Civil war has been called for by some on the far right.
There are some warning signs for civil war in the US.
The Civil War of the 1860s looked very different from a conflict like this.
Far-right figures have been spreading violent rhetoric online after the FBI searched Donald Trump's Florida home.
The GOP has always portrayed itself as the defender of law and order, but the aftermath of the raid has seen GOP lawmakers call for the FBI to be defunded.
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, she has made references to civil war on social media.
There has been talk of civil war on pro- Trump internet channels.
The FBI raid of Trump's Mar-a-Lago home came in a historically divisive time for the US, one in which millions of voters still believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.
Historians and experts on democracy warn that these lies continue to foster the potential for further violence, as they were at the center of the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. Civil war wouldn't look like the first one if the US saw it.
The distrust in the electoral process and government institutions fomented by Trump and his GOP allies has created a recipe for communal violence, according to a conversation with Insider last month. The US could end up in a civil conflict, warns Hill.
Trust in the different communities and authorities has eroded so much that people just start fighting with each other.
She made it clear that a civil conflict in the present day would not look like the American Civil War, in which hundreds of thousands of people died.
"I don't think we would see the kind of conflict that we had between the states back in the day," Hill said. People's sense of the civil and civic ways of resolving disputes are out of date.
An armed man tried to break into the FBI office in Cincinnati less than a week after the raid on Trump's home. The man who was killed by police may have had links to far right extremists, according to reports.
Ricky Shiffer appears to have made calls for violence against the FBI on Trump's social media network.
If you don't hear from me, I tried attacking the F.B.I. Multiple reports say that the suspect may have been at the Capitol on January 6 and that the account with Shiffer's name parroted Trump's election lies.
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 all of the warning signs for civil war have emerged in the United States.
Walter expanded on this in an interview with The Washington Post. Walter said the US isn't heading towards a conflict like the one between the North and South.
People think about the first civil war when they think about civil war. That is what a second one would look like in their minds. Walter told the Post that that wasn't the case. An insurgency is a type of civil war. The United States is what the 21st century version of a civil war is called.
According to Walter, an insurgency is usually a fight between multiple groups. They use unconventional methods. They are targeting infrastructure. They target people who aren't related to them. Domestic terror and guerilla warfare are used by them. She mentioned hit-and-run raids and bombs.
Walter said that right-wing extremists look to "The Turner Diaries," a novel that has been referred to as the bible of the far right, for a plan on how to take down a powerful government. A fictional tale of a civil war against the US government is told in the book.
It says to not engage the U.S. military. Don't do it at all costs. Walter told the Post that it's hard for the government to identify and kill you if you go directly to targets around the country that are hard to defend.
Research shows that the Oklahoma City bomber was inspired by the Turner Diaries.
During a recent meeting at the White House, a group of historians warned President Joe Biden that the US is facing threats similar to those seen before the Civil War, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
Historian Michael Beschloss was one of the academics who spoke to Biden. According to Beschloss, a civil conflict in the US would not be like the devastating war of the 1860s.
"If any kind of civil war faces Americans, it is unlikely to be two armies fighting over one paramount issue (slavery), as in 1861-1865, but sporadic, mounting bursts of violence against our federal government," Beschloss wrote.
Business Insider has an article on it.
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