Truth is the daughter of time. Meanwhile, what do we actually know about the events of the 6th?
Ashli Babbitt died because she was shot. Three protestors died of medical emergencies (it happens in crowds but still …). And Brian Sicknick, a Capitol policeman, a Trump supporter and no friend to the deep state died.
[BE AWARE: truth is indeed the daughter of time. The first sentence of the next paragraph now appears to be completely incorrect – evidence of how someone cautious of the MSM can still be deeply deceived by them. Read the final paragraph of this post for summary and links to better information about Brian’s death.]
Brian died because a man threw a fire extinguisher onto a group of policemen and it struck him. (The clear video hasn’t prevented some accounts, and even more comments, confabulating tales of his being beaten to death by a frenzied mob, but you can click the link to see what actually happened – a professional-looking strike by a man who approaches from the left of the video and then as swiftly retreats when the deed is done.) Throwing a fire extinguisher is no way to kill a specific targeted person, but it is a way to inflict death or injury on a random policeman. (Four years ago, in early 2017, the rioters threw concrete blocks at the police – luckily, IIRC, no-one was killed then.)
Andy Ngo said it did not look like Antifa to him. He was in England at the time, not Washington DC, so is working from videos of the event, but he has a great deal of experience of what Antifa in Portland look like. Michael Yon says in this video that it looked like standard Antifa false flag agent-provocateur tactics to him. He was there outside the Capitol and he has seen Antifa in Portland (and has seen many protests around the world). Michael Waller, another eyewitness, is very sure he saw agent-provocateurs, and that some were Antifa false flags – and is not so sure about others. The impeachers and the MSM remain in denial but gradually others – even the FBI – are deciding that the crowd listening to Trump’s split infinitive (“to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”) were not first on the scene at the Capitol.
One thing seems clear. The US right believe in the second amendment – and in their right to shoot second, to shoot back. If last Wednesday had been a coup attempt, the shooting of Ashli would have been met with return fire. This was no coup attempt. Whatever the first-at-the-Capitol group intended, it was not that.
One thing is not yet clear to me. Who were they, really, and what was their goal? It is horrible to think that Brian Sicknick may have been killed by someone from the side he sympathised with. It is horrible – and dangerously consoling – to think he was killed by an enemy activist wearing a reversed Trump hat.
– On the one hand, the collusion investigation in the first two years of Trump’s presidency and the impeachement a year ago were both deep state operations. Both were designed to deflect and delay they themselves being investigated (for the FISA warrants / Fusion GPS stuff, for Biden’s exploiting US aid to get the investigator of his son’s employer fired). This could just be third time round – a false flag operation to enable a riot-justified impeachment to drown out discussion of election fraud.
– On the other hand, more than once since the election, I’ve seen posts note that people are so angry about the steal that ‘someone on our side’ might do something violent. In November 2012, Republicans felt disappointed but not cheated – everyone could see there had been some vote fraud but they could also see that Obama won anyway. It’s different now. Throwing a fire extinguisher onto a bunch of cops facing away from you, not at some politicians or deep staters, doesn’t fit my idea of what that anger would prompt, but in such volatile situations all sorts of things can happen, so who really knows. Remember also that pollsters before the election sometimes asked not, “Will you be voting for Trump?”, but ,”Will your neighbour be voting for Trump?”, knowing that cancel culture meant the latter question gave a more accurate answer to the former. The idea of political violence in the US is ugly. So is the idea of a blatantly stolen election being supinely endured. Did some people think these neighbours could become violent?
We may know more in time, but, as Natalie points out, we cannot trust the MSM to report whatever does not suit them. Meanwhile we must live in interestingly uncertain times.
[CORRECTION (February 2021): I was made aware the day after I wrote this post that the fire extinguisher incident may have had nothing to do with Brian’s death. This has since been admitted so widely that I feel I should alert any late-coming readers to the fact. It appears that an extinguisher was thrown at some police by one man, but it seems this did not cause death, and Brian’s death is looking more like another medical emergency death. It also appears to have happened after the Capitol protest was over and in another location.]
Looks like this guy and CNN were in on the plot to storm the Capitol building.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the Mall, Trump hadn’t yet finished his speech. But the incursion into the Capitol building was already under way. Brought to you by CNN and the color revolution. We’re all Egypt now.
And, other sources report that Brian Slicknick died of a stroke. Was he, in fact, the officer who was struck by the fire extinguisher or was it another officer? I’m asking, I haven’t seen anything official.
I have a real fear of a false flag terrorist event in the near future, along the lines of Oklahoma City. Bill Clinton did pretty well out of that, and Sleepy Joe will do even better. It will enable him to get his domestic anti-terrorism law, which will effectively render opposition to him illegal. A couple of hundred dead people will be a price he would be happy to pay, no doubt about that.
The thing about Sleepy Joe is he sometimes blurts out the truth. He was right when he said the Democrats have the best organised voter fraud ever, and he was probably right when he said a dark winter was coming to America.
There are many people who believe the Jussie Smollett hoax on Chicago’s northside was engineered to provide a pretext for forcing through the anti-lynching law that I believe was championed by VP elect Sleazy.
One thing that must NEVER be forgotten is that without Trump becoming POTUS we would have WAY less evidence of the extent of the rottenness and corruption of the Fake News Media. And without Trump becoming POTUS many of us, including myself to a significant extent, would not be aware of the extraordinary extent of the corruption and rottenness of the Fake News Media.
He really was not supposed to win in 2016. REALLYYYYYY was not supposed to win.
Every time the Fake News Media earns that title whether by lie of ommission or failing to investigate a possibility or misrepresenting the news or burying important news stories or concealing evidence that contradicts The Narrative or baldfaced lying or stoking unwarranted hysteria around Fake Narratives like “police brutality” or “systemic racism” or smearing Trump supporters or demonizing Trump or demonstrating an extraordinary double standard in their portrayal of right wing violence vs left wing violence. Every single time the Fake News Media earns its title is just more evidence that Trump REALLYYYYYY was not supposed to win.
Why? Many reasons why, but ultimately:
Because to Trump supporters or Trump movement sympathizers/empathizers the sins and crimes of the Fake News Media are transparently blatant, while to those who have no empathy or sympathy for the Trump movement the sins and crimes of the Fake News Media are invisible. It’s a rorschach test that actually has a correct answer: the Fake News Media is completely bankrupt, rotten and corrupt and it’s a tool of the deep state, financial establishment, globalists, federal bureaucracy, and China.
Those still living inside The Narrative cannot see reality – and were it not for Trump most of us would largely still be living inside of The Narrative (without even knowing it, of course).
This post is a repeat from a couple of days ago.
