QAnon Exists to Sell you T-Shirts: Part 1
How American conservatism has historically mainstreamed far-right agitprop.
America’s Future, Inc. is one of the oldest right-wing organizations in the nation. It has a history of free-market conservatism, Red Scare propaganda-peddling, and flirtation with fascist sympathizers dating back to World War II. In the 1950s, it was primarily a pro-capitalist organization that leveraged anti-communist propaganda to influence and mobilize conservative voter support. It was not itself a pro-fascist organization, though its messages resonated with extreme right political groups and media at the time.
America’s Future’s 1946 charter states its mission as, “[to] promote popular understanding of the Constitution…and wider appreciation of American principles of individual and economic freedom”—values that the organization still advances.
Today, the organization is chaired by General Michael Flynn, former Trump national security advisor turned conspiracy cult grifter.
This is a story about how America’s Future is funding itself with $30 QAnon t-shirts. It is also a story about how American mainstream conservative organizations have historically appealed to and intersected with the most radical elements of the right.
But mostly, this story is about shady shit happening in Florida.
This will be a three-part series.
Part I situates America’s Future, Inc. in historical context—demonstrating its intersection and co-mingling with organizations and actors involved in far-right, fascist politics and conspiracy-peddling.
Part II focuses on the current chair of America’s Future, Inc., Michael Flynn, his mendacious fall from grace, and subsequent swampy rise into the Internet cult of QAnon.
Part III delves into the shady connections between America’s Future, Inc., Flynn, and alt-right merch websites (among others).
But first: To understand America’s Future, we need to understand its past.
America’s Future & The Primordial Conservative Soup
America’s Future, Inc. marks 1946—the year it was incorporated as a nonprofit in Delaware—as the year it was founded. But according to documents in the John T. Flynn papers, housed at the University of Oregon Library, in Eugene, Oregon, America’s Future actually formed in 1938 in conjunction with the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, later called the Committee for Constitutional Government (CCG). America’s Future initially served as the CCG’s distributor of “educational” materials.
The CCG was a conservative anti-Roosevelt organization that waged war against New Deal social and economic policies designed to help America recover from the Great Depression. Its initial goal was to block Roosevelt’s “court-packing plan,” a piece of legislation which aimed to expand the Supreme Court to as many as 15 judges. Roosevelt’s political goal was to dilute a conservative court that had already struck down a number of progressive New Deal laws and was poised to strike down more. The CCG led an aggressive lobbying campaign against the reform. The reform ultimately failed.
The Committee itself was populated with a collection of characters over the years, from run-of-the-mill pro-business conservatives to fascists and convicted seditionists. Numbered among them was its secretary and trustee, Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, author of the pseudoscientific book The Power of Positive Thinking, which you may recall from the first issue of Snake Oil. Its speaker, Elizabeth Dilling (alias Reverend Frank Woodruff Johnson), was a fascist antisemite who was indicted three times for sedition during World War II.
Leadership also included the infamous Edward Aloysius Rumely, a supporter of Germany during World War I who purchased The New York Evening Mail in 1915 with money from private backers, including Herman Sielcken, the millionaire coffee businessman of Baden-Baden, Germany, and Mrs. Adolphus Busch, wife to the founder of the Anheuser-Busch brewing company of St. Louis. Rumely also accepted $200,000—just shy of $5.48 million in today’s dollars—in advertising money from Heinrich Albert, diplomat of Imperial Germany, and suspected agent and saboteur, to promote a neutral position towards the Central Powers. Rumely was later arrested in 1918 under the Trading with the Enemy Act for not disclosing the funding for his paper. He was then convicted and sentenced to one year and a day in the U.S. Penitentiary, Atlanta.
He would later become the CCG’s executive secretary and then president.
In 1950, Rumely, now securely ensconced at the CCG, became a financial backer for one of America’s Future’s radio programs, “Behind the Headlines” hosted by John T. Flynn (no known relation to Michael Flynn). It was the height of the Second Red Scare, and Flynn’s radio show was riding the wave of communist paranoia. A staunch McCarthyist and original Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theorist, Flynn peddled propaganda about how Roosevelt was a Fabian socialist and communist colluder, and schools were covertly indoctrinating American students with socialist values. In Flynn’s 1949 book, The Road Ahead (to Socialism): America’s Creeping Revolution, he railed against the spread of a supposed global socialist conspiracy.
He also published various articles and pamphlets in conservative news outlets throughout the 1950s warning about the dangerous encroachment of socialism in America. Many of these pamphlets ended up in the hands of far-right, fascist organizations including the Christian Defenders, America First Party, and the Klu Klux Klan. Snippets of Flynn’s publications were also reprinted in antisemitic newspapers such as Gerald L.K. Smith’s The Cross and the Flag and Court Asher’s X-Ray. Millions of copies of Flynn’s pamphlets and other materials were deployed by the CCG in “educational campaigns” to influence voters in favor of conservative candidates.
