Warning #9: "Don't be troubled. I guess we shall get through"

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Forty-eight hours to go.

Tomorrow will be the day before America’s 60th presidential election. An hour of great reckoning has arrived. It will call for steadiness. My warning is simple. No matter what, do not panic. Stay steady. Have faith in America, and remember most people who drown can swim. What kills them is panic. Let us hope America’s unprepared media stays steady. 

Donald Trump knows something already that everybody should see coming, but most don’t.  This is certainly true of much of America’s news media, which is primed to short circuit when nine years of lying and corruption reach apogee. 

Trump intends to claim the American presidency if he loses. There will be no concession phone call, speech, note of grace, unity, or anything American that flows from Mar-a-Lago. Instead, venom and lies will flow like acidic lava from South Florida, and a carefully laid conspiracy will begin to act in coordination around the country to seize power illegitimately — against the will of the American people. Within hours of its beginning, the lie that Trump really won, though he is behind, will be fully saturated into the American conscience as CNN, for example, platforms the conspiracists to lie for their cause, and allows them to sow doubt about reality in the name of “balance.”

There are 48 hours left until the polls open, and the next phase of a grave crisis begins. What much of America’s political media and its corporate mandarins have failed to appreciate about Trump’s unique threat is that there is no back-up plan for the collapse of the US Constitution, which is precisely the aim of the fascist Trumpists. What they seek is the rise of a new order, a new way, a new paradigm. All of it, of course, organized by them, which makes sense because the true Americanism that they represent ranks higher on the social hierarchy that they have invented, placing them at the top. 

Note here the specific use of the word “them.” It’s specific. It refers to MAGA singularly, and not the conspiratorial “them” that weaves out, in and through Trump’s meanderings and madness in public settings. He seeks to villainize his opponents as dangerous “others.” 

MAGA is Trump’s nation. In fact, he believes that it is the nation, and below it is everyone else, ranked into categories of enemies and aliens. When the party becomes the nation, and the nation the party, what has been achieved is fascism. This is, of course, what is on the ballot. 

Violence is in the air as this election moves closer.  Earlier this month, Michael Flynn, the disgraced lieutenant general said on the right-wing podcast “American Truth Project” that if the winner of the election isn’t known by November 6, on the day following Election Day, there could be “violence.”

I actually think that’ll be a really bad spot, and I feel like people are going to go to those locations where there’s counting, and there could actually be violence, because people are so upset after 2020, and what is very clear, in terms of a fraudulent election in certain states, they’re just not going to put up with it anymore.

He claimed earlier that he was speaking about “hypothetical probabilities.”

Flynn is a political extremist and a religious zealot. What he has been preparing for over the last four years should have been covered as news everyday by America’s media, but wasn’t, with few exceptions. 

I want you to watch something over the next 48 hours. It is a PBS “Frontline” investigation called “Michael Flynn’s Holy War.” It is about the grave danger we are all facing that has fully arrived. The documentary was released in 2022. The hour that Flynn’s army has been training for is here. Two years ago, this is what I wrote about it:

Watch this essential PBS “Frontline” documentary and go on a journey with a real journalist. Michelle R. Smith isn’t part of the Washington, DC, clique of thin-skinned reporters looking to score book deals and TV fame. She put together a story based on irrefutable facts that connect all of the dots together. The result is an epic piece of television journalism that is as terrifying as anything I have ever seen. 

I had an epiphany while watching it that sent a chill down my spine. It is too late to stop what is coming. It could have been stopped, but it wasn’t. Now it is too late. I believe that with all my heart. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a piece of reporting that was so clarifying in that regard.

Retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, United States Army, is going to be an important figure in the great American crisis that lies ahead. He is a warrior. He is full of conviction about what he regards as a threat to freedom. He is messianic, angry and brilliant. He is aggressive, decisive and arrogant. He is reckless, defiant and untethered from reality. He is a domestic enemy of the Constitution of the United States of America who sees himself as an American patriot. The retired lieutenant general is the fulfillment of an infamous quote misattributed to Sinclair Lewis that “when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” 

Lt. General Flynn sees patterns in a unique way. He was very good at fitting pieces of puzzles together until he became unable to distinguish feeling and belief from reality. Perhaps that is the definition of insanity, or maybe it is better applied as a standard for measuring political radicalization. 

By any standard, Flynn is a political extremist and a religious extremist. This is typically a terrible and lethal mix. In fact, the singular genius of the United States design was the uncoupling of religion from the state. America is not a Christian nation. America is a constitutional republic that separates church and state. It allows all people the right to worship God or not, as they so choose. 

When Michelle R. Smith, the Rhode Island-based journalist walks towards a Sarasota, Florida, extremist compound that is bordered by a family-friendly nature preserve she is visibly jarred by the concussive pops of automatic weapons fire. It is a moment of journalistic discovery captured live on camera. It isn’t a premonition or a prediction that the viewer witnesses. It is an acknowledgment of an awful and unstoppable reality. What is coming is already here and plainly visible. This is the most devastating moment of the film. 

There are several remarkable interviews within the documentary that stand out. The special forces Army veteran Jack Murphy opines about the era of looming danger that will rise from the confluence of conspiracy theories, two lost wars and the warfighters who fought them for 20 years.

Denver Riggleman, the former army intelligence officer and former Republican member of Congress, chillingly explains the depth of the conspiracy and assault on the peaceful transition of power orchestrated by Flynn and his co-conspirators. 

A religious fanatic who was recruited and inspired to run for the United States Senate in Oklahoma by Michael Flynn makes clear the stakes. He says that an election loss in the United States harkens a thousand years of darkness. He believes in Michael Flynn, the political power of Jesus Christ, and the fact that he is fighting a civil war that has already begun. 

