Michael Flynn Can't Believe People Are Acting Like Martial Law Is Some Big Deal
He'd like us to all be more chill about Trump maybe using it to stay in office.
Trumpers across the internet cannot stop talking about the Insurrection Act! At least those who are still in denial that Trump lost the election ... which is most of them. The Insurrection Act gives the president the right to deploy the National Guard to quell civil unrest and rebellion on US soil. It has been invoked in the past in instances like Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion, labor disputes (on the side of management), leftwing protests like the 1968 Chicago riots, and to keep anti-segregation Southerners from preventing Black people from going to school.
Now that the Electoral College has officially declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Trump supporters would like Trump to use the Insurrection Act to stay in office, possibly forever. And it's not just, you know, random weirdos on the internet, either. It's also legislators like North Carolina state Sen. Bob Steinberg and Virginia gubernatorial hopeful state Sen. Amanda Chase.
One person who thinks this could be a swell idea is former National Security Advisor and QAnon teen dream Gen. Michael Flynn. In an appearance Thursday on Newsmax, Flynn outlined some ways Trump could stay in office and chided those who might think that Trump declaring martial law would be some kind of big deal.
Transcript via Media Matters:
GREG KELLY (HOST): I hear some murmurings, you know about the staff shake-up at the Pentagon. They're putting people in place who might not be opposed to aggressive action and the President does have some options, at least on paper.
Can you tell us what those options are, and your opinion if he might take any of them?
MICHAEL FLYNN: Well I — you know, I don't know if he's going to take any of these options. I — I mean — the President has to — he has to plan for every eventuality because we cannot allow this election and the integrity of our election to go the way it is. I mean, this is just totally unsatisfactory. There's no way in the world that we are gonna be able to move forward as a nation with this.
So, the President has a — has a — I — I just mentioned one of the options. I mean, he could immediately, on his order, seize every single one of these machines around the country, on his order.
He could also order — he could order the — the — within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities, and he could place them in those states and basically re-run an election in each of those states.
I mean, it's not unprecedented. I mean these people out there talking about martial law, it's like it's something that we've never done. We've done — martial law has been instituted 64 — 64 times, Greg.
Yes, martial law has been instituted before. For two separate wars on Mormons, to prevent the Freedom Riders from coming to Alabama to challenge segregation laws, which were at that point federally illegal, to attack union workers in several mining wars, and, more reasonably, in the cases of the Great Chicago Fire and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (both of which I have been led to believe can be blamed on Mame).
It has not, however, been used to keep a guy who lost an election in office. That would be unprecedented. It would also be unprecedented for him to seize the voting machines — not that it would matter if he did because no one stole the election from him — and it would also be unprecedented for him to force another election in all of the swing states that voted against him. These things would definitely be new!
That means that as much as he might like it, the majority of Americans who voted against Donald Trump are not just gonna lie back and think of England while he tries to deploy the military in order to stay in office forever. It's probably not going to go over too well.
Also hoping for some sweet, sweet martial law action is Steve Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, who went so far on Monday as to say that if Trump doesn't stay in office, it will be his fault that there will be a bloody civil war — in which, I assume, these "patriots" will murder all of us. For America.
Steve Rhodes, via RightWingWatch:
Through well-orchestrated mass vote fraud, the Communist Chinese and their domestic enemy allies are about to install their illegitimate puppet, Joe Biden, and his equally illegitimate puppet running mate, Kamala Harris, into the White House, with their treasonous fingers on the nuclear launch codes.
You must act NOW as a wartime President, pursuant to your oath to defend the Constitution, which is very similar to the oath all of us veterans swore. We are already in a fight. It's better to wage it with you as Commander-in-Chief than to have you comply with a fraudulent election, leave office, and leave the White House in the hands of illegitimate usurpers and Chinese puppets. Please don't do it. Do NOT concede, and do NOT wait until January 20, 2021. Strike now.
If you fail to act while you are still in office, we the people will have to fight a bloody civil war and revolution against these two illegitimate Communist China puppets, and their illegitimate regime, with all of the powers of the deep state behind them, with nominal command of all the might of our armed forces (though we fully expect many units or entire branches to refuse their orders and to fight against them) and with their foreign allies also joining in to assist in the suppression of American patriots.
Well, to be fair, we deserve it! After all, Biden's campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon didcall Republicans "fuckers." That is like ... basically the Pearl Harbor of hurting their feelings — Pearl Harbor being another instance in which martial law was declared. Coincidence? I think not. They have practically no choice but to start a war against us.
Rhodes is, of course, not happy about this — in November, at a rally, he lamented that "Us old vets and younger ones are going to end up having to kill these young kids ... And they're going to die believing they were fighting Nazis." — but he's gotta do what he's gotta do. Which is, I suppose, murdering us all. For freedom. And Donald Trump.
