At that time, Fox News was on a commercial break from its regular schedule. He had only urged viewers to be on the lookout for a segment about educators “canceling” Dr. Seuss.
And so America’s most popular right-wing television network again missed a chance – or, perhaps, again chose to miss a chance – to confront its viewers with the unmasking of a lie that has become a widespread belief among right-wing Americans.
Partly because of Fox, the conspiracy theory has spread to conservative circles. Opinion polls suggest that a large percentage of Republicans think without reason that Antifa was primarily responsible for the insurrection that was actually perpetrated by supporters of former President Donald Trump, some of whom allegedly expressed irritation that Antifa had received credit for his own behavior.
In a January poll by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, 50% of Republicans said that Antifa was largely responsible for the violence on Capitol Hill. A January NBC poll found that 48% of registered Republican voters thought that Antifa was solely or primarily responsible for the Capitol riot.
The problem is bigger than Fox
Fox News deserves part of the blame for this worrying state of affairs. Some of your most prominent personalities fueled the lie. Other Fox personalities joined Trump in the general overvaluation of the danger posed by Antifa – a far-left, sometimes violent, collection of self-styled anti-fascists – thus preparing viewers to perceive a movement that was far less deadly than the extreme extremism as the main threat to the nation.
But the problem here is bigger than any means of communication. The lie about Antifa and Capitol was promoted by a large list of right-wing people and entities.
They include right-wing television networks Newsmax and One America News; Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Trump’s impeachment lawyer, Michael van der Veen; Republican members of Congress, like Rep. Mo Brooks, Deputy Matt Gaetz and Senator Ron Johnson; Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Republican state legislators; former Alaskan governor and candidate for vice president Sarah Palin; right-wing conspiracy sites like The Gateway Pundit; and popular right-wing commentators on social media and the radio.
The lie sellers found a small nugget of truth to help their cause. Of the more than 260 Capitol defendants who have been revealed by the Justice Department to date, one of them, John Sullivan, is a political eccentric who has used the hashtag #antifa on social media. But left-wing activists have already expressed suspicions about him, the FBI has never claimed that he is a real Antifa activist, and regardless, the list of people accused of the riot is largely made up of Trump supporters – including, as Wray testified Tuesday – militia members and white supremacists.
A history of blaming Antifa
In a well-told story this week, The New York Times identified a fake article published by the conservative Washington Times on the day of the insurrection as particularly striking in spreading the lie that Antifa was responsible. The article, which the Washington Times later corrected, erroneously claimed that a facial recognition company had identified two members of Antifa on Capitol Hill.
There is no doubt that the inaccurate version of the article went viral on social media. If I didn’t, however, some other lie related to Antifa would almost certainly have.
Joan Donovan, research director at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, noted that the right-wing media found a way to falsely blame Antifa for everything from mass shootings to forest fires. The lie about Antifa orchestrating the attack on the Capitol, said Donovan, is part of “a long campaign of disinformation against the left” by a “right-wing media ecosystem that wants to shift the blame for everything bad that happens in our society” .
And much of the ecosystem of right-wing media consumers is willing to swallow it.
As impossible as it may seem to make Fox News and other profitable right-wing platforms behave more responsibly in providing information, it seems just as difficult to deal with the problem on the demand side. Between the popularity of absurd lies about the birthplace of former President Barack Obama, the rise of the crazy QAnon movement, the popularity of Trump’s lies about the 2020 elections and now the popularity of that lie about Antifa and the Capitol, it seems Of course, millions of right-wing Americans are eager to believe bizarre conspiracy theories about their political opponents.
Fact-checkers will continue to unmask the absurd. But we know that, in the short term, there are not a series of FBI fact checks or statements that can convince millions of Americans that they are wrong.