MAGA World Is Splintering

[caddieman]

TECHNOLOGY

MAGA World Is Splintering

Following the riot at the Capitol, Trump supporters are having an existential crisis on Twitter.

KAITLYN TIFFANY

JANUARY 8, 2021

Bryson Gray, a 29-year-old rapper and Donald Trump superfan from North Carolina, wants to make one thing clear: It was a group of the president’s most loyal supporters that rioted in the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday, and nobody else. When I spoke with Gray yesterday, he said he had been “too late” to get inside the Capitol itself with the rest of the mob, which broke windows and chanted through the halls of Congress in an ultimately futile attempt to disrupt the confirmation of Joe Biden as president. So he stood outside the building with a crowd and sang the national anthem.

When I left the Capitol, I actually thought I was going to get on Twitter and see a bunch of support, because it was actually a very beautiful thing,” Gray said. Instead, he was met with a strange message spreading across the site: Trump fans weren’t behind the riots. Instead, it was antifa, the decentralized left-wing group that has become a bogeyman for Republican commentators and politicians, and for President Trump in particular. Many of Gray’s former #StopTheSteal allies had disavowed the insurrection, and a good number of them were using leftist antagonists as their scapegoat. “The first tweet I saw was somebody saying ‘Patriots don’t storm buildings; there were no patriots in the Capitol,’” Gray told me. “I’m like, Uh, that literally makes no sense; what are you talking about?”

 

As early as 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, just as the mob was taking over the Capitol building, claims that antifa had “infiltrated” the group started to go viral on Twitter. The far-right blog The Gateway Pundit insisted that a whole busload of “Antifa thugs” was on the scene. Others claimed that a well-known figure in the QAnon movement, Jake Angeli, was a “paid actor” and a secret liberal supporter of Black Lives Matter, or they labeled random photosof members of the crowd “ANTIFA supporters dressed in MAGA clothing.” By the evening, the theory had been picked up by several Republican members of Congress, including Representatives Paul Gosar of Arizona, Mo Brooks of Alabama, and Matt Gaetz of Florida. (None of these representatives’ offices returned a request for comment.)

The theory is false. There is no credible evidence of involvement by antifa, which is not an organized group and has been responsible for very little violence, while Gray and numerous other known MAGA figures actually were involved in the insurrection. But empirical reality notwithstanding, the antifa story has become a dividing line within the MAGA world this week—and a telling symbol of its internal upheaval.

 

Over the past two days, Trump loyalists have been bickering online over whether to take credit for and celebrate their most dramatic action yet, or distance themselves from the scene by calling up familiar conspiracy theories to explain it away. Some may genuinely believe, as they say, that paid “crisis actors” are responsible. Many don’t seem to know what they believe, or what is most savvy to present, and pivot from post to post. Still others, like Gray, are consistently frustrated and outraged that anybody on their side wouldn’t be proud of what happened Wednesday afternoon. “The blue-check conservatives, all the popular ones, put ‘1776’ in their bios and tweet about how it’s time for patriots to stand up and fight,” he told me. “Then they turn around and condemn patriots doing exactly that.”

The coalition, in other words, is experiencing a schism—and you can watch it on Twitter, or by flipping through Instagram Stories. As soon as #StopTheSteal went offline in a serious, dangerous way, everyone who had been posting about it had to choose a side, or a reality. Broadly, the Republican establishment and its voters have had to grapple with whether they want to continue claiming the party’s radical flank. Wednesday “was probably the most visceral experience of watching a political party fracture,” says Joan Donovan, the research director at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “It seems to me that we’re in the midst of watching MAGA become its own movement.”

The antifa rumor is unsurprising and sort of stale—a knee-jerk response at this point to anything that certain right-wing commentators see in public and don’t like. “This is such a repetitive tactic that many in the [disinformation] field don’t even track it anymore, because it’s so glaringly obvious,” Donovan told me. Nevertheless, it caught on easily—just as it did last summer, when antifa was repeatedly blamed for stoking unrest during the Black Lives Matter protests, and the summer before, when Trump first tweeted that the “Radical Left Wack Jobs” were a “major Organization of Terror.” By Wednesday evening, the Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson were on air suggesting that it was not clear how many people at the Capitol were actually Trump supporters. Ingraham also tweeted the link to a now-debunked story on the Washington Times website, which claimed that members of antifa had been identified using facial-recognition technology. (The story is now inaccessible on the Washington Times site. The site’s digital editor did not return a request for comment.)

