antifa
---
fox trifecta = bad trinity?
see TWO AND THREE THUGS ON A PLANE
see mohawk formula/ outside /paid protester agitator
6/20 officially conspiracy theory, spread by social media
see active measures 820
bak 820 html laureate
---
527071ac-f37b-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story
wapo 9 2020
short for “anti-fascist,” the label “antifa” gained notoriety in 2017 over the course of several high-profile conflicts between left-wing protesters and the far right in Berkeley, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Charlottesville; and elsewhere. But antifa has been a staple of radical politics across Europe, Latin America and beyond for decades. Even in the United States, this tradition of militant antifascism has a long history under the banner of the Anti-Racist Action network. Despite this history, and a litany of journalistic “explainers” over the past three years, antifa remains largely misunderstood. Here are some of the most popular myths.
Myth No. 1
Antifa is a single organization.
On May 31, President Trump tweeted, “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.” Attorney General William P. Barr echoed his sentiments by arguing that antifa is “a revolutionary group that is interested in some form of socialism.” Right-wing figure Chuck Callesto even claimed that Sen. Rand Paul intended to “SUBPOENA ANTIFA plane records, hotel records, all travel records & all funding.”
But Trump cannot designate “ANTIFA” as a terrorist organization because antifa is not an organization. Rather, it is a politics of revolutionary opposition to the far right. There are antifa groups, such as Rose City Antifa in Portland and NYC Antifa, just as there are feminist groups, such as Code Pink. But neither antifa nor feminism is itself an organization. You cannot subpoena an idea or a movement. That’s not to say that antifa doesn’t exist, of course. Antifa is “very real,” as Rep. Jim Jordan has argued, but not in the monolithic, hierarchical way in which he and many other Americans are accustomed to thinking of political associations.
Myth No. 2
Antifa masterminds violence at Black Lives Matter protests.
:{:{Police stations were burned, squad cars were destroyed, and property was damaged across the country after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. Days later, Trump was quick to blame the violence on “ANTIFA and the Radical Left}:.”
The president also promoted a far-right conspiracy theory that a 75-year-old racial justice protester in Buffalo who was shoved to the ground by police, fracturing his skull, “could be an ANTIFA provocateur.” Rudolph W. Giuliani concurred, claiming that “antifa sprang into action and in a flash hijacked the protests into vicious, brutal riots.”}:
Opinion | Trump's 'law and order' tendencies are straight out of Nixon's 1960s
As President Trump threatens to unleash the military on American cities roiled in civil unrest, it's clear that he's embracing his inner Nixon. (Video: The Washington Post)
But neither the Justice Department, the FBI nor the press have found evidence to corroborate the grandiose allegation that the most widespread and significant political upheaval this country has seen in half a century was masterminded by one shadowy organization. Not even in Portland. Antifa groups are simply not numerous enough, nor their memberships large enough, nor their politics influential enough to have achieved such massive destruction. Militant anti-fascist groups heavily vet potential members to prevent infiltration from law enforcement or the far right. Some don’t open their ranks to new members at all. Significant investments of time and energy are expected. Such high barriers to entry necessarily keep numbers low.
Myth No. 3
Antifa is affiliated with the Democratic Party.
In August, a fake antifa website began to redirect users to Joe Biden’s campaign site. Though it was clearly a ploy to associate the Democratic Party with antifa, right wingers seized upon the apparent conspiracy. Speaking about the Democrats that same day, Trump claimed that “in my book, it’s virtually part of their campaign, antifa.” According to Ann Coulter, the Democrats are “the Antifa Party.” And columnists have argued that “antifa riots may be part of [a] Democrat power grab” or even that “antifa is the militant wing of the Democratic Party.”
Not only is there no evidence to support such allegations — which are more of an effort to associate liberalism with lawlessness than anything else — but Democratic leaders have routinely condemned antifa and political violence more broadly. For example, in 2017 Nancy Pelosi denounced “the violent actions of people calling themselves antifa” after destructive protests against right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos in Berkeley. When a reporter recently asked Joe Biden, “Do you condemn antifa?,” he responded, “Yes, I do.”
Nor is there any antifa love affair with the Democrats. The vast majority of antifa militants are radical anti-capitalists who oppose the Democratic Party. Some may hold their noses and vote for Biden in November, but many are anarchists who don’t vote at all.
Myth No. 4
Antifa is funded by liberal financiers like George Soros.
Right-wing conspiracy theorists have alleged that egalitarian protest movements, such as Occupy Wall Street or the women’s marches, have been secretly funded for many years by liberal financiers like George Soros. Trump is among those who have accused Soros of funding antifa, while other conservatives, such as Rep. Ken Buck, have dog-whistled this anti-Semitic trope by asking in more general terms “who is funding these violent riots.” Similarly, Rand Paul asked, after being confronted by protesters in D.C.: “Who paid for their hotel rooms? Who flew them in?”
There is no evidence that Soros or any other 1 percenter is bankrolling antifa groups. Receiving financial support from a billionaire would be anathema to their anti-capitalist politics. Like most anarchist, anti-authoritarian or radical groups, antifa organizations don’t have much money at their disposal. What they do have generally comes from members or occasional solidarity fundraisers. Unlike political parties, unions or nongovernmental organizations, they don’t require significant funds. The International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund collects small donations primarily for legal and medical support, but that hardly constitutes the moneyed boogeyman that Republicans have conjured.
Myth No. 5
Antifascists are the 'real fascists.'
Recently Barr described antifa as deploying “fascistic” tactics, and Donald Trump Jr. characterized the movement as having moved “to the book burning phase.” The Internet is awash with articles about how “antifa are the real fascists,” as the Spectator’s Toby Young put it, or the “brownshirts” of the Democratic Party, in radio host Michael Savage’s words. After Charlottesville, Trump called antifascists the “alt-left,” a term that did not stick. These portrayals are often supported by references to antifascists’ disruption of the events of their (far-right) political opponents — a strategy famously deployed by fascists.
Indeed, antifascists and fascists have one thing in common: an illiberal disdain for the confines of mainstream politics. In every other way they are worlds apart. As opposed to their far-right adversaries, antifascists are feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalists who seek to abolish prisons and police. Comparing antifascists to fascists only makes a bit of sense if one divorces the tactics from the underlying views that animate them. Such comparisons stem from the misguided horseshoe theory: that ultimately political extremes meet. But fascists are the real fascists because they pursue a fascist political agenda.
*Twitter: @Mark__Bray
Five myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.
---
aha 12 23 big three bogeyman/enemies are antifa, BLM, commies
aha recall Fox purpose is to be AGAINST Dems, and anything allied/associated with them is bad; this involves the endless outrage greivance hype fear anger machine: they are coming to get you/ coming to take away your kids, superior social status
recall provocateurs would intentionally go to left stronghold for photo- op whose only purpose is to get attn PR (which can be monetized) to trigger the libs pwn the libs, and so would catalyze a defensive reaction [ ez via socuial media ; white blood cells civic immune system, recall that nazi brownshirts cannot be unopposed.
---
ITS GOING DOWN DEPLATFORMED BY FACEBOOK B/C // ANTIFA pc CANCELLED GAGGED BY bIG tECH MEDIA BIAS bs
aha A TARGET B/C effective at early call out of bigotry, and rt/gop were in secret sympathy with them , and afraid of guilt /taint by association, or that their own racism will soon be called out?
---
duck 12 23
American Antifa: From Girl Scout to anarchist street warrior
One Antifa activist's journey, from college honors student to on-the-ground combatant, offers rare insight into this far-left movement and its motivations. Nicole Armbruster, 37, poised for a ...
Ask PolitiFact: What is antifa, and why is it all over my timeline?
Antifa counter-protesters prepare to clash with Patriot Prayer protestors during a rally in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 4, 2018. (AP) In spring 2017, antifa activists broke windows and set fires in ...
Five myths about antifa - The Washington Post
Sep 11, 2020Five myths about antifa. Perspective by Mark Bray. Mark Bray is a historian of human rights, terrorism and political radicalism in modern Europe at Rutgers University. He is the author of "Antifa ...
---
---
aha? antifa blm merge
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/fox-news-and-right-wing-media-circulate-seemingly-inauthentic-antifa-poster
pix of poster bring rocks ...
mma 1 23
protests emerged around the country following the release of police body camera footage of officers fatally beating Tyre Nichols, Fox News and other right-wing media sources promoted an “antifa poster” whose authenticity has not been proved. The poster supposedly called for protesters to “burn it all down” and bring rocks and heavy objects to riots in New York City.
The image was initially shared in a Daily Mail article, which called it “a shocking poster,” and on Twitter by user Rob O’Donnell, per disinformation researcher Caroline Orr.
On January 27, Fox News’ Jesse Watters hosted O’Donnell, who said he knows the poster was “put out by antifa” and it’s “calling for protests and riots at all police precincts across the city, to bring rocks, to bring pipes, to bring box cutters,” saying it’s “circulating in the underground of New York City.”
Video
In the next hour, Fox host Tucker Carlson showed the poster, using it to suggest there is “an organized militia encouraging organized violence across the United States of America.”
Carlson’s guest during the segment, former Detroit Police Chief James Craig, told Carlson the police should have “zero tolerance” for antifa protesters and chastised “Biden’s DOJ” for doing “absolutely nothing” about antifa, who he said are “threatening cities across this country.”
Carlson also suggested the poster was evidence of a “criminal conspiracy” by antifa.
Carlson’s commentary was circulated by right-wing blogs The Daily Caller and The Gateway Pundit, and FoxNews.com promoted his segment with Craig.
Video 1 27
With the poster on screen, Fox correspondent Christina Coleman saidon The Ingraham Anglethat “antifa put out this bulletin, calling for violence, even though Tyre's own family has called for peace.”
The poster was also picked up by other right-wing outlets.
On Newsmax, host Lidia Curanaj said “a police source” sent her “a flyer that showed that antifa was organizing throughout the country” but did not show it on screen. She speculated that “a lot of times these horrible incidents, like what happened to Tyre Nichols, are amplified and used by other organizations in order to achieve their political agenda.” Later on the network, Curanaj repeated that the protests must have been planned ahead of time, accused the protests of having “professional agitators,” and called on the media to “do their due diligence and actually investigate” the situation.
The poster also appeared on far-right website The Post Millennial, in an article titled “Antifa vows to 'burn it all down' in NYC following death of Tyre Nichols,” which cites the Daily Mail as having obtained the poster. Neo-Nazi collaborator and Twitter personality Jack Posobiec shared the article on Twitter.
Right-wing commentary siteTownhallshared O’Donnell’s tweet, including the image in a Friday night piece warning about “potential riots” in Memphis.
Newsmax’s Justine Brooke Murray shared the poster on Twitter, writing, “ANTIFA terrorists plan to burn down New York tonight. They’re blasting THIS out.”
Right-wing radio host David Webb on Twitter claimed the image showed that “violence is not a solution but it is a possibility.”
---
---
mma 920
fox News prime-time shows spent over 3 hours displaying violent imagery in August
Fox’s prime-time evening shows -- Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity, and The Ingraham Angle -- spent more than 3 hours displaying violent imagery throughout August, often using images that were days or months old, as they discussed the ongoing protests against police brutality across America.
In Fox News’ 3 hours and 15 minutes barrage of violent imagery the network included images of looting, crime scenes, acts of violence, fires, and the aftermath of violence or destruction. Of the 252 instances of violent imagery, 81 instances included images of burning objects.
At least 50 times, Fox displayed images or videos that were over five days old. And on more than 20 occasions, the images or videos shown in August were from May or June.
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/its-about-intimidation-trump-allies-suggest-using-federal-racketeering-laws-to-bully-anti-racism-activists/
no lnx
President Donald Trump and his supporters have been consistently disingenuous and misleading in their attacks on protesters, describing antifa as “terrorists” and glossing over the fact that thousands of Black Lives Matter activists all over the United States have been totally peaceful.Amplifying Trump’s message, Chad Wolf — acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — has suggested possibly using anti-racketeering laws to go after left-wing protesters. And reporter Kelly Weill examines that suggestion from a legal/civil rights standpoint in a Daily Beast article published on September 3.
“Can the United States government really use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, mostly known as a weapon the feds use to target mob bosses, to successfully prosecute protesters, as Wolf implied?,” Weill writes. “It wouldn’t be easy, legal experts say. But the chatter signals a potent new effort — bolstered by extra-deranged conspiracy theories — to crack down on protesters, and may already be having its desired effect: freaking people out.”
When Wolf was interviewed by Fox News’Tucker Carlson on Monday night, August 31, the far-right Carlson asked him, “Why haven’t we seen the leaders of antifa and BLM arrested and charged with conspiracy under, say, RICO, like the heads of mafia families were?” — to which the acting DHS secretary responded, “Well, this is something that I have talked to (Attorney General William Barr) personally about. I know that they are working on it.” And Wolf told Carlson that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating “the heads of those organizations.”
Weill notes that in July, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas wrote a letter to Barr and the FBI calling for an investigation of antifa “under the RICO Act.” But attorney Ken White, a former federal prosecutor, is dismissive of politicians who throw the word “RICO” around casually.
White told the Daily Beast that the RICO Act “was useful, and still is sometimes, at taking down genuine organized crime. The problem is that (RICO) sounds badass so people want to use it on everything. People basically use it like an angry emoji…. I think 98% of the time it’s invoked, it’s more emotional or performative than it is substantive.”
Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights And Dissent, stressed that antifa is not an actual organization. Gibbons told the Beast, “When (Wolf) says they’re looking at the leaders of Black Lives Matter for RICO charges, who do they mean? Do they mean the board of trustees on the actual 501(c)(3) (nonprofit) organization? Do they mean the three individuals who are credited with coming up with the hashtag? These are pretty decentralized movements…. How are we going to subpoena the hotel records of antifa? It’s a nonsensical proposition, like if I said I’m going to subpoena the hotel records of feminism.”
However, Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, argued that even if RICO charges didn’t hold up in the courts, they could still have a chilling effect on protesters. Patel told the Beast, “One of the things this administration has tried to do is label protesters as part of some criminal organization, because once you have the idea of an organization, then that makes it a lot easier to go after people who are related. You might not necessarily have to get the individual person who might have committed a crime; you can actually treat the entire group as being dangerous or criminal. And that gives you a lot more leverage in going after its members.”
Gibbons said of threats to use the RICO Act against demonstrators, “It’s about intimidation. If you’re a normal person and you’re disgusted by police racism but you think, ‘If I go out and protest, is the FBI going to open a file on me?,’ you might think twice about doing so.”
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/this-ex-trump-official-is-exposing-the-presidents-complicity-in-far-right-terrorism
Alex Henderson September 2, 2020
no lnx
Many of President Donald Trump’s allies have downplayed the threat that far-right white nationalist and white supremacist groups pose from a domestic terrorism standpoint. But conservative Republican Elizabeth Neumann, who served as assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat prevention at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is warning that such groups do, in fact, pose a major threat in the United States — and Trump, according to Neumann, is inciting such groups.
Neumann, who voted for Trump in 2016 and served in DHS under his administration, recently came out in support of former Vice President Joe Biden in an ad by Republican Voters Against Trump. And during an interview with National Public Radio’s Steve Inskeep, she stressed that Trump is encouraging extremist groups when he should be condemning them.
Neumann told NPR:
If you had a very clear voice at the top, from the president, from other senior leaders in the Republican Party, denouncing this and warning conservatives — warning Republicans — that these groups are trying to recruit you based on things that might sound like a typical conservative belief, but behind it is this insidious, ugly, evil thing, if we had more clear voices talking about it — it would somewhatinoculate people from that recruitment and that radicalization. But instead, we have the opposite effect. We have the president not only pretty much refusing to condemn, but throwing fuel on the fire, creating opportunities for more recruitment through his rhetoric.
…
He uses rhetoric to scare people. This is a known psychological tactic that if you get people to fear, they tend to follow you to the solution of ‘How are we going to save ourselves?’ And his answer is, ‘It’s me. If you vote for me, I will save you,’ … Well, for some people, the way that they think that they need to protect themselves, it’s more than just a vote for a president. It’s ‘let me go kill people.’
One of the worst terrorist attacks of the Trump era occurred on August 3, 2019, when a white nationalist gunman killed more than 20 people in El Paso, Texas, targeting his victims simply because most of them were Latino. Neumann, during the NPR interview, argued that the attacker was influenced by Trump’s rhetoric.
“When you see the El Paso attacker, his manifesto was citing language and rhetoric that comes from the president’s campaign rallies about an invasion from Mexico and how we’ve got to protect our country,” Neumann told NPR.
She compared the growth of the dangerous far-right movement to the development of ISIS:
“They borrowed from ISIS’s playbook and they learned how to radicalize people online,” she says. In the post-Sept. 11 United States, domestic extremists also adopted an emphasis on smaller attacks that could be carried out quickly with limited planning. What Neumann saw was “the pivot to bring your own weapon to the fight, use whatever you have: a knife, a gun, a vehicle, vehicle ramming,” she says. “We’ve seen a number of vehicle rammings this summer, in fact.”
But the White House was reluctant to name the threat directly.
“[If] we use the term ‘domestic terrorism’ or we talk about the white supremacist language, that seems to derail things at the White House,” she said.
