When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Kyiv’s digital information war sprang immediately to life. The Ukrainians were ready. Since then, their progress in the online conflict has seemed—to Western observers, at least—unstoppable. Ukraine has rallied international support and attracted almost universal sympathy from European and North American users across the major social-media platforms.

All of the country’s official social-media accounts have synchronized to push the same narrative of brave Ukrainians holding out against the brutal Russian invaders—a message that is, of course, essentially true. The campaign is built around Ukraine’s charismatic leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, who, for a time in March and April, had a solid claim to being the most admired man in the West.

If Ukraine’s effort in the information war has been a triumph, Russia’s has seemed almost as lackluster as the performance of its tank regiments. Moscow has made little attempt—beyond some perfunctory statements about NATO expansion—to make its case to a foreign audience. The primary target of government communications has been the Russian people, the goal to legitimize Russian aggression and ready Russians for a world divorced from the West—with no more McDonald’s, Apple, or Netflix.

The lack of effort to sell the war abroad almost suggests that Moscow knew it would be pointless. The images broadcast by the state news channel RT in the early weeks of the war seemed either clumsy in their denialism or flat-out deluded: Cheerful troops marching along and Ukrainians waving Russian flags pointed to a Potemkin military campaign.

This contrasting split screen led many observers to declare that Russia had “lost” the information war. That is now the received wisdom in the West.

But it is wrong. Moscow has not lost the information war so much as opened up new fronts in the fight elsewhere, away from Western eyes.

Russia is now directing its disinformation at parts of the world where anti-Western sentiment is already strong, countries that include former colonies of the West—above all, in Africa. Anticipating a looming world food crisis, Moscow has coordinated its media outlets and social-media accounts to spin this message: Western sanctions against Russia are to blame for causing the shortages, and Ukraine is deliberately destroying grain supplies.

[David Frum: The food war]

When I was in Odesa in late April, Ukraine’s most important Black Sea port was already ringed with mines and steel. The fighting nearby, in the south of the country, was fierce. Kyiv’s army was holding up Russian troops outside the city of Mykolaiv, about 70 miles to the east. Odesans were preparing for a long war. Where once I could walk freely along the city’s shoreline, I saw concrete slabs and sandbags and twitchy soldiers eager to stop me from taking photos of anything that they—often arbitrarily—deemed sensitive.

In the distance, bobbing just over the horizon, Russian warships were poised to strike. Until they did, they could take solace in the fact that as long as they continued to patrol Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, the country’s most important harbor could not function.

Even then, in the war’s early months, Moscow’s plan was becoming clear. If Russia could not defeat Ukraine militarily, it would target its adversary’s economy by blockading its foreign trade. The goal was simple: to strangle Ukraine by any means.

One of those means is what Ukraine’s agriculture minister, Mykola Solskyi, has called “outright robbery.” In Odesa, I spoke with the Ukrainian security analyst Hanna Shelest, and she told me about Russia’s theft and destruction of her country’s grain stores. Wherever Russian troops went, she said, they stole Ukrainian grain—especially in the south, in the regions around the cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhya.

As Solskyi told Al Jazeera, this was “happening everywhere in occupied territory.” Back in April, he accused Russia of having stolen “several hundred thousand tonnes” of grain. And what Russian soldiers did not steal, they destroyed. On June 6, Russian forces struck a grain terminal in Mykolaiv, one of the largest in Ukraine, wrecking about 300 tons of grain earmarked for export.

The problem is acute, and not only for Ukraine’s economy. Ukraine is one of the largest global exporters of crops and foodstuffs: According to the International Trade Centre, 8 percent of the world’s wheat, 12 percent of its barley, 13 percent of its maize, and 18 percent of its sunflower-seed oil come from here. The World Food Program sources much of its grain for food-assistance programs from Ukraine. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the losses of Ukrainian grain in the world export market because of Russia’s blockade of the country’s ports, as well as its theft and destruction, will inflict not just rising prices in the rest of the world but severe shortages—particularly in Africa.

[Neil Hauer: Russia has a plan for Ukraine. It looks like Chechnya.]

Historical precedent suggests that food shortages in Africa, though rarely the sole cause of social unrest, very often contribute to political upheaval. Food scarcity played a significant role in the 2011 Arab Spring, which saw people take to the streets in protests after international food prices soared and unemployment rose. Egypt’s annual food-price inflation had hit nearly 19 percent just before President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown. In that region today, the Kiel Institute calculates that Tunisia’s total imports of wheat will go down by more than 15 percent, and Egypt’s will shrink by 17 percent. The institute also forecasts that South Africa will cut its imports of wheat by 7 percent and of other grains by more than 16 percent. The result will be a food-security crisis on the continent.

Russia has already laid the groundwork for its disinformation response. “How the UK is Doing Its Best to Stir a Food Crisis While Pinning the Blame on Russia,” ran the headline of a June 24 article on the Russian state media outlet Sputnik. This is a complete fabrication, of course. I recently attended a briefing session with Western diplomats, at which, to enable them to speak freely, journalists were not to attribute quotes. “We do not impose sanctions that restrict trade in food and fertilizer from Russia and to any third countries,” said one of the diplomats, “so it’s not sanctions that are causing food-security issues.”

