This encounter with a black bear and her cubs could have ended badly. Really badly.

NPR:

A 17-year-old Southern California girl got in a shoving match with a bear to protect her dogs and walked away nearly unscathed.

Hailey Morinico and her mother were gardening in their backyard in Bradbury, Calif., on Monday afternoon when a bear and her cubs began walking atop a cinder block wall at one end of the garden.

Video of the terrifying encounter shows that the appearance of the family of California black bears on the short wall set off one of Morinico’s dogs, which began barking and lunging at them. Mama bear, in turn, started swatting at the large dog and three small ones that had joined the canine vs. ursine confrontation.

The commotion caught Morinico’s attention, and without thinking, she told KTLA news, she ran over to defend the family pets.

“I run to see what they’re barking at, and it’s not a dog — it’s a bear,” she said.

“I see the bear, it’s grabbing my dog, Valentina, and I have to run over there. She’s a baby,” Morinico said. “And the first thing I think to do is push the bear. And somehow it worked.”

Morinico threw her hands up in the air and pushed the large bear off the wall. (The cubs, frightened by the loud barking, had already high-tailed it away from the scene.) Morinico then scooped up one of the smaller dogs, and she and the pets all ran in the opposite direction.Article continues after sponsor message

The teen said she is lucky to have walked away with only a sprained finger and a scraped knee.

Her advice: Do not push bears. “Don’t do what I did — you might not have the same outcome.”

A 17-year-old wasted no time fending off a huge bear, pushing it off a wall, before it could get to dogs—including her mother's service dog—in her backyard. https://t.co/5rjCTRJ8uH pic.twitter.com/6dJ14fLy2y

— ABC News (@ABC) June 1, 2021

NBC Los Angeles reports:

Human-bear encounters are rare in California, but bears often visit foothill communities and other areas that abut wilderness in search of food — especially on trash day. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has a list of tips and general guidelines to follow regarding bear encounters.

Wild animal encounters are not rare here in the N.C. mountains. A week ago, a neighbor shooed a black bear off her front porch. A few days later, she was taking a photo of a loud tom turkey in her driveway.

Speaking of turkeys:

• 

Just yesterday, we had to corral and evict a 4-ft black snake from my MIL’s basement.

A mother bear and several cubs (below) regularly pass through her property in late afternoon. There are dens on the mountainside above and below her house just half a mile uphill from the neighborhood wine store and gourmet ice cream shop. One standing between some shrubs huffed at me from 8 feet away last summer when I surprised it just around the corner from the golf course. Another gave birth to cubs under a woman’s deck just over a mile from here.

Someone in the neighborhood shot this video from his deck last October.

Neighborhood dogs barking work like bear detectors. Protocol is to look first when you step out the door after about 5 p.m. Avoid approaching cubs. And DO NOT put trash out until the morning of trash day.

The city has been here since about 1800, but as it has spread out, bears have grown way to accustomed to people.

Viral video follow-up: Hailey Morinico, the teen who pushed a bear off a ledge to save her family’s dog:

“I had to do what I had to do … The first thing that popped into my head was to push the bear off the ledge.” pic.twitter.com/NQSFWKamId

— The Recount (@therecount) June 2, 2021

The country had better hope President Joe Biden’s long-touted Scranton scrappiness shows up to override his instincts as a Washington insider. He and we will need it. One hundred scholars of democracy think “our entire democracy is now at risk.” History will judge what we do to defend it.

Biden says he will “fight like heck” to defeat Republican-led efforts to restrict voting (if not to rig elections after the fact). “Un-American,” he called them in Tulsa, Okla. on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre of a Black community by a White mob.

Biden compared what happened in Tulsa’s Greenwood community to what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 this year:

“We must address what remains the stain on the soul of America. What happened in Greenwood was an act of hate and an act of domestic terrorism, with a through-line that exists today, still,” he said. “Remember what you saw in Charlottesville four years ago, on television, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, the KKK [Ku Klux Klan], coming out of those fields at night in Virginia, their lighted torches, the veins bulging as they were screaming.”

