Shortly after the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence for classified documents, Internet researchers spotted a troubling trend.
Twitter posts with the words “civil war” increased by nearly 3,000 percent within hours as Trump supporters denounced the action as a provocation. This was followed by similar increases on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Parler, Gab and Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform. Repetitions of these words have more than doubled on radio shows and podcasts, according to measurements by Critical Mention, a media company.
Posts mentioning “civil war” spiked again just weeks after President Joe Biden claimed that Trump and the “MAGA Republicans” (referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, let’s make America great again , in Spanish) were a threat to “the very foundations of our republic” in a speech on democracy in Philadelphia.
Now, experts are preparing for a new debate on the civil war as the November 8 mid-term elections approach and political talks become more urgent and heated.
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More than a century and a half after the actual Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in US history, references to “civil war” are becoming more frequent on the right. Although in many cases the term is used loosely to refer to the intensification of partisan divisions in the country, observers point out that for some people the phrase is much more than a metaphor.
Polls, social media studies, and growing threats suggest that more and more Americans anticipate, or even approve of, the possibility of sustained political violence, according to researchers studying extremism. What was previously the subject of serious debate solely on the political periphery is moving closer to the mainstream.
But while this trend is clear, there is far less agreement among experts on what it means.
Some far-right elements take it literally: a call for an organized battle to take over the government. Others envision something more like a protracted insurrection, with intermittent eruptions of political violence, such as the August attack on the FBI’s field office in Cincinnati. And a third group claims that the country is entering a “cold” civil war, manifested by an intricate polarization and distrust, rather than a “hot” war with conflict.
However, conversations about political violence are not relegated to anonymous online forums.
At a Trump rally in Michigan on Saturday night, Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said the Democrats wanted the Republicans dead, adding, “Joe Biden has declared all freedom-loving Americans to be enemies of the state.” During a fundraiser, Michael Flynn, who was Trump’s national security advisor for a very short time, said the governors had the power to declare war and “we probably would have seen it.”
On Monday, federal prosecutors showed a jury in Washington an encrypted message that Stewart Rhodes, founder of the armed extremist group Oath Keepers, sent to his lieutenants two days after the 2020 presidential election: “We won’t get out without a war civil”.
Experts say the ongoing bellicose talk helps normalize the expectation of political violence.
At the end of August, a survey of 1,500 adults organized by YouGov and The Economist found that 54% of participants who identified themselves as “strong Republicans” believed it was at least somehow likely that there would be a civil war in the country. next decade. Only about one third of all participants considered such an event unlikely. A similar poll, conducted by the same groups two years ago, found that nearly three in five people felt a “civil war-like rift in the United States.” It was somewhat or very unlikely.
“What we see is that limited speech at the margins is becoming more common,” said Robert Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.
Researchers at the institute searched for tweets with civil war mentions before and after Trump’s announcement of the Mar-a-Lago raid. Five days earlier, they had averaged nearly 500 tweets per hour. Which jumped to 6,000 in the first hour later, on the evening of August 8, Trump posted on Truth Social: “These are dark times for our nation.” Mentions peaked at 15,000 tweets per hour that same afternoon. A week later, the number of mentions was still six times the reference number, and the phrase was trending again on Twitter by the end of the month.
For years, extremist groups have been talking about a sort of overthrow of the government, and Pape says that the most radical positions – often related to white supremacy or religious fundamentalism – remain marginal, expressed by no more than 50,000 throughout the country.
But, in his view, there is a much larger group inflamed by Trump’s complaints about the “Washington swamp” and the “deep state” forces working against him and his allies.
These notions, stirred in a smoldering melting pot with QAnon conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine views, and election denial, have fueled growing hostility towards the federal government and heightened talk of state rights.
Social media platforms are littered with groups and forums dedicated to civil war debates. One, in Gab, describes itself as a place for “action reports” and “combat videos” and accounts of people killed in action during “the civil war which is also meant to be the second American revolution.”.
In August, a single tweet that said “It seems to me civil war has just been declared” managed to reach more than 17 million profiles, even though it came from an account with fewer than 14,000 followers, according to Cybara, an Israeli company that check the information.
“Ideas enter the echo chambers and become the only voice heard; there are no voices of dissent, “said Kurt Braddock, a professor at the American University who studies how terrorist groups radicalize and recruit their members.
Braddock commented that he did not believe these messages indicated that a war was planned. But he is concerned about what academics call “stochastic terrorism”: seemingly random acts of violence that are actually triggered by “code language, code words, and other subtext” in statements by public figures.
According to Braddock, Trump is an expert at making these kinds of claims and as an example he cited the April 2020 tweet that said “Free Michigan!” Less than two weeks later, crowds of heavily armed protesters occupied the state capitol in Lansing. He also pointed to Trump’s speech before the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, when he encouraged thousands of supporters to march on the United States Capitol and later, in the same remarks, told them: “If they don’t they fight for the death, they will be left without a homeland ”.
“Trump’s statements are not real calls to action, but when you have a rather fervent following, the odds of one or more people feeling they have to do something are pretty high,” Braddock explained.
A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
After Biden delivered his speech on democracy, Brian Gibby, an independent data entry specialist from Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote in a Substack post that he believed “Civil War II had begun” with comments. of the president. .
“I have never heard a more hateful and divisive speech from an American president,” wrote Gibby.
Asked by the New York Times to explain his opinion, Gibby said he believed Biden was “escalating a heated conflict in America.” He fears that something “similar to January 6, but much more violent” will happen around the November elections, in which armed protest groups from both sides of the political spectrum clash.
“Make your plans, go get supplies, stay safe and get out of the cities if you can,” he wrote.
