'Civil war' post by right-wing radio host roundly mocked on Twitter

It all started with a tweet.

"BREAKING," conspiracy theorist and radio personality Alex Jones tweeted this past Sunday. "Democrats Plan To Launch Civil War On July 4th."

The "Infowars" host announced that Democrats, in alliance with anti-fascist protesters and billionaire philanthropist and liberal donor George Soros, had been planning to overthrow President Donald Trump since his 2016 presidential election.

"This is it," Jones warned in a livestream that logged nearly three-quarters of a million views. "The globalists see July 4th as their new D-Day against us, and a lot of stuff is going to start then."

Jones claimed to have seen recent indicators that the alleged effort was coming to a head around Independence Day, though he gave no specific reason that a "civil war" or any other potential actions would initiate on the Fourth of July.

The radio personality has a history of incendiary and false rhetoric. In 2016, Jones helped promulgate the fictitious "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory -- which falsely alleged that a child sexual assault ring was being run by figures tied to the Democratic party. He later apologized.

He is also being sued by families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims after calling the massacre fake.

But social media users see mostly humor in his latest broadside. The hashtags #secondcivilwar and #secondcivilwarletters, comprised of mostly mockery of Jones' warning, have generated nearly 400,000 tweets, according to analytics company Spredfast. The hashtags have rapidly increased in frequency in the 24 hours leading up to Wednesday's holiday.

Some users made fun of the gap between Jones' martial rhetoric and stereotypes of liberals as coastal elites who enjoy high-end coffee drinks and electric cars, while others, including model Chrissy Teigen, joked about the difficulty of coordinating the mass effort.

While liberals online were having a lot of fun with the hashtag, it wasn't just them partaking. Self-proclaimed Trump supporters also joked about a second civil war, which they claimed Democrats would quickly lose.

Social media users also jokingly imagined letters home from the battle. Comedian Patton Oswalt and even former Office of Government Ethics head Walter Shaub got in on the #secondcivilwarletters hashtag.

Meanwhile, a few predicted that the real division of Jones' warning would be resolved not in any Fourth of July junta, but at the ballot box on November: