We’ll never know for certain whether accused domestic-terrorist-in-the-making Christopher Hasson ever would have acted on the desire to spark a racial civil war for white supremacy by committing the assassinations and mass killing for which he had so thoroughly prepared and about which he endlessly fantasized. We do know, however, exactly what might have been the spark to send the 49-year-old Coast Guardsman from Baltimore off on a killing rampage, though: the impeachment of President Trump.
Buried in Hasson’s deleted emails, along with correspondence to neo-Nazi leaders and ruminations on his admiration for Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik, were his working notes for events around which he was planning actions, notably: “what if trump illegally impeached”and“civil war if trump impeached”.
As Chris Hayes adroitly observed, it’s not hard to find where Hasson might have obtained the belief that civil war would erupt if President Trump were to face impeachment: Civil war has become an endemic talking point and source of speculation among right-wing pundits. Only this week, longtime Republican operative Joseph diGenova went on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show and warned:
We are in a civil war in this country. There's two standards of justice, one for Democrats, one for Republicans. The press is all Democrat, all liberal, all progressive, all left—they hate Republicans, they hate Trump. So the suggestion that there's ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future in this country is over. It's not going to be. It's going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things—I vote and I buy guns.
This seemingly hysterical pronouncement, in fact, is fast becoming a commonplace among right-wing pundits. (Watch for it to become a permanent talking point at Fox.) That’s because it has been circulating on the right for a good long while now, and is now being whipped up to new heights—notably, well into the mainstream of conservative-movement discourse.