But Russia’s denial of the effects of its aggression is only one part of the Kremlin’s emerging strategy. RT’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, recently relayed to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum what she called “a very cynical joke that appeared—not even a joke, just an outcry—in Moscow”: “‘All our hope is in the famine’ … It means that the famine will start now, and they [Western nations] will lift the sanctions and be friends with us because they will realize it is unnecessary.”

Simply put, Russia’s strategy is blackmail. Moscow will block the export of Ukrainian grain until it gets the relief from sanctions it badly needs. The Western diplomats were unambiguous about what they saw. As one of their number put it: “Russia is doing this on purpose—to try and leverage the [grain] issue to cause the famine, thereby creating chaos, which will lessen the sanctions. Putin has been extremely clear that grain exports will begin when sanctions are relieved. This is the public position of the Russian government.”

Another factor comes into play: Russia is also Ukraine’s greatest competitor as an exporter of grain. Moscow’s plan is not just to hold the threat of food scarcity over the world, but then to cast itself as the savior, appearing in the nick of time with its own grain supply—much of it stolen, of course—in exchange for diplomatic support for its war. With rising commodity prices already hitting African nations’ poorest citizens hard, Moscow’s gambit will surely find a receptive audience. Yevhen Balytskyi, the pro-Russia governor of the occupied areas of Zaporizhzhya, recently announced on the social-media app Telegram that 7,000 metric tons of grain would be sent to “friendly” countries. The quid pro quo is as clear as it is obscene.

Ukraine has belatedly realized that it needs to respond to the way Russia is weaponizing global hunger to further its political aims. Last month, President Zelensky gave an address to the African Union in which he told its members that their continent was now “a hostage” in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

I recently spoke with Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, Ghana’s minister of information, who is a prominent figure in the fight against disinformation in Africa. He was in no doubt about the crisis facing the region. “It is bad enough that war has broken out, but to block grain exports, which causes a food crisis in many parts of the world, especially Africa, is most troublesome,” he said. “In Africa, the situation is getting extremely worrying, as many households are increasingly struggling to feed themselves. In some countries, shortages of staples have begun. Lives are at risk.”

Nkrumah understands how serious the threat from a Russian disinformation campaign is. “We are doing our best to let our people know the true causes of this crisis, and also to show them the ways by which we can contain the situation and even where possible to switch to local alternatives,” he said. “But I must say this is very difficult as, once again, disinformation is emanating from some of the various nations responsible for this crisis—which is driven by Western social-media tools in particular, just as the crisis is driven by Western battles.”

Earlier this month, I visited Kenya to investigate these issues. In the capital city of Nairobi, fears among the population about rising food prices were everywhere apparent, even if they have not yet reached desperation level. Russian narratives are flooding Kenyan online spaces, starting with major, official sources: On April 16, the national broadcaster NTV Kenya shared a story on its Facebook page headlined, “Russia to Kenya: Blame US and EU for High Food, Fuel Prices.”

Such messaging—amplified by Russian-embassy accounts—percolates down to Kenyans’ Twitter accounts, where, recently, pro-Russian, anti-Western sentiment has become much more obvious. For example, a tweet pinned by one Jonson Mwangi, whose Twitter handle suggests he works for an NGO in Nairobi, shows images of Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, supposedly before and after U.S. intervention. The tweet text reads: “Does this ring a bell? I wonder where you find the moral authority of speaking against Russia … Russia anexted [sic] Crimea and rebuild it to great city..look at all your former invasions; women were raped, infrastructure destroyed, a well developed economy was destroyed in the name of?”

Russia’s instrumentalizing of the grain crisis is the latest instance of its wider strategy of exploiting instability to enact what the U.S. State Department has called “perpetual adversarial competition.” In the digital arena, Moscow’s information and disinformation operations seek to plant, amplify, and perpetuate insidious, corrosive narratives designed to undermine the West and democracy, and to promote Russia as a better partner for African nations.

“Everything is getting more expensive. Now I hear we may have problems with our food,” a Nairobi taxi driver named Gilbert told me. “Once again, Africans are paying the price for problems among the great powers.”

Michael Flynn faced the camera with brow creased and lips compressed. He hadn’t been born yesterday, his expression said. He was not going to fall for trick questions.

“General Flynn, do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified?” Representative Liz Cheney asked him in a video teleconference deposition for the January 6 committee.

Flynn’s lawyer pressed the mute button and switched off the camera. Ninety-six seconds passed. Flynn and the lawyer reappeared with a request for clarification. Did Cheney mean morally justified, or legally? Cheney obligingly asked each question in turn.

“Do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified morally?” she asked.

Flynn squinted, truculent.

“Take the Fifth,” he said.

“Do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified legally?” Cheney asked.

“Fifth,” he replied.

Cheney moved on to the ultimate question.

