How Pro-Trump Forces Pushed a Lie About Antifa at the Capitol Riot

[Generic Other]

If Republican members of Congress were truly concerned about democracy, they’d be doing everything in their power to quash Trump’s “big lie,” not continuing to amplify more lies about Trump’s attack on democracy.

Link to tweet

At 1:51 p.m. on Jan. 6, a right-wing radio host named Michael D. Brown wrote on Twitter that rioters had breached the United States Capitol — and immediately speculated about who was really to blame. “Antifa or BLM or other insurgents could be doing it disguised as Trump supporters,” Mr. Brown wrote, using shorthand for Black Lives Matter. “Come on, man, have you never heard of psyops?”

Only 13,000 people follow Mr. Brown on Twitter, but his tweet caught the attention of another conservative pundit: Todd Herman, who was guest-hosting Rush Limbaugh’s national radio program. Minutes later, he repeated Mr. Brown’s baseless claim to Mr. Limbaugh’s throngs of listeners: “It’s probably not Trump supporters who would do that. Antifa, BLM, that’s what they do. Right?”

What happened over the next 12 hours illustrated the speed and the scale of a right-wing disinformation machine primed to seize on a lie that served its political interests and quickly spread it as truth to a receptive audience. The weekslong fiction about a stolen election that President Donald J. Trump pushed to his millions of supporters had set the stage for a new and equally false iteration: that left-wing agitators were responsible for the attack on the Capitol...egged on only minutes earlier by a president who falsely denounced a rigged election and exhorted his followers to fight for justice — history was being rewritten in real time.

Within hours, a narrative built on rumors and partisan conjecture had reached the Twitter megaphones of pro-Trump politicians. By day’s end, Laura Ingraham and Sarah Palin had shared it with millions of Fox News viewers, and Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida had stood on the ransacked House floor and claimed that many rioters “were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.”

Nearly two months after the attack, the claim that antifa was involved has been repeatedly debunked by federal authorities, but it has hardened into gospel among hard-line Trump supporters, by voters and sanctified by elected officials in the party. More than half of Trump voters in a Suffolk University/USA Today poll said that the riot was “mostly an antifa-inspired attack.” At Senate hearings last week focused on the security breakdown at the Capitol, Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, repeated the falsehood that “fake Trump protesters” fomented the violence.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/us/politics/antifa-conspiracy-capitol-riot.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

[Faux pas]

1. Kickin' with disgust!

[Hugh_Lebowski]

2. Cult45 lives in a carefully constructed and curated fantasy world ...

After 5 years of watching their Cult Leader blatantly lie and gaslight the world, without significant consequences (hell, these fucking idiots even think he won the election), they've all decided they may as well do the same thing.

Truth, Reality, and Facts have no values in the worlds of any of these people.

It's not only sad to witness, but it's dangerous to our Democracy. As demonstrated during the events of the very day under discussion (1/6/2021).

[TheRealNorth]

4. The cult is a ticking time bomb....

And we should prepare for the eventuality that it could blow.

[gratuitous]

3. "How pro-Trump forces pushed a lie"

It was really simple. All they had to do was concoct the lie and then repeat it. The popular media took it from there. Every time some nutjob repeated the lie, the Times and the Post and MSNBC and CNN all dutifully reported that "Wingnut X said," and the lie replicated itself, grew larger, and became more embedded in the public consciousness. Oh, there would every now and then be someone who meekly noted that it wasn't true and there was no evidence to support it, but they didn't call it a lie, and they surely didn't call Wingnut X a liar.

Eight weeks later, the Times boldly reports that the whole narrative is a lie. But the promulgators of the lie still aren't called liars by the Times. Folks like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Graham, Sarah Palin and Matt Gaetz are all just passive vessels through whom the misinformation is repeated. None of them are called liars, because how could the Times possibly know what's in their hearts, even while recognizing that the lie serves conservative political interests and is gobbled up by a receptive audience.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

5. Spot on ... and this timidity and passivity needs to end, post-haste

... or our Democracy will.

If 1/6 wasn't an effective wake-up call regarding the desperate need for EVERYone to shut-down and call out these liars at EVERY opportunity ... Then I frankly have little hope our Democratic Republic's continued survival.