Michael Flynn, the infamous military figure who was temporarily the national security adviser to Donald Trump shortly after he took office in 2017 and has remained allied with the now former president ever since, was facing new criticism in recent days as footage circulated of comments of his about some of the Jews who were murdered by Nazis.
In short, Flynn had been critical of some of these victims of the Holocaust, characterizing them as having gone along with their captors. Though the entire context of his remarks wasn’t immediately available online, Flynn’s comments mirror repeated comparisons from far-right conspiracy theorists between measures like the restrictions meant to curtail COVID-19 and what Jews faced from the Nazis. Many of these figures have turned now that those restrictions are largely lifted to targeting vaccines against COVID-19 with conspiracy theories, using sources like misrepresented data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a federal initiative. The data makes no conclusive connections between vaccinations and negative health impacts.
“Really sad to see Flynn turn into a danger to our democracy. His thinking is cruel and demented. He has been swallowed by darkness,” Barry McCaffrey, a retired general from the U.S. Army, said online.
This occasion is hardly the first when Flynn has been the subject of criticism. After the 2020 presidential election, as outgoing President Donald Trump and allies of his sought mechanisms to secure another term for Trump despite his loss, Flynn brought up the idea of using military force to redo portions of the just concluded election. There was no precedent for such action in modern American law or history. Neither was there any such precedent for the related idea from some of the Republican allies to Trump of using the government’s might to seize some of the equipment that had been used in the disputed race, though multiple figures who raised the prospect of martial law around that time (though they themselves didn’t universally support it) remain in positions of power.
Really sad to see Flynn turn into a danger to our democracy. His thinking is cruel and demented. He has been swallowed by darkness. https://t.co/aD7IM6DYLH
— Barry R McCaffrey (@mccaffreyr3) August 12, 2023
