“To some,” CNN tweeted Friday, “Ashli Babbitt, who was killed in the Capitol riot, was a terrorist. 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.”
In the absence of any significant number of white supremacists, the Leftist elites are busy defaming anyone and everyone who dissents from their agenda with that label. The plan here is quite clear. Robert Grenier, who served as the CIA station chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan and later as director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, declared in February: “You know, even at the seeming height of the crisis immediately after 9/11, there really weren’t that many members of al-Qaida in Afghanistan. And the thrust of our campaign there was, yes, to hunt down al-Qaida, but primarily to remove the supportive environment in which they were able to live and to flourish.”
That “supportive environment” is ordinary, unwoke Americans who don’t want to be overwhelmed by an authoritarian socialist nanny state. When Biden refers to “terrorism from white supremacy,” what he really means are citizens who oppose the dominant political philosophy. Lies such as what he is spreading here are in service of solidifying the hegemony of that philosophy. By portraying Ashli Babbitt as if she has become the martyr of an insurrection that never was and a white supremacist movement that is likewise likely fictional, CNN is helping further that same narrative.
This isn’t empty talk. Soon the other shoe will drop. Reporting on the Biden administration’s new program to fight the “lethal threat” of “white supremacy,” the UK’s Daily Mail stated Tuesday that “the Pentagon is to start training for service members leaving the military to prevent them being radicalized by violent extremists, as part of Biden administration’s plan to combat the ‘lethal threat’ of white supremacy that was unveiled on Tuesday morning. It follows a review that stated the most dangerous elements of the threat today come from white supremacists and anti-government extremists. The White House also called the Capitol riot a ‘domestic terrorist attack’ in a report released on Tuesday and backed a ‘purge’ of extremist content online. The strategy includes $100 million for the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security for analysts, prosecutors and investigators.”
“Purge” is well chosen, because that’s exactly what this is, a nakedly political purge of the loyal opposition, and the forcible silencing of political dissent in America. It’s plain as day what is coming. What is not clear is whether or not there will be any significant number of Americans who stand for freedom and against tyranny. And if there are, will they be able to act lawfully and within constitutional bounds to save the free republic without being smeared as “terrorists”?
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