From Yahoo:
“Capitol
riot was false-flag operation by leftists, Trump backers claim, with no basis”
As an angry mob
stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, vandalizing offices, occupying the House
and Senate chambers and sending legislators and staffers running for cover,
several of President Trump’s key allies knew just where to cast the blame: on
the loose-knit movement of left-wing agitators known as antifa, a favorite
bogeyman of Trump and the right wing for the last several years. They were
undeterred by video showing rioters in MAGA hats, carrying Trump 2020 flags,
descending on the Capitol from a rally near the White House where Trump himself
had exhorted them to disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes submitted
by the states, the final step in certifying Joe Biden’s victory. To them, that
just showed that the insurrection was actually a leftist false-flag operation
meant to embarrass the president’s peaceful supporters. One of the first to
push this narrative was Rep. Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican and part of a
small group of Trump loyalists who’d pledged to challenge the Electoral College
results from several states during Wednesday’s joint session of Congress in an
ill-fated final attempt to undo Trump’s defeat. “Rumor: ANTIFA fascists in
backwards MAGA hats,” Brooks tweeted from the locked-down Capitol where he was
taking cover from the mob. “Time will tell what truth is.” Yet it was Brooks
himself, addressing Trump supporters at the rally that morning, who had
dramatically removed his camouflage cap and replaced it with a bright red one
emblazoned with the words “Fire Pelosi” and urged fellow Republicans in
Congress to back the effort to overturn the election results, declaring, “Today
is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.” When the
House eventually reconvened Wednesday evening, one of those colleagues, the
firebrand Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, declared on the floor that he had seen
“some pretty compelling evidence from a facial-recognition company showing that
some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters,
they were masquerading as Trump supporters, and in fact were members of the
violent terrorist group antifa.”
Antifa, which is
short for antifascist, refers to a loosely connected movement of militant
left-wing activists who believe that using violence is justified in fighting
white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other fascist or racist groups. Extremism
experts and federal law enforcement officials have made clear that the threat
of violence from white supremacists and other domestic extremist groups far
outweighs that posed by anti-fascist activists. But Trump and his supporters
have turned “antifa” into an all-purpose slur against any left-wing protests or
demonstrations. This has the advantage that since antifa barely exists in any
organized form, as FBI Director Chris Wray has testified, there is no one
speaking for it to dispute or correct the charge. Over the summer, Trump sought
to baselessly blame these “radical leftists” for any acts of violence or
property damage that occurred during the largely peaceful wave of nationwide
protests against police brutality and racism, and even vowed to formally label
antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, despite having no legal authority
to do so. As Trump’s supporters began converging on Washington Tuesday, Trump
appeared to start laying the groundwork to blame antifa for any unlawful
activities that might take place the next day. “Antifa is a Terrorist
Organization, stay out of Washington. Law enforcement is watching you very
closely!” he tweeted Tuesday evening. Not long after, the White House issued a
(largely performative) memo calling on the secretary of state to consider designating
the amorphous group as foreign terrorists.
Supporter of
Trump Lawyer and Trump ally Lin
Wood, who has become a devout proponent of the president’s baseless and
conspiratorial voter fraud allegations, tweeted out several pixelated photos
and screenshots Wednesday afternoon that he touted as proof that “Trump
supporters are peaceful” and antifa was responsible for storming the U.S.
Capitol. One particularly egregious example featured an edited split screen of
two images which he described as “Indisputable photographic evidence that
antifa violently broke into Congress today to inflict harm & do damage. NOT
@realDonaldTrump supporters.” Quite the opposite. In one photo is a man
who had already been widely identified as Jake Angeli, a well-known promoter of
the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory. The other shows Matthew Heimbach, a
prominent figure in the white nationalist movement, with his arm around another
man. While the photo of Angeli appears to have at least been taken during
Wednesday’s siege on Congress, a reverse image search of the Heimbach photo
suggests it was pulled from a 2018 post on an antifascist blog dedicated to exposing
neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Several others have latched onto the
false-flag narrative, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton,
televangelist and Trump surrogate Pastor Mark Burns, and Fox News political
analyst Brit Hume, as well as some popular QAnon promoters with large Twitter
followings. Franklin Graham, a leading Trump supporter among evangelicals, also
raised the specter of antifa, without evidence. Zack Vorhies, a
self-described former YouTube and Google engineer turned whistleblower, who
according to Vice is also a QAnon fan and anti-vaxxer, posted an interview with
a man outside the Capitol who claims to have overheard antifa activists
“dressed as Trump supporters” discussing how to make Trump fans look bad before
smashing a window. The video had received over 100,000 views in just four
hours. Of course, it’s impossible to know the identity and ideology of
every single person who participated in Wednesday’s violence. But for weeks,
the president has been urging his supporters from around the country to descend
on Washington for what he promised would be a “wild” day of protests. At
least three different pro-Trump groups obtained permits for protests that were
scheduled to take place throughout the day Wednesday, while many others
promoted the demonstrations online and coordinated caravans of Trump fans
traveling to D.C. to show their support.
Among those who
had publicly promised to gather in Washington on Wednesday were right-wing
militia groups like the Oath Keepers and members of the Proud Boys, a
self-described male chauvinist group with white nationalist ties that has been
involved in a number of violent confrontations with counterprotesters and
police at previous protests in D.C. and around the country. In fact, Proud Boys
leader Enrique Tarrio last week suggested that members of the far-right group
would dress in all black for the occasion, a look typically associated with
members of antifa. “[T]he Proud Boys will turn out in record numbers on Jan 6th
but, this time, with a twist,” Tarrio wrote on Parler. “We will be incognito
and we will spread across downtown DC in smaller teams.” While others were
trying to divert the blame for the chaos that took place on Wednesday, Tarrio
and others seemed to embrace it. “This is no longer Washington DC...This is the
City of The People of the United States of America!” Tarrio posted on Parler
this afternoon as images of the besieged Capitol building began flooding social
media and TV news. “Come and Take it!” Tarrio, who was arrested in D.C. earlier
this week on charges stemming from an earlier incident of vandalism at a
historically Black church, and ordered by a judge to stay away from the city,
directed his followers to another account that appeared to be posting live
photos and videos from inside the Capitol. A separate account for @TheProudBoys
posted a photo of a massive crowd of Trump supporters in D.C. with the caption
“Doesn't look like they're destroying the capital. Looks like they're
liberating it. God bless America and all her patriots.” Another Parler account
promoting the “Stop the Steal” slogan used by Trump devotees protesting the
election posted, “BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR DEMOCRATS.”
^ And the live
video of Trump telling his supporters to go to the Capital Building before the
deadly Coup Attempt and then the video of Trump praising his supporters'
violent actions at the Capital Building afterwards is all fake-news? I don’t
think so. ^
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