Revealed: how California police chased a nonexistent 'antifa bus'

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/23/revealed-california-police-antifa-misinformation

Authorities in rural northern counties spread misinformation and launched aircraft surveillance in response to false rumors about antifa ‘infiltrators’, according to records obtained by the Guardian

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The actions of officials in Shasta and Humboldt counties last summer were outlined in internal documents obtained through a public records request by Property of the People, a not-for-profit transparency group, and shared with the Guardian. They show how officers in these rural counties, known for weed farms and hiking and overwhelmingly white, were swiftly duped by unfounded allegations about “Antifa buses” threatening to “infiltrate” the community as the United States wrestled with the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that sprung up in the aftermath.

The records also show how the agencies’ response to those unsubstantiated allegations helped spread misinformation rooted in online conspiracy theories. The files were particularly troubling, experts said, because antifa conspiracy theories have inspired armed rightwing vigilantes to organize in response, sometimes with violent demonstrations.

Unverified warnings about antifa threats and buses of leftwing activists making their way to various protest sites were all over the internet on 1 June, amplified by rightwing accounts, including Donald Trump Jr’s Instagram account. Already that day, NBC News reported that at least some of the rumors were started by a white nationalist group, posing on Twitter as “antifa” and threatening to “move into the residential areas” of “white hoods” and “take what’s ours”.
On the morning of 2 June, however, Honsal, the Humboldt county sheriff, emailed staff to say he had “confirmed with CHP that the bus is currently in Redding” and that CHP had a “surveillance team” monitoring. At the same time, journalists, disinformation experts and some law enforcement officials were debunking the antifa bus rumors across the US.

Still, at a press conference on 4 June, Honsal publicly raised concerns about antifa threats, saying his agency had “substantiated law enforcement reports” that “antifa did have people in buses” and suggesting the groups “want to disrupt things and want to cause violence”. The sheriff, records show, soon received emails from a resident asking why he was continuing to make such claims “without a shred of evidence”, along with questions from a county supervisor about his comments.