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One of the biggest rallying points in the 2024 election for the extremely online far-right was the Justice for Jan. 6 movement.
While most voters expressed concerns about the economy and immigration, as Vice President Kamala Harris ran on defending democracy and highlighting the Capitol riot in an 11th-hour speech, strident Trumpers fumed.
To them, Jan. 6 represents everything wrong with the current state of democracy. An overzealous Justice Department jailing people for exercising their First Amendment rights. Secret FBI instigators cajoling peaceful citizens into wanton acts of violence. Hefty sentences from an overreaching judiciary. And an entire apparatus united in eliminating a political party and its leader before they got to the ballot box.
As Trump continued to campaign and fight, the movement demanded his first act be to pardon anyone involved in the riot, from elderly great-grandmothers on house arrest to those still in jail and awaiting trial in D.C.
But with Trump’s big win, the aims have changed. Now, emboldened by a potential ideologue in Matt Gaetz as attorney general, they’re pushing the president to completely flip the script.
The Justice For Jan. 6 movement goes on the offensive
It’s time for the people who did Jan. 6 to arrest and jail the people who did Jan. 6.
First up, prosecuting the murder of Ashli Babbit. Babbit was the first person killed in the riot, shot when a Capitol police officer attempted to hold back a bevy of Trump supporters attempting to breach a door.
A post on Patriots.win implored the “Gaetz DOJ – Don’t Forget about Ashli Babbitt! Make charging the thug that shot her a day 1 priority!.”
While conservatives have long refused to demonize cops and others involved in killing civilians (think Darren Wilson, Derek Chauvin, Kyle Rittenhouse, or George Zimmerman, to name a few,) this cop’s particular actions are galling.
The discourse is a mind-melting reversal of … pretty much every right-wing claim you’ve heard while backing the blue.
“Shooting an unarmed woman, being a bad thing, would have been something we could all agree on in saner times.”
Yup.
“I ended friendships, over ‘friendly’ assertions that they’d do the same thing in those circumstances.”
Some even argued the cop should have used de-escalation tactics instead of so casually discharging a firearm.
“She was 6 feet away and in a compromising position. He could have stepped forward and grabbed her easily.”
In fact, while conservatives have long resisted federal civil rights investigations into police departments, now, the whole Capitol Police needs to be audited.
“They need to charge every conspirator in the Capitol Police who participated. Somebody opened the magnetic lock doors to welcome in the protestors. Several of them shot munitions into, at the time, peaceful, lawful crowds. They drew first blood, as they say. That’s assault, official oppression…..it’s something that should be impermissible.”
To be fair, not everyone is on board with the attempts to go after the police. Users on the forum played devil’s advocate, insisting if that had been a crowd of antifa, it would have been alright.
Ashli Babbit… crisis actor?
But a couple of posters had an even bigger concern with the whole matter. Which is you can’t prosecute someone for murder if there isn’t a victim.
That’s right.
“I am still unsure if Ashli is dead or just another crisis actor.”
Although the Capitol riot was televised and there is video of Babbit being shot, some believe her death was faked to help spur the prosecutions of MAGA rioters.
“Time to bring Ashli back from New Zealand. She can testify before Congress as to who hired her and paid off her substantial debt. And also how she came to have the alias Ashli Pamatian.”
Babbit’s last name has been a source of some discourse from death deniers, who argued she went by the name before the riot so when she “died” she could go back to being Ashli Babbit and no one would be the wiser.
Sounds like a fun first thing for Gaetz’s to get to the bottom of.
