On July
27, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s select committee to investigate events
surrounding the Jan. 6 protests at the Capitol will hold its first hearing. The
panel is part of a broader effort to paint the demonstration as an
“insurrection,” and thereby characterize nearly 75 million Donald Trump voters
as “domestic terrorists.” But there’s another reason Pelosi and her colleagues,
law enforcement, and the press are pushing the insurrection narrative—to cover
up the one obvious crime committed that day in the Capitol building, a murder.
See it in context:
On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen shot to death four Kent State
University students protesting the Vietnam War. Events earlier that week set
the stage for violent confrontation. The radicals who dominated the protest
movement were not angels. They threw beer bottles at policemen. The campus ROTC
was set on fire. Students threw rocks, too, sending one policeman to the
hospital. After the students failed to disperse, the Guardsmen took their
positions to fire.
No one except
historians of the period remember any of what led to the massacre because the
most salient fact is that uniformed Americans shot dead four unarmed protestors
in cold blood. That’s why the Kent State shooting is one of the darkest moments
in U.S. history.
The Jan. 6
shooting of an unarmed protestor in the Capitol building also shocks the
conscience of the nation. However, legal and political measures, and the
media’s false accounts of Jan. 6, have been employed to bury the murder of Ashli Babbitt and
shield the identity of the U.S. Capitol Police officer who killed her.
Charges have been
brought against hundreds of Trump supporters for their actions during the protest.
Dozens have been detained without bail in a Washington, DC jail for non-violent
offenses, some of them misdemeanors, like trespassing. Federal and Washington,
DC authorities refuse to make public the entirety of the 14,000 hours of
videotape in possession of the U.S. Capitol Police and instead leak clips to
the press selectively edited to put the protestors in the worst possible light.
And what of the
plainclothes policeman who drew his weapon on Ashli Babbitt and shot her in the
throat? After a cursory investigation, local and federal law authorities
declined any further action. And with that, Democratic Party officials and the
press made the most important fact of Jan. 6 disappear. Because Republican
officials are scared the media will tar them as “insurrectionists,” too, they
have made no effort to hold anyone accountable for the most gruesome crime ever
committed in their place of work.
Republicans have shown their side little loyalty in the six
months since the protests. Though vocal, for instance, in their defense of
Cuban democracy activists, only a handful of GOP officials have said anything
about the Biden administration’s political prisoners. And thus Pelosi knew that
her committee would put House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy in a bind.
If he appointed members to it, he’d be legitimizing another
witch-hunt, like the special counsel investigation and the two impeachment
inquiries, heading into 2022 midterms. On the other hand, boycotting the
committee would give the Democrats an open field.
She is counting on public hearings to showcase the GOP’s
weakness and cowardice: If members will not defend the Republican voters who
came out to protest for the leader of their party on Jan. 6, they’ll lose.
She’s right but she may have overplayed her hand, for the opposite is also
true—if Republicans fight, they’ll at least carry their own supporters. To win,
all they have to do is tell the truth.
The Jan. 6 narrative is the latest in a series of
third-world-style information operations joining Democratic Party operatives,
the media, and law enforcement to target Trump, his aides, and supporters. Info
ops are designed to keep opponents tied down disproving details—i.e., prove
Trump is not a Russian spy, prove he didn’t offer a quid pro quo to the
Ukrainian president, prove Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection, and so on—so trying
to fight it point by point is a losing game.
To date, the most successful operation spun by the U.S. media
and spy services is Russiagate—generations of schoolchildren raised in Blue
cities will be taught that Trump was a Russian agent. But it also provides an
example of how to counter the narrative: Find the real story, then tell it
every day.
In the winter of 2016-17, Congressman Devin Nunes saw there was
no evidence to support the Russia collusion narrative. Rather than just contest
it directly, he made it his aim to show the country and his colleagues that
behind the false allegations that Trump was compromised by Russia there was a
genuine scandal—the FBI had spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using political
dirt funded by Hillary Clinton.
Getting out the truth and saying it every day, even in the face
of relentless media attacks, galvanized supporters. The point of information
operations, after all, is to demoralize the other side, so telling your story,
the truth, strengthens and consolidates your side.
The story of Jan. 6 is simple—it’s Ashli Babbit’s story. It’s
the story of her life, her love of her country, and the Air Force veteran’s
service to it. Call her family to testify and then her friends. Call the men
and women she served with. Tell the story of her life every day.
And tell the story of her murder. Tell it every day.
It wasn’t Trump supporters who desecrated congress, but the
officer who drew blood in its halls and those who are protecting a killer. Use
the hearings to put them on trial. Make federal and Washington, DC authorities
testify. Put the question directly to Pelosi and her colleagues: Why are they
hiding a murderer?