Here is a podcast of two Leftist commentators on the Capital protests, one of whom was present. Jeremy Lee Quinn was on the ground and inside the Capitol on Jan 6. They focus on the biased, manipulative, and shallow quality of the media reporting and Jeremy Lee Quinn has some surprising observations. They make note that some of the early reports on the event were very premature and from desk jockeys, far away from the events that were transpiring, and who could not possibly have known what was actually happening. I disagree with Weinstein’s characterization of the protest as an attempted coup attempt or an insurrection. That said, I noticed that he was honest enough to temper his opinion over time.
I found it very informative and hope it goes viral. One of my takeaways was the commentary on media’s awareness that tribal outrage is the content most likely to be shared and the most PROFITABLE. They know it; they exploit it, and it is, in fact, hard to believe that the intent isn’t to Balkanize the people of the United States.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFJdjO0fD4E&t=13s
Did Obama cheat in ’12? Yes, but the alternative wasn’t that much of a change so shame on the Republicans. Did Hillary cheat in ’16? Yes, but not enough to get the brass ring, so we ignored it. Again, shame on the Republicans. Did the Dems cheat in 2020? No doubt, and the media repeats their denials, and the Republicans can’t seem to be moved to do anything. I’m sensing a pattern here, but now it doesn’t matter. Pelosi’s HR1 bill institutionalizes at the Federal level, every cheat used in 2020. I was told that this couldn’t happen because the states are entrusted to conduct elections as they see fit. I guess I was misinformed. Will there be any calls for a more transparent and fraud-resistant election process? Yes, but only from a handful of Republicans who will be denounced in the press as traitorous subversives.
If you don’t fight when it’s easy, you will end up fighting when the cause id completely lost. Once more, shame on the Republicans.
Just a small point regarding this:
The pro-Trump movement isn’t going to run demonstrations and protests filled with the typical college-kids-interning-with-Antifa that we saw in the summer riots.
Think “Tea Party.” It’s a bunch of people who look like . . . well . . . like me, 60-ish, maybe not in prime shape, hair color rapidly resolving to gray . . .
And we have heart attacks when we get overexcited, I guess. But the “medical emergencies” in that crowd were normal and expected. Heck, go sit down by the first aid station during a Vikings game. We’re dropping left and right.
What hope is there for a society where so many ‘educated’ people announce their pronouns, either in person or in email straplines etc.?
What sort of fools would go into the Capitol building during a demonstration and walk around even if between the ropes when there has been so much violence? Were they not seeking to illustrate that they were decent?
What sort of fool denounces his foes on Twitter (a platform run by people who hate him) for years but does nothing to weaken or dismiss them, when he holds all the executive power vested in the United States?
Why can’t the decent people get a cunning, decent leader?
And one more small point: I’d like to find something that breaks all of the happenings down by time.
Because if I just watched my friend take a bullet through the neck, through a closed door, and die on the floor choking on her own blood, I might start swinging heavy objects at Capital Police too.
Slightly off topic but Sarah Hoyt has written a “How to spot the truth in the News” essay:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2021/01/14/how-to-read-the-news-in-totalitarianism/
It gathers together a lot of the ideas and instincts about things I have had floating around in my mind for a while.
Bobby:
Via Instapundit, with compliments.
Not quite all of the happenings.
Did this happen inside the Capitol?
If not, it seems to me a blatant case of making political capital (pardon the pun) out of those emergencies.
(If it happened inside the Capitol, it is still a case, but less blatant.)
Shlomo Maistre – Your comment above is right on the money, and this is why I’ve been saying for some time that Trump is the Red Klotz of presidential politics.
Red Klotz scored the winning basket in the only game that the Harlem Globetrotters ever lost.
Be careful with sources like that. There’s always a cottage industry, after any politically inconvenient death, of explaining why the death Wasn’t Really Our Fault. Often with rather implausible explanations – a conveniently timed heart attack or stroke is common. It can happen, but caution is advised. Often, “there’s a few bad apples on our side, even if we’re still right on the issues” is a much simpler, more accurate explanation.
Nah, it was nowhere near that grand. Smollett thought that being the victim of a hate crime would make him more popular, and that’d mean that he could do better in salary negotiations. (And you don’t need to plot an event to push through a law – just prep it, some dumb controversy will come along soon enough. And that way there’s no risk of you getting caught.)
TBH, this is more fascinating to me than conspiracy theories. It means that he knew, on some level, that the victimhood ladder is real and important, and he went really far out of his way to climb it. It demolishes a lot of lefty rhetoric about race relations to note that minorities want to be seen as victims of hate crimes.
Yeah because before then lynching was legal.
It absolutely wasn’t a racist dog whistle to black voters before the midterms.
Just for fun:
https://www.lawofficer.com/how-did-officer-brian-sicknick-die/
I’m going to take his brother as a reliable source.
We know that the Demonrats are using the Capitol Hill Insurrection That Nearly Toppled Democracy Forever to push their agenda – for example Representative James Clyburn (Demonrat of South Carolina) thinks that “we need a mechanism to know what domestic terrorists are thinking before they act upon it”.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/01/15/clyburn_we_need_a_mechanism_to_know_what_domestic_terrorists_are_thinking_before_they_act_upon_it.html
Cui Bono….
Alsadius.
Yesterday I requested evidence for your assertion that the Capitol guard had been beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. You were unable to reply having merely repeated parrot-fashion an unsubstantiated rumour (or news story as they are now called).
24 hours later you advise caution regarding sources who state he died of a stroke.
Your double-standards and insincerity would grace todays media.
I think the purpose of the anti-lynching legislation was to make it a federal crime and to lump it in with Hate crimes. There were two bills under consideration in Jan, 2019 one in the Senate written by Kamala Harris and the other in the House sponsored by Bobby Rush of Illinois. At the time, commentators noted the coincidence that the Smollett hoax occurred as the bills were being considered and speculated that it explained Smollett’s odd use of a noose. This is a recollection not an opinion.
If Officer Slicknick died of a stroke, it doesn’t exclude the possibility that he had a head injury or that his collapse was conflated with some other federal LEO being hit or that someone tossed a fire extinguisher in the general direction of other LEOs. Strange, though, that no other name was put forward.
The idea that some Boomers got together to beat an LEO to death or stood by and watched was laughable.
The capitol “invasion” had a lot of Antifa undercover.
He’s one who has been arrested and charged, guest appearing on would you believe it CNN
https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1349865429137670145
Oh and here is a CNN journalist participating in the capitol “invasion”
https://twitter.com/LaurenWitzkeDE/status/1349904573117341698
Buy yeah, it was all Trump supporters. No false flags, no agents provocateur whatsoever.
Shlomo:
“He really was not supposed to win in 2016. REALLYYYYYY was not supposed to win.”
And George W. Bush wasn’t supposed to win in 2000.
And Reagan was not supposed to win in 1980.
I have never experienced a case when the Mainstream Media welcomed or at least accepted a Republican President and treated him with civility and respect.
