© Photo by Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty ImagesU.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.
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.
Comment: Naturally, Putin's strong message and warning to the West will go unheeded, everything that Russia does in response to aggression will be spun to blame Russia, and the titanic geopolitical battle of wills will escalate; the saner heads of the West are simply not listening, and the pathologiically-motivated ones have next to no capacity to listen.