Over the past several months, WorldNetDaily columnist Jack Cashill has been cranking out several whitewashed accounts of Capitol rioters designed to minimize their offenses and crimes. It turns out that this was all leading up to a new book to compile all this whitewashing, the centerpiece of which is the story of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by law enforcement as she tried to crawl through a broken window inside the Capitol.
According to the book excerpt published May 15 at WND, Cashill unsurprisingly performs a whitewash on Babbitt as well; he relied on the account of Tayler Hansen, an anti-abortion activist who happened to be filming her inside the Capitol to describe her alleged interactions with another protester, Zachary Alam, whom other riot defenders have tried to portray as an Antifa provocateur. Cashill didn’t explicitly make that claim, but he hinted at it by claiming that “Alam had no social media history tying him to Trump or the MAGA movement.”
Cashill gushed that Babbitt “took matters into her own hands, literally,” as she allegedly saw Alam and others break out a window, “yanked at Alam’s backpack with her right hand. As he spun around, she slugged him square in the face with her left fist. His glasses flew off on impact. Fleeing the madness, Ashli hopped with some assistance into the window frame now fully free of glass. Only a person as small as she could have managed that feat.”
Cashill then rehashed previous attacks on Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police officer who shot and killed Babbitt as she crawled through that window, hyping his purported incompetence as an officer. But he apparently made no attempt to contact Byrd for his book, making this account largely speculation by highly biased Babbitt apologists who have an unambiguous bias that can’t be trusted at face value. The excerpt concludes with Cashill ramping up Babbitt’s victimhood:
When California physician Dr. Austin Harris tried to treat Ashli, the police pulled him off and cleared the other protestors trying to help. According to Hansen, that is all they did. “The cops just continued to stand there,” he told filmmaker Nick Searcy. “They didn’t help her. She clearly needed her throat cleared from the blood. They didn’t do anything. They just let her bleed out. And that was it.”
The FBI would later arrest Dr. Harris on the same cooked-up charges they did most other protestors. A half-hour after the shooting, Ashli was pronounced dead at Washington Hospital Center.
As to Hansen, no official ever talked to him or asked to see his video despite Hansen’s repeated attempts to reach out. “I begged and I begged these people on the committee,” said Hansen, but no one wanted to know what he saw.
Cashill doesn’t say what, exactly, was “cooked-up” about the charges against Harris. In fact, as a former friend documented, Harris desired to “be with the MAGA crowd,” posted a photo of himself on the Capitol steps wearing a “Lions Not Sheep” cap and tried to falsely blame the riot on Antifa as “a false-flag event to allow even more oppression of conservatives.” He was ultimately sentenced to probation after taking a plea deal.
Cashill made no mention of the fact in this excerpt — and, we can presume, in the book as well — that, as a more credible news organization reported, Babbitt “had become consumed by pro-Trump conspiracy theories and posted angry screeds on social media. She also had a history of making violent threats.” That inconvenient fact would interfere with Cashill’s martyrdom narrative, you see.