Right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, leader of the MAGA youth groups Turning Point USA and Students for Trump and the host one of the most listened-to podcasts in the United States, encouraged his listeners this week to take up arms in preparation for an invasion of immigrants at the southern border.

The break-ins, the looting, the murder, the rapes, the arson, its by the way, this is just getting warmed up, Kirk said Wednesday on The Charlie Kirk Show, echoing white supremacist talking points depicting immigrants and asylum seekers as inherently criminal. You got 15,000 fighting-age males that are getting deployed all across the country. Native-born Americans, you better buy weapons, everybody. Have a lot of guns at your disposal. I would never leave your home without a weapon. Its the new country we live in. It is Mad Max. [President Joe] Biden is creating Mad Max. Youre on your own.

The day before, Tucker Carlson, who had hosted the former Fox News prime-time juggernaut Tucker Carlson Tonight, had also suggested it was time for civilians to take matters into their own hands.

Its unanimous: Everyone in power, from the White House, to the hedge fund managers, to the Supreme Court of the United States, has decided to destroy the country by allowing it to be invaded, Carlson told his 11 million followers on X (formerly Twitter). That leaves the population to defend itself. Where are the men of Texas? Why arent they protecting their state and the nation?

Kirk and Carlson both of whom have long promoted the great replacement theory, falsely suggesting Democrats are bringing migrants into the country to replace white people were responding to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this week that said the federal government could remove dangerous razor wire Texas had installed along its border with Mexico.

In his response to the ruling, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) released a statement Wednesday that used language eerily reminiscent of Southern states statements of secession ahead of the Civil War: He threatened to defy the Supreme Court decision, declaring that the federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States. The next day, Republican governors from 25 states issued a joint statement supporting Abbott, praising him for stepping up to protect American citizens from historic levels of illegal immigrants, deadly drugs like fentanyl, and terrorists entering our country.

It was the latest, most dramatic escalation between Abbott and President Joe Biden over the situation at the border an escalation experts say has corresponded with increasingly dangerous rhetoric from prominent conservatives that could encourage violent vigilantism targeting immigrants.

It does provide a lot of license to vigilantes, journalist Patrick Strickland, author of the book The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands, told HuffPost. This is not an invasion; its desperate people fleeing organized crime or poverty or war or violence. Its not the same as the organized regiments of a formal army.

Strickland pointed to the mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas , in 2019, when a white supremacist who wanted to stop the Hispanic invasion at the southern border opened fire, killing 22 people in what has been called the deadliest anti-Latino hate crime in American history. Earlier that year, Abbott had published campaign material calling on Texans to defend the state and to take matters into our own hands when it comes to immigration.

Similarly, in 2018, as then-President Donald Trump, with the help of Fox News, manufactured a panic about a migrant caravan marching toward the southern border, another white supremacist opened fire inside the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The shooter, who had cited antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews hastening the replacement of white Americans by importing immigrants into the country, killed 11 worshippers.

Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents the El Paso area, said her community knows better than any that there are deadly consequences to the hatred and xenophobia the far-right is promoting.

A reminder to them that the white supremacist who drove over 10 hours to my community on August 3, 2019 to massacre immigrants and Hispanics used the same language they continue to espouse, Escobar told HuffPost in a statement. The normalization of such violent rhetoric and dehumanization led to the murder of innocent people in El Paso, and I fear such hatred and unfounded fear will only perpetuate the next incident.

Also of concern is the long, menacing history of right-wing paramilitary groups along the U.S.-Mexico border, including in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when white supremacist leaders David Duke, then a grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan, and Louis Beam, head of the Texas Knights of the KKK, patrolled the border in search of migrants. There was another explosion of right-wing militia activity along the border when Barack Obama was president.

There remains a large coterie of paramilitary groups, often acting with the implicit, or explicit, support of elected lawmakers and law enforcement officials.

People often think of vigilantes as operating completely separate from the state, completely removed from politics, and thats actually not the case, Regina Bateson, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told HuffPost. So its very common that there are relationships between people involved in vigilantism and elected officials. Its a way of pushing political agendas, sometimes trying to sort of force the state into acting where it wouldnt have otherwise.

Bateson said the current conservative panic about migrants crossing the border is fostering conditions that could lead to a new period of vigilantism.

First, she said, there are already pre-existing networks of militias along the border, and they have all the relevant skills. Second, vigilantism is typically carried out by someone from a more powerful or more privileged group in society, targeting somebody whos from a more marginalized group in this case, predominantly white Americans targeting Latino migrants. This more privileged group, Bateson added, will frame their actions as defensive, depicting their targets as a threat, even if theyre the ones proactively carrying out security patrols, or acting in ways that are offensive, like proactively going out and looking for people. Finally, Stateson said, right-wing vigilantism often thrives when theres an abundance of harsh, dehumanizing language about the target group.