — including Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), who is battling cancer — are making the math tricky for Republicans. Complicating it further is the expected retirement of Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) later this week, which will bring the Republicans' already razor-thin majority down to four. His replacement, generally expected to be a Republican, would not arrive in the House until late November."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Kevin McCarthy

GOP House Majority Votes To Slash Benefits -- And Care -- For Veterans

House Republicans voted Wednesday to cut veterans’ services significantly and limit their health care. That’s just one aspect of Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s debt ceiling and budget cuts extortion package that passed 217-215, with all but four Republicans voting for it. Those four didn’t think the cuts were deep enough.

The bill would roll back spending for the 2024 fiscal year to 2022 levels, except for defense spending. Because it’s exempted, everything else would be cut by much more. That’s an estimated 22 percent cut, which the Veterans Administration says would mean the immediate loss of $2 billion in funding for veterans services, and 30 million fewer veteran outpatient visits. The VA would lose 81,000 jobs. That would mean fewer employees to answer veterans’ phone calls, schedule health visits, process their disability claims, and provide other critical services.

The cuts would hurt rural veterans in particular, cutting necessary technology infrastructure and support for telehealth programs for vets who live far from the VA facilities they rely upon. The cuts would also limit the availability of medical equipment and technology provided to vets so they can have telehealth appointments from home.

A frequent complaint about the VA from veterans is the backlog of benefits claims. This Republican budget would slash 6,000 jobs from the Veterans Benefits Administration, meaning an estimated 134,000 pending benefits claims would be added to the current backlog. That would mean longer wait for pensions, life insurance, GI Bill educational support, and employment counseling and services.

“It’s cruel and it hurts our heroes,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in a press conference with veterans groups after the vote. Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Chris Deluzio, a former Navy officer and Iraq war veteran blasted Republicans for betraying vets.

“They're doing these cuts against the backdrop of holding our economy hostage. They're telling us, ‘If you don't want to put the economy into default and wreck this country, well, you have to cut veterans care,’” he said. “It's the same guys who I see all the time wrapping themselves in the flag, using my fellow veterans and me as props in their ads and on their websites. No more. They should be hearing from all of us.”

The defense Republicans put up against these cuts is that they aren’t real, that the word “veteran” doesn’t appear in the bill. It’s true that no specific cuts are actually spelled out in the bill, but the bill rolls back the budgets and caps the growth of all discretionary spending–again, everything but defense. They pretend like chopping off nearly a quarter of the VA won’t hurt veterans. Or maybe they are just hoping the public won’t notice or care.

Take, for instance, House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Chairman Mike Bost (R-IL), who said on the House floor, “We’re not cutting veterans’ benefits” [emphasis added]. No, they’re not cutting benefits directly, they’re cutting the VA’s ability to provide those benefits. A neat deflection from the truth of the matter. Democrats, he said, “with no regard for the impact of their words, … continue to speak lies about how House Republicans are cutting veterans' benefits and it's false.”

What’s false is the idea that the cuts wouldn’t hurt veterans and their families. When Republicans are reduced to rhetorical games about what is and isn’t a cut, you know they’re losing the argument. For a party that represents a big chunk of rural veterans and likes to wave the flag as much as they do, you’d think these would be the last cuts on the table, not the first.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Former Putin Speechwriter Predicts 'Military Coup' Will Depose Russian Despot

Former Putin Speechwriter Predicts 'Military Coup' Will Depose Russian Despot

Militarily and politically as well as economically, the war in Ukraine has been a major drain on Russia. President Vladimir Putin and his allies in the Kremlin were hoping for a quick, easy invasion, but Ukrainian forces have been much more skillful fighters than Putin anticipated.

Moreover, the invasion of Ukraine has had an unintended consequence: the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Sweden and Finland, for many years, stayed out of NATO; in 2022, they applied for membership. And U.S. President Joe Biden, in contrast to former President Donald Trump’s anti-NATO views, has welcomed NATO’s expansion.

Despite all that, an obstinate Putin is determined to keep fighting in Ukraine. But Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter, is predicting that Putin’s days as president of Russia will be ending sooner rather than later.

During a Monday, January 30 appearance on CNN, the 50-year-old Gallyamov argued that because of all the hardship the war is causing in Russia, Putin will likely be removed from power via a military coup.

Gallyamov told CNN’s Erin Burnett, “The Russian economy is deteriorating. The war is lost. There are more and more dead bodies returning to Russia; so, Russians will be coming across more difficulties, and they'll be trying to find an explanation why this is happening, looking around to the political process. And they'll be answering themselves: 'Well, this is because our country is governed by an old tyrant, an old dictator.’”

The former Putin speechwriter, born in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 1972, predicted that a military coup will occur in Russia sometime within the next 12 months.

“So, in one year, when the political situation changes and there's a really hated unpopular president at the head of the country and the war is really unpopular — and they need to shed blood for this, at this moment — a coup becomes a real possibility,” Gallyamov told Burnett.

The United States isn’t the only country that is having a presidential election next year; Russia has one scheduled for March 2024. But Gallyamov fears that Putin may cancel Russia’s 2024 elections, which will only add to the tensions in that country.

Gallyamov told Burnett, “Judging by his actions, when he is escalating on something without necessity, he might really cancel the elections. Without victory over Ukraine, he'll face difficulty with the Russians. Russians don't need him if he's not strong. He might really declare the martial law and cancel the elections.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.