“It just ain’t fair.”
Every parent employs the saying often, whenever kids complain about something that happened in their young lives. Maybe another student was picked ahead of him or her to be class president or an umpire seemingly grants the outside corner to the other team’s pitcher but calls the same close pitches from your own offspring as beyond the strike zone. Talk about getting a bunch of people riled up in an instant.
Small matters become a big deal when the moment demonstrates some semblance of inequity.
It happens with big matters too. The most glaring example being the disparate treatment of two individuals who died very public deaths at the hands of police officers in recent memory. Minneapolis resident George Floyd instantly became a worldwide household name last year when the 46-year-old ended up dying during an arrest by city police. The episode was caught on video -- both from the officers’ body cameras and footage taken by bystanders as they helplessly watched what they surmised was a homicide in progress.
Sympathy poured in for Floyd’s unfortunate fate. Even those who support the blue through and through were horrified at the scene. No one likes to see anyone suffer. Floyd’s face became the symbol of a leftist movement to not only defund and disband police departments, it fueled the activists who insisted that American history be forcibly reexamined to condemn anyone remotely connected to slavery (including Abraham Lincoln). Riots ensued. Politicians pontificated. Floyd became a much bigger cult hero in death than he ever possibly could have in life.
No one can say for sure whether the likely lethal dose of toxic drugs in his system was the actual cause of him taking his final breath that day. But it didn’t matter to the reactionaries.
Leftists the world over held up posters with Floyd’s likeness. They screamed that “Black Lives Matter”, and “ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). They took over cities (Portland and Seattle). They burned, looted and assaulted innocent people, supposedly as retribution for a system that permitted George to die so tragically and without dignity, his unconscious face pressed against the pavement. It was ugly.
Then there was the matter of 35-year-old Californian Ashli Babbitt, a woman sharing little in common with George Floyd, except for the fact she was killed by a police officer. As everyone knows by now, Babbitt was shot in the neck by a still unnamed Capitol Police member and died soon after, her face expressing shock at the realization of what had happened to her (as seen on a sickly tragic video).
World reaction to Babbitt’s killing was quite apart from Floyd’s, however. No mass protests. No miscreants rioting against police brutality. No public outcry to discover the identity of the faceless man who shot her. No demands for police reform from so-called human rights groups. Basically, nothing. If anything, the establishment media went out of its way to assert that Babbitt deserved her fate. Talk about a disconnect.
Of course, Floyd had dark skin and Babbitt was as Caucasian as they get. The former had done years in prison. Babbitt was a small business owner and outward Donald Trump supporter who’d honorably served in the military (in Iraq and Afghanistan), volunteering to join up when she was just 17 years-old. No criminal record. If not for being killed during a national news event, probably no one would ever know her name.
Babbitt’s mother recently spoke about her loss and the unfair way her daughter was portrayed by the same establishment media that practically deified George Floyd last year. Julie Kelly reported at American Greatness after speaking with Micki Witthoeft:
“Witthoeft said ‘red tape’ and the military-style lockdown in the capital caused a long delay in getting Babbitt’s body back home. In February, Babbitt was cremated and her remains scattered into the Pacific Ocean near her favorite dog park…
“’She didn’t have to be killed, there were other options,’ Witthoeft said of her 110-pound, 5-foot-2 daughter. (Babbitt was unarmed.) ‘Then they dragged her out like an animal, cleaned up the mess, and went about their business.’…
“’It’s infuriating,’ Witthoeft told me. ‘She was there exercising her First Amendment rights. This country was founded on brave men and women and I feel like that’s what our patriots were doing,’ Witthoeft also said she sings the National Anthem every night at 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time in solidarity with the January 6 detainees held in a D.C. jail, who sing the song every night at 9:00 p.m. in the East. ‘We’re fighting for justice for all of them.’”
As always, Julie Kelly’s report is well worth reading in its entirety if you have time. Kelly has become synonymous with truthful reporting of the heinous treatment that nonviolent defendants from the January 6 “mostly peaceful” protest have endured. Men and women have been confined for months and are still being held on misdemeanor charges, all the while being denied bail and basic human rights in the process. All of this by our government and “justice” department.
