![]() Snopes, the online fact-checking outlet, had already debunked the false antifa narrative - but its story attracted only 306 likes and shares on Twitter at the time, an indication of how difficult it is for fact-checking efforts to gain traction over the original falsehood. “Remember, Antifa openly planned to dress as Trump supporters and cause chaos today,” said one tweet that collected 41,100 likes and shares. ![]() ![]() to 5 p.m., the antifa falsehood was mentioned about 8,700 times across cable television, social media and online news outlets, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company. Johnson said in a radio interview as the violence was unfolding that day, “I would really question whether that’s a true Trump supporter or a true conservative.”įrom 4 p.m. If anyone was responsible for desecrating the Capitol, Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud, pro-Trump Republicans have succeeded in warping their voters’ realities, exhibiting sheer gall as they seek to minimize a violent riot perpetrated by their own supporters. Buoyed by a powerful right-wing media network that had just spent eight weeks advancing Mr. Trump’s don’t-believe-your-eyes tactics might fade after his defeat, the mainstreaming of the antifa conspiracy is a sign that truth remains a fungible concept among his most ardent followers. More than half of Trump voters in a Suffolk University/USA Today poll said that the riot was “mostly an antifa-inspired attack.” At Senate hearings last week focused on the security breakdown at the Capitol, Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, repeated the falsehood that “fake Trump protesters” fomented the violence.įor those who hoped Mr. Nearly two months after the attack, the claim that antifa was involved has been repeatedly debunked by federal authorities, but it has hardened into gospel among hard-line Trump supporters, by voters and sanctified by elected officials in the party. By day’s end, Laura Ingraham and Sarah Palin had shared it with millions of Fox News viewers, and Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida had stood on the ransacked House floor and claimed that many rioters “were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.” Within hours, a narrative built on rumors and partisan conjecture had reached the Twitter megaphones of pro-Trump politicians. Subsequent arrests and investigations have found no evidence that people who identify with antifa, a loose collective of antifascist activists, were involved in the insurrection.īut even as Americans watched live images of rioters wearing MAGA hats and carrying Trump flags breach the Capitol - egged on only minutes earlier by a president who falsely denounced a rigged election and exhorted his followers to fight for justice - history was being rewritten in real time. Trump, intent on stopping Congress from certifying his electoral defeat. ![]() In fact, the rioters breaking into the citadel of American democracy that day were acolytes of Mr. Trump pushed to his millions of supporters had set the stage for a new and equally false iteration: that left-wing agitators were responsible for the attack on the Capitol. The weekslong fiction about a stolen election that President Donald J. What happened over the next 12 hours illustrated the speed and the scale of a right-wing disinformation machine primed to seize on a lie that served its political interests and quickly spread it as truth to a receptive audience. Limbaugh’s throngs of listeners: “It’s probably not Trump supporters who would do that. Brown on Twitter, but his tweet caught the attention of another conservative pundit: Todd Herman, who was guest-hosting Rush Limbaugh’s national radio program. “Come on, man, have you never heard of psyops?” Brown wrote, using shorthand for Black Lives Matter. “Antifa or BLM or other insurgents could be doing it disguised as Trump supporters,” Mr. Brown wrote on Twitter that rioters had breached the United States Capitol - and immediately speculated about who was really to blame. 6, a right-wing radio host named Michael D.
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