 

As the disinformation exploded across social media, Donovan points out, it benefited both from the openness and scale of major sites such as Facebook and Twitter and from the fact that it was shared enthusiastically in private Facebook groups, making its virality harder to track. Of the public Facebook posts about the story, Representative Gaetz’s was the most influential, according to data from the social-media-monitoring tool CrowdTangle. His initial post has been shared more than 7,000 times. In addition, his tweet of the link has been retweeted more than 11,000 times. (Gaetz also cited the false story in a speech on the House floor Wednesday night, saying that it provided “compelling evidence” that “some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters; they were masquerading as Trump supporters.”)

After the story took off, Facebook added an overlay to the post, labeling it “false information”—but it was still shared on the platform more than 90,000 times, according to CrowdTangle. A Facebook spokesperson told me that the company was “reducing distribution” of several claims about antifa, though it is not removing them. This was a step further than Twitter: Currently, Twitter users who search for antifa are presented with a text box informing them that the group wasn’t responsible for Wednesday’s events, but beyond that, it is unclear whether Twitter has done anything to slow the spread of the conspiracy theory. (The company has not returned a request for comment.)

Oddly, these platforms were joined in their effort to correctly identify the mob’s political allegiances by Trump diehards who were proud to accept credit. Samantha Marika, a right-wing social-media personality with 293,000 Twitter followers, appeared enthralled by the insurrection and frustrated by the claims that it was staged by antifa. “Those people aren’t Antifa,” she tweeted. “They are patriots.” On her Instagram Story, she reposted a tweet from the pro-Trump blogger David Leatherwood: “I don’t know how some of you have spent the last 2 months riling up the base about a stolen election and telling everybody we must fight- And then when we finally do you cower away and blame Antifa. Beta cucks.”

Read: Trump’s internet is celebrating

Gray, the rapper and Trump fan, for his part spent much of Wednesday and yesterday reminding his 205,000 followers of the truth in exceptionally clear terms: “No it wasn’t Antifa that stormed the Capitol building. That was us,” he wrote in one tweet. “MAGA was in DC fighting for our country and freedoms,” he wrote in another. “Twitter ‘maga’ people were giving the credit to Antifa.” That tweet ended with an emoji shedding a tear.

Social media’s scale and searchability is such that anybody looking to believe almost anything can quickly and easily find what seems like evidence to support that belief, then push it out to a wider and wider circle. In the past few days, factions of political factions have coalesced around cherry-picked pieces of reality or fondly held bits of delusion. On Instagram on Wednesday afternoon, the supposed proof of antifa’s involvement I saw most often was a blurry image of a man with a hand tattoo. Popular right-wing influencers who appeared shaken by the day’s events agreed that the tattoo was definitely a hammer and sickle, indicating that the man was a communist infiltrator in (lazy) disguise. Others have posted urgings to “think critically” about why the Capitol was so easily overrun, congregating around the possibility of some kind of setup. Meanwhile, people like Gray know that they sang the national anthem outside on a patch of grass—to their mind, this means the day was peaceful.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/01/false-antifa-rumors-are-fracturing-trump-supporters/617610/

 

[coorslite21]

54 minutes ago, caddieman said:

TECHNOLOGY

MAGA World Is Splintering

Following the riot at the Capitol, Trump supporters are having an existential crisis on Twitter.

KAITLYN TIFFANY

JANUARY 8, 2021

Bryson Gray, a 29-year-old rapper and Donald Trump superfan from North Carolina, wants to make one thing clear: It was a group of the president’s most loyal supporters that rioted in the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday, and nobody else. When I spoke with Gray yesterday, he said he had been “too late” to get inside the Capitol itself with the rest of the mob, which broke windows and chanted through the halls of Congress in an ultimately futile attempt to disrupt the confirmation of Joe Biden as president. So he stood outside the building with a crowd and sang the national anthem.

When I left the Capitol, I actually thought I was going to get on Twitter and see a bunch of support system" rel="">support, because it was actually a very beautiful thing,” Gray said. Instead, he was met with a strange message spreading across the site: Trump fans weren’t behind the riots. Instead, it was antifa, the decentralized left-wing group that has become a bogeyman for Republican commentators and politicians, and for President Trump in particular. Many of Gray’s former #StopTheSteal allies had disavowed the insurrection, and a good number of them were using leftist antagonists as their scapegoat. “The first tweet I saw was somebody saying ‘Patriots don’t storm buildings; there were no patriots in the Capitol,’” Gray told me. “I’m like, Uh, that literally makes no sense; what are you talking about?”