If Babbitt had lived beyond the day, chances are she would’ve joined the others in the U.S. government’s Gulag-like holding facility for political prisoners. No doubt Ashli shouldn’t have been climbing through that window on January 6… but she didn’t deserve to die for it.
Needless to say, George Floyd and his name received justice through the legal system as well as reputational rehabilitation and de facto sainthood heaped upon his unfortunate lifeless shoulders by the outraged left and the media. His body was placed in a golden casket and the multiple public funerals were as over-the-top as one would expect for so large an expression of grief from the aggrieved blame-America-first crowd. None other than Al Sharpton delivered a eulogy at one of Floyd’s memorial services.
The politically besieged City of Minneapolis settled the Floyd family’s wrongful death lawsuit for $27 million -- not bad for an unemployed former convict who was still mixed up in petty crimes at the time of his death. The authorities won’t even tell Ashli Babbitt’s family the name of the officer who shot her. No multi-million-dollar settlement was offered. No admission of guilt. At last week’s first meeting of Nancy Pelosi’s partisan witch hunt (otherwise known as the January 6 Commission), we heard from four Capital Police Officers who battled protesters on that day.
RINO Republican Adam Kinzinger shed tears for their pain. One wonders if the spineless Illinois congressman weeps for Babbitt’s family as well? Doubtful. It would ruin his Trump-bashing narrative.
But shameless politicians will do anything to prop themselves up.
Seeking to capitalize on the nationwide “protests” and outpouring of anguish at George Floyd’s death last year, Democrats wouldn’t let the subject… subside (die?). Two weeks after the incident, on June 9, a group led by a loose mask-wearing Nancy Pelosi and “Chucky” Schumer -- and also included then-senator Kamala Harris -- donned kente cloths from Ghana and knelt in the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall for eight minutes and 46 seconds (the length of time Chauvin applied pressure to Floyd’s neck) to honor the deceased in Minnesota. Who could ever forget the high-heel wearing Pelosi practically falling over because her spindly old bones couldn’t support her after such a lengthy and somewhat physically challenging symbolic gesture?
Then, the same day that Derek Chauvin was found guilty by a Minneapolis jury of Floyd’s murder -- earlier this year -- tasteless Pelosi “thanked” the deceased for dying for justice.
The ridiculous George Floyd opportunistic honorariums continue, too. Brother-marrying Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar spoke on the House floor last week, begging for federal government action to preserve art at the site of Floyd’s homicide. In addition to whatever the Floyd worshippers fashioned as a memorial, there have been murals and statues dedicated to the man all across the country, the very symbol of leftist debasement of America.
To my knowledge, there is no artwork dedicated to Ashli Babbitt. At all. No murals. No statues. No dramatic theatrical tributes from politicians standing in the doorway where Babbitt was gunned-down for no reason while pretending to pray for her. Of course, it only took a microsecond for the officer to shoot Babbitt and a matter of seconds for her to die. It wouldn’t make for a very impressive political performance, would it?
As revealed by her mother in Julie Kelly’s piece, Babbitt was cremated and her ashes scattered in the ocean near a place that she enjoyed in life. Floyd’s drug ridden body lies in a solid gold casket next to his mother in Texas. Is this the way it should be? George is treated as a hero while Babbitt is depicted as a traitor and forgotten?
Ashli Babbitt had served her country. George Floyd had served himself, with a criminal record a mile long. Floyd may have died of his own stupidity (the lethal drug dose) even if he had never run across Derek Chauvin on that fateful day. Ashli Babbitt would almost certainly still be alive, fighting for her beliefs in one form or another if the capitol cop hadn’t killed her.
Life ain’t fair. And in Ashli Babbitt’s case, death ain’t fair either. Shouldn’t people be outraged at the disparate treatment given George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt? You decide.
George Floyd death
Ashli Babbitt
January 6 riot
Capitol police
George Floyd funeral
Black Lives Matter
George Floyd murals
George Floyd statues
January 6 political prisoners
Nancy Pelosi