Republicans aren’t ‘looking forward.’ They’re stepping into a Jim Crow past.

Also Sunday, and also in Texas, former president Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, told a gathering of QAnon followers that a military coup “should” happen in the United States. (Former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell earlier told the assembly that Trump could be “reinstated.”) Taking the stage at the same conference were Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and state Republican Party Chairman Allen West, a former congressman. Gohmert, who posed with a self-proclaimed participant in the insurrection, told the QAnon faithful that the Capitol attack wasn’t so bad (he drew laughs for mockingly calling Jan. 6 “a day that will live in infamy”) and that “it wasn’t just right-wing extremists in there.”