 

As early as 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, just as the mob was taking over the Capitol building, claims that antifa had “infiltrated” the group started to go viral on Twitter. The far-right blog The Gateway Pundit insisted that a whole busload of “Antifa thugs” was on the scene. Others claimed that a well-known figure in the QAnon movement, Jake Angeli, was a “paid actor” and a secret liberal supporter of Black Lives Matter, or they labeled random photosof members of the crowd “ANTIFA supporters dressed in MAGA clothing.” By the evening, the theory had been picked up by several Republican members of Congress, including Representatives Paul Gosar of Arizona, Mo Brooks of Alabama, and Matt Gaetz of Florida. (None of these representatives’ offices returned a request for comment.)

The theory is false. There is no credible evidence of involvement by antifa, which is not an organized group and has been responsible for very little violence, while Gray and numerous other known MAGA figures actually were involved in the insurrection. But empirical reality notwithstanding, the antifa story has become a dividing line within the MAGA world this week—and a telling symbol of its internal upheaval.

 

Over the past two days, Trump loyalists have been bickering online over whether to take credit for and celebrate their most dramatic action yet, or distance themselves from the scene by calling up familiar conspiracy theories to explain it away. Some may genuinely believe, as they say, that paid “crisis actors” are responsible. Many don’t seem to know what they believe, or what is most savvy to present, and pivot from post to post. Still others, like Gray, are consistently frustrated and outraged that anybody on their side wouldn’t be proud of what happened Wednesday afternoon. “The blue-check conservatives, all the popular ones, put ‘1776’ in their bios and tweet about how it’s time for patriots to stand up and fight,” he told me. “Then they turn around and condemn patriots doing exactly that.”

The coalition, in other words, is experiencing a schism—and you can watch it on Twitter, or by flipping through Instagram Stories. As soon as #StopTheSteal went offline in a serious, dangerous way, everyone who had been posting about it had to choose a side, or a reality. Broadly, the Republican establishment and its voters have had to grapple with whether they want to continue claiming the party’s radical flank. Wednesday “was probably the most visceral experience of watching a political party fracture,” says Joan Donovan, the research director at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “It seems to me that we’re in the midst of watching MAGA become its own movement.”

The antifa rumor is unsurprising and sort of stale—a knee-jerk response at this point to anything that certain right-wing commentators see in public and don’t like. “This is such a repetitive tactic that many in the [disinformation] field don’t even track it anymore, because it’s so glaringly obvious,” Donovan told me. Nevertheless, it caught on easily—just as it did last summer, when antifa was repeatedly blamed for stoking unrest during the Black Lives Matter protests, and the summer before, when Trump first tweeted that the “Radical Left Wack Jobs” were a “major Organization of Terror.” By Wednesday evening, the Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson were on air suggesting that it was not clear how many people at the Capitol were actually Trump supporters. Ingraham also tweeted the link to a now-debunked story on the Washington Times website, which claimed that members of antifa had been identified using facial-recognition technology. (The story is now inaccessible on the Washington Times site. The site’s digital editor did not return a request for comment.)

 

As the disinformation exploded across social media, Donovan points out, it benefited both from the openness and scale of major sites such as Facebook and Twitter and from the fact that it was shared enthusiastically in private Facebook groups, making its virality harder to track. Of the public Facebook posts about the story, Representative Gaetz’s was the most influential, according to data from the social-media-monitoring tool CrowdTangle. His initial post has been shared more than 7,000 times. In addition, his tweet of the link has been retweeted more than 11,000 times. (Gaetz also cited the false story in a speech on the House floor Wednesday night, saying that it provided “compelling evidence” that “some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters; they were masquerading as Trump supporters.”)

After the story took off, Facebook added an overlay to the post, labeling it “false information”—but it was still shared on the platform more than 90,000 times, according to CrowdTangle. A Facebook spokesperson told me that the company was “reducing distribution” of several claims about antifa, though it is not removing them. This was a step further than Twitter: Currently, Twitter users who search for antifa are presented with a text box informing them that the group wasn’t responsible for Wednesday’s events, but beyond that, it is unclear whether Twitter has done anything to slow the spread of the conspiracy theory. (The company has not returned a request for comment.)

