Not Backing Down

Fascism never stops on its own. It must be defeated.

Hello friends:

I had just finished the article below about not backing down from bullies, when I got a call from my amazing lawyers. Flynn dropped his frivolous lawsuit after three years—and after putting me hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. This isn’t over yet. But the shoe is now on the other foot.

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When I took a personal interest in exposing QAnon as a dangerous cult, in August 2020, my only impression of Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Mike Flynn was that he was the guy who sat next to Putin in December 2015—and 14 months later got fired by Trump, not for illegally talking with the Russians during the 2016 transition, but for getting caught.

Once I started digging into QAnon, however, it took just a few days for me to zero in on Mike Flynn as person of interest, for the simple reason that Q believers were uniquely and fervently focused on him—almost as much as Trump himself. Flynn’s defense fund, which raised over $8.5 million to pay his conspiracist lawyer Sidney Powell, was almost entirely paid for by QAnon cult members.

Five Years

The 67-month journey between August 2020 and Tuesday, when I wasted an entire day in court-ordered proceedings in Mike Flynn’s now 3-year long defamation lawsuit against me, has been more bizarre, traumatic, and frightening than I could have ever imagined. But it has also been the most personally valuable, enlightening, and satisfying project I’ve ever worked on, not despite the resistance I’ve met, the personal cost, and the lawsuits, but because of them.

It may be because of my childhood that being bullied by someone like Mike Flynn, someone with infinitely more access to money and power than I do, a convicted felon, a traitor, and a dangerous cult leader, triggers the fight part of the fight-or-flight reflex in me. Regardless, it did—I’m just built that way. And despite the massive personal cost, I don’t regret a single minute of it.

The cliche about getting more flak when you’re “over the target” is used by propagandists as a rationale for public pushback on false information, but it truly is a powerful, effective algorithm when you are looking to expose things that are true: the closer you get to something very sensitive, the more you will be attacked. It’s why I knew Flynn was a serious problem in 2020. Anytime I posted about him, or Russia, I got mercilessly trolled, often by people who identified as “leftist.”

Almost six years later, Flynn, with his 2.2 million followers on X, continues to promote his racist, christofascist, QAnon ideology through people like accused pedophile Matt Gaetz—while promoting ideas like government officials “hanging from lamp posts.”

At the same time, after numerous QAnon references from government agency social media accounts like DHS and Dept. of Labor, and from Putin’s spokesman Kirill Dmitriev over the last few months, the White House X account posted an unmistakable QAnon reference directly: “PATRIOTS [ARE] IN CONTROL” (in Iran).

The Q believers were ecstatic.

Q drop; White House meme

But in the real world, as the war bogs down, we know for a fact that Iran is being assisted by the Russian government in targeting our troops—and all we’ve gotten from the Trump regime is a rotating array of excuses for Putin. The latest message about Russia helping Iran came from Trump’s lead negotiator, Bronx strip mall developer Steve Witkoff: “…the Russians said they have not been sharing [intel]. We can take them at their word.”

Really, Steve?

This fealty to the Russians over American interests, from Trump to Witkoff to Mike Flynn, is becoming more and more overt—and more and more desperate.

Flynn, as he has done in every election since 2016, is using his military training as a psychological warfare operator to try to subvert the will of the people, keep Trump in power, and keep himself out of prison. His good friends Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard are also working hard to revive the Big Lie in advance of the 2026 midterms.

On Russian subcontractor Benny Johnson’s show, Flynn said Tuesday that the seizing of 2020 ballots from Fulton County, GA and Maricopa County, AZ by the FBI will prove “that there are people in Congress and serving in other state offices that didn’t win those elections… like Joe Biden.”

This is part of a multi-pronged strategy by the Trump regime to cheat in the midterms, including putting Americans abroad and at home at risk—to invite an attack by Iran or its proxies, giving Trump an excuse to declare martial law and either suspend or federalize elections.

Same people. Doing the same things.

None of this should be happening—again. The U.S. government had plenty of evidence to stop people like Flynn, and Trump, at any time in the last decade. If our government officials, or the billionaire class for that matter, had the will to bring this to a stop, they could have.

Here is Mike Flynn on January 5th, 2021, exhorting his QAnon “digital soldiers” to be “ready to die” the next day to “get this right”—meaning the lie that Donald Trump won the election. The fact that Flynn was never charged is a crime unto itself.

In his deposition in his lawsuit against me, Mike Flynn didn’t plead the Fifth over a hundred times like he did in Congress, he just perjured himself instead.

LAWYER: Have you ever been affiliated with the QAnon movement?

FLYNN: I don’t believe I have. I couldn’t tell you what it is.

LAWYER: Where were you on January 6th

FLYNN: Freezing my ass off.

To me, this is exactly why you don’t back down from people like Flynn. When confronted with facts and reality, the only resort they have is deception. It is precisely when people retreat in the face of lies, false accusations, and bullying that the enemy gains ground.

I am not interested in personal attention. I’m an introvert. I like making things that people enjoy, not strutting my own issues in front of the world. However, if you come for me, you better not miss. I am not backing down from Mike Flynn—or anyone else.

I posted this as a message to Flynn about his lawsuit. I want people to know that you can stand up to these people. And more importantly, it is the only way to stop them.

Fascism never stops on its own. It must be defeated.

If you’d like to help me with the massive legal fees this has incurred, I’d be grateful. The website is DefendSpeechNow.org. Or just become a paid subscriber which helps keep me alive and productive through this.

My deepest thanks to everyone who has supported me through the years. I cannot begin to express my gratitude. We will get through this together. 💙