Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

If Antifa is such a threat why does the right need to do the following....?

Rhetorical question. Mostly they do it because they're credulous dumb-asses with a weakness for conspiracy theories. Which explains your fascination with them.

Hoaxes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)

There have been multiple efforts to discredit antifa groups via hoaxes on social media, many of them false flag attacks originating from members of the alt-right and 4chan posing as members of Antifa on Twitter. Some of these hoaxes have been picked up and reported as fact by right-leaning media.[99]

These include an August 2017 "#PunchWhiteWomen" photo hoax campaign spread by fake antifa twitter accounts.[100] In one such instance, Bellingcat researcher Eliot Higgins discovered an image of British actress Anna Friel portraying a battered woman in a 2007 Women's Aid anti-domestic violence campaign that had been re-purposed using fake antifa Twitter accounts organized by way of 4chan.

The image is captioned "53% of white women voted for Trump, 53% of white women should look like this" and includes an antifa flag. Another image featuring an injured woman is captioned "She chose to be a Nazi. Choices have consequences" and includes the hashtag #PunchANazi. Higgins remarked to the BBC that "[t]his was a transparent and quite pathetic attempt, but I wouldn't be surprised if white nationalist groups try to mount more sophisticated attacks in the future".[101]

A similar fake image circulated on social media after the Unite the Right rally; the doctored image, actually from a 2009 riot in Athens, was altered to make it look like someone wearing an antifa symbol attacking a member of the police with a flag.[102]

After the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, similar hoaxes falsely claimed that the shooter was an antifa "member"; another such hoax involved a fake antifa twitter account praising the shooting.[103][104] Another high-profile fake antifa account was banned from Twitter after it posted with a geotag originating in Russia.[105] Such fake antifa accounts have been repeatedly reported on as real by right-leaning media outlets.[99]

Some of the opposition to antifa activism has also been artificial in nature; Nafeesa Syeed of Bloomberg reported that "[t]he most-tweeted link in the Russian-linked network followed by the researchers was a petition to declare Antifa a terrorist group".[