“General Flynn, do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?” she asked.

“The Fifth,” he repeated.

It was a surreal moment: Here was a retired three-star general and former national security adviser refusing to opine on the foundational requirement of a constitutional democracy. Flynn had sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Rule of law had been drilled into him for decades in the Army.

Now, by invoking the right against self-incrimination, he was asserting that his beliefs about lawful succession could expose him to criminal charges. That could not be literally true—beliefs have absolute protection under the First Amendment—but his lawyer might well have worried about where Cheney’s line of questioning would lead.

[Read: Making sense of Mike Flynn]

Flynn had said publicly that President Donald Trump could declare martial law and “re-run” the presidential election he had lost. He and Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s lawyers, had turned up in the Oval Office on December 18, 2020, with a draft executive order instructing the Defense Department to seize the voting machines that recorded Trump’s defeat. Flynn and Roger Stone, the self-described political dirty trickster, were the two men Trump made a point of asking his chief of staff to call on January 5, on the eve of insurrection, according to Cassidy Hutchinson’s recent testimony before the January 6 committee.

All of which raises a question: What happened to Michael Flynn?

He has baffled old comrades with his transformation since being fired as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014. He led chants to lock up Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2020, he posted a video of himself taking an oath associated with QAnon. He has endorsed crackpot fabrications of the extreme right: that Italy used military satellites to switch votes from Trump to Biden in 2020, that COVID-19 was a hoax perpetrated by a malevolent global elite, that the vaccine infused recipients with microchips designed for mind control.

Has Flynn always been susceptible to paranoid conspiracies? Or did something happen along the way that fundamentally shifted his relationship to reality? In recent conversations with the former general’s close associates, some for attribution and some not, they offered a variety of theories.

I had started trying to answer these questions about Flynn well before the country saw him plead the Fifth. The best way to investigate, I initially thought, would be to spend time with the man himself.

I’d had lunch with Flynn some years ago at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He was a one-star general working for then–Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, his most important mentor in the Army. He fit in comfortably at the Council, a pinstriped bastion of the foreign-policy establishment, which these days is a bugaboo of his dark suspicions about global elites. We spoke of then–Vice President Dick Cheney, the subject of a biography I had recently written, and he later sent word that he had enjoyed listening to the audiobook while running. His affect was thoughtful, buttoned-down, and appropriate to the setting.

I recalled that lunch to Flynn’s brother Joe, who serves as his gatekeeper with the press, when I asked for an interview for this story. (Another brother, Charles, is the commanding general of the U.S. Army in the Pacific.) Joe Flynn said those were very different times. “His attitude about speaking to the mainstream media—or I’d say I would put The Atlantic into the left-wing media—is very negative because it always blows up in your face,” he said. “They always report things that [he] didn’t say or they’re calling names that he doesn’t, you know, that don’t have anything to do with him.”

“That’s kind of the whole point of talking to a guy, to understand him in his own words,” I said.

Joe Flynn didn’t bite.

“Write what you want to write. But we don’t necessarily want to add fuel to the fire by talking to people and then they twist your words. There has not been a time yet that it hasn’t backfired,” he said. Every story turns out to say, “‘Ah, Flynn’s a nut, Flynn’s a conspiracy theorist, Flynn’s an insurrectionist,’ all the other bullshit they say.”

This week, I tried again to seek comment from Flynn, via his brother. “There is no chance General Flynn will speak to the Atlantic,” Joe Flynn wrote. “Have a great day.”

When Flynn moves through public spaces these days, three muscular men with earpieces enclose him in a wedge. One of them moved to intercept me when I approached with a question at an event, taking my elbow and turning me away. “Don’t,” he said, succinctly.

The next-best strategy, I figured, was to watch Flynn in his element, surrounded by supporters. I went to hear him speak at the Trinity Gospel Temple in Canton, Ohio, where he served as mascot and majordomo of a traveling road show called “ReAwaken America.” It was a proudly mask-free event; anyone with a covered face was asked to leave. There would be six dozen speakers over two days, including MAGA stars such as Eric Trump, Mike Lindell, and Roger Stone. But Flynn was the big draw.

Nearly every other speaker paid Flynn homage. One of them won a standing ovation by invoking a MAGA trinity: “Jesus is my God. Trump is my president. And Mike Flynn is my general!”

Flynn stood in the wings, stage left, just visible to an adoring audience of 3,000. He wore cowboy boots, a gray worsted suit, and an open-collared shirt, arms crossed at his chest in a posture of benign command.

“Ladieeeees and gentlemen, stand on your feet and greet Generalllll … Miiiiiichael Flyyyyynnn!” Clay Clark, Flynn’s touring partner and emcee, yelled into the microphone in the style of a professional-wrestling announcer. The room erupted. “Fight like a Flynn!” screamed a man in the audience, quoting a slogan that Flynn’s niece was selling on T-shirts outside. “We love you!” screamed the woman next to me.