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Georgia's Olivia Pearson Arrested For Helping Black People Vote. Again.
Oh, sorry, this time it's 'trespassing.' At the elections office.
You might recall the insane story of how Olivia Pearson, a civil rights activist and the first Black member of the Douglas, Georgia, city commission, got arrested and charged with voting fraud in 2012 for showing a first-time voter how to use a voting machine — Pearson didn't touch the machine or tell the voter who to vote for, but she was prosecuted anyway because Georgia only allows helping people with voting if the helper certifies that the voter is illiterate, not just unfamiliar with the voting machine technology. Pearson was also charged for "falsely swearing" that the person she'd helped was illiterate or disabled, although she said poll workers had asked her to help the voter and given her the form to sign afterward.
If you get the sense that there's a bit of bad blood between Pearson and local white officials in Douglas and Coffee County, you would get a nice pat on the head for being observant. She had also been investigated for such suspect activities as driving people to the polls, registering people to vote, and urging them to vote at election time. Such a troublemaker, in the John Lewis "good trouble" mold. And you know how many times he got arrested.
Pearson's first trial, in 2017, resulted in a hung jury; when she was finally able to get the venue moved to another county for her second trial in 2018, the jury acquitted her after just 20 minutes of deliberation, and everyone except the people she made uncomfortable in Douglas cheered. Oh, and don't forget, the prosecutor who went after Pearson over the six years of that case, District Attorney George Barnhill Sr., is the same worthless schmuck who initially decided the two white men who killed Ahmaud Arbery didn't need to be arrested, because "self defense." It's a small racist world, isn't it?
Now that Georgia has gone blue in the 2020 presidential election, thanks to the work of lots of Black women activists who followed Pearson, Slate reporter Joel Anderson, who had covered her trials, wanted to check in and see what she thought. She texted him back, telling him, "SURE I would LOVE to talk about it. [...] AND MY NEW ARREST AT THE POLLS."
Freaking Georgia.
Turns out that during early voting, on October 27, Pearson was doing her usual election season thing: driving people to the polls and generally pestering them to vote, because she takes democracy seriously. We'll hand the narrative over to Anderson here:
That morning, Pearson took a former student to the polls and caught the attention of an old foe: Misty Martin, the elections supervisor for Coffee County.
Pearson told me she had signed the form that allowed her to assist her former student "because I know she is illiterate and can't read." But, according to Pearson, Martin rushed in anyway to shoo Pearson away.
"She began hollering and screaming at me, saying, 'These are my buttons, my machines, don't touch them,' " Pearson said. "I kept asking her questions and she hollered, 'Call 911.' "
Pearson and the former student left, but when Pearson came back later with another friend she was shuttling to the polls, she was met by three police cars and handed a criminal trespass warning by one of the cops, because that's how they do things if you upset the elections supervisor who suspects you may have touched, or come near, buttons and/or machines.
"What is the reason I have to leave?" Pearson told me she asked the officer. Martin came outside and the two women went back and forth again before the officers arrested Pearson and placed her in handcuffs.
Someone's buttons were definitely pressed, sounds like. Pearson was booked into the county jail on a misdemeanor charge of criminal trespass and released after a few hours; she believes her arrest was intended to scare Black voters from going to the polls. She has a court date scheduled for December 21, but continued taking people to the polls — but parking across the street.
The local news site, Douglas Now, offers a different version of the events in the Coffee County elections office, although it doesn't seem to make a hell of a lot of sense:
According to witnesses, Commissioner Pearson was in the office assisting a voter. After completing the voting process, Commissioner Pearson allegedly began pushing buttons on a machine. Election officials asked her to stop but, said witnesses, she refused. The incident became heated and Commissioner Pearson was asked to leave. She eventually left the premises after officials called 911.
Why would she be "pushing buttons on a machine" and refusing to stop? No explanation at all; you're left to assume Pearson is just kind of an irrational jerk that way. We're sure we're reading more into the terse description than is intended. Was it a big red button? On the machine that goes ping?
We also like the part where Misty Martin and her contentious history with Pearson vanishes right out of that version. Martin had testified against Pearson in her earlier trials, and in 2016 dismissed the very idea of voter suppression as "a joke."
The Douglas Now story also notes that the police incident report said Pearson "is being banned for disruptive behavior. She may only come to a polling place in order to vote and she has already cast her ballot for this year's election." Her ban from polling places lasted for the "remainder of the 2020 election cycle," so that means she'll be limited to dropping people off in the parking lot across the street for the January 5 runoff elections for the US Senate.
For all that, Pearson told Anderson she's already working on ideas to keep voters engaged for those elections, which will decide control of the Senate.
"I was just thinking today," Pearson told me, "You've got to push, push, push on trying to get the voters back."
Well there she goes with the pushing again. Seems like she just can't help stirring things up. God bless her for it.
