This piece from the Daily Beast is spot on. Trump and his MAGA army are very consciously turning January 6th into a revolutionary rallying cry:
We’ve all heard the old adage that “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
With Ashli Babbitt, Donald Trump and the GOP have found a perfect martyr to rationalize their perpetual victimhood and inspire future “freedom fighters” to assist in their full-scale assault on democracy.
Babbitt was one of thousands of Trump supporters who decided to join the violent insurrection on Jan. 6 and overrun the U.S. Capitol in hopes of canceling a free and fair election. She was shot by a Capitol police officer while climbing through a broken window on a door that led to the Speaker’s Lobby. She died while wearing a Trump flag as a cape.
The pointless death of the 35-year-old Air Force veteran came in the service of Trump’s Big Lie, but his party has shown no contrition. Rather, Republicans are cynically exploiting her death to fuel their dangerous quest for power at all costs.
This week, Trump declared that the police officer had “no reason” to shoot Babbitt, because she was not a threat as she tried to breach the door amid a mob storming the Capitol, including people who brought weapons and openly announced their intent to lynch Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence. He went on, asking, “And why isn’t that [officer’s case] being opened up, and why isn’t that being studied? They’ve already written it off. They said that case is closed. If that were the opposite, that case would be going on for years and years, and it would not be pretty.”
In April, the police officer who fatally shot Babbitt was cleared of criminal wrongdoing. His identity has not been released due to death threats that inevitably increased after Trump released a one-line statement last week asking “Who Shot Ashli Babbit?” That echoed Rep. Paul Gosar, an ally of avowed white supremacists, who accused the police officer of supposedly “lying in wait” to “execute” Babbitt.
Gosar and 20 other Republicans voted against honoring law enforcement officers with the congressional medal of honor for protecting their lives on Jan. 6. Trump, who now says the police had “no reason” to shoot a violent insurrectionist, declared “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” during the overwhelmingly peaceful protests following the murder of George Floyd. Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotton called on Trump to send in the military and respond with an “overwhelming show of force” to men, women and children objecting to the police killing unarmed Black people.
The “Blue Lives Matter” crowd that claims to care so much about the safety and security of our law enforcement desperately wants to “move on” from even investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection that killed Officer Brian Sicknick, with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy vowing to strip Republicans of their committee assignments if they agree to join that investigation.
The goal is to keep enraging and confusing their base, convince them of a far-reaching “Deep State” conspiracy committed to depriving them of power and glory and “replacing” them, and deflect from the Jan. 6 investigations that will further document the extremist elements embedded within the GOP and conservative movement.
I think there’s also ample evidence that they are also using the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter to turn it back on the left. Ashli Babbit is being turned into their George Floyd and January 6th is being slowly but inexorably morphed into a “protest” with the same moral authority as the worldwide Black Lives matter protests in the summer of 2020. They do this all the time. (“My body, my choice” is being deployed by the anti-vax Trumpers now….)