Of course, the Trump hatred was exceptionally virulent, far beyond any precedent, but no Republican president was ever “accepted” by the Mainstream media.
Jacob is correct: the prejudice against a Trump is nothing new. What is new is his behaviour and refusal to concede defeat and his love of conspiracy theories.
Forgot to mention Nixon who was definitely not supposed to win in 1968.
Johnathan – there are many conspiracy theory lovers on this venerable blog, I think most commenters think the election was stolen. Maybe we should have a poll to find out who believes what.
Besides – about 40% at least of American (I mean US) voters believe it was stolen. There must be a lot of crazy people in America.
To the topic at hand. I’m going to attempt to distill the observations of Jeremy Lee Quinn from his two and a half hour conversation with Bret Weinstein. Note that they acknowledge they could talk about these events for 24 hours; and still be going around in circles. They sounded a bit scattered and incoherent, themselves, at times. However, Jeremy was clear that the MSM and the social media key board activists started gaming the narrative and that there was no attempt to present the events accurately or truthfully; it was the usual MO of cherry picking and projection. They even successfully passed off a photograph from June.
Jeremy, had been anticipating the real action to unfold in the evening of Jan 6th at Freedom Plaza and his plan had been to document that, but got caught up in the breach of the capitol. He said in terms of crowd size and activity, it was similar to being at a rock concert (10s of thousands). Cell phone reception was erratic and many did not know what events were transpiring elsewhere. He was on the west side and was with a crowd who entered, among them Grandmothers from Orange Co. He didn’t say how many people entered the capitol, other than it was a small percentage. He was attempting to interview participants on the fly. He witnessed some intentional destruction of furniture and window breakage. He knew of another documentarian who witnessed the collapse of the woman who died; her death was ascribed to mace, crush, and an inability to breathe. Jeremy, himself, witnessed the collapse of an elderly man. Nothing here seems too surprising, just the chaos, you’d expect.
The crowd was very eclectic. He saw a few people in flak jackets but no weapons. A few people were pro coup but others believed they were preventing a coup. There was an odd dichotomy toward the VA state police; some were supportive and thanking them; others called them oath breakers. To the extent there was a common theme, it was anti media and anti government over reach, coupled with the belief that their voices went unheard. They were very anti-BigTech and cancel culture. He met one self identified NeoNazi, his first one. He met eccentrics who seemed to be about performance art. This is the imagery amplified by media. There was no disciplined message that he could detect.
Some of Quinn and Weinstein’s conclusions: They believe the culture of conspiracy is in part driven by the failure of media to be honest brokers and present an ethos of integrity and non partisanship. They also focused on anarcho-tactics. Tactics are tools; noting they can be adopted by anyone for any cause. It is not a surprise that after the events of the summer that a few people might use them.
bobby b (January 16, 2021 at 7:01 am), that is interesting – and I suppose emphasises the point about, ‘What do we truly know?’
I’d seen a report in a UK paper of his dying rather of a stroke, but this is the first I’ve heard it suggested that he was maybe not struck by the fire extinguisher (or was but with too minor an effect to be worth mentioning). I take your point – a brother is typically a better source than many an MSM journalist.
It is obvious there are efforts to maximise the amount of death claimable to Jan 6th.
More than you know.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/66/2d/4e/662d4ec8d0ecc24a057281abee8ff61f.jpg
Every Republican president since Eisenhower has been Literally Hitler. (Eisenhower had just got back from -figuratively – putting down Hitler. He got a free pass.) Of course the Democrat party gets a bit testy about it. But they’ve been exceptionally testy over Trump, because it is hard to stuff Hitler into a Scrooge McDuck suit. Or maybe the other way around.
“Tomorrow belongs to me!” was in Cabaret, a movie about pre-WWII Germany. But the democrats think tomorrow was promised to them. And thus the problem.
For some context on the crossing of the Delaware: this is a long speech, but you only need to watch from 6:00 to about 26:20.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aMNzrPovu8 .
(Newt Gingrich, no matter what you think of his political views, is a brilliant historian, and he explains nicely why the concept of “we have nothing left to lose” defines so much of the traditional American culture. Crazy? Okay. I can live with that.)
And it takes us right back to the situation surrounding the death of G Floyd. We only “know” what the press decides we should know, at least for the first several days. As Sarah Hoyt has described, we now must start off by giving the popular press’s spin a negative value – not even just a neutral one.
Yes the establishment left (let us face the truth – there is little PRACTICAL difference between CNN and Marxist Antifa, they may have great theoretical differences but they are on-the-same-side, the side of tyranny) manipulated events (and manipulated people) and created the riot.
But most people will never know this – because the Collectivists control the media and the education system.
Meanwhile there are 22 thousand armed troops in Washington D.C. to ensure the massive Election Fraud takes effect and there is a “President Biden” and in due course a “President Harris”.
The Collectivists will have total power – there will b a few token judgements by the Supreme Court (to give the illusion the Republic still alive), but the main agenda will go into effect.
The United States of America, as a Constitutional Republic, has been dying for a very long time – the funeral is on January 20th 2021.
There are many kinds of “crazy”.
( my reply to Johnathan, above, was sarcasm. Goes without saying.)
We used to mock banana republics.
We used to mock Communist regimes which always insisted on staging election shows.
Ellen:
And every Republican presidential candidate since Thomas Dewey in 1944 has also been Literally Hitler.
I guess the difference is that some of them, such as Goldwater, Reagan, and Trump (perhaps Nixon?) were big enough not to worry about the abuse.
Johnathan:
Obviously you haven’t got Niall’s message, about incentives making conspiracies superfluous.
Let me give you a personal interpretation of that post by Niall, much shorter than the original 🙂
(And Niall is welcome to disagree.)
Once the media started saying that Trump won’t accept the results of the election if he loses, and will have to be removed by force, there was no need for a conspiracy to commit electoral fraud: all the vote counters knew that they could commit fraud with impunity. We are talking about the US, after all.
And if you ask me why i think that the fraud went overwhelmingly one way, my reply is: because the vote counters are public-sector employees.
f
That and it was concentrated in the Democrat run cities in the Swing states. Almost as if by design.
“Once the media started saying that Trump won’t accept the results of the election if he loses, and will have to be removed by force, there was no need for a conspiracy to commit electoral fraud: all the vote counters knew that they could commit fraud with impunity.”
This was my take on the US Presidential election – if the people at the top say ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ frequently and loudly enough, sufficient politically oriented people within the system will take it upon themselves to ‘help’. All in their own little way, from the ‘community organiser’ who steals postal votes, to the programmer who sets the counting machine to add votes one way in certain circumstances, to the count manager who gets some staff to run ballots through the machine multiple times etc etc etc. The fact there is electoral fraud in California tells you that this is not some organised conspiracy, whats the point of stealing votes in Ca when a turd on a stick would win if it was the Democrat candidate? No, this tells us it was a mood created from above that enabled and motivated the minions at the bottom to do whatever they could to please their masters. And some of those will have ‘helped’ in places that there was no need to do a thing, Biden was a shoo-in, but they felt they had to do their bit anyway.
