Placeholder while article actions are loading
In the minutes after a gunman in a bulletproof vest tried to break into an FBI field office in Cincinnati, an account with the suspect’s name, Ricky Schiffer, posted on former President Donald Trump’s social network, Truth Social: “If you don’t hear from me, true is that I tried to attack the FBI”
Shiffer’s account appears to be one of Truth Social’s most prolific posters, posting 374 posts in the past eight days — mostly to repeat Trump’s lies about election fraud and in the hours after FBI agents searched Trump’s home in Florida, calling for all-out war. “Be ready to kill the enemy,” Schiffer posted on Tuesday. “Kill [the FBI] of sight.”
Schiffer was killed Thursday in a shootout, police said, and the Truth Social account has since been taken down. But calls for pro-Trump violence are still a common presence online — including on Truth Social, where the top topics Friday morning were “#FBIcorruption” and “DefundTheFBI.”
Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, did not respond to requests for comment.
The Cincinnati shooting offers a glimpse into the real dangers of the sustained attacks by Trump and his Republican allies on federal officials in the days since FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach estate and the center of his post-presidential operations.
It also demonstrates how such violent anger can be prominently encouraged in loosely moderated online havens like Truth Social, where Trump supporters often bash perceived enemies and call for civil war.
Gunman identified in FBI field office raid, but motive remains unclear
Trump has repeatedly attacked FBI and Justice Department officials in public messages, including on Truth Social, where he told his more than 3 million followers on Thursday that the Mar-a-Lago search was a “surprise attack, POLITICS and all the time our State is going to HELL!”
People familiar with the investigation told the Washington Post that the FBI searched the home while looking for classified documents related to nuclear weapons that could seriously harm national security.
A Twitter account under Schiffer’s name featured many messages mimicking Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. But a review of his social media accounts shows that Schiffer has been most active recently on Truth Social, the Twitter clone created by Trump after most social networks blocked him following the riots at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. In April, Schiffer tweeted at Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., that he had just opened his account there, adding, “Just waiting for your dad.”
Authorities declined to comment on whether Schiffer was linked to Truth Social and Twitter accounts, but both included his name, photo and general location and were active before the shooting.
A law enforcement official familiar with the investigation told The Post that agents are investigating Schiffer’s possible ties to extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, a far-right group whose leaders are accused of helping to attack the U.S. on Jan. 6, 2021. Capitol.
The FBI searched Trump’s home for nuclear documents and other items, sources said
A review of Truth Social’s activity on Shiffer’s account showed that he posted dozens of times a day on the site, responding to influential pro-Trumpers, attacking the government and suggesting that violence was the most important way Trump true believers could to protect the former president.
Similar messages are common on the site, including from Trump himself. In May, Trump reposted — or, in Truth Social’s terminology, “ReTruthed” — a message from another user that read “Civil War.”
But Schiffer’s Truth Social account, which had 23 followers, showed he was not just expressing anger but calling for direct action to provoke armed conflict, urging Trump followers to stock up on bullets and “prepare heart, mind and his body to jump into civil war.”
On August 5, he posted: “This country has never had a worse enemy. 1776 was for much less, even WWII was for less. That day he also wrote: “Conserve ammunition and be ready and willing to be on your way as soon as you hear it has started. Someone who wanted to be a hero couldn’t have lived in a better time period. The post was “liked” 24 times.
Shiffer’s posts appear to view the Mar-a-Lago search as the triggering event. On August 8, the day of the search, he posted: “Guys, this is it. … This is your call to arms from me. Leave work tomorrow as soon as the gun shop… opens, get what you need to be ready for battle. We must not tolerate this even once.”
On August 9, he posted that “the patriots are heading for Palm Beach” and that if the “Federals” try to break it up, “kill them.” “A bloody pure rebellion against the people who usurped our government,” he wrote in a separate post the same day. “I hope to see you there (I won’t be unarmed this time).”
His second most recent public post was a meme image of Trump in the White House: “Repost for this if you want President Donald Trump back in office!” His last post on Aug. 11, the day police said he had tried to break into the FBI office, read, “Well, I thought I had a way through bulletproof glass, but I didn’t. If you don’t hear from me, it’s true that I tried to attack the FBI, and that will mean that I’ve either been taken off the internet, the FBI has caught me, or they’ve sent in the regular cops until,” before ending abruptly.
All of the posts were visible Thursday night, and there is no indication that Truth Social ever sought to remove them before they disappeared.
The dark threat of violence comes to the fore with the search of Trump’s property
Schiffer’s profile says he is a construction electrician in Columbus, Ohio, who has previously had accounts blocked or deleted on Twitter, the video site Rumble and other sites. In his biography, he wrote: “I’m ready to deal with this as an American.”
The FBI said Thursday that Schieffer tried to break into the field office’s visitor screening area before fleeing onto an interstate. He stopped and raised a gun at police before officers shot and killed him, authorities said.
After the attempted break-in at the FBI office, some Truth Social users — including a verified account with 74,000 followers who said he was the site’s designer — also shared unsubstantiated conspiracy theories suggesting the attack was a “fake flag,” organized make Trump look bad.
After months of low user activity and technical problems, Truth Social remains a minor player on the Internet with fewer than 4 million users — a fraction of the 88 million Twitter followers Trump had before his ban.
Since Jan. 6, Trump’s online audience has split between a number of right-wing sites competing for the same limited followers, including Gab, Gettr and Parler, where follower numbers have stagnated this year.
But David Thiel, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory who has studied the site, said Truth Social has specialized as a never-ending Trump gathering that functions almost like a fan message board, full of devotees eager to validate other members of the base. of Trump.
“It’s incredibly boring in most ways. This is not where content producers put their efforts. They just syndicate content from right-wing news outlets and other places,” Thiel said. “But it’s a place where you’d expect to see the kind of single person who shows signs of potentially acting against something more radical.”
Truth Social’s online traffic jumped Tuesday, the day after the FBI raid, to nearly 700,000 visits worldwide, according to estimates by online analytics firm Similarweb. The site averaged about 300,000 visits per day last month. Twitter says it has about 37 million daily active users in the United States.
The disastrous launch of Trump’s Truth Social raises doubts about its long-term viability
Gina Ligon, director of the National Center for Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education, a federally funded research center at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, said Schiffer’s online calls for violence show similarities to previous messages from attackers and offer a warning sign of potential future attacks.
“Schiffer’s call to arms,” Ligon said, is reminiscent of similar online posts by a gunman in May who shot and killed 10 black people at a Buffalo grocery store. She also compared Schiffer’s anti-government bent to that of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, whose 1995 attack killed 168 people.
“The rhetoric that is so strong on the right now online should be taken very seriously by people because it mobilizes [McVeigh] to an incredibly violent event,” she said.
Truth Social’s connection to the FBI raid is similar to Parler, another social media site once popular with Trump supporters that prided itself on free speech. Before Jan. 6, Trump supporters shared false theories about election fraud and plans to descend on the Capitol to confront members of Congress voting to finalize the former president’s loss. Groups organized on the platform, and then users registered on it, participating in the rebellion. Amazon Web Services, which ran the cloud computing system the site depended on, shut it down shortly thereafter.
Domestic terrorist incidents have increased in recent years, fueled in part by growing white supremacist propaganda.
Extremists have used social media to share inflammatory political rhetoric, while organizers of the January 6 violence spread disinformation about the election and plans to stop the election. During the coronavirus pandemic, government restrictions have intensified attacks on public health officials and Democrats, such as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the target of a kidnapping plot by members of the militia movement.
The latest clashes reflect a trend in the country’s psyche: One in every 3…
Add Comment