Nothing superficial explained the appeal. Flynn is not an orator. He does not premeditate applause lines, and he sometimes seems startled when the audience reacts. He rambles, scriptless, through fields of apparently disconnected thoughts. “He’s free-range,” Clark told me.

Some of the things he said fell into a category of assertion that his military-intelligence critics used to call “Flynn facts.” “Read some of The Federalist Papers,” Flynn told the crowd. “They’re simple; they’re amazing, amazing documents as to who we are.” He added, “Ben Franklin’s one of the ones that wrote some of this and argued some of it.” (No, he’s not.) Flynn attributed the nation’s founding to divine intervention, adding, “That’s why the word creator is even in our Constitution.” (It isn’t.)

What Flynn has is an everyman quality, according to Steve Bannon, who said he declined an invitation to join the tour. “Mike is authentic,” Bannon told me. “To them, he’s authentic. He’s a fighter. That’s big.” Flynn reminds Bannon, he said, of his Irish uncles and cousins: “He’s not pretentious. He’s one of them.”

If this was authenticity, though, it was authentically detached from reality. The animating ideas behind the “Great ReAwakening,” expounded by the various speakers, were (1) that forces loyal to Satan are stealing political power in rigged elections (2) on behalf of a global conspiracy masterminded by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, and Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli public intellectual, and (3) that the cabal has fabricated the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to mandate dangerous vaccines, which (4) make people sick and may secretly turn them into “transhumans” under the conspiracy’s remote control.

[From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q]

QAnon talking points pervade the “ReAwaken America” tour. In Canton, Clark got a rise from the crowd with a reference to “adrenochrome,” which QAnon myths describe as a drug that cannibalistic global elites harvest by torturing children.

Some of the “ReAwaken America” speakers fairly glowed with insincerity—Roger Stone grinned a Cheshire Cat grin after telling the crowd that he saw a “demonic portal” open over the White House when Joe Biden moved in.

But Flynn, by contrast, did not display any guile at all. By every outward indication, he was speaking in earnest.

The man had once had an outstanding career in military intelligence, a field that values discernment and reason, evidence and verification. Now he looked high on his own supply.

In 1972, Michael Flynn received a commendation and town title in Middletown, Rhode Island, for his help rescuing toddlers from the path of a car rolling driverless down a hill. (The Newport Daily News / AP)

Did something in his history offer a clue?

Flynn grew up in Rhode Island, the sixth of nine children of an Army sergeant first class and a mother from a military family. He stood out early. He graduated from Middletown High School in 1977 as homecoming king, a co-captain of the state-champion football team, and the “best looking” senior by vote of his classmates. Thomas Heaney, the quarterback, told me that Flynn, at maybe 160 pounds, was scrawny for an offensive lineman but he had grit. He was “not the fastest guy on the field, but played hard.”

Already, Flynn had a flair for the heroic. As a teenager, he and a friend rescued a pair of toddlers from the path of a car rolling driverless down a hill. Flynn became known in the neighborhood as a “guardian of the little ones,” according to Kathleen Connell, a neighbor and a former Rhode Island secretary of state. But he also had a brush with the criminal-justice system, he writes in a 2016 book, which landed him in juvenile detention for a night and earned him a year of supervised probation. He does not elaborate.

Flynn was a B student at the University of Rhode Island but top of his class in the ROTC cohort. In 1983, not long after graduation, First Lieutenant Flynn deployed with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in the invasion of Grenada. There was not much combat to speak of, but Flynn demonstrated valor when two fellow soldiers were swept out on a riptide and struggled to stay afloat. Again, he was the hero, diving off a 40-foot cliff to rescue them both.

Flynn began to make his name as a colonel in 2004, when the Army deployed him to Iraq as J-2, or director of intelligence, of a Special Operations unit called Task Force 714. The task force, drawn from the most elite units in the Joint Special Operations Command and led by then–Major General Stanley McChrystal, had one mission in Iraq: to track and kill insurgents.

They had a slow start. In his memoir, My Share of the Task, McChrystal writes that he arrived in the command to discover “painstakingly selected, exquisitely trained warriors” who could not keep track of their targets. In those early days, the task force would stage a raid, kill or capture insurgents, and fill burlap sacks with “scooped-up piles of documents, CDs, computers, and cell phones.” Unable to make sense of that raw intelligence in the field, the commandos would ship it all back to headquarters in Baghdad, or even back to the United States, for analysis.

At McChrystal’s direction, Flynn rebuilt the system. The two men shaped the task force into an “extraordinary machine,” a senior flag officer who worked with them told me.

McChrystal described Flynn as “pure energy.” He speed-walked, speed-talked, and filled bulging green notebooks with diagrams and briefing notes. Flynn, McChrystal writes, “had an uncanny ability to take a two-hour discussion or a thicket of diagrams on a whiteboard and then marshal his people, resources, and energy to make it happen.”

Under Flynn’s leadership, and with forward-deployed intelligence analysts, the commandos found that they could capture an enemy safe house, exploit devices and papers on the spot, and use the fresh intelligence to launch another operation within an hour or two, before insurgents had even realized that they had been compromised.

