Topline
A Tuesday article from Fox News has kicked off a budding
online misinformation campaign buoying the false claim that activist
group Black Lives Matter has come out in support of Gaza’s militant
Hamas leaders amid the ongoing conflict with Israel.
Fox News Host Tucker Carlson was one of several popular conservative
media pundits who condemned the violence that took place Wednesday, but
he also expressed sympathy for many of the "deeply frustrated"
Trump supporters who engaged in a siege on the U.S. Capitol, explaining
that "millions of Americans sincerely believe the last election was
fake," striking a sharp contrast to how Carlson and others have
characterized protesters affiliated with the Black Lives Matters
movement.
Fox News published digitally altered and misleading photos on stories about Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in what photojournalism experts called a clear violation of ethical standards for news organizations.
The image was actually a mashup of photos from different days, taken by different photographers — it was done by splicing a Getty Images photo of an armed man, who had been at the protest zone June 10, with other images from May 30 of smashed windows in downtown Seattle. Another altered image combined the gunman photo with yet another image, making it appear as though he was standing in front of a sign declaring “You are now entering Free Cap Hill.”
https://nypost.com/2021/06/20/hundreds-of-nyc-rioters-looters-have-charges-dropped/
Hundreds of alleged looters and rioters busted last year in protests over George Floyd’s murder by police have had their charges dropped, according to NYPD data — figures ripped as “disgusting” by a local business owner.
Sources in the DA’s offices insisted that in many of the cases, the evidence was not strong enough to secure a conviction. The offices are also swamped with a backlog of cases created by the courts’ prolonged closure during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Simple question - aside from the personal feelings of one victim and claims of one former policeman - why is no evidence being reported that charges were dropped in spite of having solid evidence of criminal behavior ?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/17/george-floyd-protesters-charges-citations-analysis
Some prosecutors and law enforcement observers say departments carried out mass arrests as crowd control tactic
In most instances, Detroit officers who wrote
tickets were not at the protests and didn’t actually witness the alleged
crimes, said the National Lawyers Guild and Detroit Justice Center
attorney Rubina Mustafa. Instead of continuing to attempt to prosecute
with shoddy evidence, the city earlier this year dropped
nearly 300 more citations, but has still pursued dozens of charges
against protest organizers. All told, 93% of Detroit cases have been
dropped.
Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump ally, said Wednesday in defending the president against impeachment that Republicans were consistent and condemned all violence from anyone.
“It’s all about politics,” he claimed.
The idea that Democrats did not criticize the violent elements of the BLM and social justice movement last summer is false.
Black activists are coming out strongly against a growing narrative among conservatives that equates the deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol with last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests of racial injustice.
Republican lawmakers defending President Donald Trump made the comparison again Wednesday while building their case against impeachment and accused Democrats of being hypocrites with selective outrage. Their comments mark the latest effort by Trump and the GOP to misrepresent the Black Lives Matter movement as an extremist, violent faction tied to anarchists.
“You can moan and groan, but he was far more explicit about his calls for peace than some of the BLM and left-wing rioters were this summer when we saw violence sweep across this nation,” Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida said in defending Trump before the House voted 232-197 to impeach the president for inciting an insurrection.
But the two events were fundamentally different. One was an intentional, direct attack on a hallowed democratic institution, with the goal of overturning a fair and free election. The other was a coast-to-coast protest movement demanding an end to systemic racism that occasionally, but not frequently, turned violent.
Brad Lander, who was once targeted in NYC for his strong defense of Israel, has joined the same den of radical leftists, in the name of power and acceptance of his peers.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-tell-supporters-storm/
Claim
U.S. President Donald Trump did tell supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to gather at the U.S. Capitol and try to convince members of Congress to delay the constitutional process that would affirm Biden's presidency.
Trump did not explicitly tell people to "storm" or "breach" or "break into" the Capitol.
It was a subjective call on whether Trump's use of phrases "you
have to show strength" and "demand that Congress do the right thing"
were meant to condone violence and crimes among right-wing extremists
without explicitly encouraging it.
Those last two findings are crucial because the violence was motivated
by these false beliefs. It’s amazing how easily Republicans can see how
the rhetoric of BLM activists can create a permission structure for
violence, but they become utterly blind to the same point when it comes
to violence at the seat of our government.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/07/mo-brooks-body-armor-jan-6-rally.html
Then, to prove his point about preparation, he revealed a new detail to me: that because of a tip he’d received about potential violence, he’d been wearing body armor at the very same Ellipse speech in which he encouraged rally attendees to “start taking down names and kicking ass.”
“I was warned on Monday that there might be risks associated with the next few days,” he said. “And as a consequence of those warnings, I did not go to my condo. Instead, I slept on the floor of my office. And when I gave my speech at the Ellipse, I was wearing body armor.
“That’s why I was wearing that nice little windbreaker,” he told me with a grin. “To cover up the body armor.”
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-trump-say-peacefully-patriotically-march-capitol-1561718
The official impeachment resolution points to the moments before the joint session of Congress to certify the election results, Trump reiterated "false claims that 'we won this election and we won it in a landslide'" and "willfully made statements that, in context, encourages and foreseeably resulted in lawless action at the Capitol." These statements include: "if you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore."
Donald Trump’s legal team thoroughly distorted his remarks from the rally that prefaced the storming of the Capitol last month, seizing on the one instance when Trump spoke of peaceful protest in his “fight like hell” tirade of anger and grievance.
Trump attorney Michael van der Veen accused House Democratic impeachment managers of showing selectively edited scenes of the violence and Trump’s words Jan. 6.
Yet he ignored the incendiary substance and tenor of that staging speech as well as the president’s words of affection for the attackers later, while they were still hunting for lawmakers and sacking their offices. He ignored the fact, too, that all of Trump’s provocations that day and for weeks beforehand had the lie of a stolen election at their core.
