Given a choice between informing their audience on the details of incidents like the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol building earlier this week or propagandizing about the affair, we already know what the activist media will choose, don’t we? As you have probably already seen, the press has been spinning the Kerfuffle at the Capitol since Tuesday, forging it into a political weapon to be used against the president and the conservative movement.
Yet, in their bid to concoct new and creative ways to avoid wasting a crisis, they have engaged in behavior for which they typically lambast conservative media. This is where the death of Ashli Babbitt comes in.
Babbitt was the unarmed woman who was shot by a police officer at the Capitol during the riots. (See: Woman Shot in the Neck at Capitol, Violence Escalates (WARNING: Graphic Video). She was one of the individuals who stormed the building and was shot to death as she attempted to climb through a window. However, as my colleague Streiff noted, she was not a threat.
“The very fact that the protesters seem to be unarmed and outnumbered by heavily armed police…police who are intermixed with the protesters and showing no signs of fear or concern for their own safety…leads the untrained observer to ask what the hell caused the shooting,” he noted.
It is difficult to imagine that Babbitt’s death could not have been avoided from the video footage. But we have not seen any drop of outrage from the far-left, which claims to care about police brutality and misconduct. Indeed, after Babbitt’s identity was revealed, the activist media did exactly what they rightly criticize conservative media for doing: Dredging up the past of the victim in order to smear them.
Several alleged news outlets took the opportunity to focus primarily on Babbitt’s support for QAnon and the sharing of conspiracy theories on Twitter. They dug through her past to find and highlight financial issues and problems with the law.
The Chicago Sun Times published a piece in which the author wrote: “Her Twitter account promoted mainstream conservative views but also included references to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which centers on the baseless belief that Trump has been secretly fighting deep state enemies and a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibals operating a child sex trafficking ring.”
The AP also found that “Babbitt was charged with reckless endangerment for hitting a woman’s car three times in Calvert County, Maryland, and pursuing her through the streets in what’s described as ‘road rage,’” in August 2016. While they acknowledge that she was acquitted of the charges, they never explained why it was relevant to the incident that took her life.
NBC News published a piece titled, “Woman killed in Capitol was Trump supporter who embraced conspiracy theories” in which the author honed in on her social media posts.
From NBC News:
Using the handle CommonAshSense, Babbitt’s Twitter account was almost singularly focused on radical conservative topics and conspiracy theories. Among other fringe beliefs, she tweeted about pizzagate, a viral disinformation campaign that falsely alleged a child abuse ring was being operated by Democrats from a Washington pizza restaurant.
Babbitt was a loyal Fox News watcher, according to thousands of tweets to Fox News hosts, but she also engaged on social media with the conspiracy news internet news site InfoWars. In 2020, Babbitt began to tweet with QAnon accounts and use QAnon hashtags.
The Los Angeles Times also piled on, highlighting her support for the QAnon movement and also her opposition to excessive COVID-19 restrictions. Media activist Paige St. John wrote:
But Babbitt’s social media presence was entirely different, promoting not only messages of support for Trump but also hate against those who ordered COVID-19 restrictions, distrust of the mainstream media, and a buy-in for QAnon conspiracy theories, including that Disney harbored pedophiles and thousands of children were mysteriously missing, and — looming large above all else — the country she loved was in danger.
St. John also tried to smear Babbitt as a racist, claiming “she promoted tweets that characterized Black people as criminals, even as she supported fellow Trump supporters who are Black.”
Of course, she did not provide the content of any of these alleged racist posts, but that’s no surprise, right?
Last, but not least, we have The New York Times. Media activists Ellen Barry, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Dave Philipps wrote a piece titled “Woman Killed in Capitol Embraced Trump and QAnon,” in which they brought up Babbitt’s financial troubles. They wrote:
Ms. Babbitt appeared to struggle in business. In 2017 she took out a costly short-term business loan. In effect, it meant her pool business would have to pay an interest rate that she later calculated in court filings to be 169 percent.
Within days of signing the loan agreement, she stopped making payments, only repaying about $3,400 of the $65,000 borrowed from the lender, EBF Partners, records show. The lender soon sued her.
Naturally, these reports bring up certain questions. What does Babbitt’s financial history have to do with her killing? How is her “road rage” incident relevant when she appears to be a victim of an unjust police shooting? Why do we need to know all about her social media posts – and what exactly is the point of painting her as a racist without evidence?
If you have a modicum of common sense, you know that none of these factors are relevant to the issue at hand. They are doing exactly what right-leaning media figures do when they dredge up the past of people like George Floyd, Stephon Clark, Philando Castile, and others. They are trying to distract from the actions of the police officer who unjustly killed her.
These are the same people who call conservatives racist for downplaying an act of police brutality by bringing up past crimes, and they are using the exact same tactic to push their agenda. The bottom line is that it shows that these people, despite their rhetoric, care nothing about police misconduct. It is just another method they use to attack their opponents.
Let me know what you think in the comments below!
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