How We’ll Remember January 6
I received a call on Monday from one of the women whose stories I tell in my new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6. Of the ten women profiled, two were killed on January 6, six were imprisoned, and two await sentencing. Of the ten, no one did anything more overtly criminal than break a window.
The woman with whom I spoke wanted reassurance that her sacrifice was not in vain. I told her that Donald Trump’s conviction sheds new light on her own arrest and trial. Even the most myopic Republican has come to see that the central issue in the 2024 campaign will be the restoration of American justice. As the election nears, with 1,425 (and counting) citizens arrested, the great majority for simply protesting in or around the Capitol on January 6, more and more Americans will see just how great the injustice has been.
What has cowed many a citizen into silence these past three and a half years is the belief that the protesters killed a Capitol Police officer on January 6. His name was Brian Sicknick. The media told us repeatedly that “insurrectionists” killed Sicknick by bashing him over the head with a fire extinguisher. On January 8, the New York Times added this chilling detail: “With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.” The Times cited as source “two law enforcement officials.”
Without realizing its significance, one of the women I profiled, retired NYPD officer Sara Carpenter, related a conversation she had with a Maryland friend on the way back to New York on the evening of January 6. When Carpenter told the friend she had been at the Capitol, the woman was horrified. The friend told Carpenter that the rioters had killed a police officer with a fire extinguisher. She got the news from her husband, a retired Capitol Police officer.
In sum, the fire extinguisher rumor was alive and well on the evening of January 6. So was Brian Sicknick. He died on January 7. On April 19, 2021, the U.S. Capitol Police released a press release stating, “The USCP accepts the findings from the District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner that Officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes. This does not change the fact Officer Sicknick died in the line of duty, courageously defending Congress and the Capitol.”
Sicknick’s autopsy took place on January 8. He had suffered a pair of strokes on January 7.
Some powerful people made the conscious decision to wed Sicknick’s unfortunate death to the fire extinguisher rumor and hand the counterfeit story to a complicit New York Times. These people then had Sicknick’s ashes placed in the rotunda of the Capitol before internment at Arlington National Cemetery, an unparalleled act of civic blasphemy. To help the martyrdom story marinate, the medical examiner sat on the autopsy report for more than 100 days until a Judicial Watch lawsuit forced it out. These reports are usually released within days.
Not content with misrepresenting Sicknick’s death, the Biden White House launched into a grotesque inflation of the day’s body count. On the first anniversary of January 6, Attorney General Merrick Garland, for instance, named five men “who demonstrated what true courage looks like” and “have since lost their lives.” In the trials of the J6ers, judges or prosecutors have routinely repeated the saga of the five martyrs to provoke the jurors. In reality, of the five, one died of a stroke and four subsequently committed suicide for reasons no one seems eager to explore.
In the way of reassurance, I told my J6er friend that should Trump win in November, and the truth is revealed about the events of that memorable day, January 6 will be remembered as St. Crispin’s Day is in England — or at least in the England of William Shakespeare’s imagination.
On St. Crispin’s Day 1415, October 25, the real King Henry V led the undermanned English army against the overconfident French at the Battle of Agincourt. “The fewer men, the greater share of honor,” Shakepseare’s Henry V told his troops. “He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named, And rouse him at the name of Crispian.”Unlike elected Republicans and the talking heads of the legacy media, the citizens who showed up in Washington on January 6 did not hesitate to share the truth as they saw it. They were not going to remain silent about the COVID fraud, the unconstitutional changes in voter laws, the silencing of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and the industrial-strength “granny farming” that put Joe Biden in the Oval Office. And they have the scars to show for their patriotism.
Yes, of course, those who committed real crimes should be held accountable — at least to the same standards as were the George Floyd rioters. But the great mass of peaceful protesters have been persecuted as unjustly as has been President Trump.
The day of reckoning is coming. When it does, those who stayed at home shall think themselves accursed they were not there. As to those happy few who lived that day to see old age, they will yearly on the vigil feast with their neighbors and say, “To-morrow is January 6.”
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