A point I think worth making is that after soaking the electorate in anti-Trump propaganda for four years, the Democrats still had to cheat to win.
Jacob,
Both Presidents Bush were treated with civility and respect. Reagan was for the most part, also.
Every Republican President has been accepted by the “mainstream media” except for Trump.
Like Exasperated said, the two accounts are compatible. Head injuries can lead to delayed deaths – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natasha_Richardson#Injury_and_death for a famous example. She fell during ski lessons, got a headache two hours later, and was dead two days later.
I replied. Go read it. And if that’s not good enough, wait for the murder trial – the evidence will be clear (one way or the other) by then.
Sure, there were a few antifa in the crowd. Who cares? The Trump supporters who were there are grown adults, responsible for their own actions. Blaming provocateurs is a cop-out.
“Crazy” is unfair. The theory is crazy, but the people are merely wrong.
Speaking of, did you see this one? https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/statement.html – a publication that’s been ragging on Dominion Voting Systems has admitted that their attacks had “no basis in fact”, as soon as they were challenged about it. They didn’t even try to go to court to defend their claims. And they’re based in California, which seems to have a very strong anti-SLAPP law – if they were in the right they’d have won the case and gotten their costs covered within a month.
Only in the most technical sense. They’re one-day employees, not permanent bureaucrats. And if the demographics are anything like they are here, the vast majority will be retirees, who skew well to the right as a group.
I’m not old enough to remember much media coverage from 1988-92, but you think “Chimpy McBushitler” was treated with respect? Ask Dan Rather how much respect Dubya got.
Watch the old press conferences on youtube. Yes obviously there were some moments here and there but by and large both Presidents Bush were treated with civility and respect.
Jim:
Obviously that was meant as a rhetorical question, but in fact there IS a point in increasing the Biden vote even in safely Blue States: it increases the popular vote for Biden, thus helping to legitimize Biden if he wins, or de-legitimize Trump if HE wins.
Shlomo:
If you are talking about the news media, then you might well be correct. I detected at most a subtle bias in the BBC coverage (online) of GW. (Although i was too busy at the end of 2000 to read the news, except for The Economist once a week.)
If we are talking about the culture at large, however, then Bushitler did not seem to receive much respect, to put it mildly.
I also remember watching a clip in which a Black supporter asked McCain in late 2008 to speak out more loudly against Obama, because it was not easy for him, as a Black man, to do so. (Don’t remember the exact words, but that is how i understood it.)
To be clear, initially I took the claim that a fire extinguisher bashing caused the death of Officer Slicknick’s at face value. As of now, I intend to disregard it, unless reliable sources like family or his own law enforcement organization come forward to verify it explicitly. Since the fire extinguisher story came to be so widely believed, my previous post was hypothesizing how the story may have originated. If a fire extinguisher was indeed used at the protest (example: being tossed through a window), a possible scenario is that it got conflated with the Slicknick story. Frankly, a fire extinguisher makes a clumsy cudgel.
If Biden won CA by 5 million votes, it contributes to the image that Biden won overwhelmingly.
Video of a protester throwing a fire extinguisher from above, at a bunch of policemen who seem to be restraining another protester. Not clear if it is Sicknick who was hit in this video.
After the throw, the protester turns around and walks away. Could be antifa for all what i know.
Shlomo:
Next, you’re going to tell us the Mainstream Media accepted Margaret Thatcher too and treated her with civility and respect.
No this is not just another Democrat-media attack – this is much worse. The Republic is being killed off by a mixture of Marxists (the Frankfurt School “Critical Theory” thinkers are Marxists – they say so, and they influence the education system – and the products of the schools and universities they influence go into every institution – public and private), and Saint-Simon style “Technocracy” ideas (World Economic Forum and so on). Yes the leading Tech Lords and Credit Bubble bankers are NOT formal Marxists – but they are totalitarians, they do support “Stakeholder Capitalism” style FASCISM (Mussolini’s development of Fascism) – is that not bad enough? Is that “normal – nothing to see here”?
Sorry but in the 1980s the average Corporation did NOT spout Marxist “Critical Theory” doctrines – they do now (and get rid of anyone who disagrees), this is a massive change. Treating what is going on as just more-of-the-same is just wrong. And it is government agencies as well – including the FBI and even the United States Armed Forces (the virus of “Diversity and Inclusion” Frankfurt School training is all over the place). The Marxists are in alliance with the Saint-Simon style international Corporate State people.
By the way…..
Two Capitol policeman died – not one.
One man died after (it is said) having a fire extinguisher flung at him – and that may indeed have happened. But it interesting to note (as the poster does note) that this police officer was a well known supporter of President Trump – very vocal in his opinions.
The other Capital Policeman who died “committed suicide” – he was also a well known Republican.
Tell me – did Capital Policeman well known for their support for President Reagan die in odd circumstances in the 1980s?
People who are saying “nothing to see here people – move along, everything is normal” are deluding themselves.
Although I dissent from Alsadius’ (January 17, 2021 at 5:22 am) anti-SLAPP point (Mark Steyn has been eloquent and humorous about how weak a defence from PC process-is-punishment prosecutions it has been for him), it is clear that ‘The American Thinker’ finds itself legally obliged wholly to renounce any idea of provable involvement in fraud of Dominion manufacturing itself (and on the same day to end comments, much to their regret – I guess lest any re-present the idea).
Others did so very much earlier. It became clear during the week after the ‘kraken’ first appeared that Tucker Carlson, Giuliani and Trump, and many others pursuing vote fraud were separating themselves from Wood and Powell. Instapundit linked to
and later asked whether Trump could sue longstanding Democrat Lin Wood for launching inept sure-to-lose vote fraud cases that just distracted from the important issues (final answer, ‘no’, because Wood was not working for Trump, though much coverage obscured that).
Anything used in Venezuela is clearly wholly compatible with vote fraud, and it is not two years since the NYT told me there was no such thing as an unhackable voting machine, and barely two weeks since such hacking was demoed to the Georgia senate, but (to offer one obvious analogy), it would be one thing to claim that Osama relied on Windows laptops to manage the Twin Towers attack and a legal hurdle of quite a different kind to show that Bill Gates’ team had knowingly provided software and advice to help him do so.
To conclude, while voting machines have a role in this, the very guy who hacked into one before the Georgia senate repeatedly urged looking at the actual ballots. It’s good advice. And conversely, slowing access to that physical evidence means even more than slowing access to the machines, informative though the latter also is.
