Topic: The ConWeb
The ConWeb has had trouble accepting that their fellow Trump supporters committed the Jan. 6 Capityol Riot (witness WorldNetDaily's attempts to blame Antifa). But when an purported leftist was arrested for his alleged role in the riot, they were ON IT.
Unsurprisingly, WND dived in deeply, first with an anonymously written Jan. 14 article:
The FBI has arrested anarchist leader John Sullivan of Utah for participating in and committing various crimes during the riot at the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6.
He was quoted as saying, "We got to rip Trump from office" and "It's time for a revolution."
Videos showed Sullivan agitating the crowd and encouraging violence.
That was followed the next day with an article by Art Moore declaring that this proved Antifa provoked the riot:
The FBI's arrest of a "revolutionary" activist Thursday night has shattered the conventional narrative that the loose-knit, "anti-fascist" movement known as Antifa had nothing to do with the violence that shut down the U.S. Capitol and prompted the second impeachment of President Trump.
John Earle Sullivan of Sandy, Utah, insists he's not a "member" of Antifa or Black Lives Matter, but the activists in black bloc who were behind the estimated $2 billion in damage over the summer don't carry membership cards. In quieter moments, many explain their aim is to provoke a revolution and replace the American republic with an anarchist system in which there is no state.
[...]
Prior to Sullivan's arrest, the prominent "fact-checker" site published by the Poynter Institute, Politifact, declared there's "no evidence that the crowd was infiltrated or led by antifa activists in disguise, and specific individuals held up online as antifa activists have turned out to be Trump supporters."
In fact, BLM activists in Utah, where Sullivan is from, have said Sullivan was kicked out of the group for extreme behavior and suspected far-right ties. Observers of Sullivan at the riot have said they did not see Sullivan inciting violence.
Moore then labored to distance the rioters from purportedly real Trump supporters:
Along with anti-Trump extremists, the FBI has arrested extremists who have declared support for the president.
Among them is Jacob Chansley, the QAnon conspiracy theorist who was photographed wearing horns as he stood at the desk of Vice President Mike Pence in the Senate chamber.
However, Chansley doesn't fit the profile of a typical Trump supporter. He has explained he's a practioner of shamanism, and Reuters reported a detention memo by Justice Department lawyers in Arizona said he "has spoken openly about his belief that he is an alien, a higher being, and he is here on Earth to ascend to another reality."
Among the mob at the Capitol were members of a "group" that has drawn the attention of the FBI ahead of the inauguration called the Boogaloo Bois.
The Atlantic reported the FBI warned earlier that boogaloos could launch attacks in state capitols this Sunday.
But the center-left magazine said "the boogaloos don't appear interested in fighting for Donald Trump — they tend to despise him, mostly because they think he panders to the police."
But Sullivan appears to have been the only non-right-winger arrested in connection to the riot, undercutting Moore's bogus contention that it was instigated by Antifa.
Moore is also being disingenuous by dismissing the "QAnon Shaman" arrested at the riot as not a true Trump supporter because "he's a practioner of shamanism." He's deliberately overlooking the QAnon part of the description, which is very much a pro-Trump movement.
CNSNews.com also glommed onto Sullivan's arrest in a Jan. 15 article by Melanie Arter touting how "A leftist activist was arrested and charged with taking part in the Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol," adding that "Sullivan told the Rolling Stone that he tried to blend in so that Trump supporters would trust him." Strangely, CNS deleted Arter's article; it's no longer in the CNS archive, and the original direct link comes up empty.
At the Media Research Center's NewsBusters blog, P.J. Gladnick got all excited about Sullivan's arrest -- and his appearance on CNN after the riot but before the arrest -- in a Jan 15 post:
On January 6, after the rioting in the Capitol building, Anderson Cooper interviewed a leftist "journalist," John Sullivan, who was filming the scene when Air Force veteran, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed. Conveniently not mentioned by Cooper during the interview was the fact that Sullivan had been arrested the previous July for rioting and making threats in Provo, Utah. Somehow this important fact, which would have put Sullivan's background in the proper perspective, was skipped although CNN seemed to know enough about Sullivan to identify him as the founder of far left Insurgence USA in its transcript.
[...]
It is therefore not very surprising that this "journalist" has now been arrested for very similar activity at the Capitol that CNN somehow overlooked although his organization appears in the report of Sullivan's Provo arrest.
Interestingly, we have not seen that WND, CNS or the MRC has given another other person arrested at the riot the kind of headline coverage it gave Sullivan -- which tells us they're using Sullivan as a distraction from the fact that the rioters were, in fact, pro-Trump extremists not too much unlike themselves.
