December 12, 2020

Newly Pardoned Michael Flynn Was a Crowd Favorite Among the Extremists at Trump’s Latest Rally

The disgraced former national security adviser was among the headliners at the March for Trump.

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

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Fresh off his presidential pardon, former national security adviser Michael Flynn joined the March for Trump rally Saturday afternoon in downtown Washington, DC. During a speech in front of an assortment of QAnon followers, Proud Boys, and other far-right extreme groups, Flynn told the crowd that he still fully believes Donald Trump will serve a second term (he won’t)—thanks to the power of prayer.

Despite the Supreme Court’s rejection of Texas’ lawsuit that tried to throw out all of the votes from four states that voted for Joe Biden, Saturday’s spectacle attracted hundreds of people who falsely believe the election was rigged against the president. The Trump campaign has had its complaints rejected by courts across the country, but that apparently has not stopped the president’s supporters from boldly claiming that the fight to subvert the will of 81 million voters is still not over.

Unfortunately, Flynn wasn’t the only high-profile Trump ally to make remarks that appear to be completely detached from reality. Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser for the campaign, said if you think “sleepy Joe Biden is going to fake his way into the White House, then you have not been paying attention.”

The founder of the Stop the Steal movement, Ali Alexander, threatened to vote out any Republicans who didn’t try to block certification of Biden’s win in the House on January 6, saying, “Stop the steal is never going to stop.”

Though the speakers seemed to be taking themselves very seriously, the rally was chock-full of conspiracy theorists who believe John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive and was in the crowd and that the election was stolen by an evil supercomputer. But the credibility of the movement took perhaps its biggest hit when the leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, posted on Parler that he received a last-minute invite to the White House, as if he was going to a high-level, top-secret meeting with the president.

But, as it turns out, he was just going on a public Christmas tour. 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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