Flynn and McChrystal became an exceedingly deadly team. At its peak, the task force was “doing 12 to 15 operations a night,” the flag officer said, month after month. “He was incredibly hardworking, and he could see how to connect the dots.” Another admirer of Flynn’s at the time, a retired four-star general, told me that there were no illusions about the nature of those missions. “You go in the house to kill everybody in there,” he said.

In his three years in Iraq, Flynn lived in a world of good and evil. He oversaw a relentless machine that killed thousands, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the prolifically murderous leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Flynn won his promotion to brigadier general, then added a second star when he served briefly as J-2 for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon in 2008, a prestigious assignment. Then, in 2009, McChrystal was selected to command all U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan. He brought Flynn with him.

General Barry McCaffrey, one of the most decorated generals in recent decades, made a fact-finding tour of McChrystal’s command in November 2009 and met with Flynn. He was dazzled. “He had a map, and he had this immense command of the terrorist forces in Afghanistan and the nature of the culture and what was going on in Pakistan,” McCaffrey told me. “I thought, God, this guy is flipping magic.”

People who worked with Flynn in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of whom declined to speak on the record out of respect for old friendships, said Flynn showed no sign in those years of extreme or fantastical views. One of his colleagues in Afghanistan was a young Marine captain named Matt Pottinger, who would go on to become deputy national security adviser under Trump. “When we were in Afghanistan,” Pottinger told me, “I didn’t hear wacky conspiracies.”

Still, with Pottinger’s help, Flynn cultivated a reputation as an iconoclast. He was best known in Afghanistan for a controversial white paper that he published in January 2010, a sharp critique of the U.S. government’s intelligence operations in Afghanistan by the man ostensibly in charge of them. Flynn was listed as the first and senior author, and it burnished his reputation as a defense intellectual, though in fact, Pottinger told me, he himself “wrote most of the paper,” and “Flynn provided guidance and edits.”

Flynn had taken a risk by publishing the paper outside the Pentagon chain of command, and then–Defense Secretary Robert Gates complained about the breach of protocol to James Clapper, then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. “He didn’t object to the article as much as he did object to … the manner in which it came out,” Clapper told me. Clapper called to admonish Flynn, passing along the secretary’s displeasure. But on the whole, the episode raised Flynn’s profile and laid the ground for his next promotion.

Flynn spent his career in a fixed universe of black and white, right and wrong. His expertise was in connecting the dots and drawing inferences. But somewhere along the way, his dot detector began spinning out of control.

[David Frum: Trump pardoned Flynn to save himself]

Flynn’s last job in uniform, as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, became his first major failure. He had been “a superb officer” in staff positions, a senior colleague told me, but when it came time to run a large organization—with more than 15,000 employees, most of them civilians—Flynn struggled. Another colleague, a high-ranking officer, told me that Flynn “thought he was the only one speaking truth to power.” Flynn clashed with his civilian deputy, David Shedd, and his supervisor, Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, according to Clapper.

“I think he was a one-trick pony,” McCaffrey said. “He and McChrystal knew how to hunt down and kill or neutralize terrorist threats to the United States, and they were unbelievable at it, and Flynn was a part of it. Then they moved him into DIA.” There, McCaffrey said, “he was way over his head.”

In retrospect, the first signs of Flynn’s loss of touch with evidence came in this final military posting. Flynn, colleagues told me, would become fixated on an idea and demand that analysts find evidence to support it. This is when DIA executives began to speak derisively of “Flynn facts.” Flynn would say, for example, that Iran had killed more Americans than al-Qaeda had, a claim that could easily be refuted, but Flynn kept repeating it.

In February 2014, when he was not yet two years into the job, Flynn was summoned to Room 3E834 at the Pentagon. Vickers and Clapper, his two bosses, were waiting. The position was not working out, they said. He was fired, but allowed to hang on until he reached the minimum service required to retire as a lieutenant general.

“My problem was his impact on the morale of the workforce,” Clapper told me. “It was the stories about ‘Flynn facts.’ Very erratic, you know, he’d always contradict himself and give direction and then 10 minutes later contradict it. You just can’t do that, running a big organization.” For Vickers, Clapper suggested, “it was a case of insubordination” on issues relating to the Defense Clandestine Service. Both reasons for his firing hinted at an overweening confidence in his own apprehension of the world.

Flynn wrote in a memoir that President Barack Obama fired him because he did not want to hear Flynn’s warnings about the danger of Islamic extremism. Clapper calls that explanation “complete baloney.” Obama had nothing to do with Flynn’s firing, Clapper says, and neither did Flynn’s views on the Islamic State.

Michael Flynn spoke in Phoenix in January as part of the “ReAwaken America” tour. (Mark Peterson / Redux)

Flynn’s dissolution in recent years is a subject of considerable chagrin and embarrassment to his old brothers in arms. It is a forbidden subject for many of them, and an awkward one for others.

