After news broke Monday evening that the FBI had raided Mar-a-Lago, the Florida home of former President Donald Trump, right-wing influencer Steven Crowder delivered an alarming message to his nearly 2 million followers on Twitter: “Sleep well. Tomorrow is war.”
The next day, during his show on YouTube, where he has nearly 6 million subscribers, Crowder called for the “defunding” and “dismantling” of “our intelligence agencies” and the FBI over the raid on Trump’s seaside mansion. He also called for a purge, imploring the GOP to get revenge.
“The next president of the United States needs to prosecute everyone,” he said. “Needs to clean house everywhere.”
“If a Republican gets in, investigate everybody, raid everybody,” he added. “Use all of it. I don’t care if we become Nicaragua at this point.”
Crowder’s inflammatory rhetoric was standard right-wing messaging across America on Tuesday. GOP lawmakers and MAGA influencers clamored to show their fealty to the former president after federal agents searched his home for classified information he may have taken home after leaving the White House, according to a New York Times report.
“Are you ready,” far-right influencer and “Pizzagate” conspiracist Jack Posobiec wrote in a series of hyperventilating tweets to his nearly 2 million followers on Twitter. “The federal security state has declared war on Donald J Trump and his supporters.”
These right-wing invocations of violence and “civil war” could have deadly consequences, warned Michael Hayden, spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization.
“Hard right and white supremacist social influencers have pushed civil war rhetoric repeatedly since Trump’s rise,” Hayden told HuffPost. “Whenever something happens to threaten their movement, they push it again, stoking outrage for profit. Although these calls for violence are unlikely to mobilize a large group without a unifying event like Unite the Right or Trump’s speech on January 6, they can certainly inspire horrific acts of violence, like we have seen in places like Pittsburgh, El Paso, and Buffalo.”
