Over at least the past month, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman and gubernatorial candidate Matt Flynn has made repeated references on his radio show to violence against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and state legislative leaders, even going so far as to say "they've got to be taken out."
"If [Donald] Trump gets [re-elected in 2024], he said he'll pull us out of NATO. What, there's nothing you can do about it because Clarence the clown got up on the wrong side of the bed or is nursing a grudge or who knows what he's doing? They've got to be taken out. They've got to be taken out. You cannot have a democracy when fascism creeps in on little cats' feet," Flynn said October 25th on "Matt Flynn Direct," which is broadcast by Civic Media on seven radio stations across Wisconsin.
Just moments earlier, Flynn made it clear that he was not referring to removing Thomas from the bench through impeachment and conviction in the Senate (the only legal way to remove a Supreme Court Justice from a lifetime appointment against his or her will) because Republicans in the United States Senate would never vote to convict.
"You can impeach [Thomas]," Flynn asserted, "but that takes 67 votes to convict in the Senate. The Republican caucus in the Senate is corrupt. There may be one or two honest ones, I couldn't identify them. They will stab this country in the back to simply stay in office. You can start another civil war, which I don't recommend, but what are you going to do when you can no longer vote for President? What are you going to do when they gerrymander themselves every ten years and keep this up?"
Two weeks earlier, on his October 11th show, Flynn asked a similar rhetorical question about Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and concluded that they might need to be dealt with in the same manner as French King Louis XVI and Paris Mayor Jean Sylvain Bailly, who were both executed during the French Revolution, and English King Charles I, who was executed during the English Civil War.
"What are you going to do here with Vos? LeMahieu?" Flynn asked his audience. "What are you going to do with every Republican hack you see stumbling in a wide, short tie around a spanferkel grinning and groping, grip and grin, grinning and gripping? What are you going to do? What did people in France do with the mayor of Paris and their king? I know what they did. What did people in merry old England do with their king in 1649? I know what they did, but we don't want that again."
Flynn then seemed to call for an armed insurrection against the Supreme Court similar to the American Revolution.
"What did George Washington do when British judges and kings told him what to do? I know what he did, but I don't want to have to do that again," Flynn said, again making reference to Carl Sandburg's poem "Fog." "Fascism creeps in on little cats' feet. This doesn't even depend on this election. These people are illegitimate. Alito is illegitimate. Gorsuch is a big one on this. He's illegitimate."
Five days before that, on his October 6th show, Flynn expressed his disgust with the Supreme Court for refusing to force Justice Thomas to recuse himself from election-related cases.
"The Supreme Court says they can't squeeze a guy off a case; that's baloney," Flynn explained. "If all eight of the others got together and said, 'Clown, get off this case,' he'd be off the case, believe me. They'd have the bailiff not let him into the courtroom. But they're all so intent on defending their own prerogatives, so intent on their status and their vanity and their strutting that they're going to do it right up to 1792 in France, when the mayor of Paris was sitting in his office and a bunch of guys came in and dragged him out. Same with the king, Louis. That was it."
Civic Media has not yet responded to a request for comment about Flynn's statements or if it plans to discipline him in any way. Flynn, 75, is also a litigation attorney with Quarles and Bray, a prominent Milwaukee law firm. In 2018, he ran for the Democratic nomination for Governor but finished sixth in the primary. He also ran unsuccessfully for Senate and the House of Representatives several times, including a loss to Republican James Sensenbrenner in the 1978 midterm election. Flynn also served as chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin from 1981 to 1985.