USA 2020 Elections: Thread

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Your favorite Leftist Media LIES to you...

The Media Lied Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick's Death. And
They Just Got Caught

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-about-officer
https://www.revolver.news/2021/02/maga-blood-libel-why-are-they-hiding-the-medical-report/
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/as-the-insurrection-narrative-crumbles
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/02/02/politics/brian-sicknick-charges/index.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/officer-brian-sicknick-capitol
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/capitol-police-officer-brian-sicknick-mother
https://twitter.com/ColumbiaBugle/status/1359690256446988288

The Media Lied Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick's Death. And
They Just Got Caught

By Gleen Greenwald, first posted on Substack

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.
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.

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.

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.