Flynn’s Coup Talk Is a Warning About the MAGA Violence Ahead
It Can’t Happen Here is a dystopian novel about the rise of an American dictator that Sinclair Lewis wrote in 1935.
“It Should Happen Here,” is an even more dystopian idea, authored by Mike Flynn in 2021, and it’s non-fiction. In case you missed it, when asked this weekend why America can’t have a Myanmar-esque coup (after a democratic election didn’t go their way, the military seized control and declared a state of emergency), Flynn responded, “No reason. I mean, it should happen here.”
This is a former general and national security adviser endorsing a military coup to overthrow a democratic election, depose Joe Biden, and install Donald Trump as president. Insanely, Flynn did so at a Memorial Day weekend event full of Qanon conspiracy theorists, while speaking under a logo with one of that movement’s slogans on it. (Yes, Flynn later reversed his comments on a social media platform that I have never heard of, but it’s clear what he said in the first place, and he’s been not so subtly signaling his Q sympathies for years now.) This rhetoric is dangerous, and even more so coming on the heels of the GOP’s refusal to support a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection.