Sinners, Not Saints
Mike Flynn's Holy War on Frontline PBS helps make some sedition connections.
This week Michelle Smith of the Associated Press in a documentary with Frontline PBS dove into the clear and present danger that exists from Mike Flynn and his growing political base. It gave us a deeper sense of his lifelong crusade to undermine freedom & to spread a worldview based in conspiratorial thinking & theocratic authoritarianism.
In case you missed it, here’s the full documentary. If you didn’t miss it, watch it again. Here’s the YouTube Link
Michelle Smith has covered the Flynn family over many years. This experience provided her with the insight to highlight Helen Flynn, Mike’s mother. Smith showed through her reporting that the influence of Helen's political activism can be seen today in the worldview that Mike and his family members espouse.
(In this photo, date unknown, provided by Joe Flynn, Michael Flynn, left, stands with his mother Helen Flynn, right, near a football field, in Middletown, R.I.)
July 2017 | Flynn seeks sanctuary from Russia scandal in hometown surf
Helen Flynn was the Vice Chairman of Catholics for Life. As Joe Flynn recalls, being active in the church and marches including many of the first Catholics for Life marches in Washington D.C.
RALLY AGAINST ABORTION HEARS PLEDGE OF SUPPORT BY REAGAN
Published: January 23, 1987
WASHINGTON, Jan. 22— President Reagan pledged his continued support to thousands of people rallying here today to protest abortion, saying he would work with them to overturn the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion and to ''end this national tragedy.''
''Thank you for your commitment to the right to life of America's unborn children,'' the President said in comments delivered by telephone over a sound system speaker to the protesters gathered on the Ellipse behind the White House. ''Today you remind all of us that abortion is not a harmless medical procedure but the taking of a life of a living human being.''
An estimated 5,000 demonstrators marched through a driving snowstorm to the Supreme Court today to mark the 14th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. They carried such signs as ''Stop Unborn Child Abuse'' and ''Equal Rights for Unborn Women,'' and they heard Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina describe abortion as ''an American holocaust.''
The anti-abortion march, beginning on the Ellipse and proceeding to the Capitol and the Supreme Court, has become an annual event.
In the documentary Michelle Smith found old articles where Helen Flynn had attacked her political opponent with the notion that supporting the ACLU equated to support for communism. A familiar talking point we hear today, in 2022.
Not only does the background on Helen Flynn remind me of the Flynn’s favorite communist hunter, Jack Singlaub, but of a lesser known — or at least not widely discussed — player in the plot to keep Trump in power using USAID and Executive Order 13848.
But first, a musical break, courtesy of Bob Dylan:
THE SINNERS WHO WORSHIP SAINTS
Full disclosure, I have no personal experience with religion to draw from and I have not studied the subject in a formal setting. I’m a self-taught researcher which requires me to learn by reading, listening and speaking to experts and others with direct experiences of a particular topic. The extremism that has captured churches across this country has deeply concerned me. I have wondered, while watching Mike Flynn, where does his self-described Irish Catholic roots make the crossover into his desire to take sides with Vladimir Putin, and also where does it crossover to the violent insurrection on 6 January 2021.
Here are some things I learned in the search to answer those questions.
JUNE 07, 2022 | A NUN FOUNDED A TV STATION THAT BECAME THE “CATHOLIC FOX NEWS.” THEN IT TURNED AGAINST THE POPE
by MOLLY OLMSTEAD
Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), the world’s largest Catholic media organization. For its first four decades been mostly apolitical, until it shifted.
The situation has left viewers facing an uncomfortable truth: The rift between the global church and its American arm has never been wider. Today, as the Catholic world rumbles with talk of schism and dwindling numbers in the pews, EWTN is staging its own proxy war over what it means to be Catholic.
Full Article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/06/ewtn-catholic-media-pope-francis-fox-news.html
30 OCTOBER 2020 | DEEP STATE, DEEP CHURCH: HOW QANON AND TRUMPISM HAVE INFECTED THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
by Kathryn Joyce
Catholicism’s increasingly powerful political right reflects fringe America, fueled by paranoia, conspiracy, racism, and the threat of apocalypse.
For Catholic “radical traditionalists” at odds with a pope they consider too progressive, it was “the splash heard around the world,” as one right-wing news site put it; a purge “which may well go down in history as the moment the counter-revolution started.”
Catholicism’s internal convulsions spilled over into America’s election, as right-wing Catholics, including those at the center of Trump’s campaign, cast the contest as a choice between true defenders of the faith and Joe Biden’s apostate “Pope Francis Catholics.”
While Catholic clergy aren’t supposed to make endorsements, a wink is not a sin. This summer conservative Rhode Island bishop Thomas Tobin tweeted, “The first time in a while that the Democratic ticket hasn’t had a Catholic on it. Sad.” Cardinal Burke told Fox that “no practicing Catholic” could vote for a pro-choice politician and that pro-choice candidates like Biden should be denied Communion. (“You have to be with President Trump when it comes to pro-life,” POTUS himself told Catholic TV network EWTN.)
“Alt-right Catholicism” became clearer after 2016. Steve Bannon, upon expulsion from the White House, went to Italy and made plans to launch a populist “gladiator school” in a former monastery outside Rome, in cooperation with an institute overseen by Cardinal Burke. He spoke with Italy’s vehemently anti-immigrant interior minister, Matteo Salvini, who emerged from their meeting bearing a T-shirt that read, “Benedict is my pope.”
