Yesterday, Ashli Babbitt was shot in the neck and died while protesting inside the Capitol with other protestors. A group of angry Trump supporters had got into the building and were making a racket. This is not an unusual occurrence. During the Kavanaugh hearings, Democrats organized mobs of screeching women to harass Republicans in the halls of the Capitol. Party media was there to celebrate it as the purest expression of democracy. It was power to the people time.

That was not the case yesterday, according to the media. Instead, it was a direct threat to “our” democracy. This is a bit ironic in that the protests are over the obvious corruption in the election system. The direct threat to democracy is the people demanding their elections be fair and honest. That’s why Ashli Babbitt was inside the Capitol making a racket. Her whole life she had been told this was how citizens angry at their government demand redress when the system fails.

That is how popular government is supposed to work. The people expect their government to be responsive to the will of the people. When they don’t like that they see, they vote for different people to hold office. If those politicians ignore the people, then the people go bang on their door and demand redress of their grievances. The politicians then come out and address their issues. That’s not it works now. Instead, they open fire on the people like they did yesterday.

Ashli Babbitt was not some drug-addled degenerate, like we saw last summer, when the ruling class unleashed their mobs on us. She was a veteran, serving 14 years in the US Air Force, and she was a high-level security official throughout her time in service. She was like most of the people at the protest, in that she had bought into what she was told about America. So much so she signed onto serve in the military and go overseas in various deployments.

Like most of the protestors, she was there because she had spent her life playing by the rules and defending those rules. She was there because the people in charge of maintaining the rules have been violating those rules. They ignored the official corruption in the 2016 election and they laughed about the grotesque fraud that was plainly obvious in the 2020 election. Like the rest of those protestors, she was angry that the politicians were not following the rules.

For her trouble, she died in a pool of her own blood inside what is supposed to be the people’s house in America. It is a bit ironic that a citizen exercising her rights would be murdered by an agent of a corrupt system that is now infringing on her rights. Murder is the right word here. The man who shot her was under no threat and was on the other side of a locked and barricaded door. The murderer was part of Vice President Pence’s security detail. The video, for those interested, is here.

There will be no charges against the murderer. Unlike the cops involved in the George Floyd case or any number of others, this coward will not be fired from his job or face criminal charges. He will probably get a medal. He will not have his face and address plastered all over the media, so that he can be attacked by mobs. There will be no media orchestrated campaign to defund the police over this. Most likely, the whole thing will be put on mute so that the public forgets it.

Of course, unlike George Floyd, Ashli Babbitt will not get three nationally televised funerals and be treated as a fallen hero. That honor goes to drug-addled criminals who overdose in police custody. In this America, patriots who served their country and exercise their rights get gunned down by agents of the state. This woman, this patriot, bleeding out in the halls of the Capitol, murdered by an agent of the state, is the perfect image of what has gone terribly wrong in America.

No doubt, millions of decent people who sympathized with her cause are saddened by this terrible tragedy. It did not have to come to this. This was not an accident. This was not a terrible misfortune. The people on the other side of that door, the people who celebrate the murderer of Ashli Babbitt now, they did this. They created this crisis that threatens to plunge to country into a death spiral. They had choices and they had plenty of warning, but they refused to listen and now Ashli Babbitt is dead.

Be angry, but also remember Ashli Babbitt. The Republican Party will not remember her or even mention her name. The media will work hard to make sure you forget her name and how she died yesterday. Dissidents need to remember her so we never forget why we are angry and why we are dissidents. We are angry with a system that thinks it is okay to murder citizens who play by the rules and exercise their rights as citizens to petition their government for redress.

The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independent for 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.