When far-right white nationalist Jake Lang rolled up to a peaceful religious procession in Dearborn, Michigan earlier this month with a sign calling to “deport 100 million” Muslims, he clearly didn’t plan on making any friends.

Predictably, the repeat-agitator of Michigan’s Arab-American community — who served four years in prison for his role in the January 6 insurrection — got into a scuffle with a small but angry crowd, resulting in three arrests.

In other words, he came looking for a fight, and he got one. But for Lang and his supporters on the far right, the fracas was proof positive of the “Islamification of America,” and Dearborn’s large Arab community made an obvious target.

In response to the tussle, Lang announced a “Christian Crusader March on Dearborn,” using an AI-generated poster depicting Christian paladins drawing swords and charging at a crowd of Muslims (the Crusades were a centuries-long series of religious conquests by Western European Christians involving mass slaughter of thousands of Muslims, Jews, and Orthodox Christians.)

“CRUSADE OR BE REPLACED!” the post fumed.

On Facebook, word of Lang’s “crusader march” spread like wildfire, manifesting in a disturbing outpouring of posts cheering on the racist cause — and in some cases, acts of violence against Muslim Americans.

“Okay Michigan y’all need to quit being a bunch of f****** pussies and do something about Dearborn,” wrote one Lang supporter in a Facebook post. “Let’s not get it twisted this is an attack on American soil… me personally they come to my town tried to come on my land and do that they would definitely leave in a f****** body bag.”

As the story of Lang’s ousting spread — which he outrageously exaggerated as a “stoning,” referring to a method of capital punishment — it became warped into a fictionalized tale of an innocent man having been killed by angry Muslims. The peaceful march, stripped of context, was now depicted as a violent anti-Christian riot.

“They stoned a christian to death that had shown up at a Muslim antichristian protest and turned around and tried to keep it hush hush from the media,” wrote an Indiana resident in a Facebook comment. (In reality, nobody was killed, and Lang’s attackers were swiftly arrested.)

As fate would have it, the timing of the outrage coincided with the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a patriotic gathering of hundreds of thousands of bike enthusiasts in South Dakota. Before long, Lang’s original call to action was drowned out by a torrent of AI-mangled posts calling on Sturgis attendees to ride to Dearborn and put an end to the axiomatic Muslim madness.

“So apparently it’s only 665 miles to Dearborn, Michigan to meet up with the bikers rolling out of Sturgis for the anti-Islamic protest,” read one AI-generated post on Facebook.

An anti-Muslim video featuring AI-generated imagery of Dearborn’s police chief, Issa Shahin, racked up over 600 angry comments calling on patriots to “take back Michigan” and “f**k the Muslims.”

“We have had enough of these cockroaches that have infested our beautiful country!!!” read one comment underneath the reel. “Time to remove each and every moslim [sic] man, woman and child and ship them out of our our country!!! Before they are able to turn into their thrid [sic] world crap hole !!!”

Predictably, the combined Sturgis-Dearborn callout was like catnip for Facebook’s most racist users, who made no secret about their Islamophobic intentions.

“How much more scum is hiding in dearborn? Dearborn is harboring terrorists and criminals,” one user raged. “Dearborn ‘citizens’ are all here fraudulently. We are coming. The invasion through infiltration. Stops. Aug 18.”

“What’s going on [in] Dearborn is horrible. Personally I hope when they roll up them riders are strapped to the teeth,” another commenter wrote, before encouraging violence: “Not a single one gives a toss about you… and I think that’s worth eliminating.”

Another AI-generated post shows what appear to be robotic crusaders brandishing guns alongside a “call to arms” to gather in Dearborn.

Reached with specific examples of posts calling for violence in Michigan, Facebook’s parent company Meta referred us to their policy on hateful conduct, which states that Meta “protect[s] refugees, migrants, immigrants, and asylum seekers from the most severe attacks… though we do allow commentary on and criticism of immigration policies.”

Meta appears to have deleted some of the posts we flagged, though it left others up, including the one claiming a man had been stoned to death and the one referring to Muslims as “cockroaches.”

The viral hate speech and calls for violence harken back to similar events in Facebook’s history when rampant misinformation, boosted by the platform’s engagement-driven algorithms, have galvanized reactionary users to take up violence. There’s January 6, the far-right uprising fueled by rampant misinformation spreading on Facebook (ironically resulting in Lang’s aforementioned arrest, though he was later pardoned by Donald Trump during his second term). And on the extreme end, there was the Rohingya genocide in 2017, in which racist content proliferating on Facebook resulted in an explosion of ethnic violence against Muslims in Myanmar.

Given that all the drama is currently unfolding in digital space, it’s difficult to imagine how the actual rally will play out on August 18. Regardless, the consequences reach far beyond one Islamophobic rally — as the newly radicalized will likely continue spreading their bigotry for generations to come.

Have you seen more hateful AI-generated content on social media? Email us: tips@futurism.com.

More on AI misinformation: Google’s AI Is Telling Users That Flock Cameras Are Filled With Valuable Gold and Copper