Law Enforcement Officers and Police Shootings: Try Comparing Those of January 6 to Those in Minnesota

The MSM's Treatment of the January 6 Police Forces and of the Victims That Day

One aspect about the January 6 Protest that has not been popularized enough is the extent to which the claim that half a dozen policemen died that day turns out to be utterly preposterous. 

Both Joe Biden and Hakeem Jeffries held speeches during the former's term in which the occupant of the White House and the House minority leader stated that five Capitol policemen were killed on January 6, 2021 and Hakeem Jeffries having family members solemnly come up and read the names of "the officers who are no longer with us."

But just think — the obvious questions arises: among all the protesters who were prosecuted (persecuted?) and jailed during the next four years, where were the murder cases? Why wasn't any of them charged with murder? Why has nobody seen any murder trials (five? more?)? Why do we know about all the members of the "mob" rioting at the Capitol but nothing about the people involved in the far worse problem of assassination?

The Left cares nothing about individuals — see Mamdani — it always reverts to collectivism, in this case to collective guilt, such as the conservatives of the entire state of Texas all sharing the blame for the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas (whose killer, by the way, was a Soviet-admiring communist).

Ashli Babbitt's mother at CPAC in 2023

Had I been in the buildings on the days (no matter for which party, but let's say Republican) that Joe Biden and Hakeem Jeffries made their speeches, I would have stood up to say as follows 

"We are firmly on the side of the Democrats in this matter. As you know, the GOP is known as the party of law and order and we Republicans have always stood firmly behind the boys in blue. We want to help in any way we can and we should like, therefore, to have the exact names of the policemen martyred and (as far as possible) the exact times of the afternoon of January 6 in which they were killed, as well as the videos thereof. Most of all, we demand the name of the killer(s) of each of these five men, in order to prosecute these murderers to the full extent of the law. Indeed, we are determined to demand the death penalty in every case." 

Of course, while we know the names of the five law officers who are dead, nobody can determine at what time they died on January 6 or who killed them on January 6, for the obvious reason that not a single one of them died on January 6 or was murdered on January 6 or on any other day. 

Some of them died weeks, if not months, later, and all died of unrelated causes (the one who died earliest, Officer Brian Sicknick, was from two strokes the following day). (Of course you could claim that the suicides of Howard Liebengood, Jeffrey Smith, Kyle DeFreytag, and Gunther Hashida was caused by depression due to the January 6 riot, in which case some of us will ungraciously retort that such a person should perhaps not have belonged in the police business in the first place.) 

Meanwhile, not a tear is shed by the Left for Ashli Babbitt, whose name indeed is dragged through the mud and whose death is deemed to be nothing but her own fault — if not outright mocked — by leftists galore. (See also Charlie Kirk, Andrew Breitbart, etc, etc, etc…)

• Related: The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence

Intermission: The Reader's Digest's Hard Turn to Wokeness

In a passage from a book authored by "one of Reader’s Digest International Edition’s top reporters" — which shows how far left even that monthly has gone (a 10-page summary of the book was published in the November 2002 issue, just in time to influence the mid-terms of that year) — that is hardly believable, Anita Bartholomew proves that The Digest has gone full woke. 

(NOTE: If you have no time for this lengthy "intermission", skip to the below the picture of the Minneapolis riots in the snow…)

Guess whose name is not mentioned anywhere in Anita Bartholomew's Drama in Real Life article about the "Siege at the Capitol": Ashli Babbitt's. Nowhere is Rosanne Boyland mentioned. They are mentioned in her book, Siege: An American Tragedy, but with such a different tone of voice than that for the brave policemen besieged by "the MAGA horde’s storming of the building" that is so eye-popping it sounds like a Babylon Bee satire. 

Listen to how Ashli Babbitt is described: because she was a soldier (who ever thought, in their wildest dreams, that The Reader's Digest would come down to dissing the… United States Army?!), "most of Ashli Babbitt's adult life was training and preparation to do violence"! (How is that for an upgrade from "thank you for your service"?! What about, uh, the training and preparation of the main subject of your partisan article, then, Anita Bartholomew, i.e. … police officers?!) But it gets better (sic) — in her book, the author gives outright praise for the killing of Ashli Babbitt.

