'Constant victims': Here's how Trump's allies are radicalizing some of his most ardent fans
On Friday's edition of MSNBC's "Deadline: White House," Kristofer Goldsmith, an Iraq War veteran who infiltrated the far-right Three Percenters and now runs an intelligence firm that targets disinformation and extremism, broke down the significance of how Trump allies are directly engaging with believers of QAnon, an extremist conspiracy theory cult with similar roots to the Nazi Party that believes America is ruled by Satanic child-trafficking cannibals.
Goldsmith focused in on Trump's former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who has been at the forefront of QAnon rallies and events.
"This weekend in Branson, Missouri, there were about 4,000 QAnon fanatics who met to be further indoctrinated into this Christo-fascist ideology that guys like Mike Flynn have been pushing," said Goldsmith. "And I use words like Christian nationalist, I need for people to understand that there's a difference between the definition of 'patriot' and 'nationalist', right? Patriots are the ones that we're celebrating today, the veterans who served their country, served the American people, and are serving the Constitution and protecting democracy. Nationalists are people who identify closely with their 'nation' to the exclusion of others. So when you put a term like White with nationalist or Christian with nationalist, you're talking about people who believe in an ethnostate or a religious theocracy."
Such ideology, Goldsmith continued, is "completely contradictory to our Constitution, our democracy, and our way of life."
"People like Mike Flynn are blurring the lines between politics and religion, and they are making these QAnon folks feel like they are the constant victims," said Goldsmith. "That's what Trump was so great at. That's why he got them to come to all these rallies and show up to the polls, until Tuesday."
"But it doesn't take 50 percent of our country being Christian nationalists for us to lose our democracy, right?" added Goldsmith. "Timothy McVeigh was one person. The attacks on 9/11 were a relative handful of people, and they changed the course of history, not just for the United States and our democracy or way of life, but they essentially started a couple of wars and sent, you know, people — my generation to have our lives forever changed by it."
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