Trump Sees Antifa Plot Behind Buffalo Police Brutality
The President of the United States thinks he may have unmasked the 75 year old man shoved to the ground by police on Thursday as part of the world-wide antifa conspiracy, thanks to reporting he apparently saw on the San Diego-based One America News Network.
Let’s backtrack to reality first, and then I’ll discuss the allegation.
Long time activist Martin Gugino approached an advancing line of police officers in Buffalo. As he approached, cell phone in hand, a police officer pushed Gugino, who stumbled backward, fell and hit his head on the pavement.
Video taken by a local television station showed police walking by as the man bled on the sidewalk. One officer who stopped briefly by the fallen man was urged to keep moving.
Initially the Police Department claimed Gugino “tripped and fell,” a description at direct odds with what people saw on the TV station and a viral social media post.
Two officers were fired after the video emerged. Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski have been charged with felony assault. At the urging of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, 57 other police officers resigned from the crowd control unit. (They remain on the force.)
At the first court appearance for McCabe and Togalski on Saturday, more than one hundred supporters turned out to cheer them as they left the building.
Gugino remains hospitalized in critical condition.
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It didn’t take long for the right’s conspiracy circles to spin this as an attack on law and order by the evil media.
A wingnut website, The Conservative Treehouse, published a “newly released” video (a slo-mo version of the original), claiming it shows Gugino was attempting to hack into the police radio signal by waving his cell phone across the officer’s communications belt.
The story was picked by OANN, which added “It’s an old Antifa trick” to the narrative, saying Gugino was supposedly using technology to black out police communications.
As the Washington Post noted:
First, there are no “newly released videos” — just the original video of Gugino approaching the police.
Second, this theory about Gugino scanning police communications devices is an obvious effort to create a justification for police to push him away. Cellphones can be used to record information from embedded chips that put out short-range signals; this is how tap-to-pay systems work, essentially. But beyond Gugino holding his phone in his hand, there’s no evidence this is what he was doing. There’s no evidence that the places he held his phone had any chips that would emit such a signal.
There’s no evidence that if he had collected any information about the chips being used that he would be able to do anything with them. There’s no evidence — besides the claims of this one website — that this is an “old trick” used by antifa. Particularly since the implementation of near-field communications (as this short-range interface is called) has happened within the last 10 years.
Crazy enough for you yet? But wait! There’s more!
The OANN reporter for this account was Kristian Rouz, whose previous employment was with Russian propaganda site Sputnik News. The reporter is no stranger to antifa conspiracy theories, having “reported” in 2017 a story claiming Hillary Clinton's political action committee provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to antifa.
Another OANN reporter Chanel Rion, who regularly gets called on to loft softball questions at the president during White House briefings reported the coronavirus started in North Carolina — because, as far as anybody can tell, an unidentified guy on Twitter said it had.
Why you might ask, is the President amplifying this nonsense?
Because it casts protesters in a negative light, promotes the right wing narrative of antifa as the new boogeyman, and portrays police in a positive way. The Republican Nation Committee’s twitter account is amplifying the President’s assertion, and I have no doubt they’ll soon be raising money off of it.
https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1270335685514403840?s=20
Last month, a federal judge in San Diego dismissed a One America News Network’s defamation lawsuit against Rachel Maddow, MSNBC and Comcast, concluding that Maddow was stating her opinion when she said that the right-leaning channel “really, literally is paid Russian propaganda.”
Russian propaganda or not, OANN is batshit.
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