Sometimes it’s hard to believe how deceptive CNN can be.

As we reported earlier, they actually tried to suggest that folks in the Seattle Autonomous Zone weren’t armed, asking us to deny what the anarchists themselves said and the evidence of our own eyes of the pictures and videos showing us that yes, some of them are, in fact, armed.

This photo is not a good indication of the fortifications in the protest zone. All roads leading into the zone are barricaded by vehicles, metal barricades, and armed citizens.

— Omari Salisbury (@Omarisal) June 9, 2020

If you’ve been getting your news from Oliver and @CNN, you probably have no idea WTF is actually happening anywhere. Ever. https://t.co/56Zx9rQnxE pic.twitter.com/V4T8jVC29p

— Jack (@MrBeagleman) June 11, 2020

But Brian Stelter tried to sell another deceptive story this week too in his “Reliable Sources” newsletter, that somehow, Fox is lying about the riots.

Tuesday night's @ReliableSources is about the "riot" lie: https://t.co/bUWxdgGqCH

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 10, 2020

Notice if you check the tweet, he doesn’t allow response to it, which is hilarious, showing he couldn’t take people calling him out on it. But his tweet is dated June 9 and he says in his letter: “Look, I live in Manhattan and I hated what happened in this city on May 31 and June 1. The looting and mayhem was appalling. But it was more than a week ago.”

He scolds Fox for two stories they (as well as other media) ran: a video showing the ravages of the riot on Minneapolis which the president tweeted on Tuesday and a leak of a discussion Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot had with an alderman about the “May 31-June 1 violence,” as Stelter describes it.

First, Fox never said they were said they were current shots/audio. Second, they obviously ran them as soon as they were aware of them. Pro tip? Sometimes you have visuals or audio that you don’t see when they happen, Brian. Third, I can’t find any mention at all of CNN even running the stories. Maybe I missed them, but why didn’t you cover the stories, Brian?

But the greater problem with Brian’s claims is his suggestion that somehow the “riots” or “violence” as he terms it stopped on June 1. Is he kidding? It isn’t Fox being deceptive at all, Fox never claimed that riots are still raging, it’s Stelter being deceptive if he’s trying to push that. And it’s Stelter being deceptive if he’s suggesting there are not still issues and violence from “protesters” still going on.

Apparently Brian missed a lot of action before May 31 and after his two day window, including the violence in Seattle where protesters attacked police on Saturday before they took over the six blocks and declared an autonomous zone on Tuesday. Oh, excuse me, I forgot, that’s totally “peaceful,” if you ignore the attacks the police chief described on her officers that happened over several days including on June 6, before the takeover on June 9. Did Stelter miss that whole story?

But there’s another piece he’s left out of his scenario, that’s the reason why riots stopped in places like Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. and that’s that the National Guard was deployed, including by the president in D.C.

But the last related part of Stelter’s letter is really evidence of him spinning desperately. He titles that part: The Antifa Fantasy. According to Stelter, there hasn’t been any sign of Antifa at all in any of this.

That’s what Anne Helen Petersen calls it in her must-read story for BuzzFeed News. She explores how rumors about “roving bands of Antifa have followed small protests all over the United States.” It’s nonsense, of course, nonsense fueled by Facebook posts and fringe websites, but the rumors give militias something to guard against. As Petersen writes, “it doesn’t matter if antifa was never coming in the first place. They didn’t come, and that’s evidence of victory.”

>> The reality: “NPR has reviewed court documents of 51 individuals facing federal charges in connection with the unrest. As of Tuesday morning, none is alleged to have links to the antifa movement…”

>> Historian Mark Bray, who has studied the leftist groups, made this point on CNN the other day: “You can see that when these groups in major cities mobilize, they don’t get more than a couple hundred people. And they’re more active in some regions than others…”

Seriously? What are these folks trying to sell? Do they think “Antifa” involves a membership card?

First, they completely disregard Attorney General William Barr’s assessment of the involvement of Antifa or any of the professionals who have reported Antifa involvement simply because they choose to.

“We’re seeing people who are exploiting this situation to pursue violent, extremist agendas, anarchists like antifa and other agitators,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray.

How about New York’s top terrorism cop?

From NBC:

On Sunday night, New York’s top terrorism cop, Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller, detailed his office’s analysis and investigation into why the New York City protests have become so violent and damaging at times.

“No. 1, before the protests began,” Miller said, “organizers of certain anarchist groups set out to raise bail money and people who would be responsible to be raising bail money, they set out to recruit medics and medical teams with gear to deploy in anticipation of violent interactions with police.”

He added, “They prepared to commit property damage and directed people who were following them that this should be done selectively and only in wealthier areas or at high-end stores run by corporate entities.”

“And they developed a complex network of bicycle scouts to move ahead of demonstrators in different directions of where police were and where police were not for purposes of being able to direct groups from the larger group to places where they could commit acts of vandalism including the torching of police vehicles and Molotov cocktails where they thought officers would not be.”

Psst, Brian? That’s Antifa.

We’ll just ignore the Antifa accounts organizing for protest actions or involved in bail funds because Brian doesn’t see them. We’ll ignore the far left leanings of some of the folks behind the attacks. They probably mean nothing.

But um, Brian, that guy you quoted as a “historian Mark Bray?” Yes, he wrote the Antifa handbook that former acting DNC head Keith Ellison waved around and said they should strike fear in the heart of President Donald Trump. He describes his book as “an unabashedly partisan call to arms that aims to equip a new generation of anti-fascists with the history and theory necessary to defeat the resurgent far right.”

So yeah, thinking maybe he’s really not the guy you want to be consulting?