Flynn's coup talk is a warning about the MAGA violence ahead

Although Flynn was promptly pushed out of his position as national security advisor, that happened at the very beginning of the Trump administration, when the new president was still getting his hands around the levers of power. It’s scary to contemplate how Trump might have reacted later in his term. What is more disturbing is imagining what America might have looked like if Trump had a few terms to really extirpate “the deep state” and put more Flynns in high places. The Flynn flap also makes me wonder how prevalent the sort of conspiracy thinking embraced by him is. Trump is reportedly telling people he will be reinstated by August, echoing comments recently made by “Kraken” attorney Sidney Powell. A recent poll shows that 15% of Americans (not Republicans, Americans!) believe that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.” The same number believe that “(b)ecause things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” The question facing patriots now is how do we preserve this precious democracy when a good chunk of Americans are actively rooting for a democratic election to be forcefully overthrown, and that chunk is over-represented at the upper-echelon of one of the two major political parties whose “leaders” are too weak or too addled to stand up to this madness?