President Donald Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser General Michael Flynn is set to pick up an award at a far-right conference over the weekend.
Fringe right-wing media outlet the Gateway Pundit is behind the three-day event and wants to present Flynn with an “Award for Service to America.”
Flynn pled guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI in January 2017 about his contact with Russian officials and was charged by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading an investigation into allegations of Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election. He is expected to be sentenced later this month.
The Gateway Pundit, run by Jim Hoft, is known to promote a hyper-partisan and conspiratorial right-wing narrative. The website has notoriously pushed false information during mass shooting incidents, for example, framing perpetrators os such crimes as left-wing or claiming victims were crisis actors.
This particular bent is reflected in the conference line-up.
Flynn will not only share the stage with several controversial far-right party leaders from Europe but with popular American conservative media personalities and provocateurs like Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and James O’Keefe of Project Veritas fame.
The seminars and lectures cover a variety of topics, with titles such as “The Fraud of Transgenderism” and “They’re Back! The Ten Commandments as the Foundation of Law”—a talk that will directly follow Flynn’s presentation.
It was Trump himself who tweeted links to the Gateway Pundit on 14 occasions during the presidential election and even referenced an article in his Republican nomination acceptance speech. So it’s unsurprising that someone so close to Trump, like Flynn, would not only be honored with an award, but that they would also turn up to collect it.
H/T the Daily Beast