OT: Antifa Hysteria Antitruth

[MaroonBells]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/opinion/antifa-protests.html

What can we possibly make of the crisis that unfolded in the remote Oregon seaside town of Coquille?
Coquille is a sleepy logging community of 3,800 people, almost all of them white. It is miles and miles from nowhere. Portland is 250 miles to the north. San Francisco is 500 miles to the south.
But Fox News is in a frenzy about rioters and looters, and President Trump warns about the anti-fascist movement known as antifa. So early this month as a small group of local residents planned a peaceful “Black Lives Matter” protest in Coquille, word raced around that three busloads of antifa activists were headed to Coquille to bust up the town....
...Of course, no rampaging anarchists ever showed up. The Battle of Coquille ended without beginning...
...Folks, this is insane. It’s a measure of how deluded public discourse has become, how untethered from reality, that a mob of gunmen can terrify campers apparently because of the color of their skin — and think themselves heroes who are defending their communities.
All this ugliness may also be a window into the unrest that could unfold this winter if Trump is defeated but claims that the election was stolen from him by immigrants who voted illegally.
Antifa, short for anti-fascists, hasn’t killed anyone and appears to have been only a marginal presence in Black Lives Matter protests. None of those arrested on serious federal charges related to the unrest have been linked to antifa. Still, the movement has a mythic status in some right-wing narratives, and Trump and Fox News have hyped the threat. (The Seattle Times caught Fox faking photos to exaggerate unrest in Seattle.)
Race-baiting extremists have also tried to manipulate public fears. One Twitter account purportedly run by an antifa group, @Antifa_US, announced on May 31 that “tonight’s the night … we move into the residential areas … the white hoods … and we take what’s ours.” But Twitter said that the account was actually run by white supremacists posing as antifa.
These antifa panics are where racism and hysteria intersect, in a nation that has more guns than people. They arise when a lying president takes every opportunity not to heal our national divisions but to stoke them, when people live in a news ecosystem that provides no reality check but inflames prejudices and feeds fears.

[Guest]

Sounds like you got a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories.  Your two levels deep.

[Guest]

Facebook (FB) on Thursday said it had taken action against ads run by President Trump's re-election campaign for breaching its policies on hate. The ads, which attacked what the Trump campaign described as "Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups," featured an upside-down triangle.
The Anti-Defamation League said Thursday the triangle "is practically identical to that used by the Nazi regime to classify political prisoners in concentration camps."

"We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group's symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol," Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, told CNN Business.

The hate group to which Facebook was referring in its statement is Nazis, the company confirmed.

The ads targeted the far-left group antifa, calling on Trump supporters to back the President's calls to designate the group a terrorist organization.

Responding to criticism of the ad earlier Thursday, the Trump campaign claimed the red triangle was "a symbol widely used by Antifa." 

The campaign pointed CNN Business to several links to poster, sticker, and magnet websites that sell unofficial merchandise designed by their users that contains the symbol. The campaign did not point to any examples of antifa activists wearing the symbol.

The ADL said Thursday that some antifa activists have used the symbol, but it is not particularly common.

According to Facebook's political ad library, a set of ads featuring the offending symbol began running on Wednesday on Trump's main Facebook page, the "Team Trump" campaign page, and Vice-President Mike Pence's Facebook page

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/18/tech/face...index.html

[Guest]

Lara Logan, the Fox ‘Investigative Journalist’ Who Keeps Falling for Antifa HoaxesPresident Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed antifa is a shadowy group behind nationwide protests and the violence that occurred during some of them—even though the FBI found “no intelligence indicating antifa involvement” in the May 31 protests in Washington, D.C., and antifa is literally never mentioned in the DOJ’s first round of prosecutions. Nevertheless, Logan has been utilized by Fox to lend journalistic cachet to such allegations.
But a review of Logan’s reporting—both online and on Fox News—shows a clear pattern of repeatedly falling for obvious hoaxes and passing along eye-popping but completely unsubstantiated claims.
On May 31, for example, Logan tweeted out an image of a document she alleged to be an antifa battle plan, claiming they had infiltrated law enforcement and provided a “riot” manual for protesters. 
“For those of you still in denial about who is directing & controlling the protests - take a close look at this,” Logan tweeted. 
That document, however, was merely a recirculated version of a hoax first peddled during the April 2015 Baltimore riots over Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. There’s no proof that the overwrought document, which urges antifa activists to communicate with “agitorg” leaders and rendezvous at a mystery location called “GAMMA PRIME,” is real. 
The following day, Logan posted a picture of a tweet purporting to come from a national antifa group threatening to terrorize majority-white neighborhoods. The tweet she cited read: “Tonight’s the night, Comrades...Tonight we say ‘Fuck The City’ and we move into the residential areas... the white hoods.... and we take what’s ours,” along with a black raised-fist emoji. 

That tweet turned out to have come from a fake account linked to white-nationalist group Identity Europa posing as antifa while calling for violence. The fake antifa account even included the acronym “I.E.” in its logo, a clear reference to its ties to Identity Europa.

[Guest]

Ahhh, Lara Logan: how far she has fallen. 60 Minutes  o a FOX 'investigative journalist'. Hilarious.