Ashli Babbitt

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
by Jeff Sharlet
Published 21 Mar 2023

You step back. You eyeball the green cards. Possibly, you tweet. Maybe you march. Up Constitution Avenue. January 6. Now the course of things is reversing: You take. You take ground. Press forward— “Ashli Babbitt?” I said. David G nodded slowly, looking at me through his red-tinted glasses. “I met her. I met Ashli Babbitt. It was a truck stop. Ashli Babbitt.” This was before Ashli Babbitt became “Ashli Babbitt.” How had he wound up talking to her? “Just like you and me, talking now.” Nothing flirty. Just two people at a counter. Only later would he know her, would he himself understand his close contact with the spirit of history.

…

“We love America,” said another. “If Ashli Babbitt were here,” continued Allman—if, the eternal conditional of martyr mythology—“I guarantee you she’d be out there”—on the edge of the fascist/antifascist rumble—“talking to those people.” “Scum!” a patriot screamed. “Traitors!” an Antifa screamed. “Wuhan!” answered a patriot. “Ashli Babbitt,” Allman said, “does not want you to be afraid, ever again.” Present tense. Ashli Babbitt lives, in the hallucinatory. Then Allman said the patriots would one day return to Washington, to remember her. Ashli Babbitt dies, in perpetuity. “I suffered,” said Riley.

…

Not a coincidence, Richard said. “There’s a lot more going on here than you can see.” Spiritually, he meant. “Come to church if you want to find out what all this means.” “ ‘All this,’ as in, life?” I asked, not wanting to undertake a long drive for standard-grade evangelism. “No, as in Ashli Babbitt! If you want to know why Ashli Babbitt died and why she lives in our heart. What it means to have an American heart.” Did I? I lingered at the Capitol. Too long for a group of Saviors decked out full commando. One pushed his chest into my notebook. His buddies gathered. I was surrounded—until a big guy wearing a blue T-shirt depicting Snoopy napping and the words “Red, White, and Chill,” said, “He’s cool!

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021

Gurman, “Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick Died of Stroke, D.C. Medical Examiner Says,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/capitol-police-officer-brian-sicknick-died-of-stroke-d-c-medical-examiner-says-11618864840. Ashli Babbitt: S. Pagones, “Capitol Riot: Police Officer Won’t Face Charges in Fatal Shooting of Ashli Babbitt, Prosecutors Say,” Fox News, April 14, 2021, www.foxnews.com/us/capitol-riot-no-charges-officer-fatal-shooting-ashli-babbitt. 15. Fauci dissimulation: Mia Jankowicz, “Fauci Said US Government Held Off Promoting Face Masks Because It Knew Shortages Were So Bad That Even Doctors Couldn’t Get Enough,” Business Insider, June 15, 2020, www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-a[dvice-was-because-doctors-shortages-from-the-start-2020-6.

…

There were still no “insurrection” leaders apprehended who were found to have organized what was in truth a mostly buffoonish, chaotic, and crackpot, albeit dangerous, Capitol assault. Officer Sicknick died of natural causes a day after the assault, not as sensationally reported at the hands of a violent Trump supporter. The circumstances around the one killing—that of unarmed fourteen-year Air Force veteran and small business owner Ashli Babbitt, who unlawfully entered the Capitol through a window—still remained shrouded in mystery. The details of an official inquest by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia that exonerated the officer who shot her were mostly kept quiet. And the name, gender, age, and race of the officer in question were uncharacteristically not disclosed to the public—contrary to the custom of all other law enforcement officers nationwide involved in the lethal shootings of unarmed suspects.14 Unelected health care spokespeople, who, both inadvertently and knowingly, gave contradictory advice and were never subject to audit, prompted some of the hysteria that had green-lit massive quarantines and then, indirectly, the radical changes in election-year voting laws.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

Dominic Pezzola, Case 1:21-mj-00047, January 13, 2021. 101 Former friends told Vice News: “The Proud Boy Who Smashed a US Capitol Window Is a Former Marine,” Tess Owen and Mack Lamoureux, Vice News, January 15, 2021. 102 “Load your guns and take”: “The Radicalization of Kevin Greeson,” Connor Sheets, ProPublica and Birmingham News, January 15, 2021. 103 Boyland’s family said: “Death of QAnon Follower at Capitol Leaves a Wake of Pain,” Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Evan Hill, New York Times, May 30, 2021. 104 filmed Babbitt’s death: “The Story of the Man Who Filmed Ashli Babbitt’s Death,” Samuel Benson, Deseret News, August 11, 2021. 105 “That got me moved”: “John Sullivan, Who Filmed Shooting of Ashli Babbitt in Capitol, Detained on Federal Charges,” Robert Mackey, The Intercept, January 14, 2021. 106 “Can we get some courage”: “Twitter, Facebook Freeze Trump Accounts as Tech Giants Respond to Storming of U.S. Capitol,” Elizabeth Culliford, Katie Paul, and Joseph Menn, Reuters, January 6, 2021. 107 “We need to take down”: “Facebook Forced Its Employees to Stop Discussing Trump’s Coup Attempt,” Ryan Mac, BuzzFeed News, January 6, 2021. 108 “Social media has emboldened”: “Alphabet Workers Union Statement on Yesterday’s Insurrection,” Alphabet Workers Union, January 7, 2021. 109 “You’ve got blood”: Tweet by Chris Sacca (@sacca), January 6, 2021. twitter.com/sacca/status/1346921144859783169 110 “I’ve never been a fan”: “Joe Biden,” The Editorial Board, New York Times, January 17, 2020. 111 “Perhaps no single entity”: Tom Malinowski and Anna G.