“Well, [massacre survivor] Mother Fletcher said that when she saw the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, it broke her heart,” he continued: “A mob of violent white extremists, thugs, said it reminded her of what happened here, 100 years ago, in Greenwood. Look around at the various hate crimes against Asian Americans and Jewish Americans, hate that never goes away.”

Someone from the audience called out “that’s true”. Biden went on: “And given a little bit of oxygen by its leaders it comes out from under the rock like it was happening again, as if it never went away.”

“We can’t give hate a safe harbor. According to the intelligence community, terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today,” he said.

“Hate’s never defeated,” Biden said. “It only hides. It hides.”

It was not exactly FDR’s “I welcome their hatred” speech, but with Biden’s declaration about “the most lethal threat to the homeland today,” he certainly has earned it.

Biden told the crowd he was assigning Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the charge for passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. The two will need all the fight they can muster. As will you.

Reviewing the flood of vote-suppressing and election-rigging legislation in the pipeline in Republican-controlled state legislatures, Max Boot wrote:

This brings us to a nightmare scenario: a Republican-controlled Congress overturning the 2024 presidential election results to install Trump or a Trump mini-me in the White House. In January, 139 House Republicans and eight Senate Republicans voted not to certify electoral college results in at least one state. Since then, the most prominent GOP opponent of the “big lie,” Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), has been purged from the House leadership. Willingness to lie about election fraud has become a litmus test for Republicans, with the implicit threat of mob violence if they don’t go along. Republicans are so scared of Trump and his fanatical followers that most of them just voted against a bipartisan investigation of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Many congressional Republicans will refuse to certify a 2024 Democratic win in swing states. If Republicans control Congress, they could deny the Democrats an electoral college majority and throw the election to the House — where each state delegation, regardless of population, would cast one ballot. Given that Republicans already control a majority of state delegations, they could override the election outcome. If that happens, it would spell the end of American democracy.

Eric Boehlert smacked down the “scared of Trump” meme yesterday. Republicans are not working furiously to rig upcoming elections because they are afraid of Trump. “Republicans are doing this because they want to.” The fear they have is of losing power. Especially, fear of White people losing status in a changing America. Sharing power in a diverse culture is for losers, one supposes. What wimps.

Biden trotted out his folksy at the end of his speech Tuesday in way that, honestly, made me a little misty:

And although I have no scientific basis for what I’m about to say, but those of you who are over 50, how often did you ever see advertisements on television with black and white couples? Not a joke. I challenge you, find today when you turn on the stations, sit on one station for two hours, and I don’t how many commercials you’ll see, 8:00 to 5:00. Two to three out of five have mixed race couples in them. That’s not by accident. They’re selling soap, man. Not a joke. Remember old Pat Caddell used to say, “You want to know what’s happening in American culture? Watch advertising,” because they want to sell what they have.

It’s true. Advertisers are covering all their bases. It’s capitalism, man. Racists from sea to shining sea are grinding their teeth to nubs. It certainly has their conspiracy-spouting candidates panicked and fondling their guns.

“We have hope,” Biden said. “Let’s not give up, man. Let’s not give up.”

As spooked as I am about the fate of this republic — this knife edge is really sharp! — Biden’s observation about TV ads is in part where he gets the optimism to say, “It’s never a good bet to bet against the American people.”

I want to think so. And fight like hell.

Still, “I can’t breathe” may be the metaphor for our time.

Statement of Concern

The Threats to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards

STATEMENT

June 1, 2021

We, the undersigned, are scholars of democracy who have watched the recent deterioration of U.S. elections and liberal democracy with growing alarm. Specifically, we have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures in response to unproven and intentionally destructive allegations of a stolen election. Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.

When democracy breaks down, it typically takes many years, often decades, to reverse the downward spiral. In the process, violence and corruption typically flourish, and talent and wealth flee to more stable countries, undermining national prosperity. It is not just our venerated institutions and norms that are at risk—it is our future national standing, strength, and ability to compete globally.

Statutory changes in large key electoral battleground states are dangerously politicizing the process of electoral administration, with Republican-controlled legislatures giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations should Democrats win more votes. They are seeking to restrict access to the ballot, the most basic principle underlying the right of all adult American citizens to participate in our democracy. They are also putting in place criminal sentences and fines meant to intimidate and scare away poll workers and nonpartisan administrators. State legislatures have advanced initiatives that curtail voting methods now preferred by Democratic-leaning constituencies, such as early voting and mail voting. Republican lawmakers have openly talked about ensuring the “purity” and “quality” of the vote, echoing arguments widely used across the Jim Crow South as reasons for restricting the Black vote.

State legislators supporting these changes have cited the urgency of “electoral integrity” and the need to ensure that elections are secure and free of fraud. But by multiple expert judgments, the 2020 election was extremely secure and free of fraud. The reason that Republican voters have concerns is because many Republican officials, led by former President Donald Trump, have manufactured false claims of fraud, claims that have been repeatedly rejected by courts of law, and which Trump’s own lawyers have acknowledged were mere speculation when they testified about them before judges.

In future elections, these laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections could enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections.

Democracy rests on certain elemental institutional and normative conditions. Elections must be neutrally and fairly administered. They must be free of manipulation. Every citizen who is qualified must have an equal right to vote, unhindered by obstruction. And when they lose elections, political parties and their candidates and supporters must be willing to accept defeat and acknowledge the legitimacy of the outcome. The refusal of prominent Republicans to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, and the anti-democratic laws adopted (or approaching adoption) in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Montana and Texas—and under serious consideration in other Republican-controlled states—violate these principles. More profoundly, these actions call into question whether the United States will remain a democracy. As scholars of democracy, we condemn these actions in the strongest possible terms as a betrayal of our precious democratic heritage.

The most effective remedy for these anti-democratic laws at the state level is federal action to protect equal access of all citizens to the ballot and to guarantee free and fair elections. Just as it ultimately took federal voting rights law to put an end to state-led voter suppression laws throughout the South, so federal law must once again ensure that American citizens’ voting rights do not depend on which party or faction happens to be dominant in their state legislature, and that votes are cast and counted equally, regardless of the state or jurisdiction in which a citizen happens to live. This is widely recognized as a fundamental principle of electoral integrity in democracies around the world.

A new voting rights law (such as that proposed in the John Lewis Voting Rights Act) is essential but alone is not enough. True electoral integrity demands a comprehensive set of national standards that ensure the sanctity and independence of election administration, guarantee that all voters can freely exercise their right to vote, prevent partisan gerrymandering from giving dominant parties in the states an unfair advantage in the process of drawing congressional districts, and regulate ethics and money in politics.

It is always far better for major democracy reforms to be bipartisan, to give change the broadest possible legitimacy. However, in the current hyper-polarized political context such broad bipartisan support is sadly lacking. Elected Republican leaders have had numerous opportunities to repudiate Trump and his “Stop the Steal” crusade, which led to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Each time, they have sidestepped the truth and enabled the lie to spread.

We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary—including suspending the filibuster—in order to pass national voting and election administration standards that both guarantee the vote to all Americans equally, and prevent state legislatures from manipulating the rules in order to manufacture the result they want. Our democracy is fundamentally at stake. History will judge what we do at this moment.

As Greg Sargent astutely observed:

An acceptance that protecting democracy will never, ever, ever be bipartisan, and will happen only on a partisan basis, is fundamental to accepting the reality of the situation that Democrats face.

Click over to see the list of luminaries who signed this. This actually makes me feel better knowing that at least I’m not goin crazy by being as worried as I am.

Maybe the strangest of all the 542 days of @RealDonaldTrump’s reign of error… #TrumpPutinSummit pic.twitter.com/wZjL7MQAj8

— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) July 17, 2018

My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others; they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have confidence in both parties. … I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails.

So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. And what he did is an incredible offer. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people [Russian agents indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for election interference]. I think that’s an incredible offer.

And then he lied:

Trump said he meant to say "I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia," instead of "would" during the controversial Helsinki summit pic.twitter.com/R74brNEVR2

— POLITICO (@politico) July 17, 2018

Until January 6th, I would have said Helsinki was the low point. But when you think about it, they are related. Trump has made it clear at home and abroad that he doesn’t really like or respect the United States of America and the constitutional order under which we live. He respects Kings, Sheiks and dictators.

Paul Waldman has some bad news. He took a look at the special election in New mexico to fill Deb Haaland’s seat and it is ugly:

We may be headed for another “tough on crime” era, in which politicians both cynical and cowardly pander to voters’ worst impulses, and the result is disastrous policies that make our country demonstrably worse. It’s everything bad about our politics, cooked down to a rancid sludge of hate and fear.

If you’re old enough to remember the 1980s and 1990s, you know why the possibility of a return to that kind of politics is so disturbing. Then as now, the problem was real and profound, but the politics that surrounded it were poisonous, and we’re still living with the consequences.

Driving this development is the fact that crime has risen across the country in the last year, after a long period of steady decline. Polls show crime increasing as a concern, and Republicans fervently hope the issue can be used to generate the fear that sends voters rushing toward candidates promising the harshest possible response.

That’s what happened in the New Mexico race, which is to fill the seat of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in a district Joe Biden won last year by 23 points. With the Democratic candidate almost sure to win, Republican Mark Moores focused his campaign primarily on crime, all but claiming his opponent Melanie Stansbury wants to see your family raped and murdered.

For instance, watch this horrific TV ad from Moores alleging that Stansbury wants to empty federal prisons and “dismantle” the police, over shadowy video of a man throwing a sack over the head of a woman in a dark alley while the sounds of children’s screams echo in the background.

“Murderers, rapists, and child molesters walking free,” the ad says. “Stop the madness. Stop Melanie Stansbury. Before it’s too late.”

We’re likely to see many more ads like that one, ads that could have been transported from the 1994 election. That year, which would give Republicans huge victories at the national and state level, the “tough on crime” trend reached a fever pitch.

At the time I was working in a political consulting firm, and the plans we drew up for all of our clients had them focusing almost exclusively on crime. On one conference call, a candidate questioned the plan, arguing that she had other issues she wanted to discuss. My boss told her that in his judgment, “Every second you spend talking about anything other than crime does nothing but contribute to your defeat.”

Every campaign across the country agreed, so it was a self-fulfilling prophecy: Candidates only talked about crime, so if you didn’t talk about crime you were in trouble. Those debates were not productive, to say the least. Democrats and Republicans competed to be the “toughest” — committing to create new classes of crimes, advocating the longest sentences, proposing infinite spending on prisons. Republicans did it gleefully and Democrats did it out of fear, but both participated.

If a candidate said that perhaps we should be smart rather than tough, or that locking up as many people as possible might not be the best solution to the problem, they would quickly become the target of lurid ads like the one Moores aired in New Mexico. Those ads exacerbated the atmosphere of fear and panic, and helped spur a wave of draconian crime policies.

Though some of them have been undone — for instance, in New York the NYPD no longer subjects the city’s entire population of Black and Latino men to an unceasing campaign of harassment and abuse — many of those policies remain.

Even though our prison population has declined slightly in the last few years, the U.S. still locks people up at spectacularly higher rates than any other country. According to the most recent data, in Japan there are 38 people incarcerated for every 100,000 residents; the number for Germany is 69, and for Canada it’s 104. In the United States, that number is 639. There are over 2 million Americans behind bars.

Now who thinks that crime being a hot campaign issue in 2022 is going to lead to thoughtful policy change that produces results we can all be proud of?

Adding to the problem is that we aren’t sure exactly what has produced the recent spike in crime. Conservatives argue that police had their feelings hurt by last summer’s protests, and in response they withdrew, doing fewer patrols of high-crime areas and being less aggressive about solving crimes that had already occurred.

That certainly may be part of the explanation, but only a part. Other possible factors are the way the pandemic hampered the operation of the criminal justice system, economic distress caused by the recession, and a wave of gun buying that put more guns in circulation. Ebbs and flows in crime rates are enormously difficult to explain definitively; criminologists are still arguing about the best way to account for the historic declines we saw over the last couple of decades.

But what we can say for sure is that in an atmosphere of rising crime, the politics around the issue degrade into the worst ugliness our system can produce. That’s something we all ought to be afraid of.

I think the Democrats have evolved since 94 and there will be a less hysterical reaction to all this. But in a tight election like 2022, it could be decisive anyway. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that all this crazy activity (including a spate of violence from the streets to airplanes) is a consequence of the country coming out of a year of inactivity and pent up frustration.

When did it all start? When did democracy in the United begin its death spiral?

It’s arguable, of course, but for my money, the beginning of the end was in 1968. That’s when Republican Richard Nixon committed treason, Democrats Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey learned he had… and they decided to say nothing publicly.

The lesson was not lost on Republicans. Ever since, they have assumed — correctly — that they could get away with it. That Democrats and the press would keep their pieholes shut while the GOP relentlessly (and eventually, even openly) conspired with foreign powers to subvert American interests, systematically suppressed voting rights, and fomented civil war.

The January insurrection and now, General Flynn’s outrageous statement that a Myanmar-style military coup “should happen here” are auguries of an imminent catastrophe. It’s like watching a train crash in slow motion, inevitable and horrible. But back in ’68, when Nixon betrayed his country, there was ample opportunity to nip the Republicans’ penchant for anti-democratic behavior in the bud.

But that would have required Democrats to forcefully speak up and expose Nixon. And they didn’t.

Shocking. Be sure to read the kicker …

As many as three in four Americans overestimate their ability to spot false headlines — and the worse they are at it, the more likely they are to share fake news, researchers reported Monday.

The study of surveys involving 8,200 people, which published in in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also showed Republicans are more likely to fall for fake news than Democrats are.

The team, led by Ben Lyons, a professor of communications at the University of Utah, showed study volunteers headlines presented in the format of how news articles would look if they appeared in a Facebook feed. They were also asked to rate their ability to determine whether stories were true.

“We show that overconfident individuals are more likely to visit untrustworthy websites in behavioral data; to fail to successfully distinguish between true and false claims about current events in survey questions; and to report greater willingness to like or share false content on social media, especially when it is politically congenial,” the team wrote.

In all, these results paint a worrying picture: The individuals who are least equipped to identify false news content are also the least aware of their own limitations and, therefore, more susceptible to believing it and spreading it further,” they added.

“Finally, Republicans are more overconfident than Democrats, which is not surprising given the lower levels of media trust they report.”

I guess we have no choice but cling to hope. What else can we do?

When the Jan. 6 commission became the latest casualty of Republican obstructionism on Friday, most Democrats weren’t surprised. Joe Manchin was.

Manchin, West Virginia’s senior senator and the only Democrat in Congress from a state Donald Trump won by 40 points,has not been convinced that the GOP’s current strategy is scorched-earth partisan politics.

Ahead of Friday’s vote, as Republican opposition to the insurrection commission solidified, Manchin issued a call “imploring” his colleagues to consider passing the legislation. He said he couldn’t imagine why Sen. Mitch McConnell’s conference would block a bipartisan effort to get to the bottom of the attack on the Capitol.

“There is no excuse for any Republican to vote against this commission,” he said, “since Democrats have agreed to everything they asked for.”

That argument was a pitch-perfect distillation of how Manchin views the Senate. How it was received—with just six Republicans voting for the commission—would perhaps indicate to a more mutable senator that his view may be out of step with reality and necessitate eliminating the filibuster, the 60-vote threshold for passing bills.

But not for Manchin.

“I don’t think I’ll ever change,” Manchin told reporters on Thursday. “I’m not separating our country, OK?”

Manchin said later in the day that he thought Democrats could find “10 good people” on the GOP side to support the commission. And on Friday, after Democrats predictably did not find 10 Republicans to support the commission, Manchin sounded genuinely upset and surprised that his GOP colleagues would side with a nakedly partisan view that there shouldn’t be an independent report on the Jan. 6 attack.

“This job’s not worth it to me to sell my soul,” Manchin told reporters on Friday. “What are you gonna do, vote me out? That’s not a bad option—I get to go home.”

On nearly everything of consequence on Capitol Hill these days, Manchin finds himself right where he likes it: at the center of attention and the Senate’s political spectrum. With the chamber split 50-50, Manchin is, and will be, the deciding Democratic vote to pass the central items of President Joe Biden’s agenda. He has the power to freeze the Senate floor for hours if he has a problem with language in a bill. And he has a special ability among his colleagues to broker compromises on an array of issues.

