FBI Grooming Terrorists

About

FBI Grooming Terrorists refers to a series of memes and parody posts that postulate the conspiracy theory that the FBI directly grooms potential terrorists or extremists and convinces them to commit domestic terrorism such as bombings and mass shootings. The memes are similar to glowposting and fedposting but often take a different, more direct tone with calling out the agency as responsible for alleged terrorist acts.

Origin

As early as the mid-2010s, reports of FBI agents allegedly grooming or encouraging terrorists began to receive press coverage, such as an article from The Intercept^[6] on March 16th, 2015. On November 29th, 2017, CNN reporter Lisa Rose^[1] then published an article telling the story of a man named Khalil Abu Rayyan, who at the age of 21 was approached online by two different women, with the second one reportedly pressuring him into talking about and committing a shooting attack in Detroit.

This news story and others like it would later become the real-world foundation for memes depicting FBI agents trying to catfish men online and convince them to act out. For example, on March 4th, 2021, X user @SerotoninIsaac^[2] purportedly used a Facemorph to appear female and posted it to their X account, which was quickly called out by another X user as being a fedpost with intent to entrap people (shown below, left and right).

Spread

Memes and references to federal agents posing as females online continued to be made, with their volume typically increasing after shooting tragedies occurred, particularly those embroiled in conspiracy theories. On July 6th, 2022, Memedroid user Trollmahn^[3] uploaded a variation of the For The Better, Right? meme using the phrase "known to the FBI," which was said in reference to the Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz (shown below).

Memes referencing the story and acting from the POV of someone who was groomed by the FBI began to rise in early 2023.^[5] For example, on January 6th, 2023, iFunny user @CoveySurplus^[4] uploaded a Hold On, This Whole Operation Was Your Idea meme to the site, stating that the idea to shoot up a middle school with machine guns was planned out by the FBI officer pretending to be his friend (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References