Conservatives often act like it’s no big deal that police are so frequently caught on video murdering unarmed black people like George Floyd, but Tucker Carlson changed things up on Wednesday night by expressing concern that maybe a cop used deadly force when he didn’t have to during the coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Don’t assume that means Tucker has changed his tune overall, though. While Tucker may be concerned that insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt didn’t need to die at the hands of Capitol police, just moments later he pushed a long-debunked claim that George Floyd “almost certainly died of a drug overdose,” which is not true at all.
“The only person to die that day of intentional violence was 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, a military veteran from San Diego,” Tucker said. He also asserted during the segment that Capitol police office Brian Sicknick wasn’t killed by the insurrectionists, without any evidence to substantiate that claim.
“Babbitt was wearing a Trump cape when she was shot to death by a Capitol Hill police lieutenant. Babbitt’s death was caught on video, so hers is the best documented death that took place that day. And yet it is surprising how little we know about it. Babbitt was shot as she tried to crawl through a broken window into the Speaker’s lobby within the Capitol, and that’s essentially the extent of what we know.”
In reality, the situation with Babbitt’s shooting is only unclear if you want it to be.
The window Tucker mentioned was part of a door that had been barricaded from the other side. After the insurrectionists broke the windows on the doors, the cop can be seen, with his gun drawn and pointing at the crowd on the other side. The crowd noticed him there — you can hear one of them yell that there’s a man with a gun. And the cop can be heard on video ordering the crowd, and Babbitt specifically, to step back. She continued to advance, and was shot.
So Babbitt was shot when she tried to climb through the window, during an attempt to overthrow the government alongside a violent mob, while a police offer was pointing a gun at her. You can see all this for yourself thanks to a video from the Washington Post that combines a few angles of the shooting.
Tucker didn’t bother with those actual details, instead opting to complain about their alleged absence and wonder why we don’t know the identity of the cop in question.
“Authorities have refused to release the name of the man who shot her or divulge any details of the investigation they say they’ve done. We may never know exactly why this unnamed Capitol Hill police officer took her life,” Tucker said. “According to that officer’s attorney, quote, there’s no way to look at the evidence and think that he is anything but a hero. Of course, we can’t actually look at that evidence because they’re withholding it. We can’t even know his identity.
“Killing an unarmed woman may be justified under certain specific circumstances, but since when is it quote heroic? When the dead woman has read QAnon on websites? Republicans aren’t asking that question. One Republican member of Congress from Oklahoma says he immediately hugged the officer who show Ashli Babbitt. ‘You did what you had to do,’ the congressman said. But did the officer really have to do that? We don’t know. It would be nice to know. Maybe someone could ask.”
You can watch the quoted portion of Wednesday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” in the video embedded up at the top of this article.
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