But when it comes to tackling the most high-profile issues, Manchin might be occupying a different political reality than his colleagues. Ask Democratic senators whether Manchin’s notion of bipartisan dealmaking on the thorniest issues is possible and they’ll give some diplomatic answers. They take care to avoid criticizing Manchin, but gently suggest he is wasting his time.“None of this happens if we’re going to engage in magical thinking and believe that the institutional position of the Republican Party is not to systematically disenfranchise as many voters as they can find.”— Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI)

He seemed to care about the insurrection, which indicates he has some concerns about the assault on democracy. Does he care at all about future elections?

Take voting rights legislation, which is of existential importance to Democrats in 2021. Manchin opposes the For The People Act, Democrats’ marquee voting bill. In May, however, he and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) announced they’d push to pass another top priority for Democrats, a voting rights expansion bill named for John Lewis, on a bipartisan basis.

Republicans, egged on by former President Trump, are poised to put up near-uniform opposition to these bills. Democrats question how Manchin’s push can possibly succeed.

“None of this happens if we’re going to engage in magical thinking and believe that the institutional position of the Republican Party is not to systematically disenfranchise as many voters as they can find,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI). To think there would be 10 votes for the John Lewis bill, he said, “strikes me as about 10 miles short of realistic.”

Even GOP senators openly say there’s no compromising on it. “I wouldn’t shortchange him at all,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said of Manchin, “but some of these things are clearly ideological, and so they’re really not subject to negotiation.”

Asked by The Daily Beast last week how he’d win the votes to pass the John Lewis bill while maintaining the filibuster, Manchin didn’t discuss policy specifics. He just said he’d get it done.

“We just keep working,” Manchin said, listing a set of issues that the Senate is tackling. “I have to say, keep the faith in this damn Senate, and we’ll make it, we’ll work it out, make it bipartisan.”

Oh well …

That’s all there is:

Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced that he will veto the part of the state budget that funds the legislature, seeming retaliation for Texas Democrats’ walkout late Sunday that let them at least temporarily kill Republicans’ voting overhaul.

“No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities,” Abbott tweeted.

Democratic lawmakers slowly trickled out as the last day of the session inched towards midnight, all the remaining ones leaving around 10:30 p.m. local time, according to the Texas Tribune. They congregated at a nearby Baptist church, successfully running out the clock as their absence deprived the House of having the quorum needed to vote.

Abbott has called for the legislation to be passed in a special session.

“Whether it’s in a regular session or a special session, we will be here and we will fight,” said state Rep. Rafael Anchia (D) during a Monday press conference of Democratic state lawmakers.

Nasty, petty retribution after the Democrats refused to let them pass that odious, undemocratic power grab. Of course. He couldn’t just carry on and call the special session. He had to do this. Because he’s a member of the Trump Party and that’s how they roll.

As I was just saying….

He’s just a simple Marine, but he wanted to know. So on Sunday he asked a fellow soldier, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a QAnon believer and confessed felon pardoned by Trump. Both were at a QAnon conference Sunday in Dallas, Texas.

“I want to know why what happened in Minamar (sic) can’t happen here?” Meaning a violent military coup.

The audience whooped and hollered.

Here is the video of former national security advisor Michael Flynn saying that he thinks a coup like the coup in Myanmar should happen in the US. pic.twitter.com/7mGYjfXg18

— Mamie (@MC_Hyperbole) May 30, 2021

“No reason, I mean, it should happen here. No reason. That’s right,” Flynn told the gathering of self-declared “patriots.”

CNN adds, “A message posted to a Parler account used by Flynn on Monday claimed Flynn’s words had been twisted and that he was not calling for a coup.”

Uh-huh. Your audience heard you five by five, general.

These are not patriots. They are radical Trumpist extremists. Remember when Trump called President Barack Obama weak for not applying a similar label to Islamists? Let’s not forget that.

Coming outta the long weekend a note to my friends in the MSM. A general who served at the highest levels of intel, then nat security for Trump, who colluded w Russia + planned a rendition w Turkey, is openly talking of a coup. Don't both sides this. Cover w the gravity it merits

— Cliff Schecter (@cliffschecter) June 1, 2021