Ashli Babbitt

To others, she’s a martyr and seen as a recruiting tool.” Twitter’s legion of blue-check Leftist propagandists immediately protested that other “terrorists” are seen as martyrs as well. Never-Trump former Bush consultant Matthew Dowd likened Babbitt to Hitler, who was responsible for the murder of twelve million people in Europe, and actor Terry Kinney likened her to Mohamed Atta, who was partially responsible for the murder of nearly three thousand people on September 11, 2001. In their indignation, however, they ignored the fact that CNN’s language was clearly designed to lead their tiny remaining audience to take Trump supporters for terrorists.

Of course, the comparisons Dowd and Kinney made were monstrous. How many people did Ashli Babbitt and the Capitol rioters kill on January 6, 2021? None. There isn’t even any actual evidence that their entry into the Capitol building really constituted an “insurrection.” But CNN’s tweet was little better. It was framed in exactly the same way it would have been if CNN had actually been talking about a jihadi: “To some, Osama bin Laden, who was killed in his compound in Pakistan, was a terrorist. To others, he’s a martyr and seen as a recruiting tool.”

Recruiting for what? Those “far-right terror groups” that loom so large in the Left’s imagination, but are so hard to find in reality. CNN’s story that was linked from the tweet makes this explicit: “‘She is going to be used for many, many years,’ said Simon Purdue, a fellow at the UK-based Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, who last month wrote an article on the significance of Babbitt’s supposed martyrdom as a recruiting tool. ‘The more they mention her, the more dangerous her story is going to be.’”

Purdue “drew parallels between the rhetoric surrounding Babbitt’s death and that of Vicki Weaver. Weaver was the wife of White separatist Randy Weaver who was fatally shot by an FBI sniper during a standoff with federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992. The Weavers’ teenage son was also killed a day earlier as was a U.S. marshal. Vicki Weaver’s ‘perceived status as an innocent, white, female victim of “state aggression” instantly placed her on a pedestal.’ Purdue wrote. Her death, in particular, became a rallying cry and recruiting tool on the far right and helped inspire Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.”

The Oklahoma City bombing was in 1995, but we sure are hearing a lot about it lately. That’s how far the establishment media has to go in order to find any really significant “white supremacist” violence, and so it has to be pressed into service to shore up the Left’s narrative, which Old Joe Biden’s handlers put into his mouth on June 1: “Terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today.”