Postcards From the Catastrophe

Portland police officers chase demonstrators after a riot was declared during civil unrest over the shooting in Minnesota of Daunte Wright, in Portland, Ore., on April 12, 2021. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

Commentary

Let’s play “one of these things not like the other.”

On April 11, a young black man named Daunte Wright was accidentally shot and killed while resisting arrest in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.

At first, rumors flew around that Wright had been pulled over because he had an air freshener dangling from his rearview mirror. In fact, he had an outstanding arrest warrant for first-degree attempted aggravated robbery when stopped.

Who knows where the air freshener meme came from: probably from the same emporium that supplied the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” lie to twist the true story of Michael Brown’s assault on the police in Ferguson, Missouri, a few years back.

The officer who shot Wright did so inadvertently. Police released bodycam footage soon after the incident so we know exactly what happened.

The officer had mistaken her pistol for her Taser.

Bad training there, no doubt.

But here’s the thing. I say “her” because it was only a matter of hours before the Brooklyn Center police released the officer’s name: Kim Potter.

Potter quickly resigned from the force. She was arrested and charged with manslaughter. As I write, she is out of custody on $100,000 bail.

Ashli Babbitt

Contrast that story with the story of Ashli Babbitt, the young veteran and pro-Trump activist, who was shot and killed at the Jan. 6 melee at the Capitol.

Babbitt was unarmed. She was going through a shattered window, but was in close proximity to several armed Capitol Police officers.

Who shot her and why?

We don’t know the answers to those questions.

What Kurt Schlichter aptly calls our “garbage media” has displayed a disconcerting lack of curiosity about the matter.

Babbitt was a useful prop when the media was in overdrive describing the Jan. 6 events as an “armed insurrection,” in which wild supporters of Donald Trump, supposedly (but not really) at his instigation, attacked the Capitol with the intention of overturning the rigged 2020 election.

That “rigged” is my addition to The Narrative.

You remember The Narrative.

According to it, five people, including Babbitt, died in the skirmish. Moreover, Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was actually bludgeoned to death by a raging Trumpster wielding a fire extinguisher.

That gem came from The New York Times—speaking of garbage media—and it was instantly picked up and spread like a Chinese virus, much like the hysterical lies about the “Covington kid” Nick Sandmann were spread by a willfully credulous media.

The boy was wearing a red MAGA hat, for God’s sake, he just had to be guilty!

But he wasn’t.

And there was no “armed insurrection” at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Of course, it’s absolutely critical to the Democratic narrative that the Jan. 6 incident be made to seem as violent and crazed as possible.

Only thus can pro-Trump Americans be excluded from what the left calls “our democracy” (meaning, not your democracy) and transformed into “domestic extremists” if not, indeed, into “domestic terrorists”—you know, the ordinary folks languishing in jails courtesy of Christopher Wray’s corrupt FBI.

(Don’t miss Julie Kelly’s superb reporting on this truly egregious abuse of the police power of the state by the Harris–Biden administration and their deep state puppeteers.)

Yes, five people died at or near the Capitol on Jan. 6 or a couple of days later.

None was murdered by the protesters. Babbitt was shot in the neck at close range by we know not whom.

That was the only shot fired at the Capitol that day.

The liberal commentator Glenn Greenwald further diminished the “armed insurrection” meme in an important column titled “The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot.”

Kevin Greeson, Greenwald notes, was killed not by the protesters but died of a heart attack outside the Capitol; Benjamin Philips, 50, the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo, died of a stroke that day; and Rosanne Boyland, a fanatical Trump supporter, was, the NY Times says, inadvertently “killed in a crush of fellow rioters during their attempt to fight through a police line.”

So, four of the five who died were pro-Trump protesters. And the fifth? Well, that was Sicknick, also pro-Trump, who, pace The New York Times, went home, told his family he felt fine, and died a day later from, as The Washington Post just reported, “natural causes.”

2 Tiers

So: Potter is instantly arrested and charged with manslaughter.

The chap or chapette who killed Ashli Babbitt?

Not only do we not know who it was, we have recently been told that he or she will not be charged.

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 event, “Mad Max” Maxine Waters screamed that Donald Trump was “inciting” violence and “trying to create a civil war.”

Trump did nothing of the kind. But now, we see Waters traveling to Brooklyn Center and demanding that people stay in the streets.

As the New York Post and others have reported, Waters broke the law by violating curfew (“she didn’t agree with it”) and said that if Derek Chauvin isn’t found guilty of murdering George Floyd (a conviction for manslaughter is not enough), then “we’ve got to get more confrontational.”

How much more confrontation can the mob be? They are already looting, rioting, and destroying property in cities across the country.

The Post is right: Waters is inciting violence. She is the one who is “trying to create a civil war.”

Yes, “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should strip her of her committee assignments and move for a vote to remove Waters from office.”

But of course, she won’t. Nor will Jack Dorsey remove her from Twitter.

He removed Trump. James O’Keeffe was just suspended for life because he embarrassed CNN. Dorsey and the rest of Big Tech tried to destroy Parler.

But that is different because—reasons.

In fact, we know the reasons.

We are living in a society with a two-tier justice system.

Moreover, it is a society with a two-tier system of social values.

If you have that populist Walmart stink that attaches to those Hillary Clinton placed in her infamous Basket of Deplorables, then you belong to a different tribe, almost a different species, from those whom the governing bureaucracy has anointed.

It’s not what the founders of this country envisioned. But it’s been clear for some time that our masters hold everything associated with that dispensation, from the Constitution on down, in utter contempt.

Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books. His most recent book is “Who Rules? Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Fate of Freedom in the 21st Century.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.