This past weekend former US Army General and Trump ally Michael Flynn spoke at a Reawaken America rally in Texas. Flynn, a right wing conspiracy theorist, was ‘ front and center’ with the election fraud AKA Big Lie and of course the January 6th insurrection riot. One needs to wonder how many other ex military officers and lower level personnel actually agree with this man. Quite candidly, this writer wonders just where Michael Flynn would have stood in the late 1930s America as to the coming war in Europe. Methinks Flynn would most likely have been deeply immersed with the America First movement that had Charles Lindbergh as its main spokesperson. Lindbergh, like Henry Ford, revered Adolph Hitler and the Germany he transformed into a military juggernaut. One needs to read Bradley Hart’s 2018 book Hitler’s American Friends to delve deeper into this disgraceful report. Getting back to Flynn, here is his latest piece of Anti Freedom to Choose nonsense:
“If we are going to have one nation under God — which we must — we have to have one religion,” Flynn said. “One nation under God, and one religion under God.”
That was recent. How about looking back into the mindset of far right wing zealots around the time of JFK- the early 1960s? In Oliver Stone’s riveting film JFK the director took artistic license to reveal the mindset of many at that time who supported that unofficial Cout de tat . Stone used one character, a convict named Willie O’Keefe ( played brilliantly be actor Kevin Bacon), to ram home this point. When District Attorney Jim Garrison ( played equally as brilliantly by Kevin Costner) goes to visit O’Keefe at the prison for information about defendant Clay Shaw, O’Keefe mentions this:
Willie O’Keefe : ‘Cause that motherfucker Kennedy stole that motherfuckin’ election, that’s why. Nixon was gonna be one of the great presidents ’till Kennedy wrecked it up. Got niggas running around askin’ for their damn rights. Why do you think we got all this crime nowadays? He promised those motherfuckers too goddamn much you ask me.’
Sometimes ‘ Everything changes and nothing changes ‘. So it is in America 2021. What Donald Trump allowed to occur after assuming office was, in my opinion, an unofficial legitimatizing of a white supremacist, Neo Fascist culture. Now , please understand that this culture was always there, usually reserved mostly for scant splinter groups or conducted by many white supremacist bigots behind closed doors or in private conversations. The August 2017 Charlottesville march, with actual group shouts of ‘ Jews will not replace us’ and ‘ Blood and Soil’ while carrying torches, all reminiscent of similar Nazi SA marches during the 1930s, took this all public. How terribly troubling and sad. It is going to be tough to get the horse back into the barn. Too many of my fellow citizens, fed up with being under the 8 ball economically , rally to the very sources of their displeasure. The best recourse is not to see how this Military Industrial Empire has been screwing them for decades. Instead of having anger towards the Super Rich who are raking in mega millions while they struggle, they wind up voting for these vipers! They tune in the boob tube or read the books by those media whores who profit from this unfair system. Like a score of lemmings, they march over the ‘ Cliffs of reason’.
Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on It’s the Empire… stupid website. He is also frequently posted on Nation of Change, and Countercurrents.org,. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘ It’s the Empire… Stupid ‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected]