Oddly, these platforms were joined in their effort to correctly identify the mob’s political allegiances by Trump diehards who were proud to accept credit. Samantha Marika, a right-wing social-media personality with 293,000 Twitter followers, appeared enthralled by the insurrection and frustrated by the claims that it was staged by antifa. “Those people aren’t Antifa,” she tweeted. “They are patriots.” On her Instagram Story, she reposted a tweet from the pro-Trump blogger David Leatherwood: “I don’t know how some of you have spent the last 2 months riling up the base about a stolen election and telling everybody we must fight- And then when we finally do you cower away and blame Antifa. Beta cucks.”

Read: Trump’s internet is celebrating

Gray, the rapper and Trump fan, for his part spent much of Wednesday and yesterday reminding his 205,000 followers of the truth in exceptionally clear terms: “No it wasn’t Antifa that stormed the Capitol building. That was us,” he wrote in one tweet. “MAGA was in DC fighting for our country and freedoms,” he wrote in another. “Twitter ‘maga’ people were giving the credit to Antifa.” That tweet ended with an emoji shedding a tear.

Social media’s scale and searchability is such that anybody looking to believe almost anything can quickly and easily find what seems like evidence to support system" rel="">support that belief, then push it out to a wider and wider circle. In the past few days, factions of political factions have coalesced around cherry-picked pieces of reality or fondly held bits of delusion. On Instagram on Wednesday afternoon, the supposed proof of antifa’s involvement I saw most often was a blurry image of a man with a hand tattoo. Popular right-wing influencers who appeared shaken by the day’s events agreed that the tattoo was definitely a hammer and sickle, indicating that the man was a communist infiltrator in (lazy) disguise. Others have posted urgings to “think critically” about why the Capitol was so easily overrun, congregating around the possibility of some kind of setup. Meanwhile, people like Gray know that they sang the national anthem outside on a patch of grass—to their mind, this means the day was peaceful.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/01/false-antifa-rumors-are-fracturing-trump-supporters/617610/

 

 

The Atlantic......figures.....

 

Please explain with 10 days left in his term.......why would Pelosi and company....and the media and social media platforms be so hell bent on destroying Trump?

 

You have 75 million who voted for him......part of the left's platform was unity.....so what gives?

 

Must be more to the story...

 

CL

[Shelley]

1 hour ago, caddieman said:

There is no credible evidence of involvement by antifa, which is not an organized group and has been responsible for very little violence......

 

This is where this article lost me !!!!!! I call BS on this statement and believe the author of this article is trying to insult people’s intelligence , that what was witnessed with our own eyes for months and months wasn’t Antifa and BLM 

[nstoolman1]

9 minutes ago, coorslite21 said:

why would Pelosi and company....and the media and social media platforms be so hell bent on destroying Trump?

 

 

 

Must be more to the story...

 

CL

 

 

This is typical of when a communist regime takes control. They attempt to eradicate all of the former authorities so that they can not come back and rally the people. They want Trump gone, broken and done with. This includes family as well. 

Much like a few on here. Gone Trump is a good Trump. 

[caddieman]

20 minutes ago, coorslite21 said:

 

The Atlantic......figures.....

 

Please explain with 10 days left in his term.......why would Pelosi and company....and the media and social media platforms be so hell bent on destroying Trump?

 

You have 75 million who voted for him......part of the left's platform was unity.....so what gives?

 

Must be more to the story...

 

CL

The guys a wild card is my best take. The storming of the nation’s capital scared the hell out of a lot of lawmakers.

[coorslite21]

8 minutes ago, caddieman said:

The guys a wild card is my best take. The storming of the nation’s capital scared the hell out of a lot of lawmakers.

 

That building is the most secure building in the world....zero chance it just happened.....   CL

[caddieman]

31 minutes ago, Shelley said:

 

This is where this article lost me !!!!!! I call BS on this statement and believe the author of this article is trying to insult people’s intelligence , that what was witnessed with our own eyes for months and months wasn’t Antifa and BLM 

I might agree a little bit. We’re there some ANTIFA people there. I would say yes. But most of those people were radical right Trump supporters. I’m talking about proud boys who all dress in tactical gear. Qanon people their shirts were everywhere. Also white nationalist. All those groups support Trump. Now I’d say 95% of that crowd was peaceful and just wanted to have their voices heard. Unfortunately just like this summer peaceful people have their movement taken over by the radical fringe of the left and right!