Before starting his radio show for America’s Future, Flynn had headed the New York chapter of the America First Committee (NYC-AFC), a right-wing, isolationist organization that fought against American intervention in World War II. The AFC was known to count a number of Nazi sympathizers, fascists, and agents of the Reich’s propaganda machine among its membership (penetrating American patriotic organizations was a known Nazi tactic). Among the fascists of the NYC chapter was Laura Ingalls, actress, aviatrix, and anti-interventionist. A regular speaker at the NYC-AFC, she was later uncovered as a paid Nazi agent, reporting directly to Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, head of the German Gestapo in the U.S. In 1941, The New Republic called the AFC “the most powerful single potential Fascist group in this country today.”
To Flynn’s credit, he banned Ingalls from speaking at NYC-AFC meetings before it was uncovered that she was a German spy. But that did little to deter the crowd of fascists that flocked to Flynn’s organization. Avedis Boghos Derounian, an Armenian-American journalist who went by the nom de plume John Roy Carlson published a book in 1943 titled Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America. In his record of the 1941 NYC-AFC rally in Madison-Square-Garden, Derounian noted the large collection of hate group members that “frenziedly rendered the Nazi salute,” during the speech of Colonel Charles Lindbergh, a known Nazi sympathizer.1
Derounian first depicted Flynn in a positive light for stepping up to the podium at the 1941 rally to directly denounce the presence of fascist groups and their leaders in the audience. This rosy portrayal did not last—in a later exposé,The Plotters, Derounian accused Flynn of being a full-blown fascist and subversive propagandist.2
Anti-fascist literature of the time often identified various conservative entities as being a tool of the global Nazi propaganda arm. And there was good cause—Nazi propaganda in the U.S. at the time was prolific.3 Records kept by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) show in that in 1940 Japanese freighters carried almost 10 tons of propaganda from a German publisher to the West Coast over the course of 12 weeks.
Michelle Flynn Stenehjem, Flynn’s daughter and penner of his biography, and Dr. Richard Clark Frey Jr., a historian, assert that Flynn was not an antisemite and was in fact staunchly anti-fascist. It does appear that Flynn was primarily a pro-business, anti-communist conservative who had an avid following of right-wing lunatics. Whether he was actively seeking to court the fringe, simply interested in career advancement, or working to appease his corporate backers, is hard to divine.
What is clear is that from its inception, the American conservative space has always had linkages to fascist, antisemitic politics of the far right. The figures circulating within this right-wing political space often had their hands dipped in several organizations. With the number of fascist sympathizers in mainstream conservative organizations, it would have been difficult to avoid brushing shoulders.4 The cross-pollination of membership and funding between America’s Future, Inc., the CCG, AFC, and other conservative organizations and media outlets of the time, is a case in point.
America’s Future, Inc. was always a propaganda organization. Or, in the words of Stenehjem, “a militantly anti-Communist educational group.” It spread conspiracy theories, across the radio waves and in pamphlets, that emboldened fascist and conspiracist elements in the American political space. It was just one conservative organization among many that emerged from the Great Depression, mostly reactionary in nature, seeking to combat Roosevelt’s regulation of free enterprise. The anti-interventionist slant of these conservative organizations made them both targets for Nazi infiltration and popular with America’s far-right, fascist elements—as well as with business and corporate interests.5
75 years after its founding as a nonprofit, America’s Future, Inc. continues its work. Just as America’s Future circulated conspiracy theories to court right-wing support in the McCarthy era, so too does the America’s Future, Inc. of today—only this time, the conspiracy is QAnon.
In the next installment of “QAnon Exists to Sell You T-Shirts” we hone in on the present-day America’s Future, Inc., its current chair, Michael Flynn, and his descent into the QAnon morass.
Joe McWilliams, leader of the Christian Mobilizers and principal defendant in the Alien Registration Act (a.k.a. Smith Act) trial, was also in attendance.
Anti-fascist groups at the time did not hesitate to accuse Flynn of being a fascist sympathizer, including Friends of Democracy and the Federation to Fight Fascism.
The Nazi Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment hired U.S. PR firms to promote a positive image of Germany especially targeting German Americans, academics, politicians, and right-wing organizations. Welt-Dienst, or World Service, the Nazi regime’s international antisemitic propaganda news agency, had articles reprinted in American right-wing publications such as William Dudley Pelley’s Liberation, Charles Coughlin’s Social Justice, and Robert Edward Edmonson’s American Vigilante Bulletins.
America’s Future, Inc. offices were once located at 205 East 42nd Street in Manhattan. Other organizations housed in the building included the influential Committee for the Nation headed by J.H. Rand Jr.; the office of S.S. McClure, a right-wing journalist, CCG member, and founder of McClure’s Magazine; and the office of Lawrence Dennis, a notable Philips Exeter and Harvard graduate that Life magazine called “America’s No. 1 Intellectual Fascist” in 1941.
Right-wing opposition to New Deal government expansion drew in pro-business support. America’s Future, Inc. financial backers included magnates like General Robert E. Wood of Sears, Roebuck and Co.; the Pew family, which had its hand in Sun Oil and other industrial endeavors; Ernest T. Weir, head of the National Steel Corporation; and William H. Regnery, President of the Western Shade Cloth Company. Flynn’s radio program was also initially funded by executives at firms such as Sheaffer Pen Company, Pullman-Standard, Allis-Chalmers, the Schlitz Brewing Company, and Colonel McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune.