I'm a simple Marine,
I want to know why what happened in
Myanmar can't happen here.
[APPLAUSE] >> No reason,
I mean, it should happen,
there's no reason, that's right.
>> That was Donald Trump's short
lived National Security Adviser
Michael Flynn answering a question
by a QAnon conspiracy theorists
at a QAnon conspiracy gathering.
Regarding a Myanmar style military
coup in the United States to
install Donald Trump,
or reinstate Donald Trump, as
the president of the United States.
His comments, again,
were made during this QAnon
conference in Dallas, Texas, and
the conference was titled, For
God and Country: Patriot Roundup.
Now, Ryan,
I want you to jump in right away.
Because this is very clearly
calling for a pretty horrific coup
in order to undo our democratic
election and install Donald Trump,
their preferred
president in the White House.
And, of course, now Michael Flynn
is walking back his statements, but
before we get to that,
I wanted to get your thoughts.
>> Right, I mean the QAnon kind of
philosophy, or whatever you want to
call it, calls for
[INAUDIBLE] to be straight up
executed in a violent uprising.
They're considered the worst kinds
of traitors on the planet, and
the best way to deal with them
is to slaughter them.
Flynn talking about a violent coup
in Myanmar as appropriate to bring
here is almost a tame version of
what QAnon actually calls for.
Flynn has been dabbling in and kind
of immersed in the more bonkers
elements of the Trumpist wing
of the party for a very long time.
And this kind of
shows how far he has gone.
You see coups take place all over
the world.
And usually,
you find that the United States is
somehow involved with those coups.
And you wonder sometimes how is it
that so many people in these
countries can support undermining
there own government like this.
And hearing the crowd cheer Michael
Flynn like that, it shows you that
it absolutely could happen here.
And it would have support if it did
happen here.
Now, this is a marginal group,
I don't think that there anywhere
remotely close to operationalizing
anything like this.
But at one point,
he was national security adviser.
And at some point,
it's quite likely that Republicans
will be back in the White House,
and that wing of the party is
going to remain part of it.
>> With every presidential election
cycle, the Republican Party tends
to get more and more extreme in
what they're willing to do in
regard to voter suppression, how
far they're willing to go in order
to ensure they maintain power.
During the same event, Flynn also
falsely claimed that quote,
Trump won, he won the popular vote,
which, of course, he did not, and
he won the Electoral College vote.
So he's helping to perpetuate this
lie, the big lie
about the 2020 election.
And so,
I really enjoyed the podcast
episode you did on Deconstructed,
where you talk to Lauren Windsor.
And she made a really great point
about how all of these lies
regarding the 2020 election isn't
really about reversing the results
of the 2020 general election.
It's more about getting
the Republican ducks in a row for
2022 and 2024, and I think
that she's right about that.
But there's also the fact that
democracy is incredibly fragile,
our democracy is incredibly
fragile.
And I think that this past election
made it abundantly clear to me that
there is a pretty significant
portion of the country that's
willing to throw out our democratic
process in order to ensure that
their preferred candidate
maintains power.
And I'm really worried about what
that means for the future.
Because for anyone who might have
missed the the awful coup that took
place in Myanmar, it happened in
February, we did cover it on
the show, so please check out that
video to get more details on it.
But the coup d'etat deposed
the democratically-elected
government and installed a military
leader as ruler.
A violent crackdown followed that
has reportedly killed more than 600
people and wounded thousands.
As I mentioned, Flynn did get
a considerable amount of backlash
as a result of his comments, so
now he's trying to pretend as if he
was taken out of context.
He didn't really say what
he clearly said in the video
that we showed you.
He said, quote,
let me be very clear,
there is no reason whatsoever for
any coup in America, and
I do not and
have not at any time called for
any action of that sort.
But as we know,
he responded to a person who said,
why can't we have Myanmar type coup
here in the United States?
And he's like,
there's no reason we can't.
[LAUGH] There's no other way
to take that out of context or
twist his words.
>> Right, and you're right that
Lauren made an interesting point.
Because it shows how the party's
kind of moving on two tracks at
the same time.
On the one hand,
they're squarely playing
the electoral politics game.
They're going to do a lot of
gerrymandering.
They're working on rewriting voter
laws to advantage themselves.
They have figured out when at
night, when on the weekends, and
when during the process
Democrats were more likely to vote.
And they kind of stripped those
times away, just to try to close
[INAUDIBLE] tilt [INAUDIBLE] this
big lie.
Because the huge variable is,
will the voters who came out for
Donald Trump in 2020,
who didn't even come out for
Trump in 2016, will they show up
in 2022 in a midterm?
And what about the voters who
showed up for Trump in 2016 but
hadn't shown up for
Democrats before?
Republicans don't know, Democrats
don't know, nobody knows if those
people are going to show up.
And so what they're doing is kind
of stoking as much paranoia as they
can to show that they are firmly
behind their man Trump.
And if you like Trump,
then you should come out and
support these Republicans in this
midterm election.
So it's not clear if that's
going to work, but that's their
electoral politics game.
At the same time, like she said,
they're also sowing the seeds for
a full blown overturning of a
legitimate election in the future.
Because if you can convince
your voters that 2020 was in fact
stolen, then even if it seems
gray to people in 2024 whether or
not it was actually stolen or not,
people will feel aggrieved by 2020.
And say, you know what,
payback is fair.
So we're going to pay them back for
stealing it in 2020.
In fact, Republicans believed for
decades that 1960 was stolen by
Kennedy.
Looking at the evidence,
I think it was,
they probably did illegally flip
enough votes in 1960 to flip that.
And in 2000, when Republicans stole
that one, you had plenty of
Republicans who had living memory
of 1960 and were like,
this is payback, you earned this.
Now we're in a much more
compressed time period.
And it's not the old school style
of stealing an election like
Lyndon Johnson stuffing some ballot
boxes in Texas or
the Democratic machine in Chicago
coming up with some extra boxes.
They're talking about just
wholesale invalidating entire
Electoral College results.
>> I mean, it's absolute madness.
And, I mean, for his part,
Michael Flynn has also suggested
all sorts of insane things,
including calling for
martial law in order to ensure
that Donald Trump maintains power.
Last summer, Flynn posted a video
featuring QAnon slogans.
In a recent interview, Flynn
attempted to distinguish between
the QAnon movement, which is known
for outlandish conspiracy theories.
And its followers, saying,
what I tell people to do is look at
the people that are involved,
look at the values that they
espouse and let's move along.
But the values they espouse is
supporting a military coup in order
to ensure that their preferred
candidate remains in power.
And what I'm worried about, Ryan,
isn't just the lunacy coming from
the right wing, but
more importantly, the reaction and
response from the Democratic Party.
Because we don't have a Democratic
machine that's reminiscent of
[LAUGH] the Chicago Democrats.
I mean, I don't see any strength in
pushing back against what we're
seeing in regard to the Republican
Party and what they're spreading in
terms of disinformation about
the 2020 election.
Just today, Joe Biden,
while out with Kamala Harris,
claimed that he's going to fight
like hell to ensure that these
voter suppression laws in various
states are mitigated.
But there's really no game plan, I
haven't seen any type of game plan.
And in the Senate, as you know,
we have conservative Democratic
senators like Joe Manchin
who are unwilling to do away with
the filibuster,
which is obviously necessary in
order to pass election reform.
So what are Democrats going to do?
>> I mean, everything depends on,
really, the month of June for
the for Democrats.
But you're right,
the asymmetry is just wild.
You have one party that's not
extensively in federal power that
is using what power it does have to
tilt all the rules in its favor.
And then you have the other party
that is ostensibly in power,
who isn't doing thing about it.
Like you said,
they passed HR1 in the House.
They've passed it through committee
in the Senate.
That bill would ban gerrymandering,
it would overturn a bunch of these
voter suppression laws that have
already been passed.
And it would effectively make it
impossible for
them to pass them in these other
states where they're pushing them.
It can't get through right now
because of the filibuster.
And so, June is, as far as a lot of
[INAUDIBLE], kind of the deadline
to get this done in time so that it
can be implemented in time for
the 2022 midterms.
And so Democrats are setting
up a ton of
showdowns over the filibuster.
They're going to vote on next week,
I think the Paycheck Fairness Act,
which Democrats all like and
Republicans are going to
filibuster.
They're dragging out these
infrastructure talks to show that
Republicans aren't serious about
negotiating around infrastructure.
Fortunately, for Democrats,
Shelley Moore Capito,
a Republican from West Virginia,
is the one who's taking the lead on
these infrastructure negotiations.
So, if and when that blows up,
they will have cut the knees out
from under Joe Manchin's friend
back in West Virginia.
And so each time that
Republicans filibuster something,
the intent there is to get
Joe Manchin a little bit closer to
agreeing to reform the filibuster.
And Schumer has said he's going to
have a vote on S1,
HR1 at the end of June.
Now, this is all long-shot stuff,
you're relying on Joe Manchin to do
the right thing.
But the pieces are lined up.
And if they go down and ten years
from now, you would look back and
you would reasonably say that June
2021 was the moment that they had
a shot to stay in the ballgame and
blew it.
Or if they get it done,
you say June 2021 is
the moment that Democrats
actually found their spine.
>> Hm, well,
we'll see what happens in June.
I have my own predictions,
[LAUGH] but I'll hold,
[LAUGH] I'll hold.
>> The Smart Money is
never on Democrats find a spine.
>> Right, right.
>> That's for sure.
>> Exactly.
>> Anything's possible.
>> Anything's possible, yes.