Agency and the angry mob
Does saying the insurgents were "poisoned" by Trump mean they aren't responsible?
Ashli Babbitt posted on Twitter as CommonAshSense, and her Twitter feed — still up on Thursday and gaining followers — is a pro-Trump, anti-mask, chest-thumping libertarian stew.
Nestled in the feed is a Donald J. Trump video asking people to attend what “could be the biggest event in Washington, D.C., history” on January 6, the day Congress would certify the electoral votes from November’s election.
Chatter among his supporters was already heated, and subsequent posts show D.C.-bound Coloradans, Arkansans, and Californians posing with weaponry they said they intended to bring to their nation’s capital to “take back” the election Trump said had been stolen by pedophiles and socialists in the Democratic party.
Babbitt retweeted others’ travel plans. These are accounts tagged with icons that are common identifiers of extremely conservative thought.
Babbitt, a 35-year old Air Force veteran, flew alone to D.C. from her San Diego home. Her husband planned to pick her up when she returned today, Friday.
At the Jan. 6 rally, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani called for “trial by combat,” and Trump told supporters that they would “never take back our country with weakness.” On a regular day in Trumplandia, this would just be two saggy men thumping their pasty chests.
But on Wednesday, it was a lit match to a powder keg.
Having been given their marching orders, Babbitt and the others moved toward the Capitol. Babbitt, wrapped in a Trump flag, posted a Facebook video along the way. She claimed she was among 3 million “patriots.” (The actual crowd count — patriot or no — was considerably less.)
While Congressional members and their staff were rushed to safety, the significantly-less-than-3-million insurgents pushed through the stately hallways and left pipe bombs and nooses, vandalized offices, waved the Confederate flag, and filmed themselves shouting into their phones — “This is OUR house, babeeee!” and “Stop the steal!” for nearly five hours.
The attempted coup was carefully crafted by years of inflammatory speeches and tweets. As the soon-to-be-former president’s electoral loss became real to him, he pulled open a box and a cloud of rabid bats — waving Trump flags and wearing Trump hats — flew to the Capitol. The siege was scripted, right up to “break into the Capitol and then break stuff.” Once the rioters got inside, they seemed confused, but gamely stuck around while Trump released a video that said he loved them, and that they were special.
Everyone loves validation, but on Wednesday, it was not lost on those of us watching the coup on television that the insurgents were treated far differently by law enforcement than are, say, Black Lives Matter protesters. And it was not lost on us Thursday that there were a few attempts in the media to “humanize” the insurgents. My queendom for any news story about a white terrorist that doesn’t include a flustered neighbor saying: “But he was such a nice boy.” Yes. Of course he was. Perhaps Wednesday’s events were shocking enough to jar us from our standard let’s-look-for—the-context response to white criminality. Some talking heads used the word “thugs.”
This is 2021. Everyone has a phone with a camera and it appeared that everyone in one particular Capitol corridor was videoing what happened next:
A band of insurgents stand outside a barricaded door, Babbitt among them. One of the glass panels in the door is shattered, and Babbitt appears to try to climb through the door. A handgun attached to a suited arm attached to a plain clothes Capitol police officer points at the door. The gun flashes. Babbitt falls to the floor, almost as if the door is a hot stove and she has touched it. There are shouts of “shots fired"!” and “back up!” The prone Babbitt is quickly surrounded by insurgents and police in riot gear. (The officer attached to the arm attached to the gun was placed on leave pending an investigation.)
And then Babbitt is pronounced dead at an area hospital.
So far, four other deaths have been laid at the feet of Wednesday’s siege, including a Capitol police officer who died Thursday from injuries sustained after a rioter hit him with a fire extinguisher.
Twitter can be immensely cruel. Before Babbitt’s husband received official word of his wife’s death, someone started an Ashli Babbitt’s Fiery Ghost account on Twitter that pretended to send dispatches from hell. One poster said Babbitt had not been shot, but “poisoned” by vicious rhetoric from the outgoing president. That was immediately shouted down. No one forced the insurgents to take poison. They loaded their trucks, climbed onto planes, and swarmed to the capital with the intention of…well…that last part’s a little confusing.
Babbitt’s cohorts may be charged with sedition, which could carry a 20-year jail sentence. For insurgents who escape charges, those selfies they posted are evidence, and people are on the lookout for familiar faces to turn into the police, the FBI, or employers.
Here is something else no one scripted: The violence moved some Republican senators — among them, outgoing Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia — to withdraw their formal opposition to the election’s results. That opposition was strictly symbolic — but so is the backtracking, and each carried weight. Later on Wednesday, when Senators and Representatives re-convened to count votes, the backtrackers were applauded for their change of heart. It’s all fun and games (and saggy old white men beating their chests) until a woman lies bleeding in a marble hallway.
And Trump? Thirty hours after the Capitol was cleared, Trump delivered a robotic and hypocritical speech lauding law and order. Politicians and pundits are arguing over whether he should be impeached, or removed from office via the 25th Amendment. We are 12 days out. The bats are still loose, and they’re still rabid.
The blame certainly goes in a lot of directions - the insurgents; the politicians and media heads who validated, incited, and encouraged them; the enablers who continued to support the narcissistic President who spent most of his time on self adulation. Hearing “We love you...you are very special” from the President AFTER they invaded and desecrated the Capitol, and terrorized our country’s representatives, is a clear message of support of their actions. He needs to be held accountable for sedition, along with the others in positions of power who chimed in. Backtracking now is a desperate act of self preservation. It’s too late.
The insurgents may have bought into conspiracies and lies, but they are not innocent victims. They found their hero who spoke to them and told them what they have wanted to hear. “He says out loud what we are thinking” was heard over and over by many supporters. And we know how ugly, racist, bigoted, and cruel those thoughts were now that we’ve seen it all play out in words and actions led by the POTUS.
I think there is another group that has been poisoned by the spreading of false information. Most are lifelong Republicans who have slipped down into the Trump sewer with blinders on, while seeing an alternate reality explained on Fox News or the internet (eg Breitbart). The numbers of people who voted for Trump seems to indicate that. I hope we can bring them back from fantasy to reality and value truth-seeking. I don’t know if we need real time fact checking or something else to at least bring most of us to a common understanding of truth. We certainly should hold politicians to a standard of communicating truth to their constituents. There should be a penalty for spreading verifiable lies. Information is shared in a much different way than it was a generation or so ago when we all watched and trusted Walter Cronkite and read our fact-checked newspapers. I wonder: How can we protect our country from this sort of thing in the future? It's as important as protecting our people from foreign adversary attack, I think.