Array
In the wake of an FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, some far-right figures have been spreading violent rhetoric online — including calls for war.
The Republican party has long portrayed itself as the defender of “law and order,” but the aftermath of the raid has seen GOP lawmakers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene call for defunding the FBI.
Greene has also made references to “civil war” on social media as her Republican colleagues compare the FBI to the Gestapo and depict the raid as the type of thing that only happens in “third world” countries.
Meanwhile, pro-Trump internet channels have seen a spike in talk of civil war since the raid.
The FBI raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home came in a historically divisive period for the US, one in which millions of voters continue to believe the false notion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.
Such erroneous claims were at the heart of what catalyzed the deadly January 6 riot at the US Capitol last year, and historians and experts on democracy warn that these lies continue to foster the potential for further violence. They also say that if the US did see civil war, it wouldn’t look like the first one.
Fiona Hill, who served as the leading Russia expert on the National Security Council during the Trump administration, said in a conversation with Insider last month that the distrust in the electoral process and government institutions fomented by Trump and his GOP allies has created a “recipe for communal violence.” Hill warned the US could ultimately “end up in a civil conflict.”
The country is at a point in which “trust in the different communities and authorities” has eroded “to such an extent that people just start fighting with each other,” Hill said.
But she also underscored that a civil conflict in the present day would be unlikely to look like the American Civil War, an extraordinarily bloody fight between the Union and Confederacy that left an estimated 618,000 to 750,000 Americans dead.