Trump and his allies have been making the baseless claim that the Antifa movement is a source of domestic terrorism. But Antifa, for all their militant rhetoric, do not engage in or encourage the type of attacks favored by either white nationalist and white supremacist groups or radical Islamist groups like al-Qaeda, Boko Haram or ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria).
Neumann told NPR: “If you look at the people that have been arrested for” acts of violence recently, “by and large…. it’s the Boogaloo movement, or it’s an association with QAnon. It’s the right side of the spectrum. It is not Antifa….. The threat of domestic terrorism is not from Antifa. It is from these right-wing movements.”
==
==
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/20/facebook-bans-antifascist-pages/
oN WEDNESDAY, Facebook announced an expansion of its “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy,” removing or restricting hundreds of pages associated with groups that it claims promote violence. Nearly 800 QAnon groups, committed to pernicious disinformation and potentially deadly conspiracy theories, have been removed. Facebook also shut down the pages of far-right militias, like the New Mexico Civil Guard, an armed vigilante organization, whose leaders sport swastika tattoos.
:{:{}:
}:
Alongside groups openly committed to genocidal white supremacy, which constitute a very real threat to Black and Indigenous communities, as well as other people of color, Facebook also shut down the pages of numerous antifascist, anti-capitalist news, organizing, and information sites. The move follows a pattern now well-established by the Trump administration — and unchallenged by most every mainstream media outlet — that draws indefensible false equivalences between organized, racist fascists, and the antifascists who vigorously oppose them.
Among the pages removed were those of antifascist news and research site, It’s Going Down, a media platform that publishes news, analysis, and reports on social struggles, as well as investigative work to expose white supremacist and neo-Nazi networks. Crimethinc, a bastion of left-wing, anarchist publishing and thought since the 1990s, saw its Facebook page removed too. The pages of groups organizing around the ongoing and potent antiracist uprisings were also shut down, including the PNW Youth Liberation Front, a network of youth collectives in the Northwest committed to direct action protest.
"Lumping anarchists and anti-fascists together with far-right militias who explicitly support the current administration is a strategic move to muddy the issue,” said a statement from Crimethinc in response to the bans. “This is the same operation that William Barr” — the attorney general — “performed in creating a Department of Justice task force focused on ‘anti-government extremists’ that targets self-proclaimed fascists and anti-fascists alike. In the case of the Department of Justice, this enables them to point to far-right and militia attacks in order to demand resources with which to crack down on those who are on the front lines of defending communities against such attacks.”
Both rhetorically and through specific policies, the government has obfuscated and downplayed the threat of white supremacist extremism, while sensationalizing the risks posed by the far left.
With its latest bans, Facebook is following this same playbook.
The demonization of antifascists has become a centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s reelection propaganda, which functions both to criminalize dissent and delegitimize Black liberation struggle.Following the intolerable events of the Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, Trump famously praised “very fine” members of the white supremacist coalition and blamed “both sides” for the murderous far-right violence that occurred — a stance that’s since been crystallized in his policies.
Facebook’s decision to treat leftist social justice platforms as equivalent to racist militia groups is merely an extension of the government’s position. “For months, Donald Trump has demanded this crackdown in a series of social media posts explicitly blaming anarchists and anti-fascists for the countrywide wave of protests precipitated by persistent police violence in the United States,” said the Crimethinc statement.
EARLIER THIS MONTH, as I wrote,Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, chaired a farcical Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on “stopping anarchist violence.” The senator repeatedly chastised Democrats for failing to condemn “antifa” for a murder that was in fact carried out by the far right — and refused to be corrected. Both It’s Going Down and Crimethinc were mentioned during the hearing, within baseless overtures on the threat of the far left.
In the three decades since Crimethinc’s founding, the Facebook ban is “the first thing like this that has occurred,” said a participant in the collective, who asked for anonymity out of concern for far-right retaliation and state scrutiny. Of course, none of the antifascist groups removed by Facebook expected any better from the social media leviathan. “We ultimately aren’t surprised by this move and personally all hate Facebook,” the It’s Going Down Twitter account said, noting that it was nonetheless a “vehicle to connect with people.”
At stake is not the moral standing of Mark Zuckerburg’s turpitudinous monopoly, but rather the further entrenching of a false equivalence, which stifles antifascist dissent at a time of emboldened state and movement fascism.
Related
Leaked Documents Show Police Knew Far-Right Extremists Were the Real Threat at Protests, Not “Antifa”
It bears repeating, ad nauseam, that the far right has carried out 329 murders in the last three decades; none have been attributed to antifa.Between 2009 and 2018, white supremacist and far-right extremists were responsible for 73 percent of extremist murders in the U.S. And that’s not even to mention the state-sanctioned, racist killings carried out by the police.
There’s no doubt that a number of the leftist platforms removed in the Facebook sweep advocate for disruptive dissent and protest. Antifa practice certainly involves a willingness to physically confront organized white supremacists in the streets. But Facebook’s bans, echoing Trump’s myths, equate the “violence” of disruptive antiracist protest with the violence of neo-Nazis murdering immigrants and people of color.
“This line of thinking continues to equate protest disruption and property destruction with far-right movements who fundamentally want to harm and kill large segments of the public,” It’s Going Down tweeted.
For Facebook to treat even militant, antiracist, antifascist organizing as a violence comparable to that of white supremacist militias is a statement, in no uncertain terms, about which lives it deems to matter.
---
==
8/20 now literally targets?!
ref see Qanon 3
https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-happens-when-ex-navy-seals-go-full-qanon?ref=home
no lnx many
a man filmed leaving the area of an attempted pipe bomb attack on protesters in Portland, Oregon, was a former Navy SEAL who writes conspiracy theory-heavy social media posts decrying the left, Portland activists and news media recently reported.
But the man is just one of an eclectic mix of former SEALs apparently taken in by conspiracy theories online or citing those theories in violent writings. If acted on by highly trained ex-military elite, those paranoias have deadly potential.
Witnesses in Portland say two men threw three homemade explosives at protesters early on the morning of Aug. 8. Although no one was harmed and the men do not appear to have been filmed, citizen journalist Scott Keeler pursued a man spotted in the area and filmed his face. Activists and Oregon Public Broadcasting identified the man asLouis Garrick Fernbaugh, a former SEAL and CIA contractor. Fernbaugh, 52, has been named by police as a person of interest, but not charged with a crime.
Online, Fernbaugh has an extensive history of writing about conspiracy theories, particularly where they implicated the left. In this respect, he is part of a broader pattern of ex-SEALs, many of them with large digital followings, espousing conspiratorial ideas. They’re armed, suspicious, and in some cases, write in detail about potential plans to kill people they view as evildoers.
“People who are ex-military say, ‘I’m going to go liberate the kids.’ Is it bravado or is it a legitimate call to action?”
— Marc-André Argentino]
In particular, some ex-SEALs are promoting belief in QAnon or related theories that falsely accuse many of President Donald Trump’s opponents of being involved in Satanic pedophilia and cannibalism.
Marc-André Argentino, an associate fellow at the Global Network on Extremism & Technology,who monitors the QAnon conspiracy theory, said that theory—which has become one of the foremost in U.S. politics—has inspired an uptick in criminal acts by believers. (The Navy did not return a request for comment.)
“The violence we’ve seen has been by people without acumen and physical training,” Argentino told The Daily Beast. “Where it could get scary is with people who do have training.”
[QAnon Pushes Pedo-Ring Plots. Now They’re Stealing Kids.
RAMPING UP THE CRAZY
Will Sommer]
SEALs like Fernbaugh, who could not be reached for comment for this story, have extensive military training, and might be better equipped than the average person to build an explosive device or take up weapons. A grizzled ex-special operative with a graying beard, Fernbaugh has spent years dabbling in false conspiracy theories, some of them anti-Semitic and many targeting anti-fascists, who have been highly visible at Portland protests. (The Daily Beast did not review any posts in which he expressed affinity for QAnon.)
“George Soros is known to have paid ANTIFA to instigate rioting and create chaos that has caused millions in damage across numerous cities, but especially Portland, OR,” he wrote on Facebook in 2018, citing a conspiracy theory that falsely accuses a Jewish philanthropist of paying off protesters.
In the caption of a video on the same topic, Fernbaugh mused that “I’m surprised no one has slaughtered these sheep that have grown horns (ANTIFA),” and recent posts boasted of “infiltrating” groups of Portland anti-fascists during ongoing racial justice protests.
Fernbaugh appears to wear the same jacket in one of the videos as the man identified as him did in the footage from the aftermath of the Portland attack.He currently works selling shooting targets, including one made to look like a person dressed as a Portland anti-fascist.
Multiple people who know Fernbaugh, including a former colleague, told OPB that he was the man featured in Keeler’s video from near the scene of the explosive devices. A former law enforcement official told the publication that, based on the voice of the man in the video, they were comfortable enough in his identity that they were calling the FBI.
Meanwhile, the larger online conspiracy community is sprawling—the top QAnon groups on Facebook, alone, count more than 3 million combined members, according to an internal Facebook investigation, NBC News reported last week. These theories sometimes overlap in membership, and encompass millions of other people, spanning a range of false claims like that vaccines cause autism to the idea that the world is flat. In a group that large, some will almost inevitably be military or veterans.
But QAnon and related conspiracy theories like Pizzagate (both of which baselessly accuse Democrats of child abuse) seem to have an unusually high incidence among ex-SEALs. And some retired SEALs have been vocal in more explicit support for QAnon in particular, even if they have not been tied to the scene of alleged protest-related violence.
“If these people aren’t brought to justice, there’s gonna be some fuckin’ street justice doled out.”
— Stephen Ralston, ex-Navy SEAL
Stephen Ralston is a veteran who served on SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team One from 1990 to 1994, and SEAL Team Three from 1994 to 1998. Currently, he works as a private military contractor, according to his online bio, and has a podcast about special operations forces. On the Instagram for that podcast, and on his own Instagram feed, Ralston frequently uses QAnon hashtags, promotes Q videos, and posts about his interest in killing pedophiles. (Although opposition to pedophilia is an overwhelmingly popular sentiment across political parties, QAnon turns the concern into a bogus call to arms against Trump’s foes.)
Some of the Instagram memes specifically frame elite military as a force for “Q,” the anonymous forum poster behind the conspiracy theory. One typical example, a picture that calls special operatives “the teeth of the light,” promises that thousands of specially trained veterans are willing to use their skills if QAnon’s claims are validated. “If any of the claims prove accurate, justice will be served one way or the other,” the caption reads, in part. “We don’t forgive. We don’t forget.”
Ralston’s special forces podcast has also devoted at least one recent episode to QAnon.
“If these people aren’t brought to justice, there’s gonna be some fuckin’ street justice doled out,” he says while petting a dachshund in a teaser trailer for the episode, uploaded to Instagram.
Ralston, who has not been accused of any conspiracy-related violence, told The Daily Beast he was unsure of QAnon’s popularity with former SEALs or any other group, and declined to otherwise comment for this story.
Attacks by conspiratorial veterans have long been lethal. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, was carried out by veteran Tim McVeigh, who was steeped in anti-government theories and reportedly told people the Army had implanted him with a microchip. McVeigh’s own failure to join the Army’s special ops forces was reportedly a major factor in his anger, and he viewed himself as a kind of one-man operator. (“In his mind, much of his life has been one of thinking that he is in a kind of Special Forces of his own,” a law enforcement source told The Washington Post after the attack.)
Several recent violent plots associated with the anti-government Boogaloo movement have also allegedly been carried out by veterans or active service members. In May, two veterans and a current Army Reserve soldier were arrested in an alleged plot to throw explosives at a Black Lives Matter rally. That same month, a current Air Force staff sergeant was arrested for allegedly killing a federal security officer and attempting to kill another, in an apparent plot to kick off a new civil war that Boogaloo adherents believe is imminent.
QAnon has inspired its own wave of crimes, with the FBI labeling the movement as a terror threat. Some prominent QAnon personalities are not veterans, but pose as elite Defense Department operatives, including one man linked to several recent Q-inspired kidnappings, who poses as the head of the fictional Pentagon Pedophile Task Force, The Daily Beast reported.
QAnon support extends to at least one SEAL-founded company.Project Warpath is a clothing line owned by Tej Gill, a former member of SEAL Team Five who made headlines for selling “Hillary Clinton Killed My Friends” T-shirts after the deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya. Project Warpath also posts QAnon content to Instagram, including a recent post falsely linking the debunked Wayfair conspiracy (a QAnon-adjacent theory that falsely claimed children were being sold inside furniture on the home decor site) to Soros and the Clintons. Gill, who has not been accused of any conspiracy-related violence, could not be reached for comment for this story.
Argentino said QAnon’s popularity with special ops veterans might initially seem perplexing. Believers claim Q is a high-level military official. But as veterans of military intelligence circles should know, Q’s muddled posts do not operate anything like military work. (One former QAnon believer whose father had worked for the CIA previously told The Daily Beast she’d abandoned the theory when she realized Q was artlessly aping military language, in a way no service member would.)
A gray-bearded SEAL Team Five veteran, [Clark] Impastato served until recently as a police officer in Phoenix, Arizona, where he fatally shot a 15-year-old accused of making a drug deal.]
Yet elements of QAnon might be alluring to veterans, Argentino noted.
“QAnon is rooted in this war narrative, in the sense that they’re in an information war against the ‘Deep State,’” he said. “Information wars are typically combined with a more physical element ... [Veterans] may want to be called upon to free the children from the pedophiles.”
Some conspiratorial ex-SEAL content is compatible with QAnon, but it’s unclear whether those former SEALs are aware of its full connotations.
One former member of the elite SEAL Team Six recently shared a post falsely linking Black Lives Matter to the Palestinian militant movement Hamas. The ex-SEAL appears to have copy-pasted the post’s caption, which was full of Q hashtags, although he did not write them himself. “Thoughts on this? I am only sharing, so don’t start throwing a tantrum,” he asked his followers.
[The Disturbing Appeal of Boogaloo Violence to Military Men
OUTSIDE AGITATORS
Kelly Weill]
Mitch Aguiar, another former member of SEAL Team Five, has since left the military and gone on to build a name for himself as an MMA fighter and a salesman of military-themed apparel. Like some of his fellow brothers-in-arms,he’s also shared conspiratorial content on his 133,000-follower Instagram, including a post about the death of a QAnon supporter, but used a “PizzaGate” hashtag.(The Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed prominent Democrats were engaging in sex trafficking in a D.C. pizzeria, was a predecessor to QAnon, but fell out of favor after a Pizzagater shot up the restaurant. Another man set fire to the restaurant two years later, in January 2019.)
Aguiar also commented “he’s a pedo” on a fellow ex-SEAL’s meme that falsely claimed actorTom Hanks was wearing an ankle monitor, presumably because a secret court had found him guilty of child sex-trafficking. (This did not happen.)
The fellow ex-SEAL, podcaster Clark Impastato, regularly shares QAnon-flavored conspiracy memes on his Instagram, where he has more than 87,000 followers. A gray-bearded SEAL Team Five veteran, Impastato served until recently as a police officer in Phoenix, Arizona, where he fatally shot a 15-year-old accused of making a drug deal. Although the teen was unarmed, Impastato’s use of force was found to be justified, because the teen rushed Impastato, “pulling his previously concealed hand from his waistband and forming it into a fist with a single, hooked finger extended,” as if to imply holding a gun, according to court records.
Impastato voluntarily relinquished his police certification in January 2016, after racking up multiple misconduct complaints, state records show. Among them are two civil rights misconduct complaints, which state records describe as excessive force, one of them for allegedly punching a suspect. Another misconduct complaint against Impastato is for alleged “dishonesty/false statements” during the hiring process because he “did not disclose past sales of marijuana.” It was not immediately apparent from police records whether the complaints had been substantiated by police, and Phoenix Police did not return multiple requests for comment. In an interview with a military-themed energy drink company, Impastato said he left the force to become an entrepreneur on his own beard-care line.
As protests broke out over the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis in late May, Impastato posted a picture of himself carrying a gun with the caption, “The current chaos makes me wish I was still in to help out. ???????? I’m with you in spirit BROTHERS and SISTERS..” He also posted several memes about killing anti-fascists, including one about the movement coming to the suburbs “so I can get a stateside kill.”
Neither Aguiar nor Impastato have been accused of conspiracy-related violence, and neither returned requests for comment for this story.
The extent of these ex-SEALs’ commitment to the QAnon cause, even when they flirt with it, isn’t always clear.
Increasingly, QAnon belief exists on a spectrum. Where once the theory appealed mostly to a core group of diehards who waited for the next “Q drop” (posts on a forum by an anonymous person claiming to be military intelligence), a diluted version of the conspiracy has reached a broader audience with less absurd claims about pedophilia.
As The New York Times noted last week, QAnon content has recently surged in popularity with a broader crowd, including those who are unaware of its core claims, because it attached itself to a campaign to “save the children.”
Well-intentioned fears can have counterproductive results. Sensationalized fears about Wayfair can obscure the reality that many (nearly half, per one study) of trafficked children are exploited by relatives. And the sudden popularity of sex-trafficking conspiracy theories has overwhelmed legitimate anti-trafficking organizations with bogus complaints. In late July, the National Human Trafficking Hotline released a statement saying “the extreme volume of these contacts has made it more difficult for the Trafficking Hotline to provide support and attention to others who are in need of help.”