Sometimes I feel uneasy about Paul Marks’ comments because it looks like he might be addressing me.
Let me be clear that I do not think that “everything is normal”. (As though elections in the US have ever been normal in my lifetime!) I believe that this is the American Reichstag Fire.
With this difference, that the American Establishment has been in power for much longer than Hitler had been in 1933.
But in spite of that, the American people are in a better position to resist the Establishment right now than the Germans were to resist Nazism.
WRT voting machines: I have been informed that they have been used in the Netherlands for a long time. In spite of that, Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders were able to win a significant amount of votes, so there is no evidence of fraud.
I know for a fact that Italy and Estonia use the safest method: pen+paper. I assume that the same is true of most of Europe and the Anglosphere. Italy did not allow any postal vote at all until sometime in the mid 2000s.
We now have more military troops stationed in Washington DC preparing for the inauguration than we have stationed in Afghanistan.
More than the entire country of Canada has in their military.
Expensive theater. “See what we have to do to keep those racist sexist deplorables from killing us all?!”
Just like the American news-media on covid19.
First: Nothing to see here, it’s just mass hysteria.
Later: People who leave home are mass murderers!
Snorri
Presence of A does not prove that B is not present.
WRT voting machines – Globalist placemen Trudeau and Arden got re-elected
Google says they have about 20,000 in DC for Biden’s inauguration. They had about 28,000 for Trump’s, so that would imply that they think the MAGA rioters are about 70% as dangerous as the #resist rioters of four years ago were (all else being equal).
And for comparison, the US forces in Afghanistan are down to about 2500 (smaller than the regular DC police force), while the highest number for the amount they’ve deployed historically that I can find is 23,000. (And of course, it’s a lot easier to deploy to DC than to Kabul.) Canada’s military is about 68,000.
I can’t speak for Ardern, but Trudeau was reasonably popular, and the guy he was running against was a bit of a dweeb. He was held to a minority government, and actually finished a close second in the popular vote(behind the aforementioned dweeb), but his re-election was entirely in keeping with what everyone predicted.
Also, Canada doesn’t use voting machines. It’s all pen and paper. So this just proves that “globalist placemen” can win elections honestly.
Mr Ed:
May i ask for a clarification?
Flubber:
Do you mean that voting machines were used in (all provinces of) Canada and New Zealand?
I thought that pen+paper were used in Canada.
(Added in proof: I see that Alsadius has already clarified this.)
I wrote:
I cannot resist the temptation to take another dig at Alsadius.
If he says that pen+paper are used in Canada, then he was bullshitting when he said that Canadian elections are just as prone to fraud as American elections.
Shocking.
Election machines have been subjected to so much scrutiny over the years, with so little having been found, that I don’t regard a competently designed voting machine as being a noteworthy point of vulnerability. That said, I’ll make one bit of “competently designed” clear – IMO, that means that there must be some paper copy, which the voter can see, as part of the process. Even the ones without hardcopies have been tested, and nothing’s been found, but I’m more comfortable with hardcopy backups.
Municipal elections often use machines here, but they’re more like counting machines. You fill in a paper ballot, for all the different races, and then put it into a machine that tabulates them. I regard that as no vulnerability at all. I’ve never voted at an American voting machine, though.
Also, I believe that what I said at the time was to the effect of “in some ways, we’re more vulnerable”. I don’t think the US has any equivalent to our vote-by-affidavit system, which allows anyone to vote at any polling location with no identification or security other than a signature (which is never compared to anything). If someone knows about it, and doesn’t mind the hassles involved, they can vote anywhere without ID. If an American state ever added the same rule, I’d hear the screams from up here.
Alsadius:
🙂
Just to be clear, it’s not just voting machines that create issues.
Take the ballot design (and the way to mark the ballot) in Florida in 2000. That also created issues.
I should think that voting machines are safe if they output a paper ballot that can be used in recounts.
No, because it is too bloomin’ obvious for words. Try a logic primer.
Ted S, Catskill Mtns, NY, USA,
Nope and I’m glad you don’t disagree with what I said.
@Shlomo Maistre
We know that the Demonrats are using the Capitol Hill Insurrection That Nearly Toppled Democracy Forever to push their agenda – for example Representative James Clyburn (Demonrat of South Carolina) thinks that “we need a mechanism to know what domestic terrorists are thinking before they act upon it”.
Perhaps Rep Clyburn is not up with the latest technology, but we have a mechanism for doing this. It is called “reading their social media posts”, which just goes to show how stupid it is to shut down those very posts.
Mr Ed: perhaps you meant that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
But i did not say that it is: please re-read what you replied to.
Snorri,
You said this:
“WRT voting machines: I have been informed that they have been used in the Netherlands for a long time. In spite of that, Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders were able to win a significant amount of votes, so there is no evidence of fraud.”
I’m with Mr Ed. The corollary here is “Trump got 74m votes, therefore there was no evidence of fraud”. That’s just simply a non-sequitur. The fact that Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders were able to get a significant number of votes just means that, if there was fraud, it wasn’t rampant enough or, more likely, that those two had such significant support that the fraud required to undermine them would have been so blatant and so ridiculous that people would have noticed.
You absolutely cannot conclude that the presence of a large number of votes means there was no fraud or even evidence of fraud.
This reminded me of something I have mentioned before which tends to be overlooked. Many states and municipalities, primarily blue, carry staggering unfunded liabilities, largely for public sector pension funds. They are quite desperate for federal bailouts and highly motivated to elect pols who will stick responsible America for the costs of their corruption. Public sector unions are neck deep in this gaming of the system.
As many here have noted, Trump has pulled back the curtain and exposed the governing class. I guess we’ll find out if it’s true that once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. Now, millions are conscious of the financial corruption, even some Leftists.
Pedant: Fortuyn and Wilders came out of nowhere. If their vote counts had been halved, people would not have noticed. Now imagine that Trump’s vote count last year had been 37 M votes. Would people have noticed? I should think so.
You are still confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence.
I can conclude that there is no evidence of fraud in the Netherlands by the fact that nobody complains about fraud; at least, not to my knowledge. If people do have evidence of fraud, they keep it to themselves. Wilders never complained about fraud.
Now you might reply that nobody complains because the Dutch buy the media narrative. It is at this point that i bring up the fact that the LPF and PVV rose from nothing to joining or supporting the Dutch government.
We have 28,000 NG with full arms there at last count. During the Trump inaug, we had about 8,000. Without rifles.
Snorri,
“I can conclude that there is no evidence of fraud in the Netherlands by the fact that nobody complains about fraud;”
That’s perfectly reasonable – it’s just not what you originally said. 🙂
As has been said several times – EVERYONE who died was a supporter of President Trump.
