Fox News host Laura Ingraham's guest says the country is 'in a civil war' — and people should 'buy guns'

On a disturbing episode of Fox News host Laura Ingraham's "The Laura Ingraham Show Podcast" Thursday, guest Joe diGenova echoed the calls of some of the darkest parts of the far-right movement in the United States.

"We are in a civil war in this country," diGenova, as first pointed out by Media Matters for America. "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."

One particularly odd fact about his claims is that they seemed to come out of nowhere. Ingraham had just ended a diatribe about how liberals supposedly shifted attention away from discussions about the imperiled Democratic leadership in Virginia government to allegations of a hate crime made by actor Jussie Smollett, who has since been arrested on charges of filing a false police report. It was a bizarre and twisted theory, completely out of line with reality. but it had nothing to do with a supposed "civil war."

But for many on the fringes of the far right, casual talk about political divisions in the United States easily slips into discussions of open warfare and violence.

President Donald Trump, it should be noted, once announced that he was hiring diGenova for his legal team, but he never came on board.

MSNBC's Chris Hayes noted on Twitter that a man prosecutors say was a domestic terrorist, Chris Hasson, had, according to a court filing, googled "civil war if Trump impeached."

"Where could he possibly get such an insane idea?" Hayes asked — and then he linked to diGenova's comments. "Oh."

Hasson was also found with an apparent "hit list" of Democratic politicians and media figures, according to prosecutors — a list that included Hayes.