[Slate / Buzzfeed News / Douglas Now / Image: Video screenshot, WXIA-TV]
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This Week's Sunday Show Rundown Is About WE WON!
Also some Sunday show idiots, as usual.
We won.
It was a long four hundred years coming since 2016, but we won!
In spite of or because of a still raging pandemic, the 2020 presidential election had the highest turnout rate (66.9 percent) in 120 years (since 1900 when the turnout was 73.7 percent), by preliminary estimates. Both Republicans and Democrats mobilized as many voters as they've ever done before in over a century.
But we won.
After President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris made history and gave their amazing victory speeches Saturday night, you could see on the Sunday shows that Republicans were already rewriting the narrative to seem like our victory is hollow.
Take Willard "Mittens" Romney. Making multiple appearances on CNN, ABC, NBC and Fox News (I didn't check Telemundo), the uncle of Ronna McDaniel tried to sound like a reasonable Republican. Here is a Romney quote from CNN's "State Of The Union" with Jake Tapper, responding to whether he thought it was good for the country that Biden was elected:
ROMNEY : Well, I think half the country thinks it's a great idea. I think the other half thinks it's not such a great idea But the reality is, given the fact that the statisticians have come to a conclusion at this stage, I think we get behind the new president. Unless, for some reason, that's overturned, we get behind the new president, wish him the very best. And I send our congratulations. And we will keep this president, just like the last president, in our prayers.
But it took almost zero time for Mittens to show his lack conviction when asked if he voted for Biden or Trump. (He famously wrote in his wife Ann rather than vote for Hillary to prevent Trump in 2016)
TAPPER: You said you didn't vote for President Trump, or you said you weren't going to vote for him. Did you vote for Joe Biden?
ROMNEY: I'm not going to talk about my vote. That's in the rearview mirror. I'm going to talk now about how I can work with the new president. I know he's on the other side of the aisle, but I want to make sure that we conservatives keep on fighting to make sure that we don't have a Green New Deal, we don't get rid of gas and coal and oil, that we don't have a Medicare-for-all plan put in place, that we don't raise taxes on American enterprise. That would kill the economy. So, look, I congratulate him, but I'm not going to put aside conservative principles. We're going to fight for the things that we believe in.
Ah, yes! Those good old "conservative principles," like continuing to kill the planet with fossil fuels, poisoning water with fracking, keeping those sweet ass tax cuts for corporations (they "are people, my friend" after all) and making sure America remains the only industrialized country not to provide healthcare as a basic human right.
Mittens added some extra spin to make losing the presidency, reducing the GOP's power in the Senate and not winning the House into somehow a Republican win, on "Meet The Press":
ROMNEY: Well, I learned that Republicans picked up seats in Congress, held onto the Senate, picked up statehouses across the country, but we lost the presidency. And so it's a bit of a mixed message. I think people are saying that conservative principles still account for the majority of public opinion in our country.
That's not how it works, Mittens. Technically, Democrats in the Senate lost one seat (Doug Jones, Alabama), won two (Mark Kelly in Arizona, John Hickenlooper in Colorado) and send both Georgia Republican Senate seats (Purdue vs. Ossoff and Loeffler vs. Warnock) into a runoff in new blue state Georgia. If we win those, Republicans lose the Senate completely. That is a pretty big repudiation when combined with all these progressive wins all over the country.
I'd call Mittens a
flip-flopper or spineless coward or a blatant opportunist for his own self-interest, but that would be petty. Because according to some, when Trump wins, liberals are told we must understand Trump supporters, and when Trump loses, liberals are told we must understand Trump supporters. Right?
For evidence of why we not only have to accept this win, but fight to keep it and maintain our focus we go to South Carolina GOP senator Lindsey Graham. Appearing on Fox News "Sunday Morning Futures" one week after begging teary-eyed for donations, Graham said the quiet part out loud while also disputing Romney's "conservatism is on the rise" rhetoric, by admitting cheating IS the game plan now:
“If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican preside… https://t.co/gqz5j17CwQ— Matt Wilstein (@Matt Wilstein) 1604855251.0
Yes, he really said that.
But what should be a wake up call for all Democrats is Graham saying exactly what will happen if we fight each other rather that work together to win those two Senate seats in Georgia:
GRAHAM: The bottom line is House Republicans have increased their majority. They can slow down the 'radical agenda' coming out of the House. But Senate Republicans can kill it and stop it! If we pick up these two Republican seats in Georgia, we have the ability to stop the most radical agenda in the history of the United States. Kevin McCarthy can slow it down. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and others can stop it. Only if we win Georgia. We have to win these two seats in Georgia! I'm confident that we will. To the people of Georgia: The future of America is in your hands.
This is what Republicans were doing while we all celebrated the fall of the failed empire like "Return Of The Jedi" this weekend.
