By General Mike Flynn

I spent over 33 years in service to this country. I have worn the uniform in war. I have sat in the rooms where the most consequential decisions about American power are made. I have watched the federal government turn its full weight against citizens it found inconvenient, including me. So when I tell you that what happened at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this weekend was not a random act of madness but the predictable result of a decade of institutional failure, I am not speaking from theory. I am speaking from the cost of it.

A man walked toward the President of the United States with two firearms and the intent to kill him. He was the third such man in two years. In the wake of it, senior federal officials stepped to the microphones and told the country that the rhetoric of ordinary Americans on social media is somehow part of the cause. That is misdirection, and the soldier in me recognizes the maneuver immediately.

The American people are being told to look at each other when they should be looking at the institutions that allowed this to happen.

In the military, when an operation fails, the after-action review is brutally honest. Commanders are named, decisions are scrutinized, and the chain of responsibility is traced from the point of failure back to the desk where the bad call was made. Nobody is permitted to walk away by gesturing at the broader culture and calling it everyone’s fault.

In Government, when something goes catastrophically wrong, the first move is to expand the circle of blame until the actual decision-makers are invisible inside it.

Butler. The first attempted assassination. A rooftop that the Secret Service did not secure. A communications failure between agencies that should not have been possible in the year 2024. Americans were told it was complicated. We were told there would be a review. We were told changes would be made, but then it happened again in Florida, and again this weekend. Three serious attempts on the life of a sitting or former president in less than two years, and not one senior official has been fired, demoted, or publicly held to account. That is an accountability problem, and the American people can see it clearly, even when those in the marble buildings refuse to.

When a senior official suggests that “everyone” is responsible for political violence, what he is effectively saying is that no one in particular will be held accountable. The mother in Ohio who tweeted criticism of an administration policy is now standing in the same dock as the men who failed to secure the venue. The veteran in Florida who called a politician a name in a comment thread is being asked to share the moral weight of a failure that belongs to the federal officials who were paid to prevent it.

This is not how a serious country functions. Collective guilt is what institutions reach for when they have lost the will or the capacity to assign individual responsibility. It is the oldest dodge in government, and it works only as long as the citizenry is willing to accept it.

History is unambiguous on this point. When institutions stop holding their own people accountable, two things happen in sequence. First, the failures multiply because there is no longer any cost to failing. Second, the blame migrates outward to the press, to the public, to the citizen, to the neighbor, until the original failure is buried beneath a fog of national self-recrimination thick enough that no one can see who actually dropped the ball.

We are living inside that fog right now.

The bullet at the Correspondents’ Dinner was not produced by a tweet. It was produced by a system that has not punished a single senior failure in a generation.

I will say this in plain English so there is no confusion about where I stand or why. I have watched the senior leadership of agencies lie under oath, mislead Congress, leak classified material to friendly reporters, run operations against American citizens, and walk away with pensions, book deals, and cable contracts. Not one of them has paid a meaningful price. Not one.

I am not bitter about this. I am clear-eyed about it. A government that cannot punish its own most powerful failures has lost the moral authority to lecture its citizens about their tone. That is the heart of the matter, and every American who has been paying attention for the last decade already knows it in their bones.

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The reason political violence is rising in this country is not that Americans criticize their leaders too harshly. Americans have always harshly criticized their leaders. The Founders themselves wrote pamphlets that would make a modern social media post look like a thank-you card. The reason political violence is rising is that the institutions tasked with preventing it have repeatedly proven they will not be held accountable when they fail and a population that watches its institutions escape consequences eventually loses faith that the system works at all.

That loss of faith is the real fuel. Not memes, tweets, nor the volume of ordinary Americans expressing ordinary frustration with their government. The fuel is the unmistakable sense, shared now by tens of millions of citizens across the political spectrum, that the powerful in this country answer to no one.

To the President, As One Soldier to His Commander in Chief

Mr. President, I prayed for you after Butler. I prayed for you again this past weekend. I am grateful beyond words that you are alive and that the men and women of the Secret Service did their job in the moment that mattered most. The country needs you in that office.

I am also telling you that the path forward is not through the speech of the American citizen. It is through the desks of the federal officials who have presided over three attempts on your life and have not yet been required to answer for any of them.

Fire the people who failed. Name them. Replace them with serious men and women who understand that protecting the President of the United States is not a public relations exercise. Conduct an after-action review the way the military conducts one publicly, ruthlessly, and with the chain of responsibility traced all the way to the top. The American people will respect that. They have been waiting a long time to see it.

The millions of Americans being framed as contributors to political violence are the same Americans who put you back in the White House. They stood by your side after the 2020 election was stolen. They knocked on the doors. They wrote the checks. They prayed through two assassination attempts and stood by you when the entire machinery of the federal government was deployed against your campaign and your person. They are not a threat to this Republic. They are the reason it still has a pulse. Defend them publicly and unambiguously.

What Every American Citizen Must Do This Week

First, demand names. When a senior official tells you that “everyone” is responsible for what happened this weekend, do not accept it. Ask publicly, loudly, and repeatedly: who was in charge of the security perimeter, who signed off on it, and what is happening to that person now? Accountability begins with refusing to let the question be changed.

Second, contact your two U.S. Senators and your Representative this week and demand a public statement on whether they support a full, named, public after-action review of every senior official involved in the security failures of the last two years. On the record. In writing.

Third, do not surrender your voice. Refuse the framing that ordinary American criticism of powerful officials contributes to violence. The single greatest defense against an unaccountable government is a citizenry that will not be shamed into silence by it.

I have been a soldier my entire adult life. I have buried friends. I have stood at attention while flags were folded into triangles and handed to widows. I have watched young Americans give everything they had so that the country their grandparents built would still be standing when their children grew up.

Those Americans did not die so that the senior officials of the federal government could fail upward indefinitely while the citizens back home were told to watch their tone. They died for a country in which the powerful answer to the people, not the other way around.

Finally, do not under any circumstances, for any reason, in any moment of grief or fear, let the people who failed you tell you that you are the problem.

We have been down that road before. We are not walking down it again.