Other demonstrators found themselves gripped with suspicion by pallet of bricks they claimed had mysteriously appeared in the marchers' paths: "THEY ARE LEAVING BRICKS ALL AROUND CITIES SO THE CIVILIANS CAN PICK THEM UP AND USE THEM AS WEAPONS SO THE GOV. CAN GET THE MARTIAL LAW INVOLVED. THIS IS A SET UP !!!!! THE GOVERNMENT IS TRYING TO BE 10 STEP AHEAD OF US
" one viral Instagram post read. The suspicious brick narrative soon started bleeding from left to right, with several more viral posts implying the bricks may have been strategically planted to aid those who would riot in creating more chaos. In Minneapolis, a viral video of a demonstrator claiming that loads of bricks had been placed in the path of protests to encourage people to commit property destruction was shared to a YouTube channel; the caption implied that Jews had put them there.
Meanwhile, a woman named Kambree Kawahine Koa, who was affiliated with Women For Trump in 2015 and has contributed to sites like the Daily Caller, tweeted that “pallets of bricks” had begun showing up in her subdivision, “not in an areas where a house is going to be built.” The implication, of course, was that rioters—possibly antifa ones, her followers helpfully suggested—would be arriving there soon, and had sent their weapons ahead, for some reason. “I hope we get to the bottom of this,” Kambree tweeted, before acknowledging, as it turned out, that the bricks did in fact belong to the city.
There’s absolutely no evidence to suggest that cop car was “planted,” or that demonstrators or their supposed Jewish overlords or even the cops were helpfully pre-arranging bricks, but there’s no doubt that suspicion was in the streets, and, more concerningly, in the White House. Donald Trump claimed that the protests were perpetrated by “ANTIFA and the Radical Left,” then announced that the government would be “designating ANTIFA as a terror organization.” There is no domestic terror list that “ANTIFA,” which is not an organization, can magically be placed on through the power of Twitter. The point was nevertheless made.
The discourse around this weekend’s protests was fueled, in other words, by misinformation. Bad, fractured, and partial information has raced through the marches, social media, and the Oval Office. It is being used to cynically frame what has been and will be happening, and in the hands of the powerful, it will serve specific political interests....
