[TL;DR: Facts are important, whataboutism is bad, we have to acknowledge a shared reality, check your sources and develop media literacy, I’m happy to answer questions by email!]
Ashley Babbitt was part of a mob involved in a violent insurrection at the US Capitol with the goal of overturning a free and fair election. This mob was inside the Capitol and attempting to breach a set of double doors that had been barricaded with office furniture by Capitol Police. She was climbing through broken glass of one of the doors when U.S. Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd fired a single shot to stop her entry to the secured area. This stopped her from crossing the threshold and scared her accomplices away, preventing their advance into the breach. While her death is regrettable, I feel that his use of force is one of the few captured on video that remains defensible.
In contrast, Renee Good and Alex Pretti were both in their own city, unarmed, outnumbered, and shot multiple times while engaging in activities that are protected by the First Amendment. Jonathan Ross, who murdered Renee Good, and the two as-yet-unnamed Border Patrol agents who murdered Alex Pretti did so while acting recklessly and unprofessionally, and their superiors immediately lied about their victims in official statements.
There is no equivalency here.
I do not mourn Babbitt. I am angry that her co-insurrectionists were pardoned.
My heart breaks at the fate of Good and Pretti, because they were trying to make the world a better place. I am heartened that their comrades are still doing their best, and I would like to be counted among them.
As for some of the other issues raised, I am not Sisyphus to attempt to correct every factual error on the internet