Minneapolis, MN — Right-wing social media influencers are drawing tenuous parallels between the usernames found in Minneapolis neighborhood Signal groups and claiming they are the handles of public figures involved in an insurrectionist conspiracy enveloping Minnesota.

In multiple posts to Truth Social this month, President Donald Trump has referred to many of the community members protesting ICE in Minnesota as “highly paid troublemakers, anarchists, and agitators.” The sentiment has been picked up by right-wing influencers like Cam Higby, who claimed in a long thread on X to have “infiltrated” the Signal group chats of volunteer groups working to alert neighbors, specifically around schools, of ICE’s presence around the Twin Cities.

The conspiracy theories revolve around the idea that all of the members of the Signal groups are either paid activists or members of a far-left militia bent on war with the federal government. The leadership of these groups, in the unfounded estimation of many right-wing influencers, is made up of shadowy donors, the establishment media and Minnesota public officials. Specifically, many prominent accounts have singled out Minnesota Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan as one of the masterminds behind the “insurrection.”

Related: Right-Wing Influencers Desperate to Find an Insurrection in Minneapolis [Jan. 21, 2026]

The conspiracy theories spread quickly on X after federal agents killed South Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti on Jan. 24, many of the purveyors attempting to cast Pretti as a soldier in an insurrectionist militia led by the Minnesota state against the federal government and thus justifying his death.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel appeared on right-wing influencer Benny Johnson’s talkshow Monday morning to announce that his agency is openly investigating the network of Signal groups.

“As soon as Higby put that post out, I opened an investigation on it,” Patel told Johnson, referencing the Signal groups.

“This is clearly a coordinated infrastructure,” Johnson said to Higby later in the program. “And we’d like for the feds to take a crack at trying to get rid of this infrastructure the way that they approached the mob, or cartels or other terrorist networks.” The comparison of volunteers organizing on an encrypted app to alert their neighbors of impending abductions by masked agents to that of terror networks, the mob or cartels is part of the narrative war against anyone opposing the federal occupation of Minnesota.

Higby’s original post on Jan. 24, made only an hour after federal agents killed Pretti, laid the groundwork for the expansive conspiracy theory by portraying the public Signal channels as clandestine militia operations. The post quickly racked up more than 100,000 likes and 21 million impressions, and other X posters were quick to pick apart the user lists, finding tenuous connections between code names and the names of elected officials.

With no additional proof, many accounts began spreading the idea that one of the admins of a group, “Southside Flan,” is actually Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, a revelation supported solely by the similarities of “Flan” and “Flanagan.” This began to expand the theories from what Higby portrayed as an anti-federal militia into a private army led by the state.

An X user posted Flanagan’s official portrait on Jan. 25, confidently identifying Flanagan as the Signal chat admin Flan in a post that received 107,000 likes and nearly seven million impressions on the website.

“This means the State of Minnesota is behind the protests,” he wrote. “Its not organic its a [sic] insurrection at the very top.”

“Wow I wish I could say I’m surprised,” responded Nick Shirley, the right-wing influencer who claimed to expose fraud at Somali-run daycares in Minneapolis, similarly without any proof.

Chaya Raichik, a far-right social media influencer who operates the account Libs of TikTok, also shared the conspiracy theory to her 4.6 million followers on Jan. 25.

“Wait,” Raichik wrote, acting as though she were in disbelief while including no context in a post that received more than 600,000 impressions. “Minnesota Lt Governor Peggy Flanagan was on the Signal chat coordinating the doxxing and harassment of ICE agents???”

Right-wing influencer Andy Ngo, who appeared at the White House’s “Antifa Roundtable” in October 2025, alongside Higby and other grifters, wrote an article for his substack piggy backing off the frantic conspiracy-building. In it, he claims the Signal groups are “Antifa-linked revolutionary anarchist collectives” that “instruct extremists on how to carry out obstructionist campaigns.”

“Alex Pretti and Renee Good, two militant leftist activists shot dead this month, may have been part of these groups,” Ngo wrote, parroting the White House’s false narrative that the two Minneapolis residents were domestic terrorists.

Right-wing influencer Tim Pool reposted part of a thread by neo-fascist intellectual Curtis Yarvin explicitly claiming that Pretti was a soldier who went to Nicollet Avenue ”to go to war.”

“Pretti was ‘on duty’ in an active insurgency group backed by the state,” Pool posted, taking every baseless claim made by other users on X as fact. “When confronted he fought back.”

In reality, Pretti was never seen holding or brandishing the firearm he was legally permitted to carry, and federal agents threw him to the ground after he tried rendering aid to a woman they maced and began beating him before they were even aware he had the firearm on him.

A physician who federal agents eventually allowed to assess Pretti’s condition recalled in court testimony seeing at least three bullet wounds in Pretti’s back.

While ICE watch volunteers follow and observe ICE agents throughout the Twin Cities area, they do not obstruct arrests. According to the ICE Watch patrol guide posted by Higby on his X, once again watermarked with his full name despite being publicly available, they do not explicitly advocate anything illegal, only making noise and alerting community members.

“We are neighbors protecting neighbors. We are witnesses, not warriors,” the guide reads in its introduction. “The Patrol is not a police force. It is not a militia. It is a community forming a safety net with whatever we have: whistles, horns, flashlights, courage, and each other.”

Everything outlined in the manual is completely legal and protected by the First Amendment, and ICE Watch trainers instruct new volunteers to keep eight feet away from federal agents and to avoid touching or blocking them.

The group chats are also not made up of Antifa super soldiers, but rather parents, clergy and community members from many different walks of life. Members of the media have also been present in the group chats, weeks before Higby stumbled upon them.

Despite this, claims that the Signal groups are actually domestic terrorist cells help bolster a false narrative popular with right-wing influencers that what is happening in Minneapolis is an insurrection, and that President Trump must declare it so.

A response to Higby from an individual named Eric Schwalm that garnered nearly as much traction as the original post–more than 100,000 likes and nearly 20 million impressions–added to the conspiracy by claiming the network was a nearly exact facsimile of Al Qaeda insurgent networks from the mid-2000s.

“From where I sit, this isn’t January 2026 politics anymore,” Schwalm wrote. “It’s phase one of something we’ve spent decades trying to keep off our own soil.”

Higby made the initial post in the morning on Jan. 24, using a series of screenshots from the Signal group chats with his full name smeared across each in the form of a watermark. He also included screen recordings of the user lists, exposing such names as “pickles” and “goober.”

The Signal group chats have not been anything remotely close to a secret. The links to join have been publicly available since before federal agents killed Renee Good on Jan. 7, in the form of QR codes handed out at public events, shared widely on social media and even simply through the Defend612 website.

Defend612, named after the area code for Minneapolis-based phone numbers, is an all-volunteer organization based in the Twin Cities that helps to organize some of the rapid response groups on Signal. According to their website, roughly 80,000 Minneapolis residents volunteer in the rapid response groups and support networks, which is roughly 20% of the city’s population.

The channels have been so public that national journalists were quick to join them, publishing stories on their organization as the federal presence in the city escalated at the beginning of January.

“I have infiltrated organizational Signal groups all around Minneapolis,” Higby wrote, referring to his joining of the public group as an infiltration. “BUCKLE UP ALL WILL BE REVEALED.”

Throughout his thread, Higby makes fantastic conclusions from vague posts, such as one anonymous user announcing in the chat that they are walking east on foot because “homebase is expecting me.” Instead of concluding that the user might be referring to their own home, Higby sees a much broader conspiracy.

“These thugs apparently have a ‘HOME BASE’ though I haven’t been able to identify it,” Higby wrote.

Higby also noted that messages were regularly deleted from the chat, which he said is done by organizers to cover their tracks, including a screenshot of a deleted message from one of the Signal group chats. 

In reality, the Signal group chats are general hubs for dispatchers – individuals who take a leading role in ICE watch activities – to post authenticated updates and other information to keep their community safe. Daily breakout groups appear for regular communication outside of those hubs, allowing users to more freely communicate without cluttering the main channel.

In some chats, users can still post in the main channel, but are required to follow certain guidelines that prohibit regular chatter. Posts that break these rules are typically deleted, or marked with a broom emoji to indicate to others that they should be deleted.

At the end of the thread, Higby included a screenshot of the admin lists for four of the chats, which he reminds readers “generally consist of code names.”

Late in the evening on Jan. 24, the day federal agents killed Pretti, Higby posted a screenshot from one of the Signal group chats where one user named Tom O’Hoch notified the group of the shooting in the immediate aftermath. In the post, the user indicates that the man shot may have been an observer.

Higby’s post about the screenshot emphasizes O’Hoch’s use of “we” and implies observers are trained individuals belonging to a centralized group and not–as they are in reality–volunteers from the community.

“If Tom is correct,” Higby wrote, referencing the broader conspiracy he hints at in his post, “this situation is significantly worse than we initially thought.”

On Jan. 26, right-wing influencer Rogan O’Handley, also known as DC_Draino on X, posted a picture of a recent post from Trump on Truth Social where the president announced that he had recently talked with Walz over the phone in a bid to begin cooperating on the federal presence in Minnesota.

“What a ‘coincidence’ that Tim Walz called President Trump to work together on the riots only after the Signal-gate chats were exposed,” O’Handley wrote, referencing Higby’s posts. “The rope is tightening on Minnesota fraud.”

Despite these influencers framing the protests as unnatural and engineered, saying that the protesters are driven by money from shadowy donors, the most recent polling data reflects widespread dissatisfaction with ICE. According to polling data from YouGov in the aftermath of federal agents killing Alex Pretti, more Americans support abolishing ICE than oppose it.

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