Michael Flynn: “A Myanmar-like Coup Should Happen in U.S.”
From this:
Appearing in Dallas at a QAnon conference, Flynn was asked during a Q&A session that was shared in a Twitter video: “I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here?”
Myanmar’s military seized power Feb. 1 and imprisoned the country’s democratically elected leaders, on the basis of unproven allegations of voter fraud. At least 800 civilians have died, and thousands have been arrested, in protests that have wracked the Southeast Asian nation in the months that followed.
Supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory have praised the Myanmar coup and called for the U.S. military to do the same, citing unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.
Flynn, a former Army general, was fired by President Donald Trump in 2017 after less than a month as his national security adviser, after it was revealed that he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence. After pleading guilty to making false statements to the FBI during the Mueller investigation, Flynn moved to withdraw his plea and the Justice Department dropped charges against him. A federal judge ruled the matter be placed on hold, but Trump pardoned Flynn last November before a ruling on whether the Justice Department could drop the criminal case against him.
Last summer, Flynn posted a video on Twitter reciting QAnon slogans. Twitter banned Flynn and others in January in a purge of accounts promoting QAnon theories.
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Coincidentally, I grew up with a guy who went on to become a very senior Judge Advocate General within the Marine Corps; he just recently retired, a full colonel if I’m not mistaken.
Unfortunately, I didn’t track with the entirety of my friend’s career. I know he started off defending Marines who had committed certain fairly minor crimes: AWOL, weed, drunkenness, breaking up bars with fist-fights, and so on. Regardless of how high he rose in the JAG ranks, I doubt he has any direct experience with crimes that would result in anything more than a few months in a military prison.
But here’s Flynn, a former general, calling for a military coup as a vehicle to overthrow the government of the United States of America. That should be good for a life sentence; had he done this in the mid 20th Century, he might have faced a firing squad. Keep in mind that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the electric chair in 1953 for a crime that was arguably less serious than this.
At the risk of stating the obvious, what makes this so heinous is the knowledge that there are thousands upon thousands, perhaps a million or more, who are mentally deficient and/or deranged and armed to the teeth, just waiting for the right provocation to take up arms in a far more widespread fashion than the January 6th insurrection. It’s not like we don’t have mass shootings, even outside the context of taking over the government. The Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one with four or more people injured or killed, not including the perpetrator, counted more than 600 such shootings in 2020, compared with 417 in 2019. That carnage has continued into 2021, with at least 232 mass shootings as of May 26–far more than one per day on average.
Flynn won’t be receiving any more presidential pardons for his felonies, and the justice associated with this one might be swift, and severe. We can only hope.