…

Roseanne Boyland, a thirty-four-year-old Facebook obsessive from Georgia, collapsed in a crush at a Capitol tunnel and died. Boyland’s family said she had found the online far right, and then QAnon, while searching for meaning in the aftermath of long struggles with addiction. Then there was Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old Californian, Air Force veteran, and owner of a pool-supply company who’d reoriented her life around QAnon and tweeted fifty-plus times per day. Babbitt, wearing a Trump flag as a cape, forced herself through a broken glass window in a barricaded doorway and, within feet of the lawmakers her community had insisted must be killed, was shot by a Capitol police officer.

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy
by Jamie Raskin
Published 4 Jan 2022

Many Members and staffers still avoided the west steps of the Capitol where the stench and sting of tear gas, bear mace, and the insurrectionists’ cocktail of chemical weapons still hung acrid in the air. Rumor had it there were bloodstains right outside the chamber in the Speaker’s Lounge, where rioter Ashli Babbitt was shot. Julie told me that our friend Jason in the Sergeant at Arms Office, an officer’s officer who had helped move Tabitha and Hank around on January 6, was just feet away from Babbitt when she tried to break into the House chamber and was gunned down. He apparently was the last officer who tried to save her life, with a desperate chest press, an experience I could now relate to.

…

But what struck me was that Trump had clearly convinced a lot of people that they had a right to be there that day, that they were “guests” in Congress of the president of the United States. Their sense of entitlement at being invited guests was probably reinforced by Trump’s casual lie to his rallygoers that he would be there with them on the march and by the fact that the police were not shooting rioters (with the sole exception of Ashli Babbitt, as she tried to enter the House of Representatives chamber itself). That remarkable sense of entitlement and impunity, which millions of horrified Americans came to see immediately in racial terms, was doubtless further bolstered by the undeniable fact that thousands of trespassing rioters and hooligans were simply being let go by overwhelmed and injured police officers.

…

Contradicting what we all saw with our own eyes, they invite us to believe that these “patriots” warmly greeted the Capitol Police officers on duty that day with “hugs and kisses” as they entered the building. And now it is an article of faith in the right-wing media that government lawyers are “persecuting” hundreds of “innocent” rioters. Trump’s forces are also working to propel Ashli Babbitt, the insurrectionist who was fatally shot as she tried to break into the House chamber after storming the Capitol, into the ranks of American martyrs. As a society, we have not fully reckoned with the explosion of antidemocratic violence that shook the Capitol that day, nor with Trump’s dangerous plan to stage a political coup in the Electoral College.

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
by Elle Reeve
Published 9 Jul 2024

I went inside the Capitol and filmed with my phone. There was a line of cops, an incessant alarm, and a man screaming at police that they’d had their backs for so long—why weren’t they returning the favor? A protester told me a woman had been shot in the neck. (I found out later she was an air force veteran and QAnoner named Ashli Babbitt.) Within hours, in far right Telegram channels, they’d turned her death into a logo—a woman’s face in front of the Capitol dome, a red teardrop of blood at her neck. The cops began to clear the upper terrace with tear gas. Sam and I got ready to film what we expected next, based on what we’d seen in Portland: for the cops to start beating people and arresting them.

…

But they were appalled. “The normie, or the average person—you don’t want to redpill this person,” as so many on the alt-right had once wanted, Spencer said. The result was not a fascist Chad autocracy, but QAnon. “You redpilled the masses, and they became, at best, delusional. At worst, they—Ashli Babbitt got shot in the neck while raiding the Capitol.” Spencer told me he was no longer a white nationalist. Parrott was shocked that Trump hadn’t pardoned the people who rioted on January 6. “He pretty much was like, ‘just throw ’em to the wolves,’ after goading them into the single dumbest political event—hopefully—I guess I’m in competition with them—but the single dumbest political event of the twenty-first century.”

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
by Elizabeth Williamson
Published 8 Mar 2022

Please, it’s because of your support that we’re able to get into things like this and show you the real news that the media won’t, that they will spin tomorrow. They’re gonna spin it. But guess what? Guess what? We are in the Capitol, baaaaby! Yeah!” Montoya was filming the mob bashing through a door leading to the House of Representatives chamber when Ashli Babbitt, thirty-five, was fatally shot by a U.S. Capitol Police officer. Infowars aired the graphic footage under the headline patriots storm congress raw footage includes execution of ashli babbitt, ending the video with an ad for Infowars “Alpha Power” supplements. Montoya was arrested in April 2021, his video cited by the FBI as evidence against him.[25] In late November, the House committee investigating the January 6 attack subpoenaed Jones and Roger Stone.