Edited January 9, 2021 by caddieman

[caddieman]

7 minutes ago, coorslite21 said:

 

That building is the most secure building in the world....zero chance it just happened.....   CL

I agree with that. There is some speculation that some Capital police opened up some avenues for people to get to the capital. If so I’d hate to be them Time will tell

[coorslite21]

Gen. McInerny Says Special Ops Got Pelosi’s Laptop: “This is high treason!”

---

by noah40 mins ago40 mins ago

17.8kviews

•  

 

I’ve been telling you the next 10 days will be unlike anything you have ever witnessed in America.

And now it’s not just me telling you.

 

How about a three star general?

Trending: Was Trump’s Concession a Deepfake? Skeptics Say Look at the Neck

 

General McInerny just released several videos where he breaks down everything that happened at the Capitol.

 

And it’s NOT what you think!

There were several Special Operations being ran all at the same time.

 

The guys with heavy military gear that you’ve heard about?

 

Those were the white hats.

They went in and seized multiple pieces of evidence, including Nancy Pelosi’s laptop.

 

Listen to him break it all down.

 

Here is #1:

Lt. General Thomas McInerney, speaking at the White House yesterday.

 

He says white hats (good guys, part of special forces) got Nancy Pelosi's laptop during the breach of the Capitol on Wednesday. He says she's frantic, and this is why she's pushing to impeach Trump

Pls RT pic.twitter.com/Dx2WSaCSlk

— Ian Lyne (@lyne_ian) January 9, 2021

 

And #2:

Lt. General Thomas McInerney . . .#COVID19 is being used to destroy small businesses.

They're censoring the President of the United States!

The affidavit revealing Italy's role in the rigged election is true.

Pls RT pic.twitter.com/kEuVA1lmui

 

— Ian Lyne (@lyne_ian) January 9, 2021

 

And #3:

Lt. General Thomas McInerney

Every American needs to stand up.

The attack on the Capital was done by Antifa, but it was enabled by McConnell, Schumer, Pelosi and the Mayor.

Comey sold the top secret programme, Hammer and Scorecard, to the Chinese.

Pls RT pic.twitter.com/3WKOLmQisp

— Ian Lyne (@lyne_ian) January 9, 2021

 

 

And #4:

"We're not here to be #ANTIFA"

Military white hat operation leaving with hard drives?

Is this why Pelosi suddenly wants to impeach Trump?

Full video from Ann Vandersteel (also recently deleted from Twitter)

here:https://t.co/fERHlKy7Zg

Please retweet pic.twitter.com/jIq9RlGBDT

— Ian Lyne (@lyne_ian) January 9, 2021

 

 

And because I know that will soon be wiped from Twitter during the purge, I saved them all.

Put them all in one video and saved to Rumble.

Watch here:

Intellihub had more:

The former Lt General who served under U.S. presidents in the past says Pelosi is “frantic” because she knows her laptop went missing during the chaos.

“This is high treason,” McInerney explained. “They are terrified because they [special forces] have that data.”

“There was some people in there that were special forces mixed with Anifa and they took her laptop and they have the data.”

 

The former Lt General claims the missing laptop is the reason that Pelosi wants to impeach President Donald Trump in such an expeditious push using the 25th Amendment.

Pictures showing the House Speaker’s desktop were posted on Intellihub Wednesday that reveal the contents on her desk.

Related: Rioter pictured sitting in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s chair, pictures of computer emails exposed

A Tweet in the report from the @Breaking911 account also displayed what appeared to be images of Pelosi’s email inbox. However, the Tweet has since been removed.

More:

Gen. Mcinerney has seen Pelosi’s laptop. SPECOPS got it. pic.twitter.com/8n3kpJmHS9

— Lg925 (@Luke40342003) January 9, 2021

NATIONAL POLL: Are You Happy Melania Replaced Michelle As First Lady?

 

 

Here's Lt. General McInerney claiming Pelosi is "terrified," says special forces were mixed in with Antifa agitators (dressed as Trump supporters) & breeched the Capitol Wed, grabbing her laptop & other drives.

What do you think? https://t.co/aNtnjYVv83 pic.twitter.com/77FRooDWdm

— Haley Kennington 🇺🇲 (@kenningtonsays) January 9, 2021

 

 

• 341

[nstoolman1]

If nobody is swinging from a yard arm or in front of a post it is hype to me.

I pray it is true.

[Rmc10]

What's really happening is Republicans, Libertarians, conservatives, and walk away dems are working together right now against the uniparty deep state establishment.