McChrystal, his longtime mentor and commander, is said by friends to have watched in horror as Flynn chanted “Lock her up!” at the Republican convention in 2016. He declined to be interviewed for this story. “Out of the respect for our service together, and years of closer friendship, I’m now just going to stay silent,” he told me by email. Retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, once Flynn’s commander and later his White House colleague, wrote, “I have known Mike Flynn for many years going back to our days as Paratroopers in the 82d Airborne Division. As such, he remains a friend and [I] prefer to not talk about him.” My inquiries prompted many replies like those.

Former close associates of Flynn who did respond to my queries proposed varying explanations for Flynn’s behavior in recent years. The high-ranking officer said his extremism and conspiratorial bent may have been in him all along, but tamped down.

“The uniform constrains people’s political and emotional qualities,” he said. “You can misjudge a person because they are constrained by the job and the uniform.” When he takes off the uniform, “the personality that may have been constrained comes out.”

“Keep in mind, his reputation was built essentially as staff officer who’s got, you know, a really smart commander,” another top-ranking officer said. “You had Stan McChrystal, you know, holding both arms and keeping him focused.”

Clapper thinks it was Flynn’s humiliation at the DIA that started him down the wrong road. “Getting terminated a year early ate at him,” Clapper told me. “He had a grievance. And it just, it was corrosive with him, and he became a bitter, angry man and just latched on to anybody who was opposed to Obama and the Obama administration. That’s my armchair analysis of what happened.”

The humiliation of his subsequent firing as national security adviser and prosecution for lying to the FBI about conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States (he pleaded guilty, then tried to withdraw his plea, and then was pardoned by Trump) only amplified his feelings of persecution, by this hypothesis.

[David A. Graham: Why Michael Flynn is walking free]

But Clapper has another theory too.

“He spent a lot of time deployed, maybe too much, as it turns out,” Clapper said. “He spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan chasing terrorists, and I think that, to some extent, that consumed him.” An officer who worked closely with Flynn in the field told me, “If you spend years hunting terrorists and honing this killing machine,” some people “get unhinged by all that.”

One after another in my interviews, people who know Flynn speculated about the possibility of cognitive decline or a psychological disorder, then shied away. McCaffrey was the only person prepared to say on the record, “I think he was having mental-health problems.”

At every stage of his career in the Army, Flynn’s performance had been dissected and judged by a senior rater. Given his rapid ascent, he must have been promoted at least twice “below the zone,” or before he would normally have been eligible. Shouldn’t the Army have seen the seeds of Flynn’s unraveling?

McCaffrey said that that is asking too much. There are hundreds of generals in the Army, he said, and nearly 1,000 flag officers across the armed services. They are among the most rigorously selected people in any profession.

“As people get older, in particular, and as circumstances push in on them,” he said, “every year there’s some fairly small number who have mental-health problems … So yeah, some of them go bad. But Flynn went bad in one of the most spectacular manners we’ve ever witnessed. You know, it wasn’t just bad judgment. It was demented behavior.”

Demented, and well rewarded. Which is still another potential explanation for the Flynn we see today.

Somebody is making good money on the “ReAwaken America” tour. At $250 a ticket, the gate for the Canton event was in the neighborhood of three-quarters of a million dollars, not including sales of MAGA swag, Flynn memorabilia, Jesus hats, survival gear, vitamins and plant pigments marketed as COVID therapy, and, inevitably, MyPillow bedroom furnishings. Clay Clark, the emcee, is a Tulsa-based business coach who conceived of and organizes the tour; he holds the two-day events every month. Clark declined, in an interview, to say what Flynn’s cut is.

It could be that I am wrong about Flynn’s purity of belief. It could be that he is responding, rationally enough, to incentives. Flynn faced monumental legal bills in his criminal case, and there is a lucrative role in the MAGA ecosystem for someone who says the things that he says. John Kelly, the former White House chief of staff and a retired general, told me that Flynn “spent quite a bit of money” to defend himself. Perhaps, Kelly said, “he’s trying to make some of that money back.”

Then there is the lure of adulation. The latter-day Flynn is celebrated by adoring crowds. Standing onstage, he gets to be the hero once again.

Does Flynn imagine a political future? Sometimes it sounds that way.

He closed his Ohio appearance with a rallying cry.

“I’m trying to get this message out to the American people that now is the time to decide whether you’re going to be courageous or not,” he said. “I mean, this is it.”

I asked Joe Flynn whether his brother planned to run for office.

“I don’t think he’s interested in that at all,” Joe replied.

He wouldn’t be the last guy who got conscripted, however, and there is one political office for which Flynn has been on the shortlist before.

“I personally think he should become Trump’s running mate,” Clark said. “I’d love to see a Trump-Flynn ticket.”

In the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Trump flew to as many as five campaign events a day, Flynn became his regular warm-up act. “He was an amazingly popular opener,” Bannon told me. “He was as popular as Rudy [Giuliani], and Rudy’s pretty fucking popular with the crowd. Flynn was the most popular opening act we had.”