"Had a Capitol Police officer not thwarted [the violent mob's] pursuit [of escaping congressional representatives] by shooting Ashli Babbitt, how many lawmakers would they have taken down?" Isn't "taken down" a weasel word for killed — oh, but Anita didn't use the word killed!

Turn to Jack Cashill, the author of Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6 (The real question is not why thousands of women went to Washington on January 6; The real question is why the rest of us did not), to set the record straight:

No police officers were killed or seriously injured. No members of Congress or staff were molested.

As for Rosanne Boyland, Jack Cashill addresses her case in an American Thinker article called The ‘Through Line’ from Ashli Babbitt to Donald Trump:

[Michael] Byrd was not the only cop to panic. Metropolitan Police Department officer Lila Morris beat the unconscious Rosanne Boyland repeatedly over the head with a stick. Boyland subsequently died.

But in Anita Bartholomew's book (neither Michael Byrd nor Lila Morris are mentioned in its 220 pages), Rosanne Boyland turns out to be nothing but a drug addict who "was being trampled" (by whom is, again, never clarified, but please do notice the passive voice which, beyond being passive, suggests that the protestors were, or at least may have been, responsible). 

Never in my day as a fact-checker at the Reader's Digest, where I started my career, would an editor have let such a text pass, either in the book form or in the article. In my day, the article (not to mention the book) would have received a suggestion for a total "rewrite" or an outright "drop."

One question Anita Bartholomew never bothers with: What is Donald Trump's view (not to mention that of his supporters, i.e., half the country) of the 2021 "riot", or more importantly, of Trump's view of the 2020 election. However, Jack Cashill makes some good points regarding the race-baiting and defaming Democrats' scare-mongering, "toxic nonsense", and "mass psychosis":

If … Michael Byrd thought he “saved countless lives” by killing Ashli Babbitt, [Thomas Crooks] may well have thought he’d save millions [in July 2024] by killing that Hitler-loving white supremacist Donald Trump.

Moreover, there is no acknowledgemt in Anita Bartholomew's article that already by August 2021, the FBI was confirming that there had not been an insurrection some seven months earlier. Did it make it into the book? From the looks of it — an author who seems as objective as Nancy Pelosi — the answer is an unqualified No.

In her outstanding book, La Guerre Culturelle, Évelyne Joslain points out (with an ever-so-pertinent rhyme in French) that "Le Siège du Capitole" i.e., is really "Le Piège du Capitole", i.e., what the left calls the "Siege at the Capitol" is really the Trap at the Capitol, in other words, entrapment at the Capitol.

Notice Anything Different About the Left's Descriptions of the Minnesota Riots?

Which brings us to the current uprisings in Minnesota (in which we are repeatedly assured by the "mostly peaceful protests" crowd that they are neither riots nor an insurrection). 

Renée Good is described as nothing but a mother bringing her kid to school that day, while nobody in the MSM seems to mention that she had parked her car perpendicular in the middle of the road. Or that indeed when asked to step out of the car, she immediately hit Reverse, before lounging forward. 

Think for a moment about a common traffic stop, say for speeding, whether in America, in France, in Denmark, in Greenland, in China, or anywhere else — would any policeman look at you with gentle eyes if you parked your vehicle perpendicular across the road? How about if you ignored his order to exit the car, instead setting in reverse only to bound forward?

Good's intention may not have been to hit any of the law officers, but it seems straight-out denial of reality to dismiss the bodycam of Jonathan Ross which shows him being hit, or shoved if you prefer, while the ICE agent has since been described as being in hospital suffering from internal bleeding. You think that may be exaggerated? Maybe, but: how is that different to what the Left is doing with the Left's alleged victims?

Conversely, indeed, nobody seems to be worried about the health and well-being of the many thousands of law enforcement officers in Minnesota these days. 

Which, needless to say, seems to be par for the course when you keep describing that police force as fascistic and the Gestapo.

