Ashli Babbitt and Derek Chauvin: A Case Study of How Fascism Works in Practice
Trump's Department of Justice pays millions to the family of a Jan. 6 insurrectionist, while MAGA worthies crusade to release the cop who killed George Floyd. Similarities and differences.
By Jonathan V. Last The Bulwark
You may remember Ashli Babbitt as the only insurrectionist killed by law enforcement during the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.¹
She was part of a mob attempting to break into the Speaker’s Lobby just outside the House chamber. Members of the U.S. Capitol Police were inside the room, guarding and evacuating members of Congress.
Some person or persons in Babbitt’s group broke the windows on the locked and barricaded doors to the Speaker’s Lobby. Babbitt attempted to climb through the shattered window to reach the police and members of Congress.
A Capitol Police officer had his weapon drawn and, according to one witness, issued verbal commands for Babbitt to stop her incursion: “Get back! Get down! Get out of the way!”
Babbitt did not comply. The officer discharged his weapon, hitting her in her left anterior shoulder. She later died of her wounds.
MAGA and Donald Trump have long claimed Babbitt as a martyr wrongly and unjustly murdered by police. Her estate had been in the process of filing a civil wrongful death suit against the government.² On Friday, Trump’s Department of Justice reportedly reached a settlement with them. The payout is said to be $30 million.³
Trump’s dictum that police should “not be too nice” to alleged criminals evidently did not apply in this case.
This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s a coherent—and dangerous—worldview. So let’s talk about MAGA, Ashli Babbitt, and Derek Chauvin.
Free Chauvin - and all Political Prisoners?!? You will remember Chauvin as the police officer who murdered George Floyd in 2020. Chauvin was part of a team of four police officers who responded to a call about Floyd passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a local convenience store.
Floyd was unarmed. He did not attempt to harm any of the officers. He did attempt to comply with their commands, but the officers were issuing contradictory orders. Floyd was pushed face down onto the ground. One of the officers pointed a gun at his head until he was handcuffed. Then, once he was handcuffed and prone, Chauvin knelt on the back of Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes.
Floyd verbally indicated that he was in medical distress. Numerous bystanders informed the police that they were killing Floyd. When an ambulance arrived, Chauvin’s knee remained on Floyd’s neck, even though he had no pulse. Floyd never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead shortly thereafter.⁴
A jury of Chauvin’s peers found him guilty of second-degree murder.
And yet MAGA has embarked on a years-long project of insisting that Chauvin’s actions were justified, that Chauvin did not cause Floyd’s death, and that Chauvin is merely a scapegoat.⁵
Just so we’re clear:
A police officer barricaded into a room protecting elected officials from an armed mob attempting to break in for the stated purpose of “hanging” them was not supposed to use deadly force.
But a police officer performing the slow-motion killing of a restrained, nonviolent suspect was (a) well within his rights and also (b) wasn’t really responsible for the guy’s death anyway.
I am begging you, with tears in my eyes: Stop treating the politicians and commentators and other MAGA enablers who say these things as though they are acting in good faith.
These are fascists who see violence deployed by law enforcement as desirable when it is useful to them. But when it is not useful to their project, they pretend that the enforcement of laws is, in itself, illegitimate.
We have seen this movie before.
In 2020, when protesters gathered peacefully in Lafayette Square, Trump sent armed officers to clear out the park by force.
But when armed militia members occupied the Michigan statehouse that year, challenging law enforcement officers to fights and trying to force their way onto the floor of the legislature, Trump told the governor:
And we saw it during the course of Trump’s prosecutions. The “pro-law enforcement” Republican party, which wants to give every cop who ever shot a black kid the benefit of every doubt, suddenly decided that the entire FBI was corrupt, untrustworthy, and full of crooked agents.
If you were sketching out liberalism’s approach to state-sanctioned violence, it would go something like this:
The state has a near-monopoly on the sanctioned use of violence. This awesome power must be scaffolded by a legal framework in which the rule of law is regular, transparent, and durable.
Meanwhile, fascists take a different view:
The purpose of state power is to subjugate the disfavored classes. Therefore the power of the state to commit violence must be unchecked when the fascists control it; but must be tamed by private-sector violence in the period leading up to the fascist takeover.
I bring all of this up because it’s important not to view this disparity as an example of garden-variety hypocrisy. It’s not. It’s a coherent worldview.
And we should call that worldview by its proper name.
1-That, in itself, is a testament to the professionalism of the U.S. Capitol Police. Under a sustained, violent assault by thousands of armed intruders they managed to protect every single elected member of Congress while only using deadly force on one attacker.
This is the kind of professionalism that police reformers dream about seeing in cops.
2-The suit against the government accused the Capitol Police officer of failing to “de-escalate” the situation.
De-escalation is what just about every police reformer wants and is what the Capitol Police did throughout the events of January 6th. Prior to the Babbitt lawsuit, I have been unable to find any MAGA representatives praising de-escalation as a characteristic of successful police work.
3-Does this count as “waste, fraud, and abuse”? Where are the DOGE budget hawks on this settlement?
4-Just as a thought exercise: How many of the January 6th insurrectionists would have died if the Capitol Police were made up of officers like Derek Chauvin and not officers like Harry Dunn?
I’m serious about this. Leave your guess in the comments.
5-In case you didn’t click the links, two of the prime movers in this space are Tucker Carlson and Bari Weiss.
Jonathan V. Last is the editor of The Bulwark. You can subscribe to their extensive selection of newsletters and podcasts here.
Ashli Babbitt and Derek Chauvin (Photo illustration via Air Force Times and CNN).
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Your co-founders collectively are 157 years old — not that much younger than the USA, which is 249. We somehow always assumed we’d be gone long before the nation.
Now we’re not so sure. JR/HF).