Trump, according to contemporary news accounts, looked hard at Flynn as a running mate in 2016 before selecting Mike Pence. Some Trump allies think that Flynn, who recently visited the former president at Mar-a-Lago, is back on the menu for 2024. “I think Mike [Flynn] could very well be on the VP shortlist in ‘24,” Bannon said. “And if the president doesn’t run, I strongly believe Mike is running.”

Roger Stone, the veteran operative of countless campaigns—and, like Flynn, the recipient of a pardon from Trump—told the Canton crowd to expect great things.

“There is one person who is absolutely central to the future of this country,” he said. “Absolutely central to the struggle for freedom that we face. This is a man who’s not a politician. I don’t think he much likes politics. This is a man who served his country. He’s actually a war hero … I speak of that great American patriot, General Michael Flynn.”

“And let me say this,” he added. “General Flynn’s greatest acts of public service lie ahead.”

For decades Republicans have marketed themselves as the party of freedom. During the 1990s and early 2000s, conservative activists took up the description of the GOP coined by the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist as the “leave us alone” coalition, so named because it consisted of voters whose stated aspiration was to live without government interference. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Republican governors led by Ron DeSantis in Florida gravitated toward unbending opposition to business and school shutdowns, as well as to mask or vaccine requirements, often overriding Democratic-run local governments that tried to impose them.

“While so many around the country have consigned the people’s rights to the graveyard,” DeSantis said in his annual State of the State address earlier this year, “Florida has stood as freedom’s vanguard.”

But the systematic drive by GOP state officials and the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices to roll back seemingly long-settled civil rights and liberties, including the right to abortion, has provided Democrats with a unique opening to reverse the terms of this debate, particularly in races for state offices, where the rights battles are now centered. An array of Democratic governors and gubernatorial candidates are presenting Republicans as a threat to Americans’ freedoms.

“It has frustrated me that Republicans love to cloak themselves in this blanket of freedom and feel as though they own it somehow, when in fact what they are selling to the people of Pennsylvania, or the American people, really isn’t freedom at all,” Josh Shapiro, the state’s attorney general and Democratic nominee for governor, told me in an interview. “It’s far bigger government and more control over people’s everyday lives.”

One of the most dramatic expressions of this new thrust came last weekend when California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who’s rapidly increased his visibility in national culture wars, ran a television ad on Fox News in Florida jabbing at DeSantis as a threat to liberty. In the ad, Newsom stands without a jacket or tie in the California sun as “America the Beautiful” plays in the background and declares, “It’s Independence Day, so let’s talk about what’s going on in America. Freedom: It’s under attack in your state.”

Supposedly representing the party of smaller government, Republicans across red states have in recent months approved a wave of intrusive actions as they work to unravel the “rights revolution” of the past 60 years. These measures include authorizing vigilante lawsuits by private citizens against anyone involved in providing an abortion and state investigations of parents who approved medical transition treatment for their transgender children (both in Texas), as well as restrictions on how both teachers and private companies alike can talk about race and gender and how K–12 teachers can discuss sexual orientation (the “Don’t Say Gay” law, in Florida). DeSantis has penalized in various ways the Walt Disney Company, the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team, and the Special Olympics for objecting to his policies.

[Read: America’s blue-red divide is about to get starker]

In Ohio, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill allowing “genital inspections” of high-school athletes suspected of being transgender (though the Republican State Senate leader says this measure won’t make it into the final legislation). Other red states are considering proposals to authorize lawsuits against out-of-state medical personnel who assist women in obtaining abortions and restrictions to make it more difficult for women to obtain medication abortions. Texas legislators are exploring ways to punish companies that fund travel for employees to seek abortions out of state.

Besides Shapiro and Newsom, Governors Kathy Hochul in New York and J. B. Pritzker in Illinois are advancing similar arguments about freedom and government intrusion, as is the most likely challenger to DeSantis in Florida, Charlie Crist. Newsom and Crist have both described DeSantis’s agenda as flat-out “authoritarian.” This new stress on liberty from so many state-level Democrats reflects the urgency among civil-rights advocates and party activists—which is also a register of widespread frustration at the inability or unwillingness of President Joe Biden and the party’s congressional leaders to mount a more forceful pushback against the Republican offensive.

Sean Clegg, a senior strategist for Newsom, says the governor’s decision to confront DeSantis in the ad should send a message to the White House and congressional Democrats who are planning to campaign for the midterm elections primarily on bread-and-butter economic concerns. “A lot of folks back there in D.C. don’t want to make this cycle about what is actually happening,” he told me. “You cannot focus on kitchen-table issues when the table of our democracy is being lit on fire by the other side … You’ve got to call it out.”

This year’s intensifying campaign debate over the definition of freedom recalls the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between two types of liberty. Republicans have traditionally stressed what Berlin called “negative” liberty: the freedom to live without interference from government or others. Since the New Deal, Democrats have emphasized what Berlin called “positive” liberty, concerned with creating opportunities for individuals to fulfill their potential. That approach has infused Democratic proposals for generations—Social Security in the 1930s, Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, the derailed Build Back Better plan today—with a determination to use government to provide Americans with more opportunities.

[Read: The Democrats’ new spokesman in the culture wars]

This traditional disagreement over the role of government remains a central divide between the parties. It was especially evident at the height of the pandemic, when most federal and state Republicans turned against the mandates and shutdowns that Democrats pushed as communal solidarity necessary to combat the disease. DeSantis referred to this resistance when he declared this year that Florida is “the freest state in these United States.”

In practice, the party’s powerful cultural-conservative wing has always strained Republicans’ claim to represent freedom from government interference. That tension has only grown as the GOP in the Trump era has become more reliant on blue-collar, evangelical Christian and rural voters who are motivated less by the traditional small-government touchstones of low taxes and less regulation and more by hostility to cultural and demographic change.

Bill Kristol, a conservative intellectual of the “leave us alone” GOP, now a bitter critic of the Trumpified party, explained in an interview that “the culture-war stuff was less important in the 1990s … so the let-us-alone, free-market, and free-guns-and-no-nanny-state stuff was much stronger.” Today, he said, “the more they do the culture-war stuff, the harder it is to sustain that freedom message, which is a powerful one in America.”

The race for Pennsylvania governor may be the contest this year that most clearly exhibits the new debate over freedom. Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee, is a far-right state senator who has wholeheartedly embraced Trump’s discredited claims of 2020 election fraud. He portrays himself as an unbending defender of liberty, and his campaign website is bannered “Restoring Your Freedom.” His platform elevates the usual “leave us alone” priorities: banning mask and vaccine mandates; allowing state residents to carry concealed weapons without a permit; and cutting taxes and regulations. But Mastriano also supports a state ban on abortion without exceptions once a fetal heartbeat is detected (as early as three weeks into pregnancy, he’s said); restrictions on how schools talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation; and a repeal of the state’s universal mail balloting and other changes that would make voting more difficult. (Mastriano’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

That has created a large opening for Shapiro. “Mastriano wants to dictate how Pennsylvanians live their lives—that’s not freedom,” Shapiro said after Mastriano won the GOP nomination in May; on another occasion he said, “It’s not freedom when he tries to tell the women of Pennsylvania what they can do with their own bodies. It’s not freedom when he tells you what books your children can read.”

Highlighting freedom “is not how Democrats typically talk,” Shapiro told me, but “I find that no matter who I am talking to … as I begin to explain what [Mastriano] talks about is the opposite of freedom … you can see the heads start to nod.”

Shapiro said that in his appearances, he emphasizes both definitions of liberty—not only from government as intrusive interference but also for government as a tool to create greater “opportunity in education, economy, public safety.” One important example, he said, in his heavily blue-collar state is his promise to provide more vocational and technical training in high schools so that young people “have freedom to choose” whether to pursue college or enter the workforce.

[David Frum: A rescue package for Joe Biden]

Grover Norquist himself told me that he doesn’t worry much about Democrats’ claim to champion freedom. “They can try this, but it won’t go anywhere,” he said. “It’s fine for a TV ad—that’s, what, 20 seconds—but who’s for freedom and who isn’t … doesn’t pass the laugh test.” The longtime president of the anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform conceded that conservatives might be on firmer ground if they sought to provide parents with vouchers to send their children to private schools rather than try to control what books or lessons are available in public schools. But, he argued, Democrats support too many kinds of government intervention to convince voters that they stand for freedom. “The list of things [Democrats] do to violate the ‘leave us alone’ value is long [and] deep,” he said; the GOP has “whole organizations” dedicated to pointing this out.

Bill Kristol, too, thought it would be an uphill climb for Democrats to convince voters that they alone have become the party of freedom and liberty, even if Republicans have taken positions that could negate their traditional advantage. (Kristol said that, overall, Democrats have a better chance of tagging Republicans as extremists than as opponents of freedom, and that they should use infringements on freedom as a count in that larger indictument.) Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University historian and the author of What It Took to Win, a new history of the Democratic Party, agreed that the GOP has created a vulnerability by pursuing so many policies of “moral coercion that is sold as moral virtue,” but also argued that neither side can conclusively win the argument over liberty. “Freedom … is essentially a contested concept,” he said. “It is always going to be a political football.”

The stakes in this struggle are rising. The GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court appears set on a course of reversing previously guaranteed rights, and states under Republican control are barreling through that opening to restore a pre-’60s world in which citizens’ liberties varied much more, depending on where they lived. Even with unified Democratic control of the White House and Congress, Republican-led filibusters and defections within the Senate Democratic caucus have made it impossible for Congress to respond with legislation to consolidate a national floor of rights on such issues as voting, abortion, and LGBTQ equality.

Given this environment, the years ahead could produce even more divergence in the way that states define freedom, depending on whether they are controlled by Democrats or Republicans. That means gubernatorial races are becoming a new front line in determining Americans’ basic rights. “Being a governor now is the most important job you can have in American government,” Shapiro said. “It is … the place where we are going to have to defend these fundamental freedoms.”