Related: • RIP Charlie Kirk — This Is What Is Bound to Happen When You Constantly Refer to Your Adversaries as "Fascists" and as "Threats to Democracy"  

By the way, I can assure you that no member of the Gestapo, whether in an occupied country or in Germany proper, ever had to deal with thrown snowballs, deafened with whistles, and treated to a barrage of car honks. They didn't need to cover their faces, either, for the simple reason that nobody in their right mind was out in the streets getting in the faces and organizing to doxx the families of these truly fascist people. "If you protest, and you don't expect anything to happen to you," as the meme puts it, "then you never truly believed we were living under fascism."

Ashli Babbitt family volunteers at CPAC in 2023

Question: How is what Ashli Babbitt did — jump through a broken window — any wors than what Renée Good did? Is a car not, can an automobile not be, a weapon?

• Ashli Babbitt and the left's first consequence-free taste of MAGA blood: Openly calling the Orcs to man the barricades, the Left's revolutionary cosplay is headlonging into homicidal politics

How about Alex Pretti?

As PJ Media's MATT MARGOLIS points out (in The Left Doesn’t Want You to Know This About Alex Pretti, the Man the Border Patrol Shot), 

The talking points are already circulating. Social media posts from the left keep hammering on Pretti's job as an ICU nurse, as if that somehow proves he was there with pure intentions. They are gaslighting you because they want you to believe federal agents gunned down a selfless healthcare worker for no reason.

That is not the case.

We already knew that Pretti was carrying a loaded handgun and two extra loaded magazines when he showed up at an active ICE operation targeting a violent criminal illegal immigrant. And like Good before him, Pretti wasn't some random citizen. He was part of an organized network dedicated to interfering with immigration enforcement.

And he brought a loaded gun.

 … Speaking on behalf of neighbors, [Jeanne] Massey says the community is "horrified" and "furious" about Pretti's killing. "Let me be clear: we are horrified, we are furious, and we are not going to pretend this is anything but what it is - another senseless act of violence carried out by federal agents in our city," she said.

What Massey conveniently leaves out is what Pretti was doing there in the first place. He showed up at an active federal law enforcement operation carrying a loaded weapon and extra ammunition. Video footage shows Border Patrol agents attempting to disarm him before the fatal shooting.

 … The left wants you to see this as federal overreach. The reality is that these networks have created a dangerous environment in which activists deliberately interfere with law enforcement operations. They track agents around the clock, follow them, confront them, and apparently sometimes show up armed. Then they act shocked when agents act in self-defense and things turn deadly.

Meanwhile — to restate the obvious — the protestors of January 6 did not bring any firearms to the protest. sometimes, we are told (with the utmost passion) that no no no no, this was not the case: "Oh yes, one of them did bring a gun! It was in the trunk of his car! Parked two miles away."

That's like saying that one of the peasants who attacked la Bastille in 1789 had every intention of murder; Indeed, Jacques owned a pitchfork. Oui, Monsieur! Yessir, he did. Jacques had a pitchfork in the haystack in his farm in Normandy.

In his debunking of the Left's fairy tale of the January 6 melodrama, Factcheck 's D'Angelo Gore examines all the charges against the protestors:

The mob of Trump supporters protesting his 2020 election loss brutally attacked officers with many types of weapons, including flag poles, pipes, bats, bricks and pepper spray, a bipartisan Senate report said. 

But why use pepper spray? Why use a flagpole? Why not simply bring a firearm? Especially when you — proudly — belong to the most gun-owning group of people on the planet?

But guns are what a lot of leftist protesters are bringing to the streets of Minneapolis — along with, believe it or not, bombing materials. 

This forces PJ Media's ERIC FLORACK to ask, How Is This Not an Insurrection? 

 … rule number one here seems a purely logical point. It's one that seems to be getting ignored by many: You simply do not pull a loaded gun on a federal officer doing his duty enforcing the law and expect to survive. 

When anybody brings up Renée Good and Alex Pretti in the future, don't hesitate to retort with Ashli Babbitt and Charlie Kirk. There is no more fitting description of their double standards.

RELATED: • What the January 6th protest actually reveals is the criminal determination of the Democrats to establish a one-party state at whatever the cost