The Media Lied Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick's Death. And They
Just Got Caught.
Just as with the Russia Bounty debacle, they will never acknowledge what
they did. Their audience wants to be lied to for partisan gain and emotional
pleasure.
Glenn Greenwald
Apr 19
U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) speaks during a congressional
tribute to the late Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick who lies in honor
in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on February 3, 2021 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images)
It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a
harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is because he is
the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the
January 6 riot at the Capitol.
So The New York Times on January 8 published an emotionally gut-wrenching
but complete fiction that never had any evidence - that Officer Sicknick's
skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob
until he died - and, just like the now-discredited Russian bounty story also
unveiled by that same paper, cable outlets and other media platforms
repeated this lie over and over in the most emotionally manipulative way
possible. Just watch a part of what they did and how:
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.
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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.
Articles on this Substack, Feb. 16, 2021 and Mar. 5, 2021
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:
________________________________________
Because the truth usually prevails, at least ultimately, their lies, yet
again, all came crashing down on their heads on Monday. The District of
Columbia's chief medical examiner earlier this morning issued his official
ruling in the Sicknick case, and it was so definitive that The Washington
Post - one of the media outlets that had pushed the multiple falsehoods -
did not even bother to try to mask or mitigate the stark conclusion it
revealed:
The first line tells much of the story: "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." Using understatement, the paper added: "The ruling,
released Monday, likely will make it difficult for prosecutors to pursue
homicide charges in the officer's death."
This definitive finding from the medical examiner not only rids us of the
Fire Extinguisher lie but also the second theory to which these media
outlets resorted once they had to face the reality that they spent weeks
spreading an outright lie (needless to say, they provided no real
accountability or even acknowledgement for the fact that they did spread
that Fire Extinguisher tale, instead just seamlessly moving to their next
evidence-free claim). They changed their story to claim that pro-Trump
protesters still murdered Sicknick, not with a fire extinguisher but with
bear spray, which video shows at least one protester using in his vicinity.
Clockwise: Tweet of Associated Press, Jan. 29; Tweet of NBC's Richard Engel,
Jan. 9; Tweet of the Lincoln Project's Fred Willman, Jan. 29; Tweet of The
New York Times' Nicholas Kirstof, Jan. 9
The problem with that theory is that bear spray is not usually fatal, and
the medical examiner's findings ruled out the possibility that this is what
caused his 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.
So there goes that second fairy tale. The Post did note the medical
examiner's observation regarding Sicknick's participation in defending the
Capitol that day that "all that transpired played a role in his condition."
That of course is true: just as it is true for the two pro-Trump supporters
who had heart attacks that day and the other pro-Trump supporter who died
from too much amphetamine in her system, having a stressful encounter as a
police officer likely played a role in why someone would have two strokes
the following day. But police officers are trained for stressful encounters,
and that obviously is a far cry from being able to claim that any pro-Trump
supporter murdered Sicknick.
I'll have much more on this story as it unfolds. A significant amount of
media accountability is warranted. But you're seeing why there is so much
resentment and so many attacks on platforms like this one that permit
journalists to report and analyze facts and dissect media narratives without
being constrained by liberal orthodoxies and pieties and while remaining
immune from liberal pressure tactics: it's one of the few ways that real
dissent to their lies and propaganda can be aired.
The New York Times, in a now-"updated" article, Jan. 8, 2021
Truth matters. Noble lies are never justified no matter the cause,
especially in journalism. But these employees of corporate media outlets
have been taught the exact opposite model: that their primary obligation is
to please and flatter the partisan agenda and political sensibilities of
their audience even if it means lying or recklessly spreading unproven
theories to do it. That is their profit model. And they have trained their
audiences to want and expect this and that is why they never feel compelled
to engage in any self-critique or accountability when they get caught doing
this: their audiences want to be lied to - they are grateful for it - and
would prefer that they not admit they did it so that their partisan
interests will not be undermined.
What is most depressing about this entire spectacle is that, this time, they
exploited the tragic death of a young man to achieve their tawdry goals.
They never cared in the slightest about Officer Brian Sicknick. They had
just spent months glorifying a protest movement whose core view is that
police officers are inherently racist and abusive. He had just become their
toy, to be played with and exploited in order to depict the January 6
protest as a murderous orgy carried out by savages so primitive and inhuman
that they were willing to fatally bash in the skull of a helpless person or
spray them with deadly gases until they choked to death on their own lung
fluids. None if it was true, but that did not matter - and it still does not
to them - because truth, as always, has nothing to do with their actual
function. If anything, truth is an impediment to it.
