Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) argued on Tuesday that the right’s fascination with the death of Ashli Babbitt during the Capitol insurrection is not actually about accountability, despite what boosters of the cause suggest.
Kinzinger told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday that if the person shot “was BLM, or if this was actually Antifa, or if this was Muslims,” then the reaction would have been far different. “I guarantee you, [Rep.] Paul Gosar (R-AZ) would be the one defending the action of the officer instead of calling that officer who in my mind, is a hero, a murderer,” he said.
Kinzinger was referring to efforts by Gosar, the Arizona congressman who makes a show of paling around with the far-right, to make a martyr out of Babbitt.
Gosar has used hearings about Jan. 6 before the House Oversight Committee to ask “who executed Ashli Babbitt?” He has made unearthing the identity of the officer who shot and killed Babbitt on Jan. 6 a crusade, and issued a statement on Tuesday applauding former president Trump’s decision to ask the same question.
Trump also said at a Saturday rally in Florida that, “if that were on the other side, the person that did the shooting would be strung up and hung.”
A Capitol police officer shot and killed Babbitt as she tried to make it through a window into the House Speaker’s Gallery, on the other side of which members of Congress were evacuating.
Kinzinger called the officer a “hero,” and said that “frankly, if she hadn’t been shot, as sad as it is that she was, that she was misled, you could have seen more people breach and more deaths.”
For all the crap that the Right has done, I’ve not seen a single one strung up and hanged, ever.
But he’ll go on with that false statement along with all the others he has used.
ETA: the Rittenhouse kid that killed protesters in Kenosha is still free on bail and is lauded as a folk hero by the Right.
Yeah. Just remember that one.
@sooner
Not only did the officer do the right thing, but the intruders death had the positive effect of causing the rest of the mob to run like scalded dogs.
Yep, this pretty nicely sums it up.
Just the hallmark of today’s GQP. Nothing more to see here.
I appreciate that the few Republicans that I have gone against Trump on the Jan. 6th chaos have really stuck to their guns and refuse to back down.
Yep, we’re talking about the same people who gleefully cheered the murder of an unarmed 12-year-old playing in a park and were ready to canonize a man who murdered an unarmed teenager. These are the same people who laughed at George Floyd’s murder and cried when Chauvin wasn’t let off the hook. They’re perfectly fine with the cops killing unarmed Black people merely going about their lives, but man, oh, man, they better know their place when it comes to crazed white women trying to overthrow the government.