As the riots sparked by the death of George Floyd sweep across the U.S., the left has gone into overdrive to put out the word that white nationalists are the culprits.

Powerline’s Scott Johnson, who lives in Minnesota, posted this morning about a press conference given by Minnesota Governor Walz (D) on the riots. Johnson wrote:

Consistent with my own observations, Governor Walz’s remarks called out the object of the operations as domestic terrorists. He and others sought to identify them with “white supremacists” who, to my knowledge, have yet to be sighted — see Jon Justice’s tweet below — but the enhancement of the forces of law enforcement in support of last night’s operations represents a late step in the right direction.

Stephen Montemayor reports in The Star Tribune: “A law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigations of outside agitators acknowledged that people are coming in from out of state to cause problems. But he said he has yet to see any credible evidence linking that behavior to white supremacists.” Montemayor quoted his law enforcement source” “It’s a red herring.” It’a “a red herring” deployed by Governor Walz along with the National Guard soldiers.

UPDATE: I copied and pasted the quotes from Montemayor’s article abvoe. They have now been excised from the article without any note or explanation.

Apparently @GovTimWalz confused antifa with white supremacists #TCNT https://t.co/CNyXocc5mh

— Jon Justice (@JonJustice) May 31, 2020

MSNBC’s Joy Reid asks her followers why AG William Barr is telling Americans that left-leaning Antifa groups are responsible for the violence when it’s “already documented as coming from white nationalist groups.”

So now, the attorney general, Bill Barr, is attempting to pin the anarchy and infiltration, which is already documented as coming from white nationalist groups, on "left leaning" ANTIFA groups. The goal is to force the media to repeat that. What is his proof?

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) May 30, 2020

This morning, Reid expresses her support for Antifa. She’s probably incensed that President Trump will be declaring the group a terrorist organization. Just the News reported earlier that the President has asked the FBI to surveil, disrupt and arrest members of the group who are involved in the violence.

Y’all do realize “antifa” is just short for “anti-fascists…” right? As in the people who confronted the nazis in Charlottesville… why would they try to burn and destroy black communities? https://t.co/XanvvW8mCR pic.twitter.com/m4RZMkt2GR

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) May 30, 2020

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, whom Johnson refers to as the ‘boy mayor,’ said, “We are now confronting white supremacists, members of organized crime, out-of-state instigators, and possibly even foreign actors to destroy and destabilize our city and our region.”

And now Cheri Jacobus, who writes for The Hill, has labeled Fox News’ contributor and editor of The Federalist Mollie Hemingway a white supremacist. Not only that, but Jacobus has been feverishly sending out tweets ever since. Most recently, she wrote: “Trump and Putin have always wanted this chaos, death and divide in our country. Pretending Trump isn’t a white supremacist is no longer possible…”

Mollie Hemingway is a white supremacist and works for the secretly funded white supremacist rag The Federalist. She also knows the white protesters breaking windows and starting fires are an "op" to try to blame Antifa and give Trump the race white riot he's so bloodthirsty for. pic.twitter.com/VhABG3V7JI

— Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) May 30, 2020

For my Facebook friends, since Facebook is where many Trump supporters actually are. (Trump's twitter followers are fake bots & trolls.) But the Facebookers are mostly real, watch only FOX News and don't know what Trump tweets. But now they have no excuse for their ignorance. pic.twitter.com/BsCrcNBtn3

— Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) May 31, 2020

Aside from the fact that Ms. Jacobus seems to have lost her mind, I’m getting the sense that Democrats are making one final, desperate attempt to prevent Trump from winning reelection.

We all know the riots stopped being about George Floyd a long time ago.

Has the left forgotten this is not our first rodeo? We’ve experienced the Russian collusion hoax and the Quid Pro Quo impeachment hoax and the many smaller ones in between. Democrats were convinced the coronavirus crisis would once and for all accomplish what they’d been unable to. And now, fortune has handed them one last chance.

We know how the left operates. The message goes out. Liberal politicians and the media start repeating it and the narrative gets beamed into millions and millions of homes. And before you know it, Americans are saying ‘Did you know that white supremacists are responsible for the riots?’

It is possible that white supremacist groups have shown up. But when you really think about it, why would white supremacists protest the killing of a black man?

It has not “already been documented” as Joy Reid claims. Far from it.

And while it’s possible they just hadn’t received the memo yet, The Washington Post reported last night that state officials have offered little evidence and they’ve contradicted each other.

They variously assigned responsibility for the escalating violence to far-right nationalists, left-wing radicals, drug cartels and possibly foreign agents in statements, news conferences and presidential tweets. Ultimately, the confusion of rioting and looting…offered little clarity and ample opportunity for opposing political parties to advance their own theories.

Given the absence of evidence that white supremacists are responsible for the violence, I think I’ll take the Attorney General’s word for it. Given that typically 90% of  DOJ contributions go to Democratic candidates, I don’t think Barr’s colleagues would let him get away with misleading Americans. Nor do I think Barr would lie on national television.

Additionally, many of the participants fit the profile of Antifa members. Journalist Lara Logan spoke to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Friday night about the professional agitators (Antifa) who are showing up at the riots and how to spot them in the crowd. (I covered this segment in an earlier post. But I’m including it here for those who haven’t seen it.)

Here’s what Logan had to say:

What they are doing is exploiting the existing conditions and exploiting the local residents, exploiting the very justified outpouring of grief and anger. They specialize in masking themselves behind genuine protestors and exploiting these opportunities to agitate and destroy. These are professional antagonizers. They have been trained. They have manuals in how to do this, with their tactics, with their techniques and their procedures.

And if you look at them in a crowd, you can start to pick them out because they’re very different to the rest of the protestors. They typically wear black, all dressed in black, not always. They have different levels in the hierarchical structure. But you’ll see the ones, especially that are in this subculture of professional antagonists and instigators. And, they’re all in black. They often have equipment on their backs. They’ll have gas masks that aren’t the typical masks. Theirs are the expensive ones. They’ll have SDL cameras which cost thousands and thousands of dollars which the average protestor doesn’t have. They’ll have communications like radios with military-grade antennas. You’ll see they have ear pieces in their ears. There are repeaters on top of vehicles and these people come from the outside.

Their slogans are about abolishing the police. They use sayings like the only good cops are dead cops.

So, they’re not looking to reform the system or fix the system or anything like that.

You’ve got a black police chief in Minnesota, right? You’ve got many other black officials. They don’t want to support those people. Those black people are not on their agenda. It’s the people who can be exploited because when Minneapolis is burned to the ground and any other city like Ferguson, they move on. And who’s left holding the baby, right? Who’s left with the destruction? Who’s poorer because their city has been burned down and destroyed? The citizens that they say they care about.

So, here we are at the start of a new spin cycle. After going through this so many times before, we recognize it. It’s not quite so easy to fool us anymore. Comments from Reid and Jacobus no longer sound reasonable. We recognize the subtle inclusion of “white supremacists” in the statements of the governor and the mayor for what it is. We’re looking for a little evidence this time. After so much deception, they may have even lost some of the Democrats by now.