Always wait for all the facts
A viral story about the January 6 insurrection turns out to be untrue.
I really, really, really hate it when Glenn Greenwald is proven right, but I’m darned if media outlets don’t keep doing just that.
Officer Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died just after the Beer Belly Putsch on January 6, did not die from being hit with a fire extinguisher as widely reported. He wasn’t killed by a reaction to bear spray, either. He suffered two strokes and passed away from natural causes:
Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick suffered two strokes and died of natural causes a day after he confronted rioters at the Jan. 6 insurrection, the District’s chief medical examiner has ruled.
The ruling, released Monday, will make it difficult for prosecutors to pursue homicide charges in the officer’s death. Two men are accused of assaulting Sicknick by spraying a powerful chemical irritant at him during the siege, but prosecutors have not tied that exposure to Sicknick’s death.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Francisco J. Diaz, the medical examiner, said the autopsy found no evidence the 42-year-old officer suffered an allergic reaction to chemical irritants, which Diaz said would have caused Sicknick’s throat to quickly seize. Diaz also said there was no evidence of internal or external injuries.
Diaz said Sicknick suffered two strokes at the base of the brain stem caused by a clot in an artery that supplies blood to that area of the body. Diaz said he could not comment on whether Sicknick had a preexisting medical condition, citing privacy laws.
In the days after the riot, police and a Justice Department official attributed Sicknick’s death to his efforts to contain the riot.
Democratic House managers arguing for then-President Donald Trump’s impeachment said Sicknick was killed by rioters, citing a New York Times story that said police initially believed Sicknick had been struck with a fire extinguisher. The Times later updated the story saying there was no evidence of blunt-force trauma.
Greenwald, who has taken a lot of heat in recent months (including from me) for being a “Sicknick truther,” takes a victory lap:
As I detailed over and over when examining this story, there were so many reasons to doubt this storyline from the start. Nobody on the record claimed it happened. The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick's own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media's claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke.
But the gruesome story of Sicknick's “murder” was too valuable to allow any questioning. It was weaponized over and over to depict the pro-Trump mob not as just violent but barbaric and murderous, because if Sicknick weren't murdered by them, then nobody was (without Sicknick, the only ones killed were four pro-Trump supporters: two who died of a heart attack, one from an amphetamine overdose, and the other, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot point blank in the neck by Capitol Police despite being unarmed). So crucial was this fairy tale about Sicknick that it made its way into the official record of President Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate, and they had Joe Biden himself recite from the script, even as clear facts mounted proving it was untrue.
Because of its centrality to the media narrative and agenda, anyone who tried to point out the serious factual deficiencies in this story — in other words, people trying to be journalists — were smeared by Democratic Party loyalists who pretend to be journalists as "Sicknick Truthers,” white nationalist sympathizers, and supporters of insurrection.
For the crime of trying to determine the factual truth of what happened, my character was constantly impugned by these propagandistic worms, as was anyone else's who tried to tell the truth about Sicknick's tragic death. Because one of the first people to highlight the journalistic truth here was former Trump official Darren Beattie of Revolver News and one of the few people on television willing to host doubts about the official story was Tucker Carlson, any doubts about the false Sicknick story — no matter how well-grounded in truth, facts, reason and evidence — were cast as fascism and white supremacy, and those raising questions smeared as "truthers”: the usual dreary liberal insults for trying to coerce people into submitting to their lies:
Just so we’re clear, I am still perfectly happy to call the Capitol insurrectionist mob “barbaric” even if it didn’t directly kill anyone. Indeed, the medical examiner’s report still states that the stress of the insurrection may have contributed to Sicknick’s death:
Diaz’s ruling does not mean Sicknick was not assaulted or that the violent events at the Capitol did not contribute to his death. The medical examiner noted Sicknick was among the officers who engaged the mob and said “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”
Downplaying Babbitt’s shooting by police is a classic Greenwald move, too. She may have been unarmed, but when you’re literally part of a mob trying to break into the seat of government to overturn the results of a democratic election, well, there’s only so much sympathy I will have if you are shot by police in the process. (All but the most rabid anti-police activists will concede that sometimes officers are justified in using lethal force.)
But Greenwald is correct that media outlets and politicians chose a narrative and ran with it early. And now they’ve earned whatever backlash they get. Right-wing propagandists, conspiracy theorists and hostile intelligence services have done a lot of work to make Americans mistrust the media, but that doesn’t mean these media outlets haven’t done much of it to themselves.
A good rule for everyone to follow whenever a story goes viral: ask yourself if there is a chance we’re getting this completely wrong and that the truth will end up making internet contrarians look right all along.
Yesterday I mentioned the sad case of Peyton Ham, the white teenager in Maryland killed by police while he was carrying an airsoft gun. Meanwhile, the man who allegedly killed three people in a shooting rampage at a tavern in Kenosha, Washington, has been arrested alive and taken into custody:
So, a white kid with a fake gun was shot dead by police, while an African-American accused of a mass shooting lives to tell the tale. What does this prove?
Nothing. It proves absolutely nothing. Because I cherry-picked these cases to make a point.
Usually it’s the other way around. Memes showing people of color killed by police for relatively minor infractions, comparing them to white murderers arrested alive and unharmed, is a growth industry on social media:
The thing is, I agree that African-Americans are disproportionately the victims of police brutality, and even when arrested alive are subjected to harsher punishment than white people charged with similar offences. The statistical evidence backs up this disturbing reality.
Cherry-picking cases, by contrast, proves nothing at all, except that cheap demagoguery is coin of the realm on social media. Overt and covert racism is a major problem with the American justice system (and the Canadian one, for that matter - many of the inequities against African-Americans also apply for First Nations people up here) but it is not the only factor.
Also, the viral memes are often inaccurate, lacking critical context or blatantly false. I saw this one in a Facebook group last night:
Maybe Manafort should have gotten more jail time (though it’s weird for people who argue against incarcerating non-violent offenders to make that point), and Cooper’s sentence, a fruit of the poisoned three-strikes tree, was appalling.
And that’s why Cooper’s sentence was deservedly commuted by…then-President Donald Trump.
Twitter isn’t always terrible:
It's been a challenge for some Canadians to find vaccination appointments through the myriad of different portals and the various eligibility criteria across the country.
But a team of web-savvy Canadians is making it a little easier for others to find open vaccination appointments they qualify for.
Whenever Vaccine Hunters Canada learns of an open vaccination appointment slot, they'll share it over Twitter, along with eligibility criteria, to their 32,700 followers. They also post the information to Discord, an instant messaging and voice chat platform where they have 2,000 members.
Toronto-based software developer Josh Kalpin told CTVNews.ca that the Vaccine Hunters Canada project was inspired by a U.S. website called VaccineHunter.org, which helps Americans find leftover vaccines at the end of the day before they expire.
"We believe that the best way to convince Canadians and to help Canadians get vaccinated, is by other Canadians that are helping each other, and it's our duty as Canadians to help those that are most at risk and most vulnerable," said Kalpin in a Zoom interview on Thursday.
Just 99% terrible, then.