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“The Army chief of staff was forced to issue a statement Friday stating the military has ‘no role’ in determining U.S. elections after Mike Flynn … demanded martial law” and “using military ‘capabilities’ to oversee a rerun of the election in states Trump lost,” the U.K.-based tabloid Daily Mail reported on December 18, 2020. Read story here.

Now that Trump has lost his legal challenges, and Biden’s electoral college victory closes off that avenue, Flynn in interviews and speeches is calling for using “martial law” to overturn the election.

That sounds an awful lot like armed insurrection, and it’s hard to see how that’s not treason. God help us, this comes from someone who used to be a four-star Army general (more about that below).

Nothing in U.S. law allows election reruns because the loser and his supporters are unhappy with the results. But if such authority existed, which let me repeat it doesn’t — there are no mulligans in elections — you’d have to hold a new election in all 50 states, not just the states Trump lost, because otherwise you would be selecting a president using returns from two separate elections.

Throwing out an election because of irregularities isn’t unprecedented. The putative winner of North Carolina’s 9th congressional district election in 2018 was never seated because the state elections board, acting within its statutory authority, declined to certify the results and ordered a new election based on strong evidence that Republican campaign operatives swung the election through criminal acts. They were later charged with those crimes.

Trump, a notorious and prolific liar, claims he won reelection by “a landslide” but it was stolen from him by “massive voting fraud.” There’s no evidence it was. In several key states, including Georgia and Wisconsin, the results were verified by recounts requested by the Trump campaign. There’s a legal process for challenging election results, similar to that used in North Carolina, and Trump availed himself of it but couldn’t prove his case, because there was no case to prove. Dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump’s campaign and supporters were dismissed for lack of evidence, lack of standing, or on other legal grounds. All lacked merit, because fraud didn’t occur. Rather, he seemed to expect the judges he appointed to the Supreme Court to disregard law and evidence, and award him the election out of personal loyalty to him.

I think this springs from his experience as owner of a family business, where the boss’s word is law and employees must unquestioningly do his bidding if they wish to stay employed. He has no other frame of reference, and public governance is alien to him. He doesn’t understand how it’s supposed to work. But that doesn’t excuse him.

I believe an obsession with “voting fraud” in a sense does dwell in the minds of Trump and his followers. Quite simply, they don’t like black people voting. The Republican Party in general has racist tendencies; Trump, specifically, and some of his followers, are racists; and, as I explained here, a good many Republicans think black people voting is “fraud” and consider their votes “fraudulent.” Republican vote suppression efforts especially target black voters, and in this election, the GOP made strenuous efforts to hinder black turnout and then have blacks’ votes thrown out. The recounts they commissioned targeted counties with large black populations. There’s a very strong whiff of racism in all this.

Trump, the racist, and the racists in his following are on a mission to push back against a rising tide of demographic change. When they talk about “saving America,” they mean saving white domination of America’s politics and culture despite changing demographics that will soon render whites a demographic minority in many states.

But let’s get back to the topic of this post, which is Michael Flynn’s disloyalty to America bordering on treason. The first question to ask is how did he get to be an Army general? Not through West Point, the usual route to the top ranks; he was commissioned under an ROTC program. Moreover, his background didn’t indicate he was officer material; he was already a criminal long before he entered Army service. According to Wikipedia (here),

“Flynn served time in juvenile detention for what he has described as ‘serious and unlawful activity’ in his youth, of which the records of were expunged after he served a year of supervised probation. Flynn attended the University of Rhode Island where he initially struggled academically, earning a 1.2 GPA during his freshman year, however he … ultimately decided not to dropout.”

In other words, he was a juvenile delinquent and a flunking student. But he apparently isn’t as stupid as this makes him look, and apparently took to Army life in a big way, where by applying himself he rose through the officer ranks doing military intel work. Note that military intelligence isn’t like what the CIA does; it involves things like figuring out where the enemy forces are, in what strength, what weapons they have, their resupply situation, and so on; i.e., tactical information used to fight battles, not the information that guides strategic or political decisions.

