Upon seeing the headline above, the first question many readers will ask is, “Who’s Ashli Babbitt”? Not knowing, these same people will ask, “Who killed her and why?”

For the record, 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, a 14-year USAF veteran, entered the U.S. Capitol alone through a broken window on Jan. 6, 2021. Twenty minutes later Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd – now Captain Michael Byrd, and there’s the rub – shot and killed the unarmed Babbitt without warning as she tried to climb through another broken window into the Speaker’s Lobby.

The fact that at least half of all citizens could not identify Babbitt, and only half of those could identify Byrd, speaks to the main divide in America today.

That divide is not ideology, but information. For decades now, everyday people have relied on a media whose information flow has been quietly contracting like the arteries around a diseased heart. 

As a result, news repeatedly blows up in their faces. Biden’s debate performance stunned them. Kamala’s defeat surprised them. Biden’s pardon of his son shocked them.

Having chosen to know as little as possible about Jan. 6, an internet post headlined “Sources close to the White House say Lt. Michael Byrd is requesting a full pardon from Joe Biden to avoid being charged in the slaying of Ashli Babbitt,” only puzzles them. Ashli who?

Regionally, the information flow is even more constricted. Upon seeing the October 2023 KCUR headline “Former Kansas City Police officer convicted of killing Black man asks for the governor’s pardon,” the KCUR audience would not even know of a source that might make the case for the police officer.

All of the local news skews in the same direction. Some samples:

• “Former police officer sentenced to 6 years for killing a Black man while responding to a 2019 traffic incident,” CNN, March 5, 2022.
• “Missouri appeals court upholds conviction of white KC cop in killing of Black man,” Kansas City Star, Oct. 17, 2023.
• “Former Missouri officer who fatally shot a Black man plans another appeal and asks for bond,” Associated Press, Oct. 18, 2023.

The officer in question is Eric DeValkenaere. The “black man” is 26-year-old Cameron Lamb. The governor is Mike Parson, now in the last month of his tenure. For the local media, however, DeValkenaere and Lamb are fungible commodities. So, too, is Parson, also white. The media have already judged DeValkenaere’s actions through the prism of race. They will do the same with Parson, which is why he hesitates.

On the Babbitt shooting, however, the major media avoided all talk of race – or gender, for that matter. Byrd was not publicly identified as Babbitt’s shooter until August 2021, seven months after the killing. In its first significant article on Byrd, the New York Times mentioned the race of neither the black Michael Byrd nor the white Ashli Babbitt.  

In reality, neither shooting was about race. DeValkenaere shot Lamb because Lamb was pointing a gun at fellow Kansas City police officer Troy Schwalm. Byrd shot the unarmed Babbitt out of panic. When he pulled the trigger, he did not know whether Babbitt was white, black, armed or even female.

The legal response to each shooting varied dramatically, and yet each response served the same purpose: namely to advance a subset of the Left’s agenda. Primarily on racial grounds, the Jackson County, Missouri, prosecutors instinctively presumed DeValkenaere guilty and treated him as such. 

On more naked political grounds, the sundry deep state organs – the Capitol Police, the FBI, the DOJ – presumed Byrd innocent and coddled him from the start. On leftist blogs, the very same people who marched for George Floyd and lobbied to defund the police all of a sudden became backers of the blue. Some samples:

• “President Biden must issue a full and unconditional pardon before he leaves office.”
• “Michael Byrd is an American hero. It’s unfortunate with what happened, but he took initiative. He needs to be protected!”
• “Michael Byrd was investigated thoroughly and cleared of any misconduct. … An officer’s job and sworn duty is to protect and serve PERIOD.”
• “She was trespassing on federal property. Period. End of story.”

In this lengthy thread, the very people who turned “Say her name” into a mantra, do not say the name of an unarmed woman shot fatally by the police. Not once. Throughout, Ashli Babbitt remains “she” and “her.” The mainstream media mention Babbitt by name, but almost exclusively in the negative. 

The New York Times set the tone. Within a day of the shooting, a trio of Times reporters had dug up just about every seemingly wayward blip in Ashli Babbitt’s adventurous life. 

Yes, Babbitt had been divorced, married twice, fallen into debt, and had once gotten into an altercation with a former girlfriend of her second husband, Aaron Babbitt. These enterprising reporters had managed to retrieve the complaint filed by the girlfriend and quote it extensively – all of this within 24 hours of Babbitt’s being shot and killed.

In similar spirit, the media – and Jackson County prosecutors – imagined Lamb as being as docile and defenseless as his name implied. The fact that he began his day by beating up his girlfriend and then chasing her through residential streets at speeds up to 90 miles an hour scarcely factored in their reporting.

For all the injustice, the news this holiday season promises a brighter new year. What has become clear in the last month or so is that we are at the end stages of woke media hegemony, possibly even of woke judicial hegemony.  Once their arteries open, people of all stripes will see that the shooting of Lamb was hugely more defensible than the shooting of Ashli Babbitt. 

In this new, more objective world, a world in which feckless officials do not fear mob justice, an Eric DeValkenaere would be home with his family for Christmas; a Derek Chauvin and his Minneapolis colleagues would be free as well; and a Daniel Penny would never have been arrested.

In this same world, a Michael Byrd, at the very least, would have been fired in disgrace, and a Hunter Biden would be taking one last toke on his crack pipe before heading off to Leavenworth. 

Jack Cashill’s most recent book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, makes for the perfect stocking stuffer.