Over the weekend, the now-pardoned traitor Michael Flynn appeared at a QAnon-themed event in Dallas, Texas, where he once again seemed to support the notion of a violent pro-Trump rebellion to topple the government. This was met with approval by the Trump-supporting crowd, because of course it was; the movement of oft-delusional conspiracy theory promoters is well represented among the seditionists who staged the Jan. 6 insurrection, among those still demanding that individual state electoral totals be nullified because of unspecified Frauds, and among Americans who, with incandescent stupidity, believe that the entire election was a scam or undercover front and actually Trump is still the legitimate president, something that will be made clear on such-and-such a date when Donald drives a gilded golf cart back onto the White House grounds, arrests Joe Biden, and begins mass executions of all those who doubted him. Or something to that effect.

Yes, Michael Flynn may have been caught dead to rights in acting as influence-peddler for foreign government while moonlighting as Trump adviser—which, among Trump’s many advisers, now seems to have been the most common single occupation—but now that Trump’s freed him from his criminal past he appears to believe it is time for a good, old-fashioned coup. That’s what he told the Q crowd, anyway. A self-identified “Marine” in the audience posed the question, “I want to know why what happened in Minamar[sic] can’t happen here?”, a reference to the recent military coup in Myanmar that has been promoted in Trump-supporting circles as a playbook for reinstalling Trump as president in this country.

“No reason. I mean, it should happen here. No Reason. That’s right,” Flynn replied.

After video of these remarks exploded through the internet, the ex-national security adviser once again bizarrely attempted to claim that he specifically did not say the specific thing he was filmed saying. “There is NO reason whatsoever for any coup in America, and I do not and have not called for any action of that sort,” he bellowed to fellow Parler users on Memorial Day.

As The Washington Post's Aaron Blake points out, this has become a routine for Flynn. He says something clearly supportive of martial law, an overthrow of government, or the QAnon movement itself, it gains national attention, and he or an ally responds by claiming he never meant the thing and you’re all fake news for thinking he did. Flynn, however, is a liar through-and-through. He was ostensibly fired from his White House position in the first place for lying to federal investigators and to American Jesus Mike Pence. He’s not good at it; like Trump, he simply gaslights his audiences with toddleresque claims that whatever you saw happening didn’t. If you’re a believer you’ll go along with it, and if you’re not then he doesn’t care.

If you are someone who thinks that Flynn’s Parler-dispensed disclaimer directed at “all the fake news ‘journalists’” sounds suspiciously like something issued for (ahem) legal reasons, there’s some solid backing for that theory. Flynn lawyer Sidney Powell also claimed that media outlets who had reported Flynn’s remarks (you know, by showing the video of him saying it) had “grossly distorted” his comments.

Powell, who traveled the country after the election claiming the election results were rigged and who filed innumerable lawsuits looking to overturn election totals, all of them laughed out of virtual courtrooms by sometimes-incredulous judges, was also at the QAnon funfest this weekend. Her contribution to the discourse was to assure the circling-the-drain-on-reality crowd that Trump could simply be “reinstated,” removing Biden from office, after it is somehow proven that Trump was cheated from his rightful position as incompetent god-king. Oh, but she threw cold water on the idea that Trump’s second term would then be extended to make up for the “time lost” out of the White House. For now.

QAnon true believers might not want to get too excited about her assurances, however. It was just a week ago that Sidney Powell’s own attorneys told a court that “no reasonable person” would truly believe Powell’s public claims that Dominion voting machines had been manipulated to switch Trump votes to Biden votes were “statements of fact.” If Powell and Flynn’s continued claims suggesting the Biden administration is illegitimate and that maybe the folks in “Minimar” have some good ideas on how to fix that result in more pro-Trump violence or terrorism, they will both be quick to tell courts that no “reasonable” person would take them seriously.

Flynn in particular appears to be fully off the rails, at this point. It’s not clear that he himself knows what he believes and what he doesn’t, but he seems utterly unconcerned with the violence that he and his allies have already unleashed. Instead, those in Trump’s orbit seem intent on pushing for more. You probably won’t see Michael Flynn on the frontlines of whatever new violence comes after the Jan. 6 insurrection, but at the conferences and meet-ups that validate those violent views, he continues to poke and prod for it.