Also in crime and intelligence matters one asks the question “who benefits?” – the people who benefitted from the events of January 6th were THE LEFT (the totalitarians), they are using the riot as an excuse for their long planned Crack Down, openly saying they are going to try and control the minds of the population – in their language “deprogram” their reactionary ideas.
There have been more 200 leftist activists infiltrated into the crowd – a few have been arrested, most have not.
But most people will never know the above – because the totalitarians control the “mainstream media” and the education system.
Yes, the left benefitted. That was one reason, of many, why it was so unforgivably stupid for the right to do it. And yes, everyone who died was a Trump fan. This is what happens when a mob of Trump fans attacks a group of cops(who were mostly Trump fans, because most cops are Trump fans).
As for the number of lefties:
1) If you think this was a false-flag operation, are you at least willing to say that it was an evil thing to do, and that everyone who did it should go to jail? I’d hope you’re cool with condemning a mob that you believe to be run by antifa. Nobody bothers with a false-flag to make their opponents look like jaywalkers, after all.
2) How do you know? That sounds like the kind of number people throw around when they just want to deflect blame, not one based on any actual data.
3) Why does it matter? If everyone in a position to be killed by this was a Trump fan, then clearly a decent number of Trump fans were involved. (Especially since two of the deaths – the random stroke outside, and the woman who was trampled – were random, and not plausibly targeted based on political affiliation.) At some point, those involved have to act like adults and take responsibility for their own actions.
“Unforgivably stupid”
“Unforgivably”
Dude, given everything that has been done to Trump and his supporters over the last four years, I am honestly shocked that the “Insurrection That Almost Toppled Democracy in America Forever and Ever” was not much more violent. Trump supporters and the right have again demonstrated their remarkable restraint, incredible civility, and peacefulness.
Your characterization that it is or was in any sense “unforgivably stupid” even just by itself shows that you are, as has been pointed out by multiple other commenters in these threads, a shill of the left.
Pedant:
Fair enough. What I originally claimed should perhaps have been phrased differently. For instance: there is a problem for people who think that fraud takes place in Dutch elections.
But does that strike you as the right thing to say? After all, nobody here claimed that fraud takes place in Dutch elections 🙂
To add support to Shlomo:
I can only begin to unpack the logical flaws in this:
* The American Establishment benefited. The Establishment is normally equated with the Right, not the “”left””.
* The “”right”” did not do “”it””. A few hundred lunatics (leaving aside agents provocateurs) did “”it””. Out of 74M Trump voters.
Yes, clearly the fact that the New York Times was mean to Trump means that they should have actually murdered Mike Pence, instead of merely trying to do so. Because that is the sane, adult reaction to the fact that you have political opponents. Of course.
If thinking that election results should be honored is “the left”, and thinking that they should be violently overthrown is “the right”, then sure, I’m a lefty.
The establishment is normally equated with the right by far-left activists. I didn’t think that described you.
I will agree that it wasn’t the bulk of the right that did this. The riot was of the right, but most righties were not rioters. (A bit like Muslims and terrorists, to bring back the debates of a decade ago). But if you look at polling data(see page 27), 22% of people who approve of Trump think that the Capitol attack was “not a problem”. It’s 18% for self-described conservatives, and 15% for Republicans. 24% of people who approve of Trump blame the Capitol Police “a great deal” for it, and 12% blame the rioters “not at all”(pages 32-33). So as a ballpark, something like one in every six or so Trump fans is a supporter of this attack. That’s pretty comparable to terror support among Muslims in a lot of countries, to bring it back to my earlier comparison.
So no, I don’t think the entire right is at fault here. A comparatively small group of violent diehards are at fault – still way too many for comfort, but not the bulk of the movement. Still, from a public relations point of view, this will be used to tar the right for decades to come. If for no other reason than that, everyone with any sense is condemning this fully and vocally.
Also, you and Shlomo should probably come up with consistent definitions here. I’m clearly with the establishment on this one, so if the establishment is on the right, I can’t be a left-wing shill.
I have had an epiphany about these Capitol riots, how in fact Trump, despite his words did, perhaps, mistakenly incite them.
You see in his speech Trump called for peaceful protests. For the past twelve months we have watched actions like, burning down Wendy’s, invading and burning police stations, taking over large blocks of town, smashing in windows, stealing from stores, burning cars. These activities have been described by our media as “peaceful protests”. Perhaps the rioters thought that the English language had redefined the meaning of “peaceful” and so, when Trump called for such, they went right ahead and had one of their own “mostly peaceful protests.”
It all makes sense now.
(Just to make it clear, since we are starting a social credit system in this country apparently, I condemn the capitol riots just as vehemently as I do the “summer or love” we have all had the misfortune to witness in the summer of 2020. Thuggery, vandalism, violence and theft are not justified by political dissatisfaction, no matter which flavor of politics you are dissatisfied with.)
On the other hand, being retired gives me the freedom to say quite frankly that someone ought to pack enough propane into a light truck and . . . 7 075876 captchaerror &&&&&
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Alsadius,
This will be my last reply to you in this thread.
Dude, given everything that has been done to Trump and his supporters over the last four years, I am honestly shocked that the “Insurrection That Almost Toppled Democracy in America Forever and Ever” was not much more violent. Trump supporters and the right have again demonstrated their remarkable restraint, incredible civility, and peacefulness.
I don’t recall anyone calling you a lefty. I remember multiple commenters, including myself, calling you a left wing shill. There is a difference and you have just provided more evidence that you are, in fact, a left wing shill. Very sad.
Snorri said that “The American Establishment benefited. The Establishment is normally equated with the Right, not the “”left””.” You are intentionally misunderstanding what he said or you just don’t understand the difference between “normally equated” and “is”. One is a statement about what most people understand to be reality, the other is a statement about reality. It’s somehow fitting that you didn’t notice the difference between these two things because it reveals a lot about your thought process.
“The American Establishment benefited. The Establishment is normally equated with the Right, not the “”left””.” ”
Balls. The RNC and the GOP are two cheeks of the same arse. McConnell and Pelosi serve the same masters. Their function is one of arbitrage. They leverage their power to grist some dollars wile the corporations, lobbyists and special interests get what they want.
Thats why Liz Cheney and the others thought they’d knife Trump when they thought they could get away with it.
I mean, except for the ones who murdered a cop. And what do you think those zip-ties were for? Why do you think they were pushing on a wall of cops like it was a castle’s gate?
Forgive me for summarizing. I’m unfamiliar with this concept of shilling for an ideology you’re not actually espousing. How does that work, exactly?
In context, it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense for Snorri to say “Normies think the establishment is on the right” and just leave it at that. It was hard to read it as anything other than him implicitly saying that it is normally equated by him and people like him. But sure, if it was a non sequitur, then my point can safely be ignored.
You don’t do yourself or your argument any favors here.
Here i should have written: “has normally been equated”. I mean, over the last 2 centuries, that has been the case. I wrote ‘Right’ in the sense in which the word has been normally used in the last 2 centuries: as the party of the Establishment. Or perhaps more accurately, as the party of the current and past ruling classes.
Nowadays, there are many people who delude themselves that the Establishment consists of all White cis-hetero men who don’t toe the party line, while Obama and Kamala Harris are not of the Establishment. Hence they call themselves “the left”. This has been going on long enough for the term to have assumed two meanings which are contradictory.
I never called Alsadius a shill, and i rarely use the term “left” without heavy scare quotes, to imply that the word might not mean the same to the reader and to me.
Having said that: In my opinion, all NeverTrumpers are shills, and since Alsadius self-defined as a NeverTrumper, he is a “left”-wing shill — where “left” means the party of the Establishment.
Alsadius:
That’s funny, because i am in no way a supporter of the “attack”, actually i am satisfied that people are going to jail for it. (As long as it’s not after a show trial.)
And yet, i do think that the “attack” **in itself** was not as big a deal as people are making of it. The real problem is that it has done for the American Establishment what the Reichstag Fire did for the Nazi Establishment.
And i blame the people who entered restricted areas of the Capitol, but i blame even more, not the police as such, but whoever did not order a larger police presence.
So in Alsadius’ opinion i am a “supporter” of the “attack”.
Re left/right, fair. I don’t agree with your definitions, but I can see that they’re consistent.
Re attack support, I wouldn’t count you in that group from what you’ve said here. You think it’s a problem(if not a large one), and you want people to o to jail for it. The one-sixth of Trump supporters I was referring to were the ones who seem like they’d want to join in the next riot, if they thought it was practical for them. I have my issues with your viewpoint, but you’re certainly not that bad.
Bobby,
At least he’s no longer parroting the “beaten to death with a fire extinguisher” line.
Baby steps.
Just wanted to say that they are not really my definitions: they are what i think (after much thought) are the implicit definitions used by people on the Continent up to about ww2. I could certainly be convinced that i am wrong on this. I mean to read Thibaudet’s book, Les Idées Politiques de la France, for confirmation or refutation.
PS:
Up to about ww2 fairly consistently, up to now much less consistently, and no longer only on the Continent.
I like Scott Adams’ take on the events of January 6:
They made us all safer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXCk-XScraw&t=1353s
(Go to around 17:30 and listen for a bit. Skip to the 22:00 mark if you’re in a hurry to cut to the essence.)
tl:dr: It scared the crap out of the left, who never expected actual pushback from us. They will walk a bit more softly after this.
Adams is a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian, I think. That has a decent track record with Trump, especially in 2016, but it’s hardly foolproof.
If the left as a whole was backing down, they wouldn’t be impeaching Trump right now. As for the street fighters he’s talking about more directly, remember, they call themselves “Antifa” – that’s a direct reference to street fights against Nazis in pre-Hitler Germany, which their side lost. They don’t think in terms of “the right has never attacked us before” – that isn’t their worldview. That’s a conservative’s worldview superimposed on a lefty rioter.
They think in terms of “We are constantly under assault by racist thugs, and we need to form a collective defense organization in order to do better than our forebears did”. I have a cousin who’s big into Antifa stuff, and she talks about her friends being assaulted by skinheads more than once. I don’t expect you to believe her (I’m related to her, and I’m still skeptical), but it does show how they think. This wasn’t a surprise to them, because they thought all along that this was what the right was really like. They’re horrified by the events themselves, but not surprised. The biggest change this caused, in their minds, is that normies can now see what they’ve seen all along. Again, I don’t expect you to agree with them – I don’t agree with them myself. But it’s important to understand, lest you take Scott Adams as a good source on lefty thought patterns. He gets the bureaucrats very correct, but not the rioters.
As I listened to him, I thought that he WAS talking about the bureaucrats, the Pelosi’s, the “thought leaders”, and not the balaclava’ed thugs who just do the enforcement. I thought he was saying that it was those people who were going to maybe think twice about how far to take things, now that they didn’t feel quite so safe eating their designer ice cream.
And impeachment has stalled. Sure, they voted it in, but has Pelosi sent the case on to the Senate? Not since I last heard. Impeachment is only an accusation, not a finding. She made the accusation, and now admits that she can’t back it up. Said she needed to put together her case. (She didn’t have it nailed down when she got the House to vote for it? Wouldn’t that be improper prosecution or something?)
No, I agree with Adams. The right is known for not pushing. The Jan 6 events were a push. (No, not a putsch.) I think they put Pelosi et al. back on their heels just a bit. Made them nervous. Made them start vetting our military members in DC. (That’s going over very well.) They felt a cold draft where they didn’t expect to.
https://justthenews.com/government/congress/pelosis-office-wont-say-if-she-was-briefed-potential-violence-ahead-jan-6
https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/06/dc-mayor-told-federal-law-enforcement-to-stand-down-day-before-violent-us-capitol-riot/
Hm.
[…] to Niall Kilmartin’s post of January 15th for other accounts of the death of Officer Brian Sicknick from injuries sustained at the riot at […]
We’re learning more about the injuries the cops suffered: https://mobile.twitter.com/lukebroadwater/status/1354471986609721353
Bobby b’s point above (bobby b, January 16, 2021 at 7:01 am) regarding being cautious about the fire extinguisher is now being confirmed even by CNN (h/t instapundit).
Except for the very last word in that paragraph, and CNN’s not using it about Antifa, I know no reason to question this particular CNN report, which continues:
Bobby b’s much earlier link report’s Brian’s telling his brother that he had been pepper-sprayed twice, but I grant that is consistent with investigators’ not finding actual video of it. (Brian also made no mention of any fire extinguisher.)
It is worth noting how far the narrative on this appears to be collapsing, and how obviously available data (Brian’s call to his brother, for example) meant it had no excuse for existing in the first place. One needs deaths to call it an ‘insurrection’ but it now seems likely that medical conditions, suicides and one shooting by the authorities encompass the whole of the narrative-pushed death toll.
(But I predict CNN will go on calling it an insurrection even in articles that knock the props out from under the idea.)
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1359558869291302914.html
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1359558869291302914.html
Capitol Police Chief Sund, who resigned after the insurrection, revealed that a number of those in the crowd, “were wearing radio earpieces indicating a high level of coordination,” and many also carried, “weapons, chemical munitions, protective equipment, explosives and climbing gear.” In addition, his timeline is awkward for the accusers. Granted, this might be a CYA effort.
Has anyone seen arrests for the pipe bombs? It’s curious since they were supposedly intact.
