The far-right propaganda machine doesn’t know what to do with Ashli ​​Babbitt

As soon as a window shatters, Babbitt jumps up and tries to throw himself inside. A Capitol policeman inside the speaker’s lounge shoots her at point-blank range and she falls backwards, mortally wounded.

The shocking death, the first of five on the Capitol that day, was immediately turned into a weapon by far-right propagandists. But less than a week after his death, Babbitt became a confused pawn in his war of disinformation.

There are two main narratives, one that formed a few minutes after she was shot and another that came about half a day later.

Before the authorities even confirmed that she was dead, the notorious radio announcer Alex Jones was talking about her death on the air. He repeatedly referred to the shooting as an “execution” and posted an uncensored graphic video of the shooting across his website to provoke outrage. (It is important to note here that Jones repeatedly stated in broadcasts that preceded the turmoil he was in communication with the White House about organizing the event and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on logistics.) Guest Papers “National News” Frequent InfoWars website also took that angle. “Ashli ​​Babbit, a peaceful protester executed by the DC police,” says a headline. Others skipped the simulation and were straight to call her a martyr.

This fits perfectly with existing white nationalist narratives. Few events have mobilized the modern movement like the death of Vicki Weaver by an FBI sniper in Ruby Ridge in 1992. His death still resonates powerfully as a propaganda tool for those looking to show that the government is willing to kill its own civilians, and Babbitt’s death, also in the hands of the state, has parallels that are easy and convenient to echo.

The second narrative about Babbitt’s death is less based on far-right family troops and is imbued with the unbalanced chaos of the Internet.

In this version of the events, Babbitt is a “spy” or, even stranger, he is not dead. Although her activity on social media and interviews with family and co-workers paint a clear picture of her radicalization through online conspiracy theories, that same ecosystem has now rejected it. A post from the QAnon Patriots account in Parler summarizes the most common conspiracy theory that circulates: “Ashli ​​Babbit was a false flag operation. She is alive ”, says the post. “Only a small part of her immediate family would know, the rest have to believe that she is dead to maintain the illusion.”

The post received more than 500 positive votes, and others on the topic received similarly positive engagement from Parler users.

Last week, lawyer Lin Wood, the failed architect of several rejected lawsuits trying to overturn the election, posted a link on Parler to a video that claims to reveal all the reasons why Babbitt’s death was falsified. It is the usual conspiracy chatter, consisting of slow filming and poorly crafted theories presented as absolute facts.

“So you were cheated, cheated, played. Don’t feel bad, Sheeple, DeepState has been doing this for years, ”says the video description.

Thanks to Wood, this video now has almost half a million views and has been widely publicized on social media by people eager to dismiss Babbitt’s death as a false flag.

We have never seen conspiracy theory proliferate in real time in that order of magnitude. Instead of merging months or years after the event, it is happening extemporaneously on social networks. Propagandists who previously dictated narratives are sailing on the water. The waves of group thinking are taking them to the dominant stories on Twitter and Facebook, and to more extreme centers like Gab and Parler.

As a result, propagandists like Jones are now trying to thread the needle to glorify the crowd’s actions, while shifting the blame to “bullies”. Part of his audience wants encouragement to continue, even with violence, to overturn an electoral result that they just don’t want to accept. And another party wants to make sure that their side would never kill policemen or break the law. The two sides are fundamentally in conflict with each other.

This fight is seen in the microcosm in Jones’ InfoWars. Five days after her homepage was flooded with articles about Babbitt’s death, she is nowhere to be found. She receives only a small mention in a “special report” that Jones issued on Sunday, in which he states, without evidence, that “high-level” sources in the Pentagon told her that the violence was triggered by “antifa”. There is no reliable evidence that people affiliated with the militant anti-fascist movement were the source of Wednesday’s violent revolt; there is, however, a significant trail of online and real-life newspapers that shows that the prisoners are longtime Trump supporters.

Jones claims, again without any evidence, that a “provocative agent” angered the crowd at the speaker’s lobby doors to make conservatives look bad; Babbitt, snatched at the moment, was killed by jumping the shattered glass.

Jones’ special report presents the attack on the Capitol as a victory for his audience. “As Trump supporters were so obedient to the law, it basically failed,” he says. Babbitt, once the center of his narrative of patriots being persecuted, is now just collateral damage. He bet on using her as a martyr shortly after the shooting, but as online conspiracies about antifa and false flags increased, Jones had to avoid using Babbitt as the centerpiece of his narrative.

There are real-world implications for online conspiracy theories like these. People are experiencing life through these changed lenses and we are seeing people denying their own reality as it unfolds before their eyes.

There is no more surprising example than that of another person killed in Wednesday’s riot. Rosanne Boyland, who drove from Georgia to attend the event in DC, was crushed by a crowd of Trump supporters outside the Capitol building. She died later. Justin Winchell, a friend who witnessed his death, told CBS46 the next day that he thought the antifa “instigators” started the mutiny that killed her.

“She was killed by an incited event and was not incited by Trump supporters,” he told the TV station.

There is no proof of their claims.