Frontline: "Michael Flynn's Holy War" (Midnight Films GBH, PBS, 2022)

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Alas, just after showing Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s exalting episode of his Making Black America series on October 18, KPGS showed a swary Frontline documentary called “Michael Flynn’s Holy War,” about the fascinating history of retired general Michael Flynn, Sr. Flynn was raised in Rhode Island by a hard-core Roman Catholic family who began as Democrats but switched ideological sides because of the Catholic church’s opposition to abortion and the Democratic Party’s eventual embrace of the pro-choice position. Flynn remembers hos mother running for local office in Rhode Island (unsuccessfully) and drafting him to be part of her campaign – as my mother drafted me in activism at a tender age, albeit on the other ideological side – and the woman who reported and narrated this documentary, Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press, managed to get at least the semblance of an interview with Flynn himself as well as lengthier conversations with Flynn’s brother Joe, who’s fully on board with Michael’s politics. “When I first saw Michael Flynn speak to an audience, it was hard to reconcile who he once was with who he had become,” Smith said at the outset of the program. “A retired three-star general once hailed as an intelligence genius. Today, he’s touring the country as a leader in a far-right movement trying to put its brand of Christianity at the center of civic life and institutions.”

Joe Flynn is quoted in the program as saying, “This country was founded on Judeo-Christian values” though it’s all too clear, especially from their endorsement of extreme Right-wing Christinas’ “end-times” prediction that as soon as Christ returns the remaining Jews will be given the option – either convert immediately to Chritianity or end up doomed for all eternity to Hell – they regard Jews as at best junior partners and at worst the scum of the earth. Joe Flynn continued, “I think [their mother] Helen would be proud of the activities that we're involved in. I think Christians are very involved in the conservative movement. It's no different than it was 30, 40 years ago, especially with Reagan.”

Michael Flynn started out as a member of the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne unit of paratroopers giving aid and comfort to the Right-wing contras Reagan funded during the 1980’s in Nicaragua and other countries in Central America and the Caribbean. Then during George W. Bush’s so-called “global war on terrorism,” Flynn becams a commander in Iraq and did intelligence for the the so-called Joint Strategic Operations Command (JSOC), which targeted raids on civilian homes in search of suspected terrorists, The problem was that Flynn insisted on ordering and carrying out the raids so quickly he didn’t stop to vet the intelligence on which they were based – which meant, inevitably, that the raids netted and often killed a lot of innocent civilians.

As Flynn got involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so-called “radical Islam” replaced Communism as the all-embracing enemy America faced abroad, while Flynn’s always strong belief in a radical-Right version of Christianity led him to believe that America is full of domestic enemies who need to be fought to the death, if need be, to redeem the U.S. for God and a peculiar interpretation of the Constitution that countenances events like the January 6, 2021 riots which were quite obviously an attempt to disrupt and prevent the peaceful transition of power after a Presidential election. In fact, one of the peculiarities of the modern American Right is the Orwellian doublethink that allows them to pose as defenders of the Constitution while participating in frankly unconstitutional attempts to reverse the outcome of an election because it didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to, and to resort to violence when their efforts politically and judicially met with failure. Michael Flynn doesn’t come right out and say that Democrats are the agents of Satan, but he does say things like, “The enemy of 1984 is 1776!” It’s also clear he and his followers think the Democratic Party, if left in power, will turn America into Venezuela or Nicaragua, a failed state witn an increasingly miserable and impoverished population – which makes it ironic that among the demands the Republican Party’s candidates for the House and Senate are currently making include big cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Michael Flynn’s America would be a Christian theocracy in which secular lawmakers would be ruled by his sort of Right-wing faith, including an end to women’s bodily autonomy (ironically, Iranian women are putting their lives on the line for just this right, while the American Right, which claims to be against Iranian-style “radical Islam,” wants to impose the same sort of faith-based regime on U.S. women!) and, of course, an end to Queer rights as well (even though nothing Flynn himself said in the Frontline documentary mentioned Queer people one way or the other, but being anti-Queer comes with the territory)and mayve even an Iranian-style “morality police” force to punish men who have sex with men, women who have sex with women, and women who seek, let alone get, abortions. While the Black church has its own set of problems – it, too, is anti-Queer and years ago I attended a service at a Black church in which a well-known minister preached against the theory of evolution and said it had destroyed all morality – nonetheless the Black church has been a leading voice of liberation, especially for Black people themselves, while Michael Flynn’s white church is an instrument of authoritarianism and domination.