But even in the military, Flynn didn’t completely get with the program or get totally squared away; he was something of a loose cannon. Again citing Wikipedia (link above), after he ascended to the top ranks and was given high-level responsibilities, “Colleagues were concerned with Flynn’s chaotic management style and … his superiors viewed him as insubordinate.” There also were concerns he’d been compromised by Russian intelligence, due to his involvement with a Russian woman; and he leaked classified information to at least one foreign government. He had a tendency to question policy decisions made above his pay grade, and in addition, he had a reputation for dishonesty; from the Wikipedia article above: “According to The New York Times, Flynn exhibited a loose relationship with the truth, leading his subordinates to refer to Flynn’s repeated dubious assertions as ‘Flynn facts’.”

Given these shortcomings, it’s surprising he stayed in the service as long as he did, and received promotions. The Army must have laxer standards than the Navy, where officers are routinely relieved for “loss of confidence” for such things as committing adultery or minor lying in reports. But at any rate, Flynn’s antics must have reached a breaking point, because he was forced into early retirement.

After a couple years of civilian “consulting” work for foreign governments, in which he was effectively a foreign agent, Trump picked him for one of the most sensitive White House jobs: National security adviser, a post he held for exactly 24 days before being fired for lying about his contacts with Russia to the vice president (he also was deemed a security risk, i.e., seen as vulnerable to being blackmailed by the Russians). By then he was already being investigated by the FBI for his Russia shenanigans.

You know the rest. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, tried to change his plea, Trump’s attorney general a/k/a personal lawyer ordered the Justice Department to drop the charges, the judge wouldn’t go along, and Trump pardoned Flynn. If you said as a reward for his loyalty, I would disagree, because Trump doesn’t reward loyalty, he only looks out for his selfish interests. There was something in it for him, most likely Flynn keeping his mouth shut about Trump’s various doings.

Now Flynn is advocating a military overthrow of the duly-elected U.S. government. The Pentagon’s reaction to that is astonishingly mild; all they said was, “There is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election.” This is correct on all levels — constitutionally, legally, operationally — in that “civilian control of the military is a key tenet of the U.S. Constitution, and a distinguishing characteristic of democracies compared to military dictatorships,” but it’s not nearly emphatic enough to discourage Flynn from propagating his sedition or keep restless Trump supporters from taking it seriously. (To see how delusional some of these people are, watch the video below.)

Labeling this agitation by Trump, Flynn, and outlets like Fox and Newsmax which give them a soapbox as disloyal and unpatriotic is being too kind to them. They want to take away your freedom and force you to live under dictatorship. In that respect, there’s no daylight between them and, say, Sandanistas or Maoists.

Maybe Trump also has an ulterior motive: Grifting his supporters. He’s already parlayed his b.s. fraud claims into a $200 million slush fund he could use as seed money for another run in 2024, which he’s talking about. But Flynn has no such incentive, and appears to be a True Believer, someone who really does want military intervention to prevent President-Elect Biden from taking office. In that scenario, presumably soldiers would bar black people from voting, to preclude the same outcome. Either that, or Flynn hasn’t thought his scheme through, and is knee-jerking; because otherwise, why wouldn’t Biden win again? And what, then, would be the point of the whole exercise? Is this just his 1.2 GPA intellect manifesting itself again?

Whatever the case, Flynn is a criminal. The pardon doesn’t change that. Here is a gangster-like figure who somehow won general’s stars. How did that happen? The Navy rightly weeds out officers with character deficiencies. Why doesn’t the Army do that with the same rigor? In the wake of its Flynn fiasco, it needs some self-examination to determine what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. Hopefully the new Secretary of Defense will recognize the problem and take the needed actions.

I predict there will be no insurrection. Without military backing, which never was going to happen, Flynn’s coup is nothing but a wet dream. There is no army of MAGA diehards ready and willing to fight a civil war. However eagerly they listen to this crap, they will do nothing. Like that truck driver, they have families and jobs, many have children, and they will go about their lives as they always do.

Update (12/19/20): Flynn reportedly was in the White House on Friday, December 18, 2020, peddling his coup ideas to Trump (i.e., using martial law to overturn the election) while the president’s aides struggled to prevent him from entertaining something so stupid, dangerous, and illegal. Read story here.

Photo above: Turncoat Russian agent? Power-hungry egoist? Who knows what his unpatriotic motives are.

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