Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Donald Trump's scariest pick so far? Right-wing fruitcake Michael Flynn as national security adviser
From Heather Digby Parton at Salon:
Flynn’s recent descent into extremism and his unfitness for this particular job have been well documented, but every day seems to bring new revelations of just how unhinged he really is. For instance, it came to my attention that in the days just before the election, Flynn was talking to the media about Hillary Clinton’s alleged association with pedophilia, which means that he’s enmeshed in the deepest reaches of the right-wing fake-news fever swamps. That reference could only be to #Pizzagate, which involved the bizarre and spurious claims that Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of the back of a pizza parlor in Washington.
It also turns out that Steve Bannon isn’t the only close Trump associate with connections to the white nationalist “alt-right.” CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported that a week after the election Flynn was praising Breitbart’s odious racist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos:
-snip-
He went on to call Yiannopoulos one of the bravest people he’s ever met. Keep in mind that this is a former general who led troops into battle, praising the so-called courage of a nasty little online troll who describes Donald Trump as his “daddy.”
It’s known that Flynn travels on the far edge of the conspiratorial extreme of neoconservative thinking, having recently written a book called “The Field of Flight” with Michael Ledeen, a longtime proponent of the idea that the U.S. faces an existential threat from … well, pretty much everyone. (Ledeen famously speculated that even Germany and France were in cahoots with al-Qaida when they failed to back the U.S. invasion of Iraq.)
Flynn and Ledeen are heavily influenced by the late Laurent Murawiec, a French-American neocon ideologue who wrote a book they hail as a “masterpiece” called “The Mind of Jihad.” Murawiec apparently found a web of connections between radical Islamism, Bolshevism and and the Nazis that Ledeen and Flynn find convincing. Among other things, Murawiec was associated for many years with Lyndon LaRouche, one of the fringiest political figures in American life.
Curious about Flynn’s views of China and North Korea, about which he has said very little, the New York Times consulted “The Field of Flight” for clues as to his thinking. This is what they found:
-snip-
The technical term for that absurd and paranoid worldview is “nutty as a fruitcake.” And what’s more frightening is that the man Flynn will now be working for can fit his own knowledge of world affairs in a shotglass.
-snip-
It also turns out that Steve Bannon isn’t the only close Trump associate with connections to the white nationalist “alt-right.” CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported that a week after the election Flynn was praising Breitbart’s odious racist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos:
-snip-
He went on to call Yiannopoulos one of the bravest people he’s ever met. Keep in mind that this is a former general who led troops into battle, praising the so-called courage of a nasty little online troll who describes Donald Trump as his “daddy.”
It’s known that Flynn travels on the far edge of the conspiratorial extreme of neoconservative thinking, having recently written a book called “The Field of Flight” with Michael Ledeen, a longtime proponent of the idea that the U.S. faces an existential threat from … well, pretty much everyone. (Ledeen famously speculated that even Germany and France were in cahoots with al-Qaida when they failed to back the U.S. invasion of Iraq.)
Flynn and Ledeen are heavily influenced by the late Laurent Murawiec, a French-American neocon ideologue who wrote a book they hail as a “masterpiece” called “The Mind of Jihad.” Murawiec apparently found a web of connections between radical Islamism, Bolshevism and and the Nazis that Ledeen and Flynn find convincing. Among other things, Murawiec was associated for many years with Lyndon LaRouche, one of the fringiest political figures in American life.
Curious about Flynn’s views of China and North Korea, about which he has said very little, the New York Times consulted “The Field of Flight” for clues as to his thinking. This is what they found:
-snip-
The technical term for that absurd and paranoid worldview is “nutty as a fruitcake.” And what’s more frightening is that the man Flynn will now be working for can fit his own knowledge of world affairs in a shotglass.
-snip-
10 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
