By CGTN
September 01,
2022:
Information Clearing House
-- Between the Biden
administration and Donald Trump, between
America's political left and right, tensions
have never been higher.
The recent raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence
has infuriated Republican lawmakers in the U.S.,
who have called it an "escalation in the
weaponization of federal agencies" and vowed to
launch investigations over the incident.
Meanwhile, it has prompted more extreme
reactions from Trump supporters and far-right
figures who have been spreading violent rhetoric
online since, even calling for a civil war with
the federal government.
After news of the raid emerged, Ricky Shiffer,
42, put that call to action by attacking the
FBI's field office in Cincinnati, Ohio. Armed
with a nail gun and an assault rifle, Shiffer
tried to break through a bulletproof barrier at
the entrance before dying in a subsequent
shootout with the police.
Shiffer was hardly alone in unleashing or trying
to unleash violence against the U.S. government.
Adam Bies, 46, from Mercer, Pennsylvania, was
arrested on August 12 after he made a series of
death threats against the FBI.
In a hate-filled rant posted on Gab, a
right-wing social media platform, Bies wrote "we
the people cannot WAIT to water the trees of
liberty with your blood" while referring to
"every single piece of shit who works for the
FBI in any capacity, from the director down to
the janitor who cleans their fucking toilets,"
according to a criminal complaint in Pittsburgh
federal court.
The general rage, distrust and belligerence
toward federal authorities is perhaps more
eloquently put by Kari Lake, a Trump-endorsed
Republican candidate for Arizona governor.
"This illegitimate, corrupt Regime hates America
and has weaponized the entirety of the Federal
Government to take down President Donald Trump,"
Lake wrote in a statement published after the
raid. "Our Government is rotten to the core.
These tyrants will stop at nothing to silence
the Patriots who are working hard to save
America. This is an incredibly horrendous abuse
of power. If we accept it, America is dead."
Since Trump became the 45th president of the
United States in 2016, active talks about the
possibility of a second civil war have entered
both the mainstream and among America's elites
as the political left and right found themselves
drifting to polar opposites on a wide spectrum
of social issues.
Many conservatives have come to view progressive
movements such as LGBT rights and Black Lives
Matter as existential threats to the traditional
Christian values on which America was built.
Meanwhile, Democrats and progressives see Trump
and his MAGA movement as reactionary and think
it represents a far-right ideology that is
racist and autocratic.
Combined with the increasing rate of gun sales
and firearm deaths, political polarization is
morphing into political violence.
A real possibility
A survey released by the California Firearm
Violence Research Center showed that half of
Americans believe there will be a civil war in
the United States in the next few years. If
found in a situation where they think violence
is justified to advance an important political
objective, about one in five respondents think
they will likely be armed with a gun. About 7
percent of participants – which would correspond
to about 18 million U.S. adults – said they
would be willing to kill a person in such a
situation.
"Coupled with prior research, these findings
suggest a continuing alienation from and
mistrust of American democratic society and its
institutions. Substantial minorities of the
population endorse violence, including lethal
violence, to obtain political objectives," the
report concluded.
Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor
at the University of California at San Diego who
specializes in political violence, warned in an
April op-ed for the New Republic that over the
past six years "all of the warning signs for
civil war have emerged in the United States, and
they have emerged at a surprisingly fast rate."
Smoke fills the walkway outside the Senate
Chamber as violent rioters loyal to President
Donald Trump are confronted by U.S. Capitol
Police officers inside the Capitol in
Washington, January 6, 2021. /AP
Walter, who has done extensive research on civil
wars, expanded on this in an interview with The
Washington Post last month. Like other scholars
looking at these issues, Walter said the U.S. is
not heading toward a conflict akin to the fight
between the North and South.
"When people think about civil war, they think
about the first civil war. And in their mind,
that is what a second one would look like. And,
of course, that is not the case at all," Walter
told the Post. "What we are heading toward is an
insurgency, which is a form of a civil war. That
is the 21st-century version of a civil war,
especially in countries with powerful
governments and powerful militaries, which is
what the United States is."
The Turner Diaries
Since its publication in 1978, "The Turner
Diaries" has served as a spiritual guide and one
of the most influential texts for America's
right-wing extremists and militant groups. The
novel depicts a group of white supremacists'
attack on Capitol Hill in an effort to overthrow
the U.S. government, leading to a nuclear and
ultimately a race war that exterminated
nonwhites.
Experts have pointed out the frightening
parallels between the novel's plot and real-life
events of the January 6 Capitol Hill
insurrection last year, where thousands of
protesters broke into the Capitol Building in
Washington, D.C., in an effort to keep Trump in
power.
In the following days, on social media and in
militant chat rooms on sites like 4chan, some
users celebrated the violence and likened it to
"the Day of the Rope," a mass hanging that
occurs in "The Turner Diaries," according to The
New York Times.
"The real value of all our attacks today lies in
the psychological impact, not the immediate
casualties," the novel's narrator, Earl Turner,
writes in his diary. "They learned this
afternoon that not one of them is beyond our
reach."
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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