GOP's Adam Kinzinger warns of potential American civil war: 'Our basic survival is at stake'

On Monday's edition of CNN's "The Situation Room," Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) weighed in on the GOP's continued perpetuation of election lies and downplaying of the January 6 Capitol attack.

"How dangerous is it for the Republican National Committee to whitewash the events of that day and simply call it 'legitimate political discourse?'" asked anchor Wolf Blitzer.

"Oh, it is extremely dangerous and it is not even — it's, if there was a word even more intense than dangerous I would use that," said Kinzinger. "It is not a far thought, Wolf, to think that some day, some militia shows up somewhere to do something and then some countermilitia, and at that point that is how you end up in a civil war. I never would say that we would ever have ended in that position, but I now believe it is a real possibility that we have to be wide-eyed as we walk into so we don't have that happen again."

"You fear, potentially, there could be a civil war here in the United States?" Blitzer pushed him.

"I do," said Kinzinger. "And a year ago I would have said no, not a chance. But I've come to realize when we don't see each other as fellow Americans, when we begin to separate into cultural identities, when we begin to basically give up everything that we believe so we could be part of a group, and then when you have leaders that come and abuse that faithfulness of that group to violent ends, as we saw on January 6, we would be naïve to think it is not possible here."

Kinzinger concluded with a plea for more understanding between Americans.

"We have to look at this wide-eyed and walk in and say, we may have differences as left and right, but we have to bridge those differences, because our basic survival is at stake, the basic survival of this democracy," he said.

Watch below:

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