Conservative sounds the alarm on rabid Trump supporters who are agitating for a civil war

Christian Vanderbrouk, a conservative commentator who previously worked in the George W. Bush White House, has written a new piece at The Bulwark sounding the alarm about a sect of rabid Trump supporters who are now agitating for a new civil war.

In particular, he singles out Federalist contributor Jesse Kelly, who last year wrote an essay that imagined white conservatives scalping their fellow citizens who had succumbed to "socialism."

He also points to Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who over the weekend posted and then deleted a meme about sparking a new civil war in which he predicted conservative states would win because they're armed with trillions of bullets.

And he notes that the Claremont Institute's Robert Curry last year warned that a Democratic victory in the 2018 midterm elections had the potential to change America more than if the North had lost the Civil War in the 19th century.

"If a Democrat-controlled Congress can prevent the President from building the wall and keep him tied up long enough for them to get their demographic transformation of America past the point of no return, it might well be game over for the regime of liberty," Curry warned.

Vanderbrouk traces this kind of narrative back to a 1978 book called "The Turner Diaries" that was written by neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce that tells the story of white people in America violently overthrowing their government and replacing it with a white nationalist ethnostate.

This book, writes Vanderbrouk, inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and he warns that these kinds of narratives are likely to inspire more terrorist violence as they percolate through more right-wing media outlets.

"What then must the responsible conservative do today?" he asks in conclusion. "An easy first step would be to stop promoting the spread of racist and insurrectionist literature. It shouldn’t be difficult for the party of Lincoln to purge itself of civil war agitators."

Read the whole essay here.