Some ex-SEALs operate in the murky area of Q-ish talk about sex-trafficking, conflating real cases with bogus statistics and linking their theories to high-profile celebrities and politicians, usually on the left.
Craig Sawyer, a Texas-based former SEAL Team Six member, runs an anti-trafficking group, and produced a documentary about child sex-trafficking. The group is distinct from theories like QAnon. Some QAnon believers, including the person pretending to be a member of the fictional Pentagon Pedophile Task Force, have targeted Sawyer, falsely accusing him of trafficking. Sawyer has even been openly critical of Q on Twitter, although not of all its claims.
“I’m not big on q, mainly due to how scary some of the followers are in their cult follower tendencies of an entity they can’t vet,” he tweeted in June. “But as long as the q narrative is ‘Do your own research’ & the info is accurate, that’s a good thing.”
Nevertheless, Sawyer frequently interacts with pro-Q personalities, and shares a wealth of Q-adjacent material, including a conspiracy meme about figures like Bill Gates and George Soros pursuing a number of fantastical aims like population control and “one world government.” (He shared the meme, asking followers’ opinion on it, without explicitly endorsing it.) Sawyer, who has not been accused of conspiracy-related violence and declined to comment, shared a picture last Tuesday night of Sen. Kamala Harris posing with Soros’s son.
[Navy SEAL Promoted After Choking Green Beret to Death
WTFO
Kevin Maurer]
The post, about Harris being named Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick, referred to a sexist conspiracy theory about her. “We now know who’s on team New World Order / Global Marxism,” Sawyer wrote. “Literally GOOD vs EVIL.”
Argentino, who recently authored a scholarly article about QAnon’s potential as a national security threat, said while most violent incidents carried out in the theory’s name were done so by people in a state of crisis, calls by military types are acting as a steady drumbeat.
“People who are ex-military say, ‘I’m going to go liberate the kids,’” he said. “Is it bravado or is it a legitimate call to action?”
For his part, Garrick Fernbaugh’s primary preoccupation has appeared to be theories about anti-fascists. But after years of posting about his interest in hurting them, someone appears to have attempted just that in Portland—while Fernbaugh was very nearby.
Approximately three weeks before the pipe bomb incident, Fernbaugh contacted Sawyer about his interest in anti-fascists. On LinkedIn, Sawyer had authored a post defending the federal agents who notoriously pulled Portland protesters into unmarked vans earlier this summer.
“I think this is actually a very calm & gracious response in the face of such destructive terrorism funded by our nation’s subversive enemies,” Sawyer wrote. “Law & order must prevail??”
Fernbaugh replied in the comments. “I infiltrated ANTIFAin downtown PDX 3 nights ago,” he wrote. “(Dudes in camo) Hit me up, I’ll throw on my Cryes [a brand of combat apparel] and give you a hand restoring law and order, then we’ll go grab a well deserved beer!”
With reporting by Adam Rawnsley
Kelly Weill
Reporter
kelly.weill@thedailybeast.com
==
---
escalator:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/how-trump-is-once-again-colluding-with-russia/
no lnx twt
how Trump is once again colluding with Russia
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 14, 2020
Almost two weeks ago, a story circulated that Portland protesters were burning Bibles and American flags. It spread via social media and was picked up by conservative outlets, such as the Washington Examiner. Of course, several Republican leaders joined the bandwagon.
tp kirk --> djt jr?]
---
ted cruzretweet: This is who they are.
Ian Miles Cheong
@stillgray
Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland. https://twitter.com/Shelldrayk/status/1289481822414413827/video/1
---
don jr
Now we move to the book burning phase. I’m pretty sure ANTIFA doesn’t actually stand for what they say it stands for. Maybe just remove the anti part of them name and it’s perfect.
---
tpkirk
BLM inc arsonists just burned a stack of Bibles in Portland
The activist media won’t report on this because it’s likely they support it
Our faith is under attack.
If you vote for Biden—you vote for Bible burnings
---
Two reporters at the New York Times, Matthew Rosenberg and Julian Barnes, decided to look into the story and found Vladimir Putin’s fingerprints all over it. As is often the case with effective propaganda, this story contains a kernel of truth. Apparently, some group was handing out Bibles to protesters that night and one of them was used to start a fire. An American flag was also burned. But a local paper covering the protests that night devoted just one sentence to that story in a lengthy piece about what happened.
The video news agency connected to Russia Today (RT) was regularly streaming a live feed of the Portland protests. They edited the clip of the fire and made it the focal point of their protest coverage that night. Then, RT did an entire story about it. Social media took it from there and the next thing you know, outlets like the Washington Examiner were picking it up. Here is how Rosenberg and Barnes summarized the process:
The Russian technique is a kind of information laundering, akin to money laundering.Stories originate with Russian-backed news sites, some of them directly connected to Moscow’s spy agencies, officials and experts said. They are then picked up by Americans on social media or in domestic news outlets, and their origins quickly become obscured. Often, by the time a story reaches most of its American audience, there is little to indicate that it was created to fuel grievances and deepen political divisions.
Following Trump’s press briefing on Wednesday, Hunter Walker tracked down another example of Russia’s attempt to get their propaganda in the news. He wrote about the question OAN reporter Chanel Rion asked the president.
Rion: In the last hour or so, if you googled antifa.com. it would take you straight to Joe Biden’s website, his official campaign website. Odd situation. We don’t know who’s behind that. But it raises an interesting leadership question. Should Joe Biden, the Democrat party, Kamala Harris– should they publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?
Trump: They should. I think they’re afraid to. It’s– in my book it’s virtually a part of their campaign, Antifa. The Democrats act like, gee, I don’t know exactly what that is.
Take a look at Portland. Take a look at any place you want to take a look at, and they’re all over the place. They were here.
Basically Rion gave Trump the opportunity to claim that Antifa is part of the Biden campaign—which is, of course, a blatant lie.
Walker looked into what actually happened with the antifa.com website. Once again, as Pelosi said, “all roads lead to Putin.”
:{:{}:
}:
Records for “antifa.com” in the domain name database Whoisology.com show the site was registered in the Russian Federation from 2013 through last July. Starting last November, the site’s registration was moved to Panama, The website has always been anonymously registered and its owners could not be reached for comment.
Russia set up the antifa.com website and eventually redirected it to Biden’s campaign page, allowing the president to claim that the group was involved politically with Democrats. Of course, this raises the old question of whether this was all coordinated with the president or if Trump is simply taking advantage of Putin’s efforts. The same questions are raised about the role of OAN in these kinds of Russian propaganda efforts.
So there you have two examples of how Russia is currently interfering in the 2020 election to support the reelection of Donald Trump. One thing worth noting is that if these examples are reflective of their efforts, Vladimir Putin has calculated that his best bet is to inflame the so-called “culture wars,” something that has been the bedrock of the Republican strategy for decades. The Bible burning story was especially useful for the Christian nationalists who want to scare their followers into thinking that, as Trump has suggested, Joe Biden is against God and the Bible.
It is important to keep in mind that the only reason we know about these Russian efforts is because some reporters put in the time to track down the story. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who has seen what our intelligence services know about Russian interference, said that the 2020 efforts “make Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play.” But the Trump administration is keeping that information from the public, while the attorney general hypes the antifa story and puts all of his energy into accusing the Obama administration of “spying” into the Trump campaign. That strikes me as the definition of collusion.
==
---
cdv antifa
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-and-his-regime-have-again-turned-crisis-into-an-opportunity-to-advance-their-neofascist-authoritarian-agenda/
In his 1838 Lyceum Address, a young Abraham Lincoln warned:
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
In the year 2020, the United States in the Age of Trump has arrived at one such moment. Donald Trump is an authoritarian and a neofascist. Such a description does not need the modifiers of “apparent” or “would be” or “impending” or “inclinations” or “autocratic.”
That language is all too often deployed by journalists and others to soften the hard blows of the full and horrible reality that the United States is a failing democracy where Donald Trump is now only barely restrained in his anti-democratic behavior by the country’s now much weakened political norms, institutions and culture.
In his response to the protests and people’s uprising that was sparked by the savage killing of a black man named George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, Donald Trump has fully graduated from “would-be tyrant” and “apparent authoritarian” to full-on membership in such a category of ignoble leaders,
just as Derek Chauvin snuffed out the life of George Floyd, Donald Trump has his knee on the throat of American democracy.
Because he is mentally unwell and lives in his own malignant reality, worships power in the service of his own fabulism, narcissism, ego and greed, lacks empathy and concern for other human beings, and is an authoritarian and a neofascist, Donald Trump is only capable of destruction. Healing and creation are anathema to him.
As such, Donald Trump’s response to the protests was to slur those Americans who are sickened by police thuggery and brutality and are therefore moved to force positive social change as being “thugs.” Trump also summoned his paramilitaries and street thugs to defend him at the White House by participating in “MAGA Night.”
Trump threatened to enforce martial law by invoking the Insurrection Act through which he would deploy at least 10,000 active duty soldiers to crush and “dominate” protesters.
Trump also threatened to attack the protesters outside of the White House with the Secret Service and their “ominous” weapons and “vicious dogs.” The protesters outside of the White House were shot with rubber bullets, choked with tear gas, and beaten by police and other law enforcement forces at Trump’s and William Barr’s command. Why? So that Donald Trump could have a photo op where he could look “strong” as he walked from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church across the street in what was a Christian fascist authoritarian spectacle.
The resulting images were supposed to be akin to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will” but instead Trump and his coterie looked like something out of an Ed Wood movie.
Donald Trump’s reaction to these protests was so dangerous and reckless and likely illegal that the country’s most senior military and civilian leaders decided to ignore his orders to unleash the United States military on the American people.
Lost in this maelstrom of events is how Donald Trump and his regime have again turned crisis into an opportunity to advance their neofascist authoritarian agenda. In response to the George Floyd protests, Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr declared “antifa” to be a “terrorist organization.” Such a designation means that offering material support to antifaor perhaps even being a “member” is now a very serious federal crime.
In a master stroke unnoticed by most Americans, the Constitutionally guaranteed rights to protest, free speech, and criticize elected officials are imperiled. In total, by declaring “antifa” a terrorist organization Donald Trump has criminalized dissent by the American people (and others) against him.
The facts:
Antifa is not an organization. It is an organizing strategy and an ideology.
As Billie Murray, professor of communications at Villanova University and an expert on rhetoric and social justice, explained to Salon in a phone conversation, “Antifascism is self-defense. They believe they are protecting their community, they are defending their community from fascist organizing and violence.”
Murray also clarifies the false equivalencies that are often made by too many reporters and other members of the commentariat when they discuss and write about “antifascists”:
We have a history of fascist violence that has led to world war. You are forgetting your history when you are assuming that fascist organizing is just a bunch of crazy people. You allow it to be a non-problem in your mind.
Too many people assume that fascism died in 1945. We won the war. Mussolini is gone. Hitler’s gone. Franco’s gone. We’re good. That is absolutely not true.
The first antifascist groups started in the late 1940s by Jewish people who were walking around Germany and seeing fascists on the side of the street touting the same things that Hitler did. Those Jewish people said, “We were soldiers in this war. We won this war and this guy is still on the corner saying such things!”
Clearly, we did not get rid of all of fascism because it’s an ideology. You are never going to completely eradicate it even with a world war. I think people assume that fascism died and, therefore, is no longer a problem.
Then, when you have antifascists on the scene, you can say, “Well, what are they even fighting for? They must just want to engage in violence. They just are being crazy and they’re just crazy just like those other people.”
We talk about these right-wing fascists as being “hate” groups or something like that because fascism is supposed to be dead.
Contrary to Trump’s and Barr’s and the broader right-wing echo chamber’s lies and fantasies, antifa is not responsible for the violence which took place during the protests following George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police. The FBI’s own data shows that violent acts such as arson, other property crimes, and physical assault was committed by local criminals who took advantage of the chaos, as well as “boogaloo” and other right-wing extremists.
As with “Obamagate,” “antifa” is an empty phrase, a type of signifier that can be made to mean whatever Trump and the right-wing disinformation machine want it to mean in the service of criminalizing Democrats, liberals, and progressives as somehow being “un-American.”
Trump and his agents use of “antifa” also represents the type of conspiracism and propaganda now rampant among American conservatives and other members of the right wing — and the resulting damage it has caused to American politics and society.
Writing at Business Insider, Sonam Sheth details how:
Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights who released a report last year on how disinformation would affect the 2020 election, told Business Insider thatefforts to frame the George Floyd protests as “a violent leftist conspiracy” bear “all the earmarks of current-day disinformation.”
“The now-familiar elements include profuse social media posts of dubious provenance, flat-out falsehoods by President Trump, and deft amplification by right-wing figures on Fox News,” said Barrett, who is also the author of a newly released report on content moderation.
The theory that antifa is behind organizing the riots is the most prominent piece of misinformation flying around about the demonstrations, according to Zignal Labs, which tracked and analyzed certain types of mis- and disinformation connected to the protests.
Out of 873,000 pieces of misinformation linked to the demonstrations, 575,800 mentioned antifa, Zignal Labs told The New York Times.
The allegations gained traction after Trump tweeted on May 31 that antifa and other left-wing radicals were responsible for the violence. But they started bouncing around social media days earlier, according to The Times, which found more than 6,000 Facebook posts linking antifa to the protests that garnered 1.3 million likes and shares from May 25 to June 1.
On Thursday, the hashtag #exposeAntifa began trending on Twitter as the president and his allies continued amplifying the theory.
Legal scholars and others have warned that Trump’s decree against antifa is “unconstitutional“. That may in fact be true. However, Donald Trump, an authoritarian and neofascist, has no respect for the rule of law. “Unconstitutional” is increasingly no longer a useful analytical category.
What role does Trump’s and the broader right wing movement’s misrepresentation and weaponization of “antifa” fulfill?
By criminalizing antifa (which literally means “anti-fascist”), Donald Trump is announcing that he is a fascist. He is doing this through the façade of fighting against “terrorism.”
Trump and the right wing’s lies about antifa legitimates violence against Trump’s political enemies. The logic is simple: To support Donald Trump is to love America. Anyone who stands against Donald Trump or otherwise opposes him is, by definition, a member of antifa and a “terrorist.” It is good and right that terrorists are to be subjected to violence and ultimately destroyed to keep America “safe.”
Trump’s recent comments about Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old man who was pushed to the ground by members of the Buffalo Police Department, suffering a fractured skull while his blood poured out of his ear on to the sidewalk and police officers walked over him like he was human trash, is one such example.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump said via Twitter that: “Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”
Trump and his followers feel no human care of concern for “protesters” like Martin Gugino because they are supposedly antifa members. In Trump’s authoritarian worldview protesters are enemies of the state who are to be destroyed.
Other Republicans have been even more clear and direct in their public claims that antifa members should be hunted down and killed.On Twitter, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz recently said, “Now that we clearly see antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?”
The criminalization of dissent by labeling anti-fascists as “terrorists” is a preview of how free speech and other rights will increasingly only apply to Donald Trump’s right-wing Christian followers.
Such an escalation is taking place in how the FBI and local police are now interrogating people who they detained during the protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police.
The Intercept reports how:
Joel Feingold was in his apartment in Brooklyn when he heard the sound of police beating protesters outside of his building Wednesday night. Having spent much of the week in the streets joining the waves of demonstrations against police brutality currently sweeping the nation, Feingold rushed outside. He was swiftly tossed to the ground by a senior New York City police officer in a white shirt, thrown in a police van, and placed under arrest along with four other individuals for having ostensibly violated a recently imposed curfew on New York City residents.
Feingold and the others were taken to the NYPD’s 78th Precinct, where they were told that they were being cited for violating the city’s 8 p.m. curfew. It was there, Feingold told The Intercept, that they were interrogated by the NYPD and the FBI about their political beliefs and their reasons for participating in the nationwide protests — subjects that should, under the Constitution and local NYPD rules, be off-limits from law enforcement inquiries following an alleged curfew violation.
The Intercept continues:
After being processed and taken to a cell, Feingold said he and the three men he was locked up with were approached by two men in plainclothes. “One of them is from NYPD intelligence and the other is an FBI agent,” he said. Feingold said a third officer confirmed the affiliations of the two men as they were being discharged. The FBI agent’s line of questioning was clearly focused on his political views.
“We want to know who’s hijacking your movement and making it violent,” Feingold recalled the agent saying. “That is what he said verbatim.”
The FBI’s involvement in protest interrogations is part of an emerging pattern, New York City civil rights attorneys say, that seems to have followed Attorney General William Barr’s designation of the leaderless movement against fascism known as antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. President Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly alleged that outside agitators affiliated with the movement are stoking violence and unrest across the country.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party’scriminalization of dissentby targeting antifa is also best understood as part of a much larger effort to undermine America’s multiracial secular democracy.
This effort consists of: Voter suppression, voter theft, and gerrymandering; attacks on the free press and journalists as being “enemies” and “fake news”; targeted harassment and threats against those reporters, journalists, professors, and other public voices deemed to be enforcing “political correctness” against conservatives and Trump supporters; Trump’s use of white supremacist and other right-wing paramilitaries and extremists to enforce his will through violence and intimidation obedience to Trump’s political-religious cult; legal threats against the news media if they dare to criticize Donald Trump; and an effort to punish Twitter and other corporations if they disobey Trump’s orders.
