Even by Florida GOP Standards, This Is Lunacy

Editor’s Note: This has been updated to reflect that Bridget Ziegler was not at the executive committee election.

A decidedly dangerous normalization of lunacy took the form of a name on a sign-up sheet for poll watchers at a meeting of the Sarasota County Republicans late last week.

Michael Flynn.

Flynn is nationally known as a retired general who has championed the Big Lie about the 2020 election, at one point urging military action to overturn it. He is also known for having been convicted of lying to the FBI while he was briefly President Trump’s national security advisor and for having subsequently received a presidential pardon. He has ascribed to various ”deep state” conspiracy theories.

On Thursday evening, Flynn was one of several dozen new members of the local Republican executive committee elected by voice vote at the Morgan Family Community Center in Northport, Florida.

As if that were not scary enough, they also elected James Hoel, a local leader of the Proud Boys.

Hoel and fellow Proud Boy Nicholas Radovich were active in the Aug. 23 Sarasota County School Board election that saw a longstanding 3-2 liberal majority become a 4-1 conspiracy minority. Radovich showed up at the victory party in a Proud Boys hat and T-shirt and flashed a white power sign during a group picture. The one re-elected incumbent conservative, Bridget Ziegler, subsequently denounced the Proud Boys as a “menace.”

Ziegler was not at the election of the new Republican executive committee members. Local Republican activist Conni Brunni told The Daily Beast afterwards that nobody was heard to voice an objection to a supposed menace being among them.

“It was not discussed at all,” Brunni said after the meeting. “They were all sworn in.”

“It was not discussed at all,” local Republican activist Conni Brunni told The Daily Beast after the meeting. “They were all sworn in.”

Brunni described the atmosphere at the meeting as “so awesome.”

“The energy in that room was completely electric,” she said.

The county GOP leadership apparently did not want to risk a furor such as the one that followed the white power sign flashed in the giddy group photo at last month’s school board victory party.

“They wouldn't let us take a picture,” Brunni reported.

But several people at the meeting posed for photos with Flynn that were subsequently posted on the Facebook page for Sarasota Watchdogs, which is associated with Hoel and the Proud Boys.

“Congratulations to all the new Sarasota Republican Executive Club members!” the Sarasota Watchdog page said. “This is local action at its best! For the first time in a long time, families are involved and excited! Please message us for an application to get involved at the October meeting! Fighting for our freedoms in Florida...we will hold the line! Prayers and love to each of the 50 plus new members.”

She said that several people suggested to her that because she helped bring in Flynn and the Proud Boy and so many others, she should challenge the acting Sarasota GOP chair, Jack Brill.

“After that night, I think they saw leadership,” Brunni said, confirming a Sarasota Herald-Tribune report that she is seriously considering making the move.

According to Brunni, Flynn did not play a role in the school board flip last month. Nor, she said, was he active in the election of three conservatives to the Sarasota County Hospital Board. One of these new “health freedom” board members was Victor Roe, a retired New York City police officer who has called COVID-19 vaccination “a joke” and did not trust highly regarded Sarasota Hospital to treat him after he caught what he termed “bad case” of the virus.

As Brunni tells it, Flynn decided to run for the local Republican executive committee at her suggestion.

“It was me that convinced him to do it,” she told The Daily Beast.

She said that back in March she was making a door-to-door effort to get fellow Republicans on her street more involved when she spoke to one of her newer neighbors, Laurie Flynn.

Bruni says the next day, she was in her golf cart, about to pull out of her driveway, when a man approached and introduced himself as Laurie’s husband: ”I’m Mike Flynn.”

She said that the very idea that this star of the far right might want to be an executive committee member initially seemed laughable.

“This man who was the national security advisor to the president of the United States has nothing better to do?” she remembers thinking.

But Flynn was immediately open to the idea when she broached it. He put his name in during a meeting of 45 local Republicans in her living room. Flynn is viewed in more liberal circles as a dangerous threat to democracy, but he is a bona fide celebrity in this set.

“Of course, when we were done everyone wanted to talk to him in my kitchen,” she recalled.

She was more than happy to have Flynn join the executive committee, and she was also untroubled by the election of a Proud Boy, accepting Hoel’s description of the extremist group as a “frat.” She noted that the party rules set forth only two requirements for executive board members.

“I only want to know, ‘Are they Republicans? And are they willing to work?’” she said.

At the time of the school board and hospital board elections, Flynn was busy with his national efforts to perpetuate the Big Lie and its attendant conspiracy theories.

But when the clipboard was passed around at Thursday night’s meeting, he and his wife both signed up to become poll watchers.

“They're very interested in getting, you know, grassroots-involved,” Brunni said.

The Sarasota Republican Party did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Flynn also did not respond to a request for comment. The Daily Beast did get a response from the retired general’s brother, Joe Flynn, who sometimes serves as a kind of gatekeeper for him.l.

“Fuck off,” Joe Fklynn said in an email.. “Quote me.”

Michael Flynn did offer an extensive comment on Steven Bannon’s podcast The War Room on Sept. 10.

“As long as I got a breath left in me, I am going to continue to push this message of local action and national impact,” Flynn said. “And now I, now I wanna be able to tell people when they say, when somebody says, well, are you doing, what are you doing specifically? I'm gonna, I am now part of the Republican executive committee for the Sarasota, GOP. And I also am volunteering to be a poll watcher in the upcoming elections, particularly in this county, in the state of Florida.”

Thus spoke a man who once called for the military to stage a coup to prevent a legitimate transfer of power as set forth in the Constitution that he has repeatedly sworn to uphold.

As kids, we are taught that any American can grow up to become president. We now witness proof that the Republican Party has become such a haven for lunacy that even someone who sought to scuttle a presidential election can become a poll watcher.