This is a singular documentary. It is a grave warning and a searing indictment of a corrupted political media that saved urgent warnings for book deals, and got rich trading in the information markets with arsonists who want to burn it all down. 

“Frontline” has informed the American people. The matter is in their hands. The struggle is only beginning. Michael Flynn is a figure of the future in that struggle. Michael Flynn won’t likely be remembered for anything he has already done. It is what he will do next that will be remembered in this country. He aims to tear it all down. 

Michael Flynn has a plan. He has a mission. He is deadly serious and dangerous. The country is asleep to the threat it is facing. Michael Flynn is a wolf.  

Where is Michael Flynn right now? 

Who is covering him? 

The answer is, of course, no one, but don’t worry, I expect we will hear from him soon. Let’s pray it is only more bombast. 

The most dangerous hours of modern American life will soon be on us. The notion that everyone is entitled to live in their own reality, in which their delusions are the same as real life is about to crash into an immovable object at near-warp speed. The era of pretend is about to end one way or another. A great moral test is ahead for the American people, no matter the outcome because the test comes next. 

At this hour, more than 62 million Americans have voted, and scores of them are women whose right to vote for president became part of the US Constitution only 105 years ago. Incredible though it may seem, there are still a few American women alive who were born before it was passed. Think about that. Time moves quickly. 

Elizabeth Wiling Powel could not vote. The 19th Amendment and Suffrage movements didn’t exist in a country not yet born. Powel was a politician’s wife. She was married to the mayor of Philadelphia and a fixture of Philadelphia society.  She was close to General Washington and his wife Martha. It was Powel who asked Ben Franklin the question that elicited the famous and oft-quoted answer from our most important founding elder, ‘’A Republic if you can keep it.’

Powel fired back, “And why not keep it?”  Dr. Franklin responded, “Because the people on tasting the dish, are always disposed to eat more of it than does them good.” Franklin was the oldest of the Founding Fathers and his genius was epic. It extended from the sciences to common sensical observations about human beings. “The first man put at the helm will be a good one.  Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.” 

It could be argued that the entire system of American government was designed to hobble the ambitions of the type of men that Franklin feared, and knew loomed both in the moment and over the horizon. 

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president. Eighty-five years after the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, the Union was breaking up over the evil of slavery. The Southern states were in open rebellion. The American Civil War had begun. Lincoln called the Congress into session on July 4, 1861, and sent a powerful message. He began his message with a salutation to his fellow “Citizens” as there is no greater or superior title or peerage in the American Republic.

Lincoln’s message began one of the most extraordinary special sessions of the United States Congress in history. Vice President Hannibal Hamlin called the Chamber to order. The Southerners were absent, and their desks were startlingly vacant for the commencement of momentous affairs. Then, like now, it was the politicians and faithless elites who were the threat and the cause of the crisis.  Then, like now, there were some who looked at the empty desks and saw crisis in the absence – not the cause of the absence.

Lincoln saw clearly then what matters much now – the fecklessness, cowardice and betrayal of so many elected and appointed officials.

The failure of fidelity and loyalty towards the nation comes from the pampered and privileged who have received the most and given the least.  Here is an excerpt from his message to the 37th Congress:

Great honor is due to those officers who remained true despite the example of their treacherous associates; but the greatest honor and most important fact of all is the unanimous firmness of the common soldiers and common sailors. To the last man, so far as known, they have successfully resisted the traitorous efforts of those whose commands but an hour before they obeyed as absolute law. 

This is the patriotic instinct of plain people. They understand without an argument that the destroying the Government which was made by Washington means no good to them.

Our popular Government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled--the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains--its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. 

It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace, teaching men that what they can not take by an election neither can they take it by a war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.

When Lincoln sent this message most thought that the “rebellion” would be settled quickly. It was not. It would grow into one of the bloodiest civil wars in history, and would kill more than 600,000 in a divided nation of 34 million souls. The war would be an industrialized preview of the horror of the 20th century’s wars of complete annihilation. 

William “Tecumseh” Sherman, one of the American Army’s greatest commanders, was deeply skeptical about Lincoln in 1861. 

He thought the Union cause was hopeless because the people were soft and indifferent, and led by politicians who were equally corrupt, incompetent and selfish. He thought Lincoln was particularly inept.

After his American martyrdom, Sherman had this to say about Lincoln, “Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness than any other.” 

What Sherman understood was what made Lincoln great and good: his absence of malice and embrace of love as the means towards national reconciliation. Lincoln’s toughness was not in doubt by 1865. He had no heart for meanness. He dreamed of reconciliation. He knew though that reconciliation could not come at the price of the Union because the Union is what guarantees our liberty and freedom.

Lincoln noted the differences between the Union and the Confederacy in their respective founding documents. Lincoln noted the omissions. There was no “We the People” or “All Men are Created Equal” in the Confederate version.

Lincoln understood the inherent contradictions and hypocrisies of American freedom, as did his admirers and critics, like Federick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe. He imagined the possibilities of freedom expanding, propelled by the incandescence of the American idea and ideal that first came to life on July 4, 1776.

We are Americans. The luckiest people on Earth. Trouble has found us like it found our ancestors. 

The Confederacy of Jefferson Davis and Robert Lee was crushed, yet the ember of the malice and racism that breathed life into it has never been completely extinguished. It is the idea that matters. It must be constantly confronted. There have always been people for whom the idea of equality between all people must be resisted at all costs. 

That struggle continues today, and the work is undone. It might be wise to heed the departing words that President Lincoln left George William Curtis after an interview: “Don’t be troubled. I guess we shall get through.”

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