Donald Trump and his Republican Party also command a massive disinformation propaganda machine consisting of Fox News, the OAN network, social media, radio, television, print, film, websites and other digital means of circulating right-wing lies and propaganda more generally.
Writing in her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt previewed the type of authoritarian movement that Donald Trump now commands:
Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.
There are many examples where Trump and his propagandists have created an alternate reality for members of their movement. These include: “antifa” and “Obamagate” and “Benghazi”; Trump was a “victim” and “exonerated” by the Mueller investigation; a “deep state conspiracy” exists against Donald Trump; and Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden are the real “criminals” and “traitors” in the Ukraine extortion scandal and subsequent impeachment.
The truth and empirical reality as they exist must be silenced if the power of Trump and his movement’s malignant reality is to endure. Dissent is not allowed because the truth threatens the artifice of Trump and his movement’s “greatness.”
* * *
For three weeks, by the many hundreds of thousands (if not more) the American people have been protesting, struggling and engaging in both symbolic and corporeal politics where channeling the power of George Floyd’s death, they have faced down rubber bullets, tear gas, police batons, National Guard troops, militarized police, and literal loss of life and limb, in an effort to force a better and more just America into existence.
These protesters in this nationwide and now global people’s uprising against social inequality in its many forms are also braving death from the coronavirus. This is also true of black and brown and other Democratic Party supporters who have shown in Wisconsin and Georgia that they will wait for hours and days to vote — even during a pandemic — to remove Donald Trump, his regime and the Republican Party from power.
The birth of this new and better America will be painful. Those who engage in such a patriotic struggle are hope warriors.
Donald Trump, his Republican Party, and the other members of the right-wing power elite (and the corporatocracy) have been temporarily disoriented by these weeks of protests and people’s uprising.
Their response will be crushing. The empire always strikes back. Trump and his enforcers’ efforts to criminalize dissent will be amplified. The American people must not let themselves be cowed.
On Election Day 2020, the American people have a choice to make. Will they save the United States and its democracy by voting for Joe Biden, or will they commit national suicide by reelecting Donald Trump?
The American people will have to be their own heroes in the centuries-long story of defending and improving American democracy. In doing so they should heed journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers’ recent warning and advice that, “because truth is the foe he most fears, he has banned it from his administration and his lips. Yes, Bernie, you are right: the man in the White House has taken all the necessary steps toward achieving the despot’s dream of dominance. Can it happen here? It is happening here. Democracy in America has been a series of narrow escapes. We may be running out of luck, and no one is coming to save us. For that, we have only ourselves.”
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/antifa-are-a-ridiculous-right-wing-bogeyman-but-theres-more-to-the-story/
josh h
With his tweet suggesting that Martin Gugino, the 75-year-old man who was violently shoved to the ground by Buffalo police during a protest last week, may have been an antifa super-ninja, Trump’s ooga-booga about anti-fascist activists descended into farce. And he isn’t alone. Locals on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state terrorized a multiracial family of four who were just out for a nice camping trip because they decided they were antifa activists. The Vergereports that “mythical buses full of bloodthirsty antifa protesters are causing panic in rural counties throughout the country,” leading small towns to board up shop windows and shut down their main streets. And this week, the Turkish regime under Recep Erdoğan blamed the Kurdistan Workers Party for training antifa units to commit acts of violence in the United States.
The reality, as you may know if you’re not a Fox News fan, is that while there are some local organized antifa groups, antifa is a philosophy, and a loose network of activists, rather than an organization. In its current iteration in the US, the movement arose from the punk scene, and some antifa activists engage in street fights with the Proud Boys and similar far-right groups. There has long been a debate on the left about the utility of those tactics (which I’ve written about).
But one thing that many mainstream commenters don’t acknowledge is that most antifa activism has nothing to do with physical confrontation. As Caroline Orr wrote at Medium, “antifascist activity is incredibly diverse, encompassing everything from journalism, developing educational materials, and writingprotest songs, to infiltrating far-right extremist groups and subverting them from within.”
They also have a long history of organizing successful efforts to curb neo-Nazi recruitment and stop them from infiltrating spaces like the punk rock scene. More recently, they’ve taken on the scourge of online radicalization by getting far-right extremists kicked off platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
It’s that last part that is so infuriating to the right. Many anti-fascist activists, whether or not they identify as such, do their work from behind a keyboard. They’re basically online sleuths, who scour the fever swamps of the internet, try to identify anonymous members of extremist groups and expose them.
the point is to attach professional and social costs to membership in white supremacist, neo-Nazi and similar organizations. Whenever you read about a cop or schoolteacher being fired or a service member being discharged from the military for being affiliated with far-right groups, or for abhorrent expressions of racism or homophobia or antisemitism, an anti-fascist probably brought those activities to light. (Reasonable people can debate the ethics of “doxxing,” which is a tactic that can be turned against anyone.)
While conservatives are obviously engaging in some ridiculous fear-mongering about hordes of bloodthirsty antifa rioters to delegitimize the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the country and to distract from Trump’s many miserable failures, there’s more to it than that. For years, many on the right–including mainstream conservatives–have embraced the idea that freedom of speech includes the freedom from facing any consequences for offensive speech. The First Amendment, in their formulation, doesn’t just constrain the government from punishing people for expressing their views. It should also prevent people from being fired by their employers, businesses from being boycotted and writers and artists from losing their perches.
Just last week, for example, there was widespread outrage on the right when Andrew Sullivan, who has a long history of offering inflammatory takes on race, revealed that NY Magazinewouldn’t publish a column on the George Floyd protests and that his writings on these issue would receive extra scrutiny by the magazine’s editors going forward. The New York Post was one of many conservative publications to characterize what was a routine editorial decision as “censorship.”
Some antifa activists have committed acts of vandalism and bloodied some noses of far-right goons. They’ve made what many see as tactical errors at times. Most tend to play the media relations game poorly, and some have assaulted the wrong targets.
But they have also decimated the alt-right–the less extreme version of more hardcore fascist groups–by making it hard to be a member without one’s neighbors and employers finding out about it. And that’s what many on the right really find so terrifying.
---
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/heres-the-outrageous-oan-segment-that-led-trump-to-falsely-smear-a-75-year-old-protestor-as-an-antifa-provocateur/
also 70 yr old head wound via oann;
no lnx
here’s the outrageous OAN segment that led Trump to falsely smear a 75-year-old protestor as an ‘Antifa provocateur’
Image via Screengrab.
Written by Alex Henderson June 9, 2020
Buffalo police have been widely criticized for a disturbing incident in which a 75-year-old George Floyd protestor, Martin Gugino, was violently shoved to the ground. And now — based on reporting by the right-wing cable news outlet One America News President Donald Trump — is smearing the man as an “Antifa provocateur.”
OANN or OAN prides itself on being more pro-Trump than Fox News, which Trump has criticized at times for not being consistently supportive of him. Here’s the segment the network aired on Gugino.
Eugene Daniels
@EugeneDaniels2
Here's that OANN report that led to the president's tweet.
Embedded video
20
6:16 AM - Jun 9, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
29 people are talking about this
Trump tweeted, “Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?
76.7K
5:34 AM - Jun 9, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
102K people are talking about this
Gugino is still hospitalized because of the injuries he suffered. Two Buffalo police officers, Aaron Torgalski and Robert McCabe, have been charged with assault.
---
Trump takes a swing and a miss at Romney for joining Black Lives Matter protestIgor Derys
==
---
https://theconversation.com/what-or-who-is-antifa-140147
The movement called “antifa” gets its name from a short form of “anti-fascist,” which is about the only thing its members agree on.
President Donald Trump and some far-right activists and militants have claimed antifa is allegedly conspiring to foment violence amid the protests sweeping the U.S. In my forthcoming book, “American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism,” I describe antifa as a decentralized collection of individual activists who mostly use nonviolent methods to achieve their ends.
Their goal is to resist the spread of fascism. That word can be an inexact term, but generally antifa activists see fascism as the violent enactment and enforcement of biological and social inequalities between people.
Opposed to violent supremacy
An anti-fascist protest in Berlin, 1928. Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-05976/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Fascists go beyond viewing particular categories of people as inferior, based on gender identity, race and ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. They believe it is imperative to use violence to oppress and ultimately eliminate those groups. In addition, they use violence to oppose their ideological enemies, even if they are from groups they believe are not inferior, such as heterosexual white men.
The initial anti-fascist movements were founded in Europe and North America between the world wars, and were primarily organized by anarchists, communists and socialists – three groups that were frequently targets of fascist violence.
The modern-day anti-fascist movement in the United States, including antifa, grew out of the Anti-Racist Action Network, a decentralized activist movement resisting racist skinhead subcultures and public demonstrations by neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan organizations in the 1980s and 1990s.
Anti-fascists’ objections aren’t simply that they disagree with fascists. Their problems with fascism are much more fundamental.
Personal and collective self-defense
The arts have long been a part of anti-fascist efforts, including by American singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie in the 1940s. Al Aumuller/New York World-Telegram and Sun/Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons
My own research has found that a significant proportion of anti-fascists are women, people of color, members of LGBTQ communities, or otherwise have some characteristics fascists seek to control or eliminate.
These anti-fascists, therefore, often see fascists as a threat to their personal existence, and their physical and emotional well-being – as well as presenting threats of violence or vandalism to their communities and shared gathering spaces. They perceive their opposition as very much in personal and collective self-defense.
Because opposing fascism is a viewpoint rather than a formal organization, people’s actions vary widely. Informal or everyday anti-fascism can include speaking out against bigotry, standing up for victims of fascist harassment or confronting fascists in public places. Generally, these are relatively spontaneous actions that happen when anti-fascists encounter fascism in the normal course of their regular lives.
More formal anti-fascism can include large, well-funded mainstream organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, who monitor fascist activity and provide the public information on its scope.
cnn vid 8 min]
local action
But the antifa label is most often applied to smaller-scale groups of like-minded people who live in the same community, working to prevent fascists from threatening their targets and from attracting new followers.
These groups are rarely militant or violent. Most of them engage in commonly accepted forms of political activism. For instance, anti-fascists often work to find out where fascist groups and people are active in an area, and then share that information with the wider community, bringing that activity to public attention.
Anti-fascist activists also take advantage of the general social stigma associated with being a fascist, and identify people who participate in fascist events or post fascist messages online.
Culture is another part of anti-fascist work, including art and music. By creating T-shirts and stickers with inclusive messages, and hosting concerts, film screening and art shows, anti-fascists work to create an environment of inclusion and equality that doesn’t directly attack fascism but simply exists in opposition to it.
Antifa members have taken part in the anti-racist marches that have emerged in cities nationwide. Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Some direct confrontation
There are more militant anti-fascists, too, who mostly engage in non-militant activism but are willing, at times, to use more confrontational tactics. These people are more open to counterprotesting, sabotage and the use of force, which includes acts of violence.
The varied and decentralized nature of anti-fascist efforts means it includes virtually anyone who opposes violent enforcement of social inequalities to engage in activism. A diverse range of participants and tactics falls under the umbrella of a broad effort to stop fascism.
:{:{}:
- Racism
- Fascism
- Donald Trump
- Ku Klux Klan
- anti-fascism
- Southern Poverty Law Center
- Antifa
- Neo-Nazis
- Antifascists
- anti-racism
}:
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/qanon-loving-senate-candidate-wants-martial-law-declared-in-oregon-to-combat-antifa/
no lnx vid
qAnon-loving Senate candidate wants martial law declared in Oregon to combat ‘antifa’
Written by David Neiwert / Daily KosJune 7, 2020
The Oregon GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate, Jo Rae Perkins, decided to let her “Q light” shine on a Facebook livestream earlier this week—and it was a doozy.
Perkins, an unrepentant “QAnon” conspiracy cultist, told her audience that the state needs to be placed under martial law, with the National Guard being sent not just to Portland—where there have been violent protests over police brutality—but to rural places like Klamath Falls and Bend. Her reasoning:Busloads of nefarious antifa activists, financed by the evil George Soros, are fanning out to these towns to wreak destruction.
The only problem with Perkins’ scenario: They’re not. The only places “antifa” activists (as well as many others) have clashed with police—and the only protests in which damage has occurred—have been in Portland.
There have, however, been a string of far-right hoaxes that have found audiences with credulous residents and even law-enforcement officers in these rural areas—utterly spurious reports of buses loaded up with black-clad antifascists, coming to their towns to break windows and harass local businesses.In turn, large crowds of heavily armed men have turned out on the streets of those towns to fend off the invading antifa hordes.
Perkins happily promoted those hoaxes, as well as a panoply of associated conspiracy theories, including the notoriously false and anti-Semitic claim that financier George Soros is secretly funding “antifa.” She also offered a new twist, claiming that the antifa hordes are “the army that Obama put together a few years ago.”
At the zenith of the rant, she demanded that martial law be imposed via the National Guard: “This is insurrection. And the governors need to call in the National Guard,” she said. “We need martial law to squash this ASAP.”
She continued: “Let’s think about this. We’ve been under a soft martial law since March, the middle of March … You know that and I know that. And in some places, it is far beyond a soft martial law. It has gone into a hardcore martial law.”
The solution, she said, was to call in troops: “The National Guard needs to come in because there is not enough police officers to squash what is going on. We need the National Guard to do that.”
Perkins said she was “in pure shock” at reading reports that busfuls of antifa protesters were heading to these towns: “This is ridiculous. In Klamath Falls?” she said. “People are out to protect their businesses. Two or three buses full of antifa came down from Portland. Wow! Wow!”
She began praying aloud during the livestream: “But Lord, now we have this evil, this antifa, Father God. And we say no more. Lord God, I ask that you bring out your warring angels to protect the cities, to protect the innocent people, to protect the business owners, Lord God.”
Perkins repeatedly described “antifa” as “evil”: “These cannot be people,” she said. “All I can see, Lord, is just the demonic outcry, oh God, of people that just people that feel they can just … total disregard, total disregard for other people, for their property. All in the name of justice for George Floyd.”
In short order, this became an attack on George Soros:
Lord, these people have no sense of morality, of what is right and what is wrong, Lord God. Not the ones that are causing this mayhem. This antifa. Father God, shut down George Soros, Lord God. End his reign of terror, Lord God. We know that he is funding this. Lord, we say. ‘Strip that money, strip that money strip that money.’ If there is a way, Father God, that President Trump’s administration can block him from being able to spend any more money, Lord God, then allow that happen.
She later reiterated: “Then we have theantifa thugs. Many many people believe that they are being paid for by George Soros. And I have seen anything to dispel that rumor. I have never seen George Soros come out and say he has nothing to do with it.”
Perkins added that “the media are supporting antifa because they are all part of the same cabal,” which she went on to explain was “the Deep State.”
But it wasn’t just Soros to blame, according to Perkins. So was former President Barack Obama:
Clearly there’s crazy people out there. Clearly we need to get a grip. Clearly we need to be praying. Clearly we need some strong leadership in our states. That is clear. Oregon needs Governor Brown to call out the National Guard. The National Guard is here, they need to be deployed, they need to be activated. Ashland, Klamath Falls, Eugene, Salem, Portland. Where else are they gonna pop up? Bend? I will bet you guys that Bend is gonna happen next. It will be next, because Bend is a large town. Bend, and Pendleton. They are deploying all over the place.
This is the army—this is the army that Obama put together a few years ago. Wasn’t there an army that he put together a few years ago? I just read about it.
For the record: No buses bearing hordes of ravening antifascists appeared in Klamath Falls, or any other of the multiple locations where they were rumored to be about to descend—which in Oregon included such towns as Medford, Grants Pass, and Coquille. (In Curry County, the local sheriff shared the false rumor with his constituents on Facebook, then later deleted the post when it became apparent there was no there there.) There still are no reports, yet, of similar mythical buses headed for Bend or Pendleton, but given the ease with which they appear to spread on Facebook and among “QAnon” conspiracists, that likely is just a matter of time.
Perkins will face incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in the November general election.
==
==
this is annotated in mohawk vly
https://theintercept.com/2020/06/04/white-house-forced-retract-claim-viral-videos-prove-antifa-plotting-violence
many lnx twt pix vid
white House Forced to Retract Claim Viral Videos Prove Antifa Is Plotting Violence
Robert Mackey
June 3 2020, 9:29 p.m.
THE WHITE HOUSE engaged in an extraordinary act of rumor-mongering on Wednesday, releasing a compilation of viral video clips posted on social media recently by people who believed, wrongly, that the piles of bricks they came across had been planted there by anti-fascist activists, known as antifa, to inspire violence at protests.
“Antifa and professional anarchists are invading our communities, staging bricks and weapons to instigate violence,” a caption for the video posted on the official White House Twitter feed claimed. “These are acts of domestic terror.”
A screenshot of a video and caption posted on the White House Twitter feed on Wednesday.]
Within minutes, journalists discovered that most of the clips included in the video posted online by the White House had already been investigated and debunked. A short time later, without explanation or apology, the White House deleted the video from its official Twitter and Facebook feeds — but only after it had been viewed more than a million times on Twitter alone.