Yub nub, y'all... Here & all over the planet, YUB NUB*!!! 🇺🇸🌎🎆🗺️🧨🌐👏🌍🎇🌏😍🏳️🌈🥰🏳️⚧️👍 (*#Hooray_Freedom) https://t.co/igMe1c6qYI— Mark Hamill (@Mark Hamill) 1604802355.0
It's time to get back to work and clinch this thing on January 5 if we want to see real progress from electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
We won. Let's continue winning!
Have a week.
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Let’s Get Stacey Abrams Her Nobel Prize, Please.
She delivered some good trouble for Georgia.
I was up late last night, watching the updated numbers come in from Clayton County, Georgia, a majority Black town 30 minutes south of Atlanta. It is the heart of the late John Lewis's former congressional district, one soon-to-be former President Donald Trump once claimed was “crime-infested" and “falling apart," so it was fitting that this county was the one that put Joe Biden over the top in Georgia (barring sad Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's desperately awaited military ballots).
Yes, Georgia. No Democratic presidential candidate has won the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. I was a college freshman during that election. My friend Zach ran around the Tate Student Center at the University of Georgia, cheering and dancing, once Clinton was declared president-elect. We were excited for change, but we didn't fear that democracy was at stake. We also didn't think we'd have to fumigate the White House once George H.W. Bush left.
It's a different, much darker time now, and not just because I've grown old and wear my trousers rolled. But I want us to reclaim our joy today and try not to think too much about President Klan Robe. Today is for the heroes.
Yes, sir. Clayton County, Georgia! https://t.co/m2Fr1rnNRV— Maya Harris (@Maya Harris) 1604655141.0
Stacey Abrams narrowly “lost" the 2018 Georgia governor's race, one where her opponent was the secretary of state and literally in charge of who was able to vote. Brian Kemp's voter suppression tactics were blatant and repulsive, but Abrams still came within 55,000 votes of defeating him.
She accepted the tainted election results, but she didn't concede the battle. She launched the nonprofit Fair Fight, which according to Newsweek went on to register an estimated 800,000 new voters in the next two years.
[Fair Fight] also raised around $32 million by October 2020 to help increase registration. Abrams previously founded the The New Georgia Project in 2013, which focused on registering minority voters in the state.
Discussing these new voters with NPR on November 2, Abrams said: "Of those numbers, what we are excited about is that 45 percent of those new voters are under the age of 30. Forty-nine percent are people of color. And all 800,000 came on the rolls after November '18."
The early voting numbers in Georgia were through the roof and had almost matched the 2016 turnout before Election Day. It was predicted at least six million Georgians would vote in 2020. Black voters across the state, joined by more than a few Julia Sugarbakers in the Atlanta suburbs, came out in force to dump Trump.
This isn't “fraud." These are all legal ballots cast legally by American voters in a free and fair election. Republican officials have done everything they can to disenfranchise Black voters, but this election in particular has shown us our strength, the power we possess. Georgia was always more than Brian Kemp, Kelly Loeffler, and David Perdue. It's the home of Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and Stacey Abrams, who broke through the red wall like the Doctor in my favorite episode of television.
Even if Biden's lead doesn't hold or survive a recount, this was a remarkable achievement that gave us a shot at prying the Senate from Mitch McConnell's cold, dead hands. Perdue fell below 50 percent and will face Jon Ossoff in a January runoff. Loeffler, who ran an overtly anti-Black campaign, will go head-to-head against Rev. Raphael Warnock. Flipping those seats feels like less of a longshot now.
Black voters also helped return the Rust Belt to the Democratic column. We turned out in record numbers in Detroit,Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. Some of the people sitting in lawn chairs in lines that wrapped around the block had never voted before, even for Barack Obama. That's how much was at stake this year.
Gerry Gaines was 62 years old when she cast her first-ever ballot — on Tuesday in West Chester for Joe Biden.
"After the [2016] election, I felt bad," Gaines. "I said, 'That's it. I'm voting.'"
Philadelphia Councilwoman Cherelle Parker, who is the leader of Northwest Philadelphia's 50th Ward, said proudly, "People came on a mission, they came to get a job done."
Philadelphia is known as the birthplace of freedom, but like most majority-Black cities, Trump considers it hostile territory. During his first deranged debate performance, he claimed that “bad things happen in Philadelphia." He apparently meant voting. This is why he declared victory Tuesday night before votes from the state's largest city were fully counted.
If only white people voted, Trump would've comfortably won reelection. But Black people in this country vote and we will continue to vote. Republicans who oppose true democracy won't stop their dirty tricks, but heroes like Stacey Abrams will make sure every Gerry Gaines has their voice heard. Today, we are speaking loudly and uniformly, and it's beautiful to see.
[Atlanta Journal-Constitution / Newsweek]
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