Ashli Babbitt

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

red, white, and blue face paint and a fur hat with horns, and carried an American flag on a spear. Amid the chaos, QAnon follower Ashli Babbitt was killed. Despite frantic phone calls from politicians begging Trump to intervene, he refused. Two full hours later, he finally released a video urging his

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, 2021, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/jan-6-rioter-known-as-qanon-shaman-sentenced-to-41-months. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT follower Ashli Babbitt: Ellen Barry, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, and Dave Philipps, “Woman Killed in Capitol Embraced Trump and Qanon,” New York Times, December 11, 2023, https://www.nytimes

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.com/2021/01/08/us/who-was-ashli-babbitt.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “You’re very special”: Travis Caldwell, “Trump’s ‘We Love You’ to Capitol Rioters Is More of the

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet  · 21 Mar 2023  · 308pp  · 97,480 words

myself pulled by the undertow into deep water, jagged with needles and knives and razors and broken glass—like that of the window through which Ashli Babbitt, a subject of this book’s title essay, attempted to climb when she invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Babbitt, shot for her trouble

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for Black women killed by police. It’s grotesque. But the dead are the dead, no matter what they died doing, so, yes, her name: Ashli Babbitt. She was not a hashtag. When she was a girl in rural Lakeside, California, she’d ride her horse to the 7-Eleven. She was

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. An earnest face. Gone, now, like her 8,000 tweets. Like the ashes her family sifted into the ocean. What’s left is a meme, “Ashli Babbitt,” on Twitter and Fox and Newsmax and Telegram. Two words in the mouth of the man for whom she died, who did not bother to

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. “Yeah,” says the witness who remains. “I can’t believe I seen it.” 2. Sacramento, California, six months later Nisenen land 6 The Justice for Ashli Babbitt Rally opened with a prayer, asking God to bless Ashli’s family, sitting in a row of white “Justice 4 Ashli” T-shirts, and to

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In the back of the crowd, protesters challenged patriots to define “Nazi.” “Somebody who wants border security,” said one. “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

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/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

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. Ashli Babbitt dies, in perpetuity. “I suffered,” said Riley. “But I didn’t pay the price Ashli did.” He thought this was for a reason. “I’m

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cutoff jeans bedazzled red-white-and-blue across her back pockets—she said her name was “Freedom”—screamed, “Criminals!” “Why don’t people know who Ashli Babbitt is?” asked Ashli’s mother. “The criminal frickin’ media!” affirmed Freedom. “Exactly,” said the mother. Why wouldn’t the media say her daughter’s name

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all is not lost, he said—literally, he said, “all is not lost”—for God so loved the world he sent us an “angel like Ashli Babbitt,” to “remind us” that freedom “comes at a cost,” and that the price is “blood.” Whose? At the back of the rally, Nosferatu was down

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’s some magic: White woman breaks into a building and tries to crawl through a smashed-out window and gets killed—and then lives forever. Ashli Babbitt was processed, made productive, almost immediately after her death, transformed right away into yet another flag, like a new tarot card in the deck of

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Ben Philips, inventor of the Trumparoo, a kangaroo stuffy dressed as Trump, who died of a stroke. Memes and theories, memes as theories. “Who Killed Ashli Babbitt?” written in the cartoonish style of the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Ashli compared to George Floyd, by those who acknowledge Floyd was murdered

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by liberalism. An account on the right-wing social media site Parler depicts Ashli as an armored, avenging angel; a Twitter account called We Are Ashli Babbitt features an avatar of Blind Justice holding scales above the words “in her other hand, is a sword.” The banner on this account features Malcolm

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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

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into the Senate Chamber to leave a menacing note for the vice president, or a congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has called for Democrats’ execution; Ashli Babbitt, who died empty-handed, or Lauren Boebert, a Colorado congresswoman who open carries; the “zip-tie guy,” seen at the insurrection leaping over Senate chamber

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of literal-mindedness, deaf to the metaphors of others. There was world-building in Straight’s rhetoric, same as the imaginary past summed up in Ashli Babbitt’s use of a date, 1776, and its spirit, the year itself like the Holy Ghost. It’s dialectical: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. There was the

