June 4, 2024

Pardoned convicted felon Michael Flynn ranted at the Christian nationalist Reawaken America forum that to fix America we need to have only one religion: his version of Christianity.

CNN's Jim Acosta and Carl Bernstein were horrified by his words and couldn't believe he was Trump's first national security advisor.

JIM ACOSTA, CNN: Former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who is also facing a January 6th subpoena. It was alleged at one point that he was talking about martial law, of all things, with Donald Trump to try to overturn this election. But these are some other comments that Flynn was making about religion over the weekend.

Let's take a look and talk about it.

MICHAEL FLYNN: We are going to have one nation under God, which we must. We have to have one religion, one nation under God, and one religion under God.
[end clip]

ACOSTA: Carl, and to think this is Donald Trump's first National Security Advisor, it's just shameful.

CARL BERNSTEIN: It's not a question of shameful. It's a question of let's look at the kind of people who came into Donald Trump's orbit and became the most influential around him.

Let's look at Rudy Giuliani. Let's look at Mike Flynn. Let's look at these people who are saying out loud things that have never been said by an aide or close associates of the President of the United States.

It's so stupefying to think that we had a president of the United States that would entertain these knaves, fools, and dangerous authoritarian figures.

That's what we need, to look at the big picture. Donald Trump looked for people to facilitate his authoritarian impulse, both as the president and as the unelected next president, to use a coup to stay in office. That's what he did.

That's what the instruments are, these people, whether it's Flynn, whether it's Giuliani, whether it's Ellis, whether it's all of these lawyers that he gathered around him.

He engaged in a conspiracy in which he said to these people, find me a way to stay in office. I will do anything to stay in office. We now need to find all of these blueprints. We're starting to get them.
It should be a surprise to no one that Michael Flynn is saying the kind of things that he is saying.

But what's mostly significant here is that much of the Republican Party, both the officials in the Republican Party and voters, the 48, 50% of the voters who believe in Donald Trump and Trumpism, many of them, something like 35% in exit polls, have said that they favor Trump and Trumpism because Christianity is being taken away from them.

So Michael Flynn is not that far away from huge numbers of people in this country.

Flynn is a dangerous religious right crackpot of the worst kind. He uses his military background to normalize his calls for martial law and to turn this nation into a theocracy.

Evangelicals make up most of the MAGA cult, but there are many more people that don't adhere to that kind of crazy Iin this country.

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