A screenshot showing that a video was removed from the White House Facebook feed on Wednesday.]
Although the White House tried to hide the video once it became clear just how riddled with errors it was, The Intercept saved a copy before it disappeared.
The video is worth examining in detail, since it shows just how unconcerned with the truth people in the White House are, as they conduct a frantic search for evidence to support the president’s baseless claim that the protests over racial injustice and police impunity have been hijacked by phantom “professional protesters.”
The compilation includes seven clips showing bricks, rocks or paving stones that the people who filmed them found suspicious. Three of the clips were broadcast a day earlier in a report from “Inside Edition,” which told its viewers that “police say small bands of the so-called ‘professional agitators’ are taking advantage of the crisis and hijacking peaceful demonstrations.”
“Piles of bricks have also appeared at the scenes of major demonstrations,” a reporter for the tabloid news show added. “There is speculation they may have been planted there by Antifa, for use as projectiles aimed at cops and storefront windows.”
However, as open-source investigators for BBC News, Buzzfeed and Vice had already reported before the White House compiled the clips, almost all of the video included in it showed ordinary piles of bricks used in construction projects which were underway before the wave of protests began in response to the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by Minneapolis police officers last week.
In the first clip, recorded in Dallas on Saturday night, a young black protester addresses the camera, and shares the conspiratorial idea that a pallet of bricks outside a courthouse must have been planted there to provoke a riot.
Reuben Lael
@reubengotsoul
The Dallas protest was a lot of things. But I was very disappointed to see this RANDOM stack of bricks in front of the courthouse. #setup #BlackLivesMatters #makeblackcount
Embedded video
6,417
7:56 AM - May 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
2,653 people are talking about this
“This is a set-up,” the young man says to the camera in the original video, which was posted on Twitter by a black activist. “You got to do better,” the man adds, wagging his finger in a sarcastic scolding of the slipshod provocateurs he imagines were responsible. In the background, another protester can be heard saying, “there ain’t no damned construction around here.”
That is not quite correct, however. Photographs and video shot on May 5 at the same location, outside the Dallas County Courthouse — during a protest by the far-right Oathkeepers in support of Shelley Luther, a salon owner who was jailed for reopening her business during the coronavirus lockdown— showed that there were extensive roadworks and piles of bricks at that same street corner three weeks before George Floyd was killed.
Oath Keepers
@Oathkeepers
Standing outside the Dallas County Courthouse waiting to see if defiant Dallas salon owner Shelley Luther will be arrested today by the local tyrant judge. She is inside court house for a “contempt of court” hearing. Stay tuned.
View image on Twitter
21
12:33 PM - May 5, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
16 people are talking about this
Even if the roadwork had been largely or entirely completed by last Saturday, it seems far more likely that the bricks had just not been cleared away than that they were removed and then planted again, outside a courthouse, by left-wing agitators.
In an interview, the man who recorded this video and posted it online, Reuben Lael, told me that he took the threat of “interlopers,” meaning “anarchists or any other anti-America groups,” using violence to distort the meaning of the Black Lives Matter protests very seriously. “America is vulnerable and on the radar of people who want to destroy the country,” he said. Lael argued that it was important to him “to protect the young protesters” and “kind of keep the narrative clear” by at least letting the young man who suspected the bricks might have been a set-up make it plain that he was not a rioter and not interested in violence.
Another clip used by the White House, and “Inside Edition,” shows a pile of bricks in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in video that was posted on Twitter on Saturday. However, as Benjamin Strick of The BBC reported on Tuesday, the bricks were clearly visible at the same spot in video posted on YouTube on May 24, one day before the killing of George Floyd.
Benjamin Strick
@BenDoBrown
Hi @WhiteHouse. You are wrong. Some of these "staging bricks" to "instigate violence" videos are false. This one filmed in #Fayetteville (https://www.google.com/maps/@35.0527635,-78.8789179,3a,75y,165.39h,76.74t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sWhaj_0gr7RbgZ8d5Z4oF9Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 …) the bricks were there pre-May 24 in this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5rJCesyF_A …. See more here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/52877751 https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1268248480880963584 …
View image on Twitter
46
1:37 PM - Jun 3, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
21 people are talking about this
The Fayetteville Public Works Commission also confirmed to Strick’s colleague, Shayan Sardarizadeh, on Tuesday that the paving stones had been placed on that sidewalk last week ahead of planned work to restore the cobblestoned street following work on water and sewer lines beneath the pavement.
In the White House compilation, that video from Fayetteville is the fifth clip, and, as Strick pointed out on Twitter, the pile of paving stones in it appears to be identical to those shown in the second clip in the sequence, which seems to show the same stones (surrounded by the same traffic cones and brick wall) at a different time of day.
The third clip in the White House video, of a police officer removing blue boxes of stones from a street corner in Gravesend, a part of South Brooklyn where there have been no protests or rioting, was posted on Twitter on Tuesday morning by someone who claimed, without evidence, that they had been placed there by Anifa. “Bricks have been places strategically around Brooklyn in anticipation of protests,” a conservative Brooklyn resident named Yaakov Kaplan wrote in his video caption without evidence. “ANTIFA is way more organized than politicians pretend.”
That video was shared on Twitter on Wednesday morning by Commissioner Dermot Shea of the New York Police Department. However, Mark Treyger, a New York City Council member who represents that area responded to the commissioner’s tweet a short time later, calling his accusation that the stones had been placed there by antifascists false. “This is in my district. I went to the site. This construction debris was left near a construction site on Ave X in Gravesend,” Treyger wrote on Twitter.
Mark Treyger
@MarkTreyger718
This is in my district. I went to the site. This construction debris was left near a construction site on Ave X in Gravesend. Could be evidence of a developer breaking law since phase 1 hasn’t begun, but there was no evidence of organized looting on X last night that I’m aware of https://twitter.com/nypdshea/status/1268187062001455111 …
Commissioner Shea
@NYPDShea
This is what our cops are up against: Organized looters, strategically placing caches of bricks & rocks at locations throughout NYC.
Embedded video
2,577
10:28 AM - Jun 3, 2020 · Brooklyn, NY
Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,045 people are talking about this
It is nor clear where the fourth clip in the White House compilation was shot, but it shows what look like ordinary construction materials.
The sixth clip, of young protesters in Manhattan picking up bricks during a march on Saturday night, was edited by the White House to cut out the start of the scene, in which they could be seen first breaking down a barrier around a clearly defined construction site in the East Village. The original clip, posted by a reporter, showed a yellow fence around the building materials and a sign reading “LANE CLOSED CAUTION,” before it was pulled down by the protesters to get at the bricks.
Kevin R Hogan
@KRHogan_NTD
"Yo, we got bricks. We got bricks!"—#Rioters in Manhattan chanced upon a cache in the street equipped with bricks and a shovel at 10:01 p.m. on Second Ave between St. Marks Pl. and Seventh St.
Embedded video
3,263
9:41 PM - May 30, 2020 · Manhattan, NY
Twitter Ads info and privacy
2,908 people are talking about this
The seventh and final clip offered by the White House as supposed proof of anti-fascists “staging bricks” was perhaps the most embarrassing mistake. That viral clip showed several piles of large rocks inside six metal cages on a sidewalk in Sherman Oaks, California, which people on social platforms speculated were caches of ammunition for future riots.
Talia
@talialikeitis
Wow. All over LA ... anyone else seeing these?
Not my video. Just sharing —
Embedded video
2,986
7:49 PM - Jun 1, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
3,606 people are talking about this
In fact, as the Chabad of Sherman Oaks had already explained on its Facebook page on Monday, in response to the viral rumor that these were stones prepared for rioting, the structures were in fact security barriers that had been in place outside the Jewish center for nearly a year.
Jennie (she/her) ?????? #BlackLivesMatter
@JennieRoberson
People keep RTing this like it's prep for looters. That's a hoax. This is in front of Chabad in Sherman Oaks. They're bolted to the cement to keep people from ramming a car into the place of worship & are getting boarded up. Share the shit out of this 2 stop the false narrative.
View image on Twitter
169
4:55 PM - Jun 1, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
112 people are talking about this
“Nevertheless to alleviate people’s concern that they may be vandalized and used by rioters, they were temporarily removed,” the center said in a message posted on Facebook with a photo of the cages after the rocks had been removed.
A screenshot of a Facebook message posted on Monday, debunking a viral rumor.]
The White House social media director, Dan Scavino, did not reply to a request for comment on why the video was posted after most of its contents had already been debunked, and why it was removed without explanation.
Despite a lack of evidence, belief in the president’s conspiracy theory that “outside agitators” from the ranks of the anti-fascists are infiltrating protests to spark violence has become an article of faith among his supporters, and has been echoed from senior officers in some police departments. On Monday, Terence Monahan, the chief of department and the highest-ranked uniformed police officer in the NYPD, told a local television crew that it was time “to get those groups out of here — from California, from all over this country, who are being paid to take this movement, which is a good movement, and turn it into violence” against police officers.
Robert Mackey
@RobertMackey
NYPD is being led by a chief, Terence Monahan, who reveals here that he believes the baseless conspiracy theory that groups from other parts of the country "are being paid" to hijack the protests and inflict violence on the police. He's in charge. https://twitter.com/morenabasteiro/status/1267589169695666176 …
Morena Basteiro
?
@morenabasteiro
An emotional ?@NYPDChiefofDept? tells ?@JoshEiniger7? that it’s time to get the agitators “out of here” - “from California, from all over this country, who are being paid to take this movement, which is a good movement, and turn it into violence.” ?@ABC7NY?
Embedded video
48
3:57 PM - Jun 2, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
29 people are talking about this
Other departments have found themselves forced to debunk viral rumors of imminent attacks from anti-fascists, who use the term antifa as a nickname, but are not members of an organized group, as Trump and his followers seem to believe.
On Monday, a police department in Idaho wrote on Facebook that a viral rumor spread by a rightwing militia group, that “Antifa has sent a plane load of their people into Boise and three bus loads from Seattle into the rural areas,” was entirely untrue. “The Payette County Sheriff’s Office has been monitoring social media posts that have stated FALSE information,” the department wrote. “The Payette County Sheriff’s Office has not had contact with and has not verified that Antifa is in Payette County. The Payette County Sheriff’s Office has not given any specific warnings to our citizens about Antifa or other organizations.”
Ahead of a protest on Sunday, the Sioux Falls Chamber of Commerce tweeted that it “had received tips from unnamed sources that protesters from outside of Sioux Falls planned to attend the rally and incite violence.”
Sioux Falls Police Chief Matt Burns told The Argus Leader, a local newspaper, on Monday “that authorities were looking for the buses and didn’t find any evidence of them arriving and unloading protesters.”
But unverified claims that “pallets of bricks” have been mysteriously delivered to protest sites have also been embraced by some anti-Trump activists on the left. The podcaster Tonya Tko used many of the same viral clips of bricks in her own video analysis posted on Facebook on Monday, in which she concluded that the government must be trying to undermine peaceful protests in favor of racial justice by inciting people to violence. Tko’s video, “Bricks Planted in Protest Cities Across the U.S.: IT’S A SET-UP!” in which she also suggests that the Covid-19 pandemic might have been part of a wider government plot, has already been viewed 3.4 million times.
==
barr trump need bogeyman/threat to justify cop violence
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/bill-barr-and-trump-desperately-want-to-blame-antifa-for-violence-but-theyre-coming-up-dry-so-far/
no lnx alex h
President Donald Trump has turned his wrath on Antifa during the George Floyd protests, demanding Antifa be labeled a terrorist organization and accusing the movement of committing acts of violence at demonstrations. But journalists William Bredderman and Spencer Ackerman, in the Daily Beast, threw cold this week on efforts to blame the leftist group.
They found that “none of the 22 criminal complaints representing the first wave of protest charges mention Antifa in any way.”
Calling Antifa a “terrorist organization” is problematic in more than one respect. First, Antifa doesn’t begin to fit the traditional definition of terrorism and doesn’t target innocent bystanders the way that actual terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or the Ku Klux Klan have done. Second, Antifa isn’t an organization, but a decentralized movement and collection of tactics.
Bredderman and Ackerman discuss the ideologies of defendants in the protest cases, noting that they range from “anarchism” to the far-right Boogaloo movement — and that none of the charges mention anti-fascism (which is what Antifa stands for). According to retired FBI special agent Mike German, “What it definitely demonstrates is that anti-fascism is not a driving force in the current protest violence.”
Nonetheless, Attorney General William Barr has joined Trump in blaming Antifa for violence at demonstrations. At a press conference on Thursday, Barr told reporters, “We have evidence that Antifa and other similar extremist groups, as well as actors of a variety of different political persuasions, have been involved in instigating and participating in the violent activity.”
Bredderman and Ackerman note some reasons why Trump and Barr’s claims about Antifa are so misleading.
“Despite Trump’s rhetoric about designating Antifa a terrorist organization, Antifa is an ethic rather than an actual group — and even if it were a group, there is no domestic terrorism statute for designating a non-foreign entity as a banned terrorist organization,” Bredderman and Ackerman note. “That’s not stopped a chorus of right-wing voices from fantasizing about state violence against ant-fascist Americans.”
For example, the Beast journalists point out, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas tweeted, “Let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.”
Tom Cotton
@TomCottonAR
US Senate candidate, AR
Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.
If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let's see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they're facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.
We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.
137K
6:29 AM - Jun 1, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
69.9K people are talking about this
Far-right fear-mongering around Antifa is nothing new. In November 2017, FBI Director Christopher Wray was asked if the FBI was doing anything to counteract Antifa; Wray responded, “We’re not investigating Antifa as Antifa – that’s an ideology, and we don’t investigate ideologies.”
According to German, Trump and Barr are badly misinformed where Antifa is concerned.
“Typically, when we’re talking about Antifa — which doesn’t exist as a group in the way the president imagines — it would make it difficult to associate somebody with a group that doesn’t exist as an organization,” German explained. “They’re imagining something that isn’t real.”
==
an 520
An alternative path to public safety: mutual aid
A common justification for authoritarian actions during times of crisis is that the public is prone to panicking and losing control, but social scientists agree that in emergency situations,people actually “tend to be more cooperative and more generous toward others than they may normally be.” In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for example, it wasn’t the police who protected people from roving white militias. It wasn’t FEMA or NGOs who provided food and medical care after Harvey and Sandy. It was networks of neighbors and volunteers who calmly took matters into their own hands. People cooperated, not competed. They made decisions democratically, not unilaterally. They provided mutual aid, not policing.
Mutual aid is a foundational concept of anarchist political philosophy. It’s the idea that helping each other is crucial to our survival and intrinsic to our humanity. It’s understanding that an individual’s happiness and wellbeing is linked to the happiness and wellbeing of others. In the midst of the pandemic, people all over America are proving it true.
An antifascist group in Portland has made 225 gallons of hand sanitizer for frontline workers and people without homes. An antiracist group in New York City has made and delivered over 3,000 meals to families in the Bronx and East Harlem. Food Not Bombs in Philadelphia is delivering thousands of masks to essential workers. Professionals across the country areoffering legal aidfor rent strikers. This isn’t charity meted out from above, but ordinary people helping their neighbors and peers in need.
==
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/neo-nazis-virginia-gun-rally_n_5e221a24c5b63211761391ad
no lnx pix vid
6 Suspected Neo-Nazis Have Now Been Arrested In Lead-Up To Virginia Gun Rally
The men are all alleged members of The Base, a white supremacist group that hopes to start a race war.
By Sebastian Murdock
George Bush Praises ImmigrationGeorge Bush Praises Immigration
Six neo-Nazis have been arrested just days before a gun rally in Virginia is expected to draw thousands, including far-right extremists.
Three Georgia men were arrested Friday on charges of conspiracy to commit murder and participating in a criminal street gang as members of The Base, a white supremacist group that seeks to start a race war.The suspects are Luke Austin, Michael Helterbrand and Jacob Kaderli, The Associated Press reported.
:{:{}:
}:
The men are accused of seeking out antifascists to kill, and were planning to “overthrow the government and murder a Bartow County couple,” the Floyd County Police Department said in a statement.
Left to right: Luke Austin Lane, Jacob Kaderli and Michael Helterbrand are all suspected neo-Nazis who allegedly planned to t
FLOYD COUNTY POLICE DEPARTMENT]
Left to right: Luke Austin Lane, Jacob Kaderli and Michael Helterbrand are all suspected neo-Nazis who allegedly planned to target and kill antifascists.
Atlanta Antifascists, a group that works to confront and expose fascists throughout Georgia, told HuffPost the news of the arrests “underscores that organized white supremacists remain a threat to our communities.”
“Targeting people as members of our group has become a favorite pastime of violent white supremacists,” Atlanta Antifascists said. “Many of these people are not even connected to organized antifascism at all — they simply have become caught in the crosshairs. This is part of a concerted attempt by fascists to create a general attitude of terror and paranoia. We extend our solidarity to all members of the community targeted by white supremacy and fascism and encourage everyone to watch out for each other and keep each other safe.”
The arrests came a day after three other suspected neo-Nazis affiliated with The Base were arrested in Maryland. One of the men, Patrik Mathews, fled Canada earlier last year after his white supremacy ties were discovered. A former reservist in the Canadian Army, Mathews trained as a combat engineer and is an explosives expert.
