Ms. Ingraham, who instructed Fox Information viewers about “antifa sympathizers” on the riot, later shared on Twitter that the Washington Occasions article she cited had been debunked; she didn’t challenge an on-air correction. Mr. Herman, the Limbaugh visitor host who speculated about antifa, wrote in an e-mail on Saturday that “it was clear a big group of Trump supporters entered the Capitol and assaulted folks.” However he continued to claim, falsely, that antifa activists had plotted to impersonate Trump supporters.
Of the 290 individuals who have been charged within the assault, a minimum of 27 are identified to have ties to far-right extremist teams just like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys. Others have hyperlinks to neo-Accomplice and white supremacist entities, or are clear supporters of the conspiracy motion QAnon. The overwhelming majority expressed a fervent perception that Mr. Trump was the election’s rightful winner.
On Jan. 8, the F.B.I. said there was no proof that supporters of antifa, who’ve been identified to aggressively counterprotest white supremacist demonstrations, had participated within the Capitol mob. And on Jan. 13, Consultant Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Home minority chief, spoke at Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial and declared, “Some say the riots have been brought on by antifa. There’s completely no proof of that, and conservatives must be the primary to say so.”
However the subsequent day, the arrest of a protester named John Sullivan prompted yet one more surge in right-wing media about antifa and the riot.
Mr. Sullivan referred to as himself an “activist” from Utah and CNN launched him, inaccurately, as a “left-wing activist” when he appeared on the community on Jan. 6. (He had offered footage to CNN and different information retailers that confirmed the taking pictures of Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who died contained in the Capitol.) The conspiracy website Gateway Pundit and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, seized on Mr. Sullivan’s arrest to once more blame antifa in posts that collected tens of 1000’s of likes and shares on Fb and Twitter.
In actuality, Mr. Sullivan was an consideration seeker whose politics have been fungible and seemingly shifted based mostly on which protest he was attending on the time, in keeping with activists from Seattle, Salt Lake Metropolis and Portland, Ore., who had issued warnings about him months earlier than the Capitol riot.
