Truth Social users are claiming calls for violence against FBI are false flags

On Friday, The New York Timesreported that pro-Trump users on the president's social media network Truth Social are starting to push the idea that calls for violence against the FBI for most of the week were a false flag operation planted by government agents.

"Truth Social users posted that the United States was born 'through an insurrection followed by several years of bloody violence,' and that the country would 'become a communist state just as long as we don’t pick up arms and fight back!!'" reported Tiffany Hsu and Sheera Frankel. "There was talk that 'the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,' a phrase from a letter by Thomas Jefferson, and that 'sometimes clearing out dangerous vermin requires a modicum of violence, unfortunately.'"

"But later in the week, a different narrative gained traction, propelled without evidence by other prominent Truth Social users: that calls for violence were posts planted by federal law enforcement officials or Democratic operatives to frame right-wing patriots as insurrectionists and extremists," said the report. "The point, the conspiracy theory goes, is to give the Biden administration cover to strip Trump supporters of guns, or to set up a pretext for martial law."

Among the prominent users pushing this was Jack Posobiec, a far-right activist who helped spread the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory. On Thursday, Posobiec posted “ANYONE POSTING ABOUT BEING VIOLENT RIGHT NOW IS A FED.”

This comes after Ricky Shiffer, a former January 6 insurrectionist suspected to have posted calls for violence against federal agents on Truth Social, tried to shoot his way into an FBI field office in Cincinnati, Ohio on Thursday. State police pursued him and eventually killed him in a shootout.

"The sentiments on Trump’s social media network extended to other platforms as well," the report continued. "One Proud Boys Telegram channel, used by hundreds of members of the militant group, posted in the hours after the search that 'civil war is imminent.' On Twitter, there was a tenfold increase in tweets mentioning 'civil war' in the 24 hours after the raid, according to Dataminr, a tool that analyzes Twitter data."

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