Patrik Mathews fled Canada after his white supremacy ties were discovered.
RCMP
Patrik Mathews fled Canada after his white supremacy ties were discovered.]
Authorities said Mathews is a top recruiter for the terrorist group and was allegedly planning to start violence at Monday’s gun rally in Virginia along with accomplices Brian Lemley and William Bilbrough IV. Police found guns and more than 1,500 rounds of ammunition during the arrests.
Monday’s rally in Richmond is expected to draw thousands of people who oppose recent gun control bills introduced in the state legislature, including one that would require universal background checks for firearm purchase and another that would limit people from buying more than one handgun per month.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) declared a temporary state of emergency on Wednesday banning all guns from the state Capitol grounds amid threats of violence from far-right extremists.
“We have received credible intelligence from our law enforcement agencies of threats of violence surrounding the demonstration planned for Monday, January 20,” Northam said in a tweet. “This includes extremist rhetoric similar to what has been seen before major incidents, such as Charlottesville in 2017.”
Organizers of the rally, anti-gun control group Virginia Citizens Defense League, falsely accused Democratic leaders of inviting violent groups to the rally following the temporary ban on guns.
“[Democrats] would love for it to degenerate to ‘violence, rioting, and insurrection’ in order to smear gun owners,” the group said in a statement. “Has the Democrat leadership actually invited violent groups to attend for the purpose of disrupting our peaceful assembly?”
Hours after the statement, three of the suspected neo-Nazis were arrested. The VCDL did not respond to a request for comment.
==
---
https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/revealed-the-fbi-is-targeting-immigration-activists
no lnx
Revealed: The FBI is targeting immigration activists
Written by Igor Derysh September 6, 2019
An FBI document obtained by Yahoo News shows that the bureau is monitoring groups that protest the Trump administration immigration policies as “extremists.”
An FBI “external intelligence note” that was sent to law enforcement and government agencies by the bureau’s Phoenix field office in May warns that immigration activists are “increasingly arming themselves and using lethal force to further their goals,” although it offered no evidence of violence.
The memo alleges that “anarchist extremists” are “very likely” increasing the “targeting” of immigration enforcement officers and detention facilities and pose the “risk of armed conflict.” The memo acknowledges that the claims were made with “medium” and “low confidence.”
Even though nearly all evidence cited in the memo refers to nonviolent protests and statements, the document alleges that the “threat” to Arizona “likely will grow” and may be “emboldened” if given an “opportunity for an escalation to violence.”
The memo further claims that some of the groups it described as “anarchist extremists” have “banned firearms or [are] carrying loaded weapons.” No specific evidence that this had actually happened was cited.
“These indicators, if found to be accurate, could cause a change in the confidence levels or in the assessments in general,” the document says.
The evidence cited for the FBI’s claims largely refers to activist websites and social media accounts calling for “disruptions” near ICE facilities.
The allegation that immigration activists are arming themselves appears to refer to comments from “antifa” groups about training members to use firearms. There have been no instances of shootings linked to antifa members. The document also cites a single human source to claim a group planned to provide “armed support of the migrant caravans” in December 2018. There has been no evidence that any group or any individuals actually did so.
Despite this general lack of hard evidence, the memo states that agents assessed that it was “likely” that immigration activists planned to use firearms against the government and right-wing groups, rather than arming themselves for self-defense, even though sources had told the FBI that these groups have “summarily banned the use of firearms.”
The memo was produced by the FBI Phoenix field office and distributed to other agencies. A bureau spokesperson told Yahoo News that the contents of the document offered only the perspective of the Phoenix field office and included nuanced qualifiers.
“These products are intended to be informative in nature,” the spokesperson said, “and as such, they contain appropriate caveats to describe the confidence in the sourcing of information and the likelihood of the assessment. Additionally, when written at a local level, these products will note that the perspective offered may be limited to the field office’s area of responsibility.”
Mike German, a former FBI special agent, told Yahoo News that the memo is evidence of the bureau’s post-9/11 “overreach” in classifying protest groups as terror threats.
“It’s been a feature of the post-9/11 counterterrorism effort by the FBI to focus on nonviolent civil disobedience and to prioritize it,” German said. “For several years after 9/11, the FBI called environmental activists the No. 1 domestic terror threat, even though there’s not a single homicide related to environmental ‘terrorists’ in the United States.”
A 2010 FBI inspector general report criticized the bureau for targeting groups like PETA and Greenpeace, noting that some investigations were “factually weak,” and showed no indication of federal criminal activity.
“In some cases, the FBI extended the duration of investigations involving advocacy groups or their members without adequate basis, and in a few instances the FBI improperly retained information about the groups in its files,” the report said. “The FBI also classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its ‘Acts of Terrorism’ classification, which resulted in the watchlisting of subjects during the investigation.”
German told Yahoo News that even groups like antifa, which have been involved in violent street clashes with far-right groups, would not qualify as terror threats.
“Congress passed a definition of domestic terrorism. It requires illegal activities harmful to human life,” German said. “I’m not aware of any fatal attacks committed by somebody associated with an antifascist movement.”
Nate Snyder, a former Homeland Security and Justice Department official, told Yahoo News that the FBI also erred in linking antifa to anarchist groups and immigration activists.
“Those are three very different groups,” he said.
This federal scrutiny is apparently not limited to activist groups. An NBC San Diego investigation earlier this year found that government authorities are tracking journalists who have covered migrant caravans at the border.
Snyder called the memo a “head scratcher.” In July, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress that domestic terror cases are on the rise, but that most of them involve “white supremacist violence.”
Despite Wray’s testimony, Yahoo News reported last month that the Justice Department had suppressed a report showing that white supremacists were responsible for all race-based domestic terror incidents last year. The Trump administration has also shifted resources and staff away from investigating white supremacist violence, while increasing DHS investigations that have targeted Muslims and other minority groups.
“There are people out there actually harming other people, and that’s where the counterterrorism resources should be devoted,” German told Yahoo News, “not toward people who are simply challenging government policy,”
==
---
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/far-right-journalist-andy-ngo-exposed-as-right-wing-troll
no lnx
Far-right ‘journalist’ Andy Ngo exposed as right-wing troll
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon August 28, 2019
Andy Ngo, the right-wing journalist and provocateur who was embraced by mainstream Republicans and covered favorably in mainstream media after he was attacked by antifa activists during a street fight in Portland, Oregon, may suddenly be persona non grata among conservatives.Nearly all mentions of Ngo were scrubbed from the upscale right-wing publication Quillette after a newly-released video showed him acting friendly with members of Patriot Prayer, a far-right hate group that has repeatedly sought out fights with leftists.
Ngo, who has used selectively edited videos to paint antifa as a violent, criminal group was hit with punches and milkshakes during a clash between antifa activists and members of the Proud Boys, an organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many on the right rallied around Ngo after that altercation, and spread false rumors that the milkshakes thrown at him and others had contained quick-dry cement.
Ngo used his newfound fame to boost his profile, appearing on Fox News and other cable news outlets and embracing his victimhood.
Just weeks later, however, a video surfaced on Twitter showing Ngo pal around with the Proud Boys-adjacent group Patriot Prayer.
The video shows Ngo laughing as the group plans a violent attack on antifa members at a Portland bar in May. The video surfaced as part of a lawsuit brought by the bar, accusing Patriot Prayer members of causing a riot.
The Portland Mercury reports that Patriot Prayer members targeted antifa while they were celebrating a day of peaceful May Day celebrations. The lawsuit brought by the bar owners alleges that Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson and six others trespassed onto the property with the aim of engaging in violence.
The video of Ngo laughing as the group plans their attack, wrote Portland Mercury news editor Alex Zielinski, “is the clearest evidence I’ve seen supporting the claim that [Patriot Prayer] & leader Joy Gibson were intent on instigating a fight that afternoon.”
Alex Zielinski
?
@alex_zee
This clip, shot right before Patriot Prayer arrived at Cider Riot on May Day, is the clearest evidence I've seen supporting the claim that PP & leader Joey Gibson were intent on instigating a fight that afternoon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awN9J88j4mA&feature=youtu.be …
YouTube ?@YouTube
2,553
The video shows members discuss their weapons and making preparations for the attack. Ngo is present the entire time and can be seen laughing at certain points.
“There’s no way he couldn’t know the group was planning on instigating violence,” Zielinski wrote.
In Ngo’s coverage of the violence, however, videos of the attack were selectively edited to remove violence by Patriot Prayer members. His tweets entirely blamed antifa for the violence.
Respectable Lawyer
@RespectableLaw
- Aug 23, 2019
Replying to @RespectableLaw
And of course, Andy also posted misleading footage after the attack. He shows a woman aggressively approaching Patriot Prayer members in hysterics, and then a Patriot Prayer member hits her with some kind of club.https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1125811724932632576 …
Andy Ngo
?
@MrAndyNgo
Replying to @katemshepherd
Here is the moment that woman charged in to fight and got knocked out. Notice the masked person who went in the direction of the camera man with a blade or pick. I saw numerous patrons on the bar’s property with weapons ready. pic.twitter.com/exCiimM4cp
Embedded video
Respectable Lawyer
@RespectableLaw
But as @imminentbulb pointed out, a full video shows the woman was attacked immediately prior to the start of Andy’s clip. If you listen to Andy’s clip, you can even hear one Patriot Prayer member frantically apologizing for the attack on her.https://twitter.com/imminentbulb/status/1125818772793618432 …
^,,
@imminentbulb
Replying to @imminentbulb and 2 others
Here's what happened immediately before the footage Andy is pushing. Deme Cooper, thirsty to carry out further #PatriotPrayer violence, returned to blatantly assault that person. She responded briefly in self defense, then Ian Kramer struck her after she had turned around.
Embedded video
1,653
“As more people send me clips, it becomes clear that Andy’s work is plagued by these dishonest edits,” wrote a Twitter user who has posted numerous videos discrediting Ngo’s tweets. “For example, in this clip, he edited out some goons stomping a man’s head, and did it with a sloppy looking jump-cut in his own clip.”
Respectable Lawyer
@RespectableLaw
- Aug 23, 2019
Replying to @RespectableLaw
This is the same woman who Andy had filmed and identified to his followers. She was knocked unconscious and suffered a broken neck. Andy also published her name while she was in the hospital.
Respectable Lawyer
@RespectableLaw
As more people send me clips, it becomes clear that Andy’s work is plagued by these dishonest edits. For example, in this clip, he edited out some goons stomping a man’s head, and did it with a sloppy looking jump-cut in his own clip.https://twitter.com/leftkist/status/1163913780197113856 …
Grifts Gone Wild
@leftkist
For your Andy Ngo list @RespectableLaw
Andy crudely edited out footage of Patriot Prayer associates Tiny Toese and Igor Ponomarev pummeling someone on the ground on 10/13/18.
Footage from @itsmikebivins shows what he cut.
Embedded video
1,927
376 people are talking about this
Quillette, where Ngo worked as a photo editor until Monday, announced after the video surfaced that Ngo was leaving his job at the site. Ngo’s name was scrubbed from the site, The Daily Beast reported.
Quillette editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann told The Daily Beast that Ngo left the site weeks earlier but the move was not publicized until Monday.
“Andy actually moved on from Quillette a few weeks ago because he is undertaking bigger & better projects, we just hadn’t updated the website and he hadn’t updated his Twitter bio until today,” she told the Daily Beast. “I haven’t seen the video,” she added.
Lehmann also said that Ngo had been on a “break” from a “brain injury” he suffered at the Portland rally.
Ngo, however, did not remove Quillette from his Twitter bio until Monday, noted National Observer reporter Caroline Orr, the same day that the Patriot Prayer video was released.
Meanwhile, Ngo’s crowdfunding campaign has raised nearly $195,000 since the Portland attack, which was even cited in a letter sent by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to the Justice Department.
Cruz cited the Ngo incident to demand that the FBI investigate Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and prosecute antifa members under the RICO statute. Cruz’s call was amplified by President Trump to his 63 million followers on Twitter.
“At least give Andy Ngo credit,” wrote HuffPost reporter Luke O’Brien, for “lifting $200k off some of the dumbest people alive. Right-wing writers staked their reputations on this guy. Ted Cruz based an anti-anti-fascist congressional resolution on Ngo.”
---
==
819
The leader of a large right-wing militia group told followers to skip a planned rally in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, saying that organizers hadn’t properly kept white nationalists away from the event and that attendees could face legal consequences.
In a statement on his group’s website, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes said he owed it to his membership to disavow the so-called “End Domestic Terrorism” rally, where attendees will demand that anti-fascists, or “antifa,” be labeled a terrorist group.
“We do not believe the organizers are taking the steps necessary to ensure that white nationalist and suspected white nationalist groups and individuals will be excluded,” he wrote.
Rhodes expressed concern that threats of violence from the right could put attendees at legal risk.
Citing the work of anarchist news website It’s Going Down, Rhodes pointed to the archived posts the site has collected that show prominent far-right figures, including the event’s organizers, seemingly threatening violence.
Rhodes said that statements that can be “construed as expressing an intent to come to Portland to seek out Antifa and engage them in street fights” or “worse” could “potentially expose all attendees to possible prosecution using both an Oregon state ‘rioting’ statute and a federal rioting statute.”
Joe Biggs, an event organizer and former InfoWars host who frequently posts threatening messages and memes online, claimed in a recent Facebook post flagged by The Oregonian that the FBI had asked him to “tone down” the rhetoric about the event.
“Everyone in law enforcement is on edge after these last two shootings,” he wrote, presumably referring to the shooting massacres in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, recently.
The Portland Police Bureau said in a statement earlier this month, “Based on publicly-available information, the Bureau is concerned events on August 17 may involve persons interested in participating in criminal activity.”
Messaging for Saturday’s rally has focused on the assault of right-wing commentator Andy Ngo in Portland in late June. Video from the last time the right-wing “Proud Boys” gang rallied in Portland appeared to show counterprotesters — clad in black with their faces covered, a uniform of some — attacking Ngo and pouring milkshakes on him. The footage spread like wildfire on the right and was touted by conservatives as supposed evidence of the left’s terrorism problem, and used as fodder for Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) resolution calling antifascists a domestic terrorist organization.
But Portland has seen multiple violent confrontations in recent years between extreme right-wing groups, including outright hate groups, and anti-fascists.
Rhodes’ note to Oath Keepers membership came on the same day the leader of the ultranationalist group Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, was reportedly charged with felony rioting over a brawl at a Portland cidery on May Day. (Gibson’s attorney denied wrongdoing.) The group’s leader is one of several people charged recently in relation to the incident.
==
---
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/dangerous-republican-resolution-suggests-that-all-forms-of-political-dissent-could-soon-be-considered-terrorism/
no lnx
Dangerous Republican resolution suggests that all forms of political dissent could soon be considered terrorism
Written by Urie Dvorozniak / Salon July 23, 2019
Last week, Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Ted Cruz of Texas introduced a resolution to designate “antifa,” which the Anti-Defamation League defines as “a loose collection of groups, networks, and individuals who believe in active, aggressive opposition to far right-wing movements,” as a “domestic terrorist organization.”
In fact, antifa is a constellation of many different activist groupings, with no official leader or clear hierarchy. As the New York Times has noted, its membership count is “impossible to know.” That didn’t stop the two Republican senators from claiming that “Antifa are terrorists, violent masked bullies who ‘fight fascism’ with actual fascism, protected by Liberal privilege.”
Senator Ted Cruz
?
@SenTedCruz
Antifa is a terrorist organization composed of hateful, intolerant radicals who pursue their extreme agenda through aggressive violence. Time and time again their actions have demonstrated that their central purpose is to inflict harm on those who oppose their views.
26.2K
1:02 PM - Jul 18, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
23.5K people are talking about this
Antifa, short for “anti-fascist,” traces its ideological roots to 1920s and 1930s Germany and supposes that if people had opposed the Nazi Party more aggressively, Adolf Hitler might never have come to power. The ADL reports that many people who act within antifa are anarchist or very left-wing, but that “since Trump’s election, some people with more mainstream political backgrounds have also joined their ranks.”
:{:{}:
}:
In their resolution, Cruz and Cassidy reference the “violent demonstrations” on June 29 in Portland, Oregon, where writer right-wing Alex Ngo was assaulted while covering an antifa protest against the “far-right nationalist” group known as the Proud Boys.
:{:{}:
}:
After the incident, Cruz called for a federal criminal investigation of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat who is also the police commissioner of the city.
Ted Cruz
?
@tedcruz
To federal law enforcement: investigate & bring legal action against a Mayor who has, for political reasons, ordered his police officers to let citizens be attacked by domestic terrorists. https://tinyurl.com/y2udrv5d https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1145212511966441473 …
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler Under Fire for Not Stopping Antifa Protests
Wheeler's hands-off policy when it comes to Antifa came under scrutiny on Saturday after journalist Ngo was assaulted by masked assailants.
breitbart.com
Ted Cruz
?
@tedcruz
To law enforcement: find & prosecute these violent felons. https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1145212299914952704 …
39.4K
11:10 PM - Jun 29, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
19K people are talking about this
Cruz and Cassidy also point to antifa activists occupying the areas outside of Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, as well as posting the personal information of ICE officials online.