I look forward to the show trials, the presentation of evidence including the Sicknick autopsy, as opposed to idle speculation. What will happen when the defendants are vetted by the Internet?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/02/11/tucker_carlson_we_know_very_little_about_the_capitol_riot_facts_bear_no_resemblance_to_story_left_is_telling.html
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/02/11/tucker_carlson_we_know_very_little_about_the_capitol_riot_facts_bear_no_resemblance_to_story_left_is_telling.html
https://www.revolver.news/2021/02/maga-blood-libel-why-are-they-hiding-the-medical-report/
Last week, CNN was tactically baffled by a simple question that grows stranger by the day: Why are investigators struggling to build a murder case in the death of US Capitol Police Officer Sicknick?
The stakes are high: Officer Sicknick’s death is the only purported death by a largely tourist crowd that was let into the building by police, stayed inside the velvet ropes, seemed at least partly there out of confusion, for social media clout, or just for the memes, and that even the New York Times conceded caused limited property damage.
That’s a far cry from murder. Yet MAGA is being blood libeled with a felony murder charge in the court of public opinion and at Donald Trump’s impeachment, while potentially exculpatory evidence is silenced or sealed. As the Washington Uniparty mulls domestic terror laws over a MAGA Bloodbath, it increasingly looks like MAGA may have been Bloodbathed. Time is of the essence for the Feds to release all evidence, damn the guilty, or the clear the MAGA movement of these serious allegations.
Narrative 1:0: The Brazen Lie
The day after Sicknick’s reported death, depraved toilet paper company and full-time libel factory known as The New York Times jumbo-tronned a massive, howler headline, later confirmed to be a Judith Miller-level damn dirty lie.
Narrative 1.0 absolutely saturated the airwaves, editorials, and social media. Every MSM outlet from USAToday to the NY Post to the Daily Dot repeated that Sicknick was “bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher.” Not “sources say.” Not “many believe” — just a totally unqualified, unequivocal statement of fact.
In an unforgivable shocker, the House Trial Memorandum itself, which sets forth the very impeachment charges for which the 45th President stands accused, names Trump liable for “insurrectionists” that “killed a Capitol police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher.” Their source? The New York Times.
But the toilet paper Times left a real stinker inside this one. Because every claim they made, every detail conveyed, was a lie.
Law enforcement officials now tell CNN that there was no fire extinguisher blow, no bloody gash, and no blunt force trauma to Sicknick’s body when he died.
Not only that, but it is increasingly unclear when, where and if Sicknick was even rushed to the hospital.
As it turns out, multiple hours after the protest had already concluded, Sicknick texted his own brother Ken that very night he was basically fine, other than being “pepper sprayed twice,” confirming he was safe and “in good shape.”
Then, an odd thing happened. The next afternoon, the Sicknick family began getting phone calls that Officer Brian Sicknick had been declared dead. The phone calls didn’t come from the hospital. They didn’t come from the treating physicians. They didn’t come from the US Capitol Police, or the FBI, or the DOJ.
They came from media reporters.
Certain privileged media personnel were evidently the first to receive sensitive information circulating among “law enforcement officials” that Brian Sicknick was dead.
But then the story got stranger. In a dark, twisted echo of Monty Python’s “bring out your dead” scene, it turned out Sicknick was not dead yet.
The US Capitol Police responded in a public statement late that Thursday evening that swirling media reports were untrue. Sicknick was still alive.
One hour later, as Sicknick’s family rushed to the hospital to see what they believed was their beloved Brian still fighting for his life, the US Capitol Police issued a further statement: now Sicknick was dead.
But even that statement contained a curious detail: Ken Sicknick had been told his brother collapsed inside the Capitol building, then was rushed to the hospital. Wikipedia’s entry on Sicknick still has this as the official story.
But the US Capitol Police’s statement that night told a different story: he had returned to his office at the police division first.
Sometime between Sicknick being fine, healthy, and back in his office on Wednesday night, and dead or effectively dead on early Thursday evening, Sicknick apparently suffered a stroke. The sequence of when and how that happened should be the easiest part of this story to put to bed. And yet we are being told to take this on faith — or as the media likes to say: “without evidence.”
Then the story gets even odder:
Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen says the DOJ will “spare no resources” in getting to the bottom of what happened to Sicknick. Yet well over a month after his death, precisely zero information has been disclosed by the DOJ, the FBI, the US Capitol Police, the DC medical examiner, the hospital that cared for him, or the treating physicians.
One full month after Sicknick’s death, no autopsy has been released. For reference, autopsies take just 2-4 hours to perform, and preliminary results are typically available within 24 hours.
Investigators are “vexed by a lack of evidence that could prove someone caused his death.” Authorities have “reviewed video and photographs that show Sicknick engaging with rioters amid the siege but have yet to identify a moment in which he suffered his fatal injuries.”
Ominously, no findings from the DC medical examiner have been released.
No announcements have been made by authorities about the ongoing process.
The US Capitol building is one of the most video surveilled buildings on Planet Earth. And yet no internal video footage has been released by Federal authorities, or has been promised to be made available.
Unannounced to anyone except incidentally in that Sicknick’s memorial remains turned up in an urn instead of a coffin, Sicknick’s body has been cremated. That means no further forensic analysis can be done to establish the cause or time of Sicknick’s death. Why, one must wonder, would a family still searching for answers, who has no autopsy results, no death certificate, and no medical report, authorize a cremation? Did they?
Narrative 2.0: Strategic Ambiguity and Rhetorical Conflation
With Narrative 1.0 turning into a total mainstream media hoax, a bald-face lie the size and phrenology of Brian Stelter’s head, the Globalist American Empire (GAE) media is transitioning to Narrative 2.0: strategic ambiguity and rhetorical conflation.
Sicknick wasn’t killed by a MAGA mob.
Sicknick died after sustaining injuries while physically engaging with protesters, per the Capitol police.
They’ve silently removed the “by,” and added a “while” and a “with.” Then reframed the entire clause in the passive tense so 90% of readers conflate what happened and move on.
But “Injured while physically engaging” is like “dying with Covid.” Even if you died in a motorcycle crash, they count it. It’s a trick.
But using this framing device, the memetic energy of Narrative 1.0 (the Brazen Lie) is preserved, without readers hard forking to a more accurate narrative that describes what investigators really believe happened that day:
“Officials Killed 5 People.”
But how exactly, did they die? We explore this disturbing question in part two of this explosive investigative series. Stay tuned, it’s about to get weird.
[…] Of course anyone who was paying attention has known for at least a month that we do not know exactly how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is exactly why Niall Kilmartin wrote the following almost prophetic post for Samizdata exactly a month ago: “All who died on the 6th supported Trump. What else do we truly know?”. […]
Uh.oh. How awkward for the narrative. That said, why the uncertainty? Does this mean that the family was not provided with the autopsy results? What gives?
Let’s hope they televise this show trial for January 6th “insurrection”, eh?
Byron York @ByronYork
Assuming Byron York got this right, the media clowns and the political gas hags need to be mocked and ridiculed til the end of time.