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human interaction we have yet conceived. They’re not completely wrong—the turn toward primary sources is in one sense a democratization. Imagine you’re Ashli Babbitt, inclined toward knowledge of the world, alert to the way such knowing can shape your life. At seventeen you join the Air Force because you

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hero of your own story? mask free autonomous zone, read a red-white-and-blue poster on the front door of the pool-cleaning business Ashli Babbitt ran with her husband and her brother, Better known as AMERICA. Through these doors, the only thing that should be touching your lips is an

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. But much like the cross for Pastor Dave, such corrections miss the point. You can’t fact-check a myth. How to say then, that Ashli Babbitt is not a martyr? There’s the word itself, martyr, which means “witness,” one’s life given as testament to some larger truth. The story

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there’ll be a civil war?” They all said “Yes.” Most thought it was coming, soon, and some said it was already here. Some said Ashli Babbitt was the first casualty; others noted January 6 as one more date in a calendar crowded with the death days of modern martyrs. All the

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of coffee and a stack of newspapers. He muttered. Column inches advanced. Bad news? Of course. I told him I was following the ghost of Ashli Babbitt across the country. I said it just like that. “Yuh-huh,” he said. He acknowledged that he knew the name, but his wide-framed glasses

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scowled. He and Tom had both served. How could Tom forget his oath? “In this country we solve problems with the ballot box,” he declared. Ashli Babbitt was a traitor. They all were. “If I could have a selective machine gun”—The Man cradled an invisible one in his arms. Buda-buda

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Floyd Justice in Policing Act would have struck the word willfully from 18 U.S.C. § 242. But the same Republicans who asked, “Who killed Ashli Babbitt?” had no qualms about killing the George Floyd Act, an apparent contradiction that seems like evidence of hypocrisy only if you mistakenly believe that the

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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

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is anymore. “Huh,” he says, which is exactly the right response. I tell him I began in California, with a rally for a dead woman. “Ashli Babbitt?” I say. “The woman killed in Washington at the Capitol?” “Uh-huh,” he nods, like I’m saying nothing odd. I’m driving cross-country

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arc of history may yet bend toward justice, but the American arc, as played out onscreen—in a movie theater or a viral video of Ashli Babbitt’s killing on YouTube—took a sharp right turn from noir to paranoia to the hopeless absurd. The Big Lebowski plays it all for laughs

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—“super glad she is dead” was a popular response; or who mock it, such as the cut-up who created an account called “Dead Cunt Ashli Babbitt”; or those who embrace the authoritarian “justice” of the insurrectionists themselves, such as the commenter who observed “that bullet cost a lot less than a

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dupe? Fascism’s fool? Was the policeman’s bullet legitimate deadly force? The inevitable punctuation point of the Big Lie? Both? Neither? 5 “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?” Trump asked in a one-sentence statement July 1, the day his business was indicted for tax fraud. Soon it became part of his repertoire

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: “The person that shot Ashli Babbitt, boom, right in the head, why isn’t that being studied?” he asked. She was not shot in the head, but for Trump the story

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worked better if she had been. “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?” he asked a Fox News host. “Why are they keeping that secret?” They weren’t. But for Trump, the story worked better if they were

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it as an account of original sin, something that happened very long ago. It was not so long ago. Nothing in America is. In 2021, Ashli Babbitt invoked 1776; news anchors compared the invasion of the Capitol to the War of 1812. Sacramento, the oldest incorporated city in California, dates back only

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people left little evidence of their existence.” Here is a website created by the Nisenan: www.nisenan.org. Around the corner from the rally for Ashli Babbitt I’m in Sacramento to attend, there’s a memorial for the Californians who served in Vietnam, erected in 1988. Here’s a picture: The

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

by Max Fisher  · 5 Sep 2022  · 439pp  · 131,081 words

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

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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

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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

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

by Victor Davis Hanson  · 15 Nov 2021  · 458pp  · 132,912 words

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

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, 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

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-ashli-babbitt. 15. Fauci dissimulation: Mia Jankowicz, “Fauci Said US Government Held Off Promoting Face Masks Because It Knew Shortages Were

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

by Jamie Raskin  · 4 Jan 2022  · 450pp  · 144,939 words

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

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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

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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

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth

by Elizabeth Williamson  · 8 Mar 2022  · 574pp  · 148,233 words

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

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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

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

by Elle Reeve  · 9 Jul 2024

? 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

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, 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