In Ashli Babbitt, MAGA Has Found Their Michael Brown

Horseshoe Theory is alive and well.

Last week marked the four-year anniversary of the January 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol — a day when angry Trump supporters, who’d been conned into believing the 2020 election had been stolen, tried to forcibly stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win.

Much to the annoyance of many on the right, that national media recognizes the day every year, replaying horrific video footage, revisiting the series of events that led up to it, talking to police officers who were beaten while defending the Capitol, and presenting the sharp contrast between what Republican leaders were saying then and what they say now.

This year’s anniversary had additional significance, of course. It’s when the man who provoked that attack was, himself, certified as our next president. Unlike last time, the certification went off without a hitch, and our nation re-embraced a longstanding tradition it was denied of four years ago.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, who famously had to be rushed to safety by Secret Service agents last time, commented on this year’s moment:

The peaceful transfer of power is the hallmark of our democracy and today, members of both parties in the House and Senate along with the vice president certified the election of our new president and vice president without controversy or objection.

I welcome the return of order and civility to these historic proceedings and offer my most sincere congratulations and prayers to President Donald J. Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance on their election to lead this great Nation.

I also commend the members of the House, Senate and the Vice President who did their duty under the Constitution of the United States, it being particularly admirable that Vice President Harris would preside over the certification of a presidential election that she lost.

God bless our new President and Vice President and their families and may God continue to bless the United States of America.

Though a page in U.S. politics has been turned with the return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office, the infamy of January 6 will assuredly live on — not just in the hearts and minds of those who recognize it as an unprecedented assault on our nation’s system of democracy, but also in the tireless efforts of those who’ve worked so hard to rewrite the events of that day.

One of the many bogus narratives we hear quite often in MAGA-world, including from president-elect Donald Trump himself, is about the one individual who was shot and killed that day: Ashli Babbitt, a January 6 rioter.

A veteran police officer named Michael Byrd pulled the trigger.

“She was shot for no reason whatsoever,” Trump said again just this week, adding (as he has before) that Babbitt was unarmed. In the past, Trump has outright accused Byrd of murdering the 35-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran.

It’s a claim he and many of his supporters like to make… and it’s utterly ridiculous.

Babbitt wasn’t shot while meandering around the Capitol like the ‘QAnon Shaman’ or one of those “peaceful grandmothers” you may have heard about, which one might conclude from Trump’s framing. No, she was among a pack of very dedicated rioters, busting her way through an interior window alongside a barricaded door. With a backpack over her shoulders, and ignoring repeated warnings for her to stop, she was trying to force her way into the Speaker’s Lobby… mere feet from evacuating lawmakers whose job it was for Byrd to protect.

How do we know this with certainty? For the same reason Byrd was cleared of wrongdoing by multiple law-enforcement agencies including the DOJ: there’s clear video of the incident.

This is the situation Byrd found himself in, on what Donald Trump calls “a day of love”):

What Byrd did on January 6 was difficult but correct. Babbitt had every opportunity to spare herself from what happened, and she refused them all. Yet, Byrd is still considered by many (including the incoming leader of the free world) to be a murderer who shot an “unarmed victim.”

I can’t help but notice striking similarities between this situation and another high-profile police-shooting — one that went down in Ferguson, Missouri back in 2014.

Police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed an 18-year-old man named Michael Brown. Brown was unarmed — a fact that became a huge part of the racially-charged national story that saw riots and looting throughout the city. All it took for many to make up their mind about what had happened was two factors: Brown was an unarmed black man, and Wilson was a white cop. The rest of the narrative wrote itself. Wilson, as far as many were concerned (including Democratic politicians and much of the media), was a murderer. Case closed.

But as it turned out, Brown’s actions that day, as described by Wilson and later substantiated by witnesses, were a crucial part of the story. Brown was charging at Wilson, seconds after violently assaulting the police officer in his vehicle and trying to take away his service pistol — a confrontation that began when Wilson responded to a shoplifting report in which Brown was, in fact, the culprit.

Just about everyone on the political right understood that Wilson had acted in accordance with the law. Brown posed “an immediate threat to the safety of the officer or others,” as defined in the Department of Justice’s policy on the use of force. Social-justice warriors on the left, however, had a very hard time letting go of the ideologically-confirming narrative that Brown was the victim. Heck, many still haven’t accepted the truth (despite Barack Obama’s DOJ ultimately clearing Wilson), and continue — to this day — to lump Brown in with victims of unlawful police shootings.

They’d just as soon Wilson still go to prison, as St. Louis County prosecutor, Wesley Bell, tried (and failed) to make happen just five years ago.

In the case of Ashli Babbitt, it’s MAGA folks that are playing the role of social-justice warriors, ignoring crucial facts and dismissing even the notion that Babbitt posed an immediate threat to the safety of the lawmakers who stood (again, just feet away) on the other side of the shattered barrier she was charging through.

She was “unarmed,” they repeat over and over, echoing Michael Brown’s defenders. This, despite the fact that Babbitt was later found to have knife on her.

I’m half surprised they haven’t taken to dropping to their knees and shouting “Hands up, don't shoot!”

Babbitt’s and Brown’s deaths were both unfortunate. Neither needed to happen. Sadly, they were both brought on by their own unlawful conduct.

Of course, Byrd isn’t the only Capitol police officer who’s been raked over the coals by Trump and his followers. Similar to how Darren Wilson was cast by the Left as a product of a institutional corruption, pretty much every police officer who answered the call on January 6 has been disparaged… some worse than others.

Aquilino Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant, was assaulted by more than 40 people that day as he defended the Capitol. He recently wrote this of the lawmakers he protected inside:

The mob didn’t get to them, but not for lack of trying. They’re here today because four years ago officers like myself did what we did inside the Capitol tunnel. Had the mob taken that entrance, a lot of members would have been hurt or killed.

Some of these same elected officials—who claim to be on the side of the rule of law—are now defending the January 6th rioters and calling on Trump to pardon them. He has said he intends to do so. And adding insult to our injuries, some members of Congress are inviting rioters to Trump’s inauguration, bringing them back to the site of the building they desecrated. This infuriates me. It is dishonorable. We cannot expect these lawmakers to stand up to Trump or defend the Constitution in the future.

People fail to realize that we were simply doing our jobs that day. They accuse me and my fellow officers of letting the mob in, of siding with Democrats, of hating Donald Trump. No. I sided with the law. I did it to the point that I lost my health and my career.

Close to 150 police officers were injured on January 6, some so badly that they had to retire from the force. One died of a stroke the following day, and four later committed suicide. Yet, in an act of MAGA social justice, their assailants (“patriots” according to Trump) will very likely have their crimes wiped from their records by the self-professed “law and order” champion (whose lies put them in a rage at the Capitol in the first place).

So much for backing the blue.

In a recent Q&A, I described horseshoe theory, in which the far-left and the far-right don’t exist on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but rather bend toward each other, in the shape of a horseshoe. The far-right finding their Michael Brown is just more evidence that the theory is sound.