But the Republican senators’ resolution is little more than a political stunt.
Cruz and Cassidy’s resolution, which is entirely non-binding, won’t actually change U.S. law — because there is no existing law to change. The Patriot Act defines domestic terrorism as criminal activity that appears intended to “intimidate or coerce” civilians or influence government policy using violent methods. But, domestic terrorism is not a specific crime under U.S. law. Labeling a group as domestic terrorists give federal law enforcement broader powers to conduct investigations of other crimes, but does not itself define any criminal activities. criminal make. Furthermore, since antifa isn’t a singular group, as mentioned above, its definition under this resolution is unclear.
The designation of what “groups” are called terrorist, domestic terrorist or hate groups is extremely loose. For instance, the Pulse Nightclub shooter was charged with terrorism, while the Ku Klux Klan is legally considered a “hate group,” not a domestic terror organization. And while the federal government keeps a list of foreign terrorist groups, there is no public list of domestic terrorist groups.
Some outlets have thought it worthy to equate the confrontational tactics of antifa to political violence on the far-right. But as the ADL has pointed out, “To date, there have been no Antifa related murders,” yet “right-wing extremists” have “ murdered hundreds of people in this country over the last ten years alone.”
Just last week, James Alex Fields Jr., an avowed neo-Nazi, was sentenced to life in prison plus 419 years for the violent assault he committed during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fields deliberately drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyerand injuring several others.
Free speech activists have expressed concerns that the Cruz-Cassidy resolution could set a precedent for more groups to be labeled domestic terrorist organizations. As National Observer reporter Caroline Orr noted, Cruz’s resolution uses the terms “antifa” and “left-wing activists” interchangeably. Most dangerously, it suggests that all manner of dissent could be considered terrorism.
Cruz’s move looks to be a transparent attempt to saddle congressional Democrats with a divisive political debate, declaring themselves either against antifa or in support of it, invariably alienating some of the party’s supporters ahead of a critical presidential election.
---
How conservative figures turned a flimsy rumor about "concrete milkshakes" in Portland into a meme
Nobody is doubting that there was a physical confrontation. The details, however, remain murky.
Blog ››› July 1, 2019 4:39 PM EDT ››› PARKER MOLLOY
Over the weekend, far-right and anti-fascist protesters clashed in downtown Portland, OR. Among the controversies was an attack carried out against Quillette editor Andy Ngo, caught on film by Oregonian reporter Jim Ryan. The June 29 footage shows black bloc demonstrators punching and kicking Ngo while others throw milkshakes at him.
[ 2 vids]
A trend of throwing milkshakes at far-right politicians and activists originated earlier this year in the United Kingdom, but has more recently made its way over to the United States. Supporters of the practice see it as a way to humiliate political opponents and make them fear public organizing. Critics correctly note that this is a form of battery but have also warned that this tactic could quickly escalate into more damaging, permanent attacks involving acid or other corrosive chemicals.
According to some on the far-right, their worst fears of such an escalation were realized during the attack on Ngo. In reality, there’s not any actual evidence of that -- and that’s a big problem.
A rumor takes off thanks to a vaguely worded tweet the Portland Police Bureau seemingly sent out of an abundance of caution.
One rumor coming out of the face-off was that some vegan milkshakes being handed out by antifa demonstrators contained cement or other harmful chemical substances. This rumor took on a sense of legitimacy when the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) tweeted that it had “received information that some of the milkshakes thrown today during the demonstration contained quick-drying cement.
[twt]
While there is plenty of video evidence of people throwing milkshakes, and members of the left-wing contingent were handing them out, there’s no actual evidence to suggest that the “quick-drying cement” rumor is anything more than that -- an unsubstantiated rumor.
Willamette Week writer Katie Shepherd reached out to the PPB for any additional information it had regarding “cement.” In response, the department again said that it “received information during the event that some people were mixing a concrete like substance into the milkshakes” and cited a police lieutenant’s on-site observation of a cup that “appeared to have material on it consistent with quick drying cement.
[twt px]
As it turns out, this substance was likely just a coconut milkshake. At the Portland Mercury, Alex Zielinski wrote that the police had offered no proof that there was cement in the shakes and noted, “Several people ended up throwing their 12-ounce milkshakes at people associated with the alt-right and at PPB officers -- but most people consumed the coconut milk-based treats.” Zielinski went on to link to several Twitter posts of people who drank the shakes without their internal organs turning to stone.
Conservative journalists and commentators began running with the PPB’s tweet as confirmation that there was concrete mixed into the shakes when, of course, this was far from a statement of certainty.
Jack Posobiec, a One America News Network host and right-wing conspiracy theorist with links to white supremacist activists, was one of the most vocal proponents of this narrative. On Twitter, Posobiec mischaracterized the PPB’s alert, which only echoed its earlier claim that it had received an unconfirmed report that there could be substances in shakes. He described it as “Portland PD report on Antifa mixing concrete into milkshakes,” claiming that “this creates an acid-like chemical weapon.” He did the same regarding the information obtained from the PPB by Shepherd, framing it as “Portland PD share additional details about concrete chemical-laced milkshakes used by Antifa.”
Posobiec also used a photo to further the rumor, and photographer Shane Burley called him out for the misleading and unauthorized use.
[twt pix]
IanMiles Cheong, managing editor of conservative site Human Events, tweeted matter-of-factly, “Antifa mixed quick-drying concrete into the shakes. Called it the ‘Stonewall Shake’—a clever pun referencing both the ingredients of the secret recipe as well as the LGBT riots in 1969, NYC.” While Popular Mobilization, the group distributing the shakes, had indeed named the drink the Stonewall Shake “in honor of the 50th anniversary” of the LGBTQ protests, Cheong omitted the group’s tweet containing the actual recipe: coconut-based ice cream and cashew milk (plus rainbow sprinkles). In a separate tweet, Cheong elaborated, “The milkshakes were lined with quicklime/quick dry concrete mix and produce chemical burns, in addition to being heavy.”
Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson, and anti-Muslim bigot Pamela Geller similarly amplified this narrative. Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh took the “milkshake laced with cement mix” line at face value, distorting what the PPB said while also using the occasion to get in a dig at trans people.
Fox News published a story to its website headlined “Antifa, conservative protests turn violent as demonstrators throw milkshakes of quick-dry cement at police and onlookers.” Mother Jones reporter Ali Breland noted that Fox later quietly edited its headline to remove the reference to the milkshakes without issuing a correction.
[twt pix]
It should be easy for media figures to denounce exaggerations and the spread of flimsy rumors.
Early in the day, Ngo posted a tweet showing a white liquid splattered across his bag, and like many, I made a joke about it, saying that it looked like he’d been attacked by a small family of pigeons. Once the video of him being physically assaulted was posted later, I apologized for the joke, which by then seemed to be in poor taste, and unequivocally condemned the violence he faced -- which appeared to involve kicking, punching, and yes, throwing milkshakes. Condemning violence against journalists should be easy enough.
As the unsupported rumors about anti-fascist protesters weaponizing milkshakes with cement were increasingly presented as facts, even Ngo’s biggest fans and defenders should have been willing to come forward and call this out as irresponsible. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.
Political violence is wrong, and so is the spread of unconfirmed or exaggerated accounts for the purpose of advancing a political cause. Doing so is not only intellectually dishonest, but it is sure to increase tensions at a time that demands de-escalation -- or we can all expect further clashes like those we just saw in Portland.
==
rww alex ross against the fascist creep bk clark bros temple shooting
, these are the guys who tried to bust up my book talk in DC. There was a Daily Caller journo waiting in a cab outside livestreaming in case something went down. Instead, dozens of antifascists came and ensured the security of the space. Fash couldn't even catch a ride home
==
rww
Ardent pro-Trump commentator and online conspiracy theorist Bill Mitchell declared on his “YourVoice America” program
that the Department of Justice should investigate whether Antifa is responsible for starting the wildfires that have devastated California, despite admitting that he literally has no evidence to support this assertion.
Mitchell said that while nobody knows what caused these fires, it is possible that they could be the result of “domestic terrorism.”
“Now who is the only domestic terrorist organization that we know of in America?” he asked, rhetorically. “Antifa. Who loves to light things on fire? Antifa. So we have to ask our questions: Is it possible that Antifa is behind the California fires?”
“It isn’t too much of a coincidence that after decades and decades and decades of relatively low amounts of fires, we have all of these simultaneous fires going on in California just as Democrats take back Congress,” Mitchell said. “I am willing to bet one of the first major legislations that come out of the Democrat House will be climate change legislation—based on what? The California fires. Started by who? I wonder. I wonder. It’s all too convenient by half.”
“People say, ‘What evidence do you have that Antifa started this?’ Nothing,” Mitchell continued.“I have no evidence. I’m not accusing them. I’m just asking if it’s possible. It is something that we should consider because if Antifa is, in fact, a domestic terrorist organization and this is, in fact, a terrorist act, we must ask ourselves, ‘Is Antifa involved in this?'”
“The FBI, the DOJ should look into whether they are involved in that because nobody knows who started this,” Mitchell declared. “This is not some wild, fire-bomb-throwing on my part, I just want to know because inquiring minds want to know.”...
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/army-documents-antifa-national-security
Wednesday, The Daily Beast reported that newly released Army documents from 2017 show military officials tried, unsuccessfully, to prove that "antifa" protestors are a threat to national security.
"The Army assessments, dating from mid-2017, were meant to alert servicemembers to potential risks anti-fascists posed to military or military installations. But they also stated that the U.S. Military is "not aware of any threats from Antifa directed at the Army or DoD [the Department of Defense] in general." The heavily redacted documents, marked unclassified, were provided to The Daily Beast by the transparency nonprofit Property of the People and are believed to be the first public disclosures of Defense Department references to antifa.
The documents showed the Army struggling to characterize antifa, or antifascism, a decentralized movement that confronts extremist right-wing forces. Despite conceding that antifa is not connected to any known threat facing servicemembers, the documents showed the Army is encouraging servicemembers to "maintain situational awareness" of the movement, whose profile has soared after the election of Donald Trump — and which mainstream Republican politicians demagogically describe as a Democrat-aligned mob.
The documents paint antifa in broad strokes, at one point describing them as a "network of left-wing anarchist group [sic] whose goal is to 'smash fascism in all its forms,'" (some antifa groups are anarchists, but not all of them are), while defending their opponents as "not affiliated with racist nationalists" (the deadly alt-right demonstrations in Charlottesville went on to prove they very much were).
It is unsettling to see the military seemingly try to endorse the far right's attacks on their political opponents, and it reflects a broader, worrying trend of our government institutions taking right-wing political stances under the auspices of national security. Last year, the FBI targeted civil rights protestors marching against police brutality as "black identity extremists." And more recently,Border patrol agents attended a private screening of the white nationalist propaganda film "Killing Free Speech," after which theagents' union endorsed the film.
Much worry has been devoted to the threat to the rule of law if President Donald Trump chooses to shut down the special counsel probe into Russia, an act that would be seen by many as seizing political control of the justice system. But the fact is, such a move would only be the latest piece of a long-running erosion of the security state's independence in the Trump era — and we are already facing the consequences of that erosion.
---
mark bray antifa bk see milo 2
https://www.salon.com/2018/01/31/antifa-vs-milo-yiannopoulos-who-won/
==
---
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/california-police-caught-helping-out-neo-nazis-continuing-longstanding-american
After violence erupted in 2016 between neo-Nazi groups and anti-racist activists in Sacramento, the head of the white supremacist Traditionalist Worker Party went on a well-known racist radio program to gloat about the number of attacks his group had carried out.
“They got one of ours, but we got six of them,” Matthew Heimbach proudly announced, according to the SPLC. “Six antifa on the way to the hospital.”
A year and a half after what is now grimly called the 2016 Sacramento riots, lawyers for anti-fascist activists involved in the protest say they’ve turned up documents proving investigating officers are working on behalf of the racist attackers. A report from the Guardian finds that court papers document “officers expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizer’s identity” while also seeking “the prosecution of activists with ‘anti-racist’ beliefs.” Three anti-fascist counter-protesters, Yvette Felarca, Mike Williams and Porfirio Paz, are looking to have felony charges dismissed, citing a “cover-up and collusion with the fascists” by prosecutors and law enforcement.
California Highway Patrol records show TWP member Derik Punneo was asked by officers to review audio and pictures of antifa activists in order to help identify them by name. Law enforcement investigators reassured Punneo that they are “pretty much going after [the anti-racist activists],” but that they would be treating him “as a victim.” As Heimbach alluded in his radio appearance,multiple people were stabbed during the Sacramento incident, and police records indicate Punneo was carrying a knife at the rally. The friendly police interview took place when Punneo was brought in for unrelated domestic violence charges.
While they attempted to identify antifa protesters, CHP officers helped Traditionalist Worker Party members avoid public identification. CHP officer Donovan Ayres told another TWP member, Doug McCormack, that he didn’t know the source of a public records request about the incident, but noted that, “If I did, I would tell you.” He also told McCormack he planned to “suggest that we...redact your name or something until this gets resolved.” McCormack, police files indicate, was also carrying a knife during the Sacramento melee.
In addition to McCormack and Punneo, police records show “three other TWP-affiliated men...were armed with knives.” None face charges.
In contrast with his handling of the neo-Nazis’ cases, Officer Ayers treated the anti-racist activists like seasoned criminals.The investigator’s report describes at length past activism by Felarca, whom the Los Angeles Times reports “sustained a bloody blow to the head” during the riot. Ayers went so far as to dig up Facebook photos of an African-American counter-protester giving a fist salute to justify claims that he had “intent and motivation to violate the civil rights” of the racists on hand that day. That protester left the rally in an ambulance, having suffered stab wounds to the hand, chest and stomach. (“The Nazis [went] after the black people,” a medical assistant on the scene told the Sacramento Bee.) Ayers “recommended the man be charged with 11 offenses, including disturbing the peace, conspiracy, assault, unlawful assembly and wearing a mask to evade police.” He has not been charged.
The Guardian’s revelations are a reminder of longstanding reports linking law enforcement with the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. In 2006, the FBI issued an intelligence paper [uk link?]titled “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement,” which acknowledged that “white supremacist groups have historically engaged in strategic efforts to infiltrate and recruit from law enforcement communities.” Speaking to the Intercept writer Alice Speri last year, Chapman University sociologist Pete Simi helped historicize the ties that bind police and hate groups, pointing to U.S. policing’s roots in slave patrols, night watches and violent suppression of African-American communities.
“If you look at the history of law enforcement in the United States, it is a history of white supremacy, to put it bluntly,” Simi told Speri. “More recently, just going back 50 years, law enforcement, particularly in the South, was filled with Klan members.”
It’s impossible to cite hard and fast numbers on law enforcement membership overlapping with white supremacist groups, but that’s kind of the point of getting a foothold in both. The 2006 FBI report includes a reference to “ghost skins,” a term originally employed in white supremacist circles to denote movement affiliates who publicly downplay their racism in order to more stealthily spread their beliefs. Racists might trade in sheets for police uniforms, or alternately, khakis and boat shoes. Only a fraction of those covert operatives in police ranks are discovered, and even then, it’s likely the notorious blue wall prevents an unknowable percentage from ever being publicly revealed. Speri enumerates a handful of cases dating back to the 1990s in which white supremacist cops tipped their hands:
In Los Angeles, for example, a U.S. District Court judge found in 1991 that members of a local sheriff’s department had formed a neo-Nazi gang and habitually terrorized black and Latino residents. In Chicago, Jon Burge, a police detective and rumored KKK member, was fired, and eventually prosecuted in 2008, over charges relating to the torture of at least 120 black men during his decades long career. Burge notoriously referred to an electric shock device he used during interrogations as the “nigger box.” In Cleveland, officials found that a number of police officers had scrawled “racist or Nazi graffiti” throughout their department’s locker rooms. In Texas, two police officers were fired when it was discovered they were Klansmen. One of them said he had tried to boost the organization’s membership by giving an application to a fellow officer he thought shared his “white, Christian, heterosexual values."
More recently, as the Guardian notes, police invited an alt-right protester to aid them in arresting an anti-racist counter-protester at the same rally. There was also the well-publicized case of DeAndre Harris, an African-American man badly beaten by a mob of racist thugs in Charlottesville, who somehow ended up being charged with a felony. The charges, after sustained outcry, were dropped in December.
Donald Trump stepped on the national political stage just as the covert racism and implicit bias that often underlie police brutality were getting a national airing. The administration has helped reset progress, which had moved a few nanometers at best, on the issue. Since taking office, Trump has canceled funds earmarked to oppose violent white racist groups, despite studies proving white nationalists are a bigger threat to public safety than ISIL. Alt-right influenced attackers have killed and injured more than 100 people since 2014, according to the SPLC. Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice has essentially restarted Cointelpro, creating out of thin air the designation “black identity extremists,” a vague category that seems to implicate any politically outspoken African American. Alongside all this, the president peddles the well-worn lie that fighting against neo-Nazis is as bad as being a Nazi, which is dumb but absolutely in keeping with his character.
Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.