Over the past two years, Bannon’s movement collapsed, and Salvini slipped from power, but a series of “National Conservatism” conferences have drawn together traditionalist Catholics and far-right activists, under a theme contrasting Francis with John Paul II. At the first meeting in 2019, a correspondent for Church Militant described a “war between globalism and nationalism being waged at the heart of Western Christendom.”
Church Militant—also begun, founder Michael Voris wanted to provide an orthodox counter to pop-culture fare like The Da Vinci Code—transitioned too, coming to declare itself the home of “the red-pilled laity” who were abandoning the “Church of Nice parishes” for the rawer meat of traditionalism. As Voris wrote recently, “It’s not only liberals who can get all ‘woke.’”
In May, Viganò had launched an “appeal” manifesto, signed by numerous dissident church and media leaders (including anti-vaccination activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), declaring the pandemic a pretext for a globalist coup aided by “shady business interests.”
“We have reason to believe,” the appeal read, “that there are powers interested in creating panic among the world’s population with the sole aim of permanently imposing unacceptable forms of restrictions on freedoms,” in “a disturbing prelude to the realization of a world government beyond all control.”
Viganò’s June Trump letter had also entwined his message with the convoluted worldview of QAnon, the conspiracy theory turned mass delusion. At its heart QAnon is rooted not just in centuries-old anti-Semitic slurs like blood libel but similar anti-Catholic claims as well.
Days after Viganò’s letter to Trump, a Q drop linked it approvingly, and two subsequent messages reposted its entire text.
“The mere fact that Q links to the LifeSiteNews posting of Viganò’s letter to Trump means that many thousands of QAnon adherents will read the letter and absorb it into their twisted mythology,” Lafferty wrote at Where Peter Is. There were already disconcerting parallels in the language Viganò and QAnon used: about the “deep state” and “deep church,” certainly, but also about light and darkness, Trump’s role in an apocalyptic showdown, even certain grammatical tics. There was also the connection of Michael Flynn, Trump’s embattled former national security adviser, considered a martyr in Q lore. By fall Flynn’s brother Joseph, a board member of Catholics for Trump, would tell Church Militant that Viganò had become the family’s spiritual guide.
Viganò began mirroring Q’s style: sending regular messages from hiding—“V drops,” as they say on Where Peter Is—out to the right-wing Catholic press. That the pope’s religious order, the Jesuits, was funded by George Soros. That God would ensure Trump’s victory.
Days before the election, Viganò published a new open letter to Trump, warning him of the coming, “liberticidal” Great Reset in the “first trimester” of 2021. He concluded with the letter, “It is you, dear President, who are ‘the one who opposes’ the deep state, the final assault of the children of darkness.”
Full Article: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/how-qanon-and-trumpism-have-infected-the-catholic-church
In 2017, the Italian Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, which is authorized by the pope, published an article charging that conservative American Catholics were getting lost in polarization, joining conservative evangelicals in “an ecumenism of hate” to promote “an apocalyptic geopolitics” that thrives on fear and uses theology to justify belligerence.
Full Article: A Vatican Shot Across the Bow for Hard-Line U.S. Catholics
SIN & INSURRECTION
Now, let me tie in this fractured Catholic faction and their role in the plot to overthrow the government to install Donald Trump using Executive Order 13848.
Meet Catharine O’Neill
O’Neill came over to USAID straight off of the Trump 2020 Re-Election campaign. She was the Executive Director of Catholics for Trump 2020.
Immediately after the election, Trump executed a leadership change at USAID to ensure it would follow through with his plan. Trump fired the Deputy Administrator of the USAID, Bonnie Glick, so the Acting Administrator and Trump loyalist John Barsa could extend his “Acting” status and take her place.
Trump also had his own “liaison” to the USAID who acted as an enforcer — 6th-generation Rockefeller and christo-fascist extremist Catharine O’Neill.
Catharine O’Neill was recorded on the 9th of November along with John Barsa on a conference call with USAID employees to inform them that “there is no [presidential] transition in place.”
Here’s where it gets quite interesting.
George O’Neill Jr and Maria Butina are/were co-conspirators.
George O’Neill Jr is Catharine O’Neill’s father.
Meet U.S. Person 2 in Maria Butina’s Spy Ring His name is George D. O’Neill, Jr. He’s a Rockefeller heir, gun nut, serial abuser of women & children, sexual deviant, and a big fan of Vladimir Putin.
Maria Butina of course is the Russian spy who cozied up to Patrick Byrne — the “Overstock Guy” — who also happens to be Mike and Joe Flynn’s business partner at the America Project, and who has poured millions into the Big Lie to sow distrust in our elections.
It seems as though there’s much more to learn I realize as I began to make these connections while writing this piece. I intend on finding out more, and I’ll be sure to update you when I do.
As my friend Jim says, #ArrestMikeFlynn
Dangerously twisted cultists. Fkn Mary Matalin and her idiot husband. I had no idea how deeply this insane side of Catholicism had been super charged by Trumputin Regime in 2016. Our press core failed so miserably for us Americans. Fuk the Patriarchy 😵💫 love you, Gal
George O’Neil 👀💥