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https://theintercept.com/2020/06/04/white-house-forced-retract-claim- viral-videos-prove-antifa-plotting-violence/
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.”
Protests for Black Lives
Read Our Complete Coverage
Protests for Black Lives
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.
“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.
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. pic.twitter.com/sQU2X9sTB8
— Oath Keepers (@Oathkeepers) May 5, 2020
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. pic.twitter.com/cmgbSnKvQv
— Jennie (she/her) ??? #BlackLivesMatter (@JennieRoberson) June 1, 2020 “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.
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.
Last Updated: Friday, June 5, 1:30 a.m. PDT
This article was updated to add comments from Reuben Lael, who filmed a
protest in Dallas, to report Tonya Tko’s video analysis, and to note reporting from Benjamin Strick of the BBC indicating that the second
and fifth clips in the White House compilation video seem to show the
same pile of paving stones in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at
different times of the day. Screenshots were also added to show the
video on the White House Twitter feed, before it was deleted, and the
error message that appeared after it was removed from the White House
Facebook feed.
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