He was showing me videos of people who stormed the Capitol who were (according to my friend) wearing Antifa logos. And from the videos he concluded, “Most of the people who stormed the Capitol were actually Antifa.” Based on his latest FB post, he still believes this. Oh, and FBI provocateurs, of course.
I’m not sure how to respond to him. Or if I should respond to him.
He suffers from a serious case of confirmation bias. I have distanced myself from him over the last few years. Which is unfortunate, because he’s an O.K. person with the exception of all the conspiracy theories he believes in. (I once made the mistake of challenging his conspiracy theories. He got upset, called me a sheep, and said, “You believe everything the government tells you, don’t you?”)
I googled this out of morbid curiosity.
The best I could find is that there’s a guy with a hand tattoo that got misidentified as the Antifa logo, when in fact it was the Outsiders mark from the video game Dishonored (link).
Apart from that, the other evidence of Antifa is that some of the protesters supposedly looked like people photographed at BLM rallies. Even though at this point most of the capitol rioters in those photos have been arrested, and of course shown to be long time supporters of trump.
I know the Antifa claim is laughable, I’m not an idiot, I just wanted to see what on earth they thought actually supported that claim.
He “didn’t go in the Capitol building”, but we don’t really know how close he was to it. But no matter where he was, did he personally see any “Antifa” there? I’m betting at the time he thought he was surrounded by “loyal American patriots”. If any of them had seen “Antifa” on the actual day, we would have heard that immediately, and we would never stop hearing about it.
So his current belief pretty much negates his entire personal experience, based solely on poorly-made YouTube videos (see discussion of same above).
AFAICT no one is claiming that the majority of the people who stormed the capitol were antifa. Only that there were a bunch of them who egged on the crowd. If you didn’t even attend the storming of the capitol and were only at the STS rally, it’s not contradicting the evidence of your own eyes to believe this. (FWIW, there was at least one left-winger who did storm the capitol and egged on others to do so, but I believe his motive was to get footage that he could sell to the media rather than to discredit the RW.)
Anyone who attended that rally was already down a rabbit hole. I’m just quibbling with the assertion here that this belief is contradicting what he saw with his own eyes.
At the time I recall he posted some photos on his FB page (personally taken by him) that purported to show that there were “Antifa” members in the crowd. I’ll see if I can dig them up and put them on my Flickr account.
I betcha Emmanuel Goldstein was there, and the whole thing is his fault. Republicans should perhaps dedicate a couple of minutes every day to denouncing this evil character.