The last two years have seen an easing of the longstanding social prohibitions around public displays of racism, and Trump plays no small part in that. (In fact, TWP claimed the Sacramento rally was “a statement about the precarious situation [the white] race is in” as evidenced by make-believe “brutal assaults” by protesters at Donald Trump rallies. Ironically, TWP head Heimbach participated in the actual 2016 physical assault of a young black woman protester at a Trump rally.) That has only worsened law enforcement’s already outsized racism problem. Prosecutors in the Sacramento case claim information in the motion to dismiss is “inaccurate or fabricated.” As the case’s outcome is weighed, we can expect these issues to become yet more familiar.
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/right-wing-media-are-already-spinning-vile-new-conspiracy-theory-about-texas
Michael Edison Hayden
Posted with permission from Newsweek
no link pix/doc
For anyone monitoring America’s far-right, it was only a matter of time before Devin Patrick Kelley, the man identified as the Sutherland Springs, Texas, shooter, became “antifa.”
Antifa, a leftist protest movement with no organizational hierarchy whatsoever, was blamed for the mass shooting in Las Vegas by Alex Jones’ conspiracy website Info Wars. They were responsible for allegedly plotting a civil war involving supersoldiers Saturday—one that utterly failed to manifest. And on Sunday, after a man murdered at least 26 people in a Texas church, the right’s conspiracy peddlers waited only a matter of hours to try to blame the violence on leftists.
Police did not immediately announce Kelley's motive in the mass shooting. But Mike Cernovich, a self-described “American nationalist,” posted about the motive shortly after news of it broke. “Mass shooting at The First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, which has a largely white denomination,” Cernovich wrote. “Antifa terrorist attack?”
Cernovich pushed the same idea further Sunday evening, citing only “photos.” “Photos of Texas shooter is consistent with profile of Antifa member,” Cernovich posted. “This is looking more and more like Antifa terror.”
Alex Jones, who devoted his entire Saturday to doing live coverage on his web-show Info Wars on a second American civil war that absolutely never happened, also pushed the idea that the shooter could somehow be an antifa activist.“Was this part of the Antifa revolution against Christians and conservatives or a Isis op? [ sic],” Jones tweeted Sunday afternoon to promote his show. “Live from the church.”
Jack Posobiec, a pro-Trump figure with a large following on social media, who has a reputation for creating and pushing fake news stories about leftists, posted a screen shot of something that looked like a direct message conversation on Twitter. The conversation was between a man named Dave Pollack and It’s Going Down (IGD), a self-described “digital community center for anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements” frequently associated with “antifa” protests.
The Dave Pollack figure says in the screenshot: “Go after the heart of the far-right: conservative churches.” A spokesperson for Its Going Down, who asked not to be named, told Newsweek through a direct message that the screenshot was entirely fabricated, but noted that many people on social media have seized onto the picture and shared it anyway. On ZeroHedge, a libertarian blog, one of the commenters on a post about the mass shooting summed it up this way: “ He's Antifa, but you'll never see that confirmed because the FBI is a bunch of leftist commie sympathizing traitors,” a user named Gaius Frakkin’ wrote.
“Today we learned that Jack Posobiec was sharing a manufactured and fictitious conversation that was created to look like our account speaking with several others,” the spokesperson for IGD wrote to Newsweek. “The conversation implied that anarchists and antifa organizers are somehow supportive of church shootings. Nothing could be further from the truth, and our hearts go out to people across the U.S. who have lost, and continue lose loved ones in these horrific mass shootings.”
The spokesperson accused Posobiec and others of using the “pain and misery of working-class people” for profit.
“Posobiec wants to attack social movements to further his own reactionary political ends while growing his fame and career along the way,” the spokesperson wrote. “For the sake of not only the truth but people's lives, it's imperative that people recognize these phonies for what they are and denounce them.”
---
---
http://www.alternet.org/media/6-examples-fake-news-about-antifa
twitterbots
==
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/01/antifa-charlottesville-violence-fbi-242235
deral authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.
Since well before the Aug. 12 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly, DHS has been issuing warnings about the growing likelihood of lethal violence between the left-wing anarchists and right-wing white supremacist and nationalist groups.
Previously unreported documents disclose that by April 2016, authorities believed that “anarchist extremists” were the primary instigators of violence at public rallies against a range of targets. They were blamed by authorities for attacks on the police, government and political institutions, along with symbols of “the capitalist system,” racism, social injustice and fascism, according to a confidential 2016 joint intelligence assessment by DHS and the FBI.
After President Donald Trump’s election in November, the antifa activists locked onto another target — his supporters, especially those from white supremacist and nationalist groups suddenly turning out in droves to hail his victory, support crackdowns on immigrants and Muslims and to protest efforts to remove symbols of the Confederacy.
Those reports appear to bolster Trump’s insistence that extremists on the left bore some blame for the clashes in Charlottesville and represent a “problem” nationally. But they also reflect the extent that his own political movement has spurred the violent backlash.
In interviews, law enforcement authorities made clear that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and policies — first as a candidate and then as president — helped to create a situation that has escalated so quickly and extensively that they do not have a handle on it.
“It was in that period [as the Trump campaign emerged] that we really became aware of them,” said one senior law enforcement official tracking domestic extremists in a state that has become a front line in clashes between the groups. “These antifa guys were showing up with weapons, shields and bike helmets and just beating the shit out of people. … They’re using Molotov cocktails, they’re starting fires, they’re throwing bombs and smashing windows.”
Almost immediately, the right-wing targets of the antifa attacks began fighting back, bringing more and larger weapons and launching unprovoked attacks of their own, the documents and interviews show. And the extremists on both sides have been using the confrontations, especially since Charlottesville, to recruit unprecedented numbers of new members, raise money and threaten more confrontations, they say.
“Everybody is wondering, 'What are we gonna do? How are we gonna deal with this?'” said the senior state law enforcement official. “Every time they have one of these protests where both sides are bringing guns, there are sphincters tightening in my world. Emotions get high, and fingers get twitchy on the trigger.”
Even before Charlottesville, dozens and, in some cases, hundreds of people on both sides showed up at events in Texas, California, Oregon and elsewhere, carrying weapons and looking for a fight. In the Texas capital of Austin, armed antifa protesters attacked Trump supporters and white groups at several recent rallies, and then swarmed police in a successful effort to stop them from making arrests.
California has become another battleground, with violent confrontations in Berkeley, Sacramento and Orange County leading to numerous injuries. And antifa counter-protesters initiated attacks in two previous clashes in Charlottesville, according to the law enforcement reports and interviews.
By JACQUELINE KLIMAS and WESLEY MORGAN
Rallies are scheduled over the next few months across the country, including in Texas, Oregon, Missouri and Florida. Authorities are particularly concerned about those in states where virtually anyone, including activists under investigation for instigating violence, can brandish assault rifles in public.
Tensions have gotten so heated that after activists traded accusations after Charlottesville, a rumor circulated online that antifa would try and shut down the massive Sturgis, South Dakota, motorcycle rally because there were too many Confederate flags and Trump signs. It wasn’t true, but it prompted an outpouring of pleas by attendees for anti-fascists to come so they could assault them. One displayed a “Sturgis Survival Kit” for potential antifa protesters, complete with a tourniquet, morphine, body cast and defibrillator.
“Both the racists and a segment of violent antifa counter-protestors are amped for battle in an escalating arms race, where police departments are outmaneuvered, resulting in increasingly violent dangerous confrontations,” said former New York City police officer Brian Levin, who has been monitoring domestic militants for 31 years, now at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “It’s an orchestrated dance. The rallies spill over into social media and then even more people show up at the next rally primed for violent confrontation.”
In recent decades, authorities have focused almost exclusively on right-wing groups as the most likely instigators of domestic terrorist violence, especially since Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168 people.
More recently, the antifa groups, which some describe as the Anti-Fascist Action Network, have evolved out of the leftist anti-government groups like “Black bloc,” protesters clad in black and wearing masks that caused violence at events like the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests. They claim to have no leader and no hierarchy, but authorities following them believe they are organized via decentralized networks of cells that coordinate with each other. Often, they spend weeks planning for violence at upcoming events, according to the April 2016 DHS and FBI report entitled “Baseline Comparison of US and Foreign Anarchist Extremist Movements.”
Protesters in black, associated with Antifa, beat a man with a pole and shield during a "No-To-Marxism" rally Aug. 27 in Berkeley, California.
Protesters in black, associated with Antifa, beat a man with a pole and shield during a "No-To-Marxism" rally Aug. 27 in Berkeley, California. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
Dozens of armed anti-fascist groups have emerged, including Redneck Revolt and the Red Guards, according to the reports and interviews. One report from New Jersey authorities said self-described antifa groups have been established in cities including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco.
Some of the DHS and FBI intelligence reports began flagging the antifa protesters before the election. In one from last September, portions of which were read to POLITICO, DHS studied “recent violent clashes … at lawfully organized white supremacist” events including a June 2016 rally at the California Capitol in Sacramento organized by the Traditionalist Workers Party and its affiliate, the Golden State Skinheads.
According to police, counter-protesters linked to antifa and affiliated groups like By Any Means Necessary attacked, causing a riot after which at least 10 people were hospitalized, some with stab wounds.
At the Sacramento rally, antifa protesters came looking for violence, and “engaged in several activities indicating proficiency in pre-operational planning, to include organizing carpools to travel from different locations, raising bail money in preparation for arrests, counter-surveilling law enforcement using three-man scout teams, using handheld radios for communication, and coordinating the event via social media,” the DHS report said.
The intelligence assessments focus less on guns than handmade weapons used by antifa, with photos of members brandishing ax handles and shields, often with industrial-sized bolts attached to create crude bayonets. A senior state law enforcement official said, “A whole bunch of them” have been deemed dangerous enough to be placed on U.S. terrorism watch lists.
The FBI and DHS had no comment on that, or on any aspect of the assessments, saying they were not intended to be made public.
By the spring of 2016, the anarchist groups had become so aggressive, including making armed attacks on individuals and small groups of perceived enemies, that federal officials launched a global investigation with the help of the U.S. intelligence community, according to the DHS and FBI assessment.
The purpose of the investigation, according to the April 2016 assessment: To determine whether the U.S.-based anarchists might start committing terrorist bombings like their counterparts in “foreign anarchist extremist movements” in Greece, Italy and Mexico, possibly at the Republican and Democratic conventions that summer.
Some of the antifa activists have gone overseas to train and fight with fellow anarchist organizations, including two Turkey-based groups fighting the Islamic State, according to interviews and internet postings.
In their April 2016 assessment, the DHS and FBI said the anarchist groups would likely become more lethal if “fascist, nationalist, racist or anti-immigrant parties obtain greater prominence or local political power in the United States, leading to anti-racist violent backlash from anarchist extremists.”
The assessment also said the anarchist groups could become more aggressive if they seek to “retaliate violently to a violent act by a white supremacist extremist or group,” they acquire more powerful weapons or they obtain the financial means to travel abroad and learn more violent tactics.
Several state law enforcement officials said that all of those accelerating factors have come to pass. And recent FBI and DHS reports confirm they are actively monitoring “conduct deemed potentially suspicious and indicative of terrorist activity” by antifa groups.
But one of the internal assessments acknowledged several significant “intelligence gaps,” including an inability to penetrate the groups’ “diffuse and decentralized organizational structure,” which made it difficult for law enforcement to identify violent groups and individuals. Authorities also “lack information to identify the travel patterns linking U.S. and foreign anarchist extremists,” the assessment said.
The two agencies also said in their April 2016 assessment that many of the activities the groups engaged in “are not within the purview of FBI and DHS collection” due to civil liberties and privacy protections, including participating in training camps, holding meetings and communicating online.
In another assessment this past August, DHS warned about the potential for unprecedented violence at Charlottesville. The agency also acknowledged gaps in its understanding of antifa, saying it had only “medium confidence” in its assessments regarding both the affiliations among the various groups and the motivation of attackers.
Said one senior New Jersey law enforcement official following the antifa groups: “There’s a lot more we don’t know about these groups than what we do know about them.”
==
rising up? wapo reporter not at berk; 5 sec video virl, but guy was pepperspraying random ppl before
---
===
http://www.alternet.org/activism/why-its-just-bonkers-compare-fascists-activists-trying-stop-them
For my sins, I recently read the Washington Post essay by Marc Theissen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The essay is titled – ‘Yes, antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis’. Theissen wrote speeches for George W. Bush. His experience with anti-fascism appears to be negligible. He did, however, use his Washington Post column in 2015 to ask candidates in the US presidential election to stop calling Donald Trump a ‘fascist’ or to compare him to Hitler. And, Theissen did start his political career at the feet of Senator Jesse Helms, who was closely aligned with the variant of American fascism that opposed the civil rights movement. So this, now, is the person that the Washington Post turns to in its quest to disparage the upsurge against American fascism.
What got Theissen’s goat were the recent clashes in Berkeley, where some anti-fascists got into a fracas with the ‘peaceful protestors’ – as Theissen puts it – of the ‘No to Marxism in America’ rally. These ‘peaceful protestors’ include Kyle Chapman, a newly minted hero of the Bay Area fascists, who looked forward to coming for the Battle of Berkeley 3. He tweeted a video with the Imagine Dragon song, ‘We are the Warriors,’ with images from a previous encounter in Berkeley between neo-Nazis and white supremacists against anti-fascists and other anti-hate protestors.
Chapman’s evocation of a Battle of Berkeley 3 refers to two previous battles – on March 4 and April 15. A police officer – Darrin Rafferty - saw Chapman ‘swinging what appeared to be a wooden stick at many people.’ Chapman also sprayed pepper spray at those who objected to the pro-Trump rally on March 4. Before the April 15 rally, Chapman returned to Berkeley to video a message, ‘Most of the inhabitants of this city are a bunch of fucking cowards that couldn’t fight their way out of a paperbag.’ A judge at Chapman’s arraignment hearing said that he was not allowed to go to the ‘No Marxism’ rally.
The April 15 rally at Berkeley was a flashpoint. Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups from across the American West and into western Canada streamed into Berkeley to make an example of this famously radical city. It was at this rally, with the Berkeley police deciding to stand down, that Nathan Domigo of Identity Evropa punched an antifa protestor in the face repeatedly. Identity Evropa considers itself a ‘generation of awakened Europeans who have discovered that we are part of the great peoples, history and civilization that flowed from the European continent.’ These are young people – Domigo is 30 – have reacted to multiculturalism and the demographic shifts in the United States with violent fantasies of European domination and purity. Alongside Identity Evropa were the Proud Boys, whose pride is equally fantastic since they see themselves as ‘Western chauvinists who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.’ These are men who are angry at the idea that whites are neither dominant nor the master race. This is classic Nazi stuff with an impeccable lineage in the United States that goes back to Teddy Roosevelt and the Confederacy.
...
==
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/28/a-dartmouth-antifa-expert-was-disavowed-by-his-college-president-for-supporting-violent-protest-angering-many-faculty/
mark, occupy , lectuerer campus reform
---
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-august-31-2017/
not a group; some eur sport teams ID, music; anti-capitalist
fascist shd never have a platform, nip in bud
; black bloc is a tactic, origin German 80's ~ neo-naZI skinheads attacked immigrants; battle of Seattle
---
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/noam-chomsky-antifa-major-gift-right
Chomsky has criticised the anti-fascist movement and argued its actions are wrong in principle and it is a “major gift to the right”.
The eminent intellectual, who is described as the father of modern linguistics, argued the movement was self-destructive and constituted a tiny faction on the periphery of the left.
Antifa, shorthand for anti-fascist organisations, refers to a loose coalition of militant, decentralised, grassroots groups which are opposed to the far-right.
The movement, which was founded in Europe in the 1920s, has dominated headlines in the wake of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville earlier this month. Neo-Nazis, KKK members and “alt-right” supporters clashed with anti-fascists and a woman was left dead after a car ploughed into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters.
In the wake of the deadly violence, President Donald Trump has prompted anger for drawing a moral parity between white supremacists and anti-fascists, saying counter-protesters were as violent as the far-right and the "alt-right" groups included some "very fine" people.
Chomsky, a leading voice on the left who is famed for his critique of US foreign policy, neoliberalism and the mainstream media, has now criticised Antifa.
"As for Antifa, it's a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were," the linguist and political philosopher told the Washington Examiner. "It's a major gift to the right, including the militant right, who are exuberant."
"What they do is often wrong in principle – like blocking talks – and [the movement] is generally self-destructive,” the 88-year-old told the conservative paper.
He added: "When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it's the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is. That's quite apart from the opportunity costs – the loss of the opportunity for education, organising, and serious and constructive activism."
While many only associate the anti-fascist movement with militant direct action, it is worth noting it adopts a wide variety of tactics. This includes union organisation, migrant solidarity, public education programmes, ousting white supremacists and neo-Nazis to their neighbours and employers, and urging venues to cancel far-right events.
Chomsky has previously stated he is against the shutting down of far-right meetings, arguing it is tacitly self-destructive and the emphasis needs to instead be on education.
Chomsky, who recently left his post as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become a laureate professor at the University of Arizona, has prompted criticism for his assessment of Antifa.
...
==
http://thehill.com/homenews/media/348383-laura-ingraham-proposes-declaring-antifa-a-terrorist-organization
==
hmmn
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/trump-fan-known-pizzagate-rants-beaten