Yahoo News White House deletes video after fake news about Antifa staging bricks and weapons debunked
The White House was forced to delete a video claiming that Antifa was leaving stacks of bricks for use by demonstrators at the George Floyd protests.
The compilation video showed stacks of bricks in various cities across the country, with a caption that claimed that Antifa and "professional anarchists" were invading American communities and staging the bricks as weapons.
"These are acts of domestic terror," the caption stated.
The majority of the clips used in the compilation had already been investigated by journalists and debunked by the time they appeared in the White House's video. After pointing this out, the White House quietly deleted the video, offering no explanation or retraction.
Despite its deletion, the video had more than a million views and has fed into the narrative that the George Floyd protests are not about police brutality or systemic racism, but are well funded, well organised plots by far left extremists to cause discord and suffering across the US.
The Intercept saved a version of the video before the White House deleted it, and analysed the compilation.
Open source investigators found that every stack of bricks shown in the video had been there prior to the George Floyd protests.
In one of the clips, a protester shows a pile of bricks outside the Dallas County Courthouse and speculates that they were put there to help provoke a riot, calling it a "set-up."
However, photos and video from 5 May at the same spot showed that the bricks had been sitting there for at least three weeks prior to the death of Mr Floyd.
Another video, showing blue plastic bins filled with cinder blocks left at a street corner near a garbage can, was included in the video compilation. That video was debunked when Mark Tregyger, a New York City Council member living in the area where the bricks were allegedly left, said the boxes were construction material from a nearby building site.
In another instance, a video showed a series of wire cages containing stacked rocks in Sherman Oaks, California. Rather than serving as a weapon staging area for anarchists to use during an insurrection, residents explained on Twitter that the caged rocks were actually meant as barricades for a local Jewish centre.
Out of fear that the rocks might be weaponised, the Jewish centre reported that it removed the stones from the cages.
"To all our concerned neighbours and friends, there were false pictures and video going around today, claiming some bricks or rocks were placed at our centre. Here is the truth: THESE ARE SECURITY BARRIERS and have been here for almost a year," the centre said in a statement posted to Facebook.
In addition to the outright debunking of the White House's claims that the bricks were left for anarchists, the FBI also revealed that it has received "no intelligence" suggesting Antifa was involved in organising the protests, despite the White House's insistence that they are involved.
