No fire extinguisher murder at the Capitol

Fire Extinguisher, how does it feel to be exonerated from murder charges from the Capitol riot incident after being incessantly smeared by the media? // photo by Erik Mclean

[Edit April 20, 2021] The Washington Post reported that Sicknick actually died of natural causes, not even complications from bear spray, making it definitive that the rioters did not murder a single person that day. The post has been corrected below. CJ Ciaramella at Reason makes a compelling argument that lack of government transparency and worse, reporting incorrect facts is the root cause of the misreporting, although I stand by the NYT's and broader media's negligence in their fire extinguisher story by abjectly failing to properly examine any evidence, especially when ProPublica had a much more accurate story the same day.

I wrote a post about the January insurrection into the Capitol and in it, I wrote that a police officer, Brian Sicknick, was killed following a blow to the head with a fire extinguisher. That's what just about everybody was reporting and was the highlighted death out of the five total.

It turns out that was fake news.

The entire fire extinguisher murder narrative was based on two anonymous sources from law enforcement in a New York Times article. The rest of the corporate media ran with it, inflating the falsehood to where it was repeated enough to become a "fact". It later came out there was no blunt force trauma inflicted on the officer. His death was more likely due to bear spray that he may have inhaled during the insurrection ruled as natural, arising from complications from two strokes. ProPublica published an article that cast major doubt on the official narrative the same day as the New York Times published their article. In the article, the family said they received a text from Sicknick saying that he had been pepper-sprayed and no mention of getting bludgeoned. It's also suspicious that there had been no footage whatsoever uncovered of him getting struck by a fire extinguisher in a place where every square inch is monitored by security cameras. The article also stated that the family also wished for his death to not be politicized. Whoops. Kind of difficult when the "paper of record" brazenly misreports the death in an effort to push a narrative of violence. To my knowledge, the New York Times has not printed a correction but merely edited the old article to reflect a more accurate version of events with a snippet at the top. 

With this corrected, there were now zero intentional killings from the insurgents. Even if the bear spray was the cause and it was from a pro-Trump rioter (which is likely), it's far from clear that it was done with the express intent of killing the officer, as substances like this are typically utilized as a non-lethal defense weapon. Either way, dying from complications of pepper spray is a far cry from getting bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher. The only intentional killing we know for sure was an officer who shot a Trump demonstrator. While still an idiotic move by those involved, the whole terrorism angle the Democrats have been angling for during the lead-up to the impeachment trial, is effectively dead.

Also in the past month, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, always the brilliant manipulator, talked about how scared she was during the incident, outlining a narrative of her day. Okay, fine. That's fair. I probably would be scared as well being in the midst of that, especially if I were a Democrat. Her bloviating about how Ted Cruz tried to have her murdered by proxy of the Capitol attacks, however, was just full of cringe.

Then weeks later, it came out that she wasn't even in the building. She was in the Cannon Building, the next building over. Nancy Mace, a fellow Congresswoman down the hall, stated that there were not any rioters in the building. Okay, AOC didn't really come out and state she was in the Capitol building, but it was pretty damned misleading to omit that fact and that there were no actual rioters nearby while throwing a police officer trying to evacuate her under the bus. That is why #AlexandriaOcasioSmollet was trending on Twitter, to which AOC asked her followers to flag any content that criticized her in this fashion.

She should ask Rand Paul what really being in danger is like, after he was shot at (not specifically targeted) by a crazed Bernie Sanders supporter at a baseball game, attacked by his neighbor followed by many violently inclined people on Reddit and elsewhere cheering for the neighbor (I'll let you guess how these people are politically aligned), then he was in the middle of a violent mob with his wife shouting at him to say Breonna Taylor's name, despite the fact that he had drafted a bill called the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act to curb police actions that got her killed. AOC, you haven't been anywhere close to the level of violence directed toward Rand Paul.

And yet, despite the fact that the level of violence at the Capitol building came nowhere close to the level of violence displayed at just the one senator from Kentucky, much less the insane levels of violence directed at peaceful business owners in 2020, you have people like Nancy Pelosi calling for a 9/11 style commission on the Capitol building riot, people like Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC invoking extrajudicial drone strikes while talking about the Capitol riot, and people like Nicole Hannah Jones talking about "deprogramming" conservatives in 1984 fashion.

How interesting that an insurrection by a group that intentionally killed zero people would have these people pushing actual violence upon this group while groups that intentionally killed numerous people in 2020 were met by claims of "mostly peaceful protests". The Cathedral does not tolerate any slight against them or their cadre of useful idiots while when violence is committed against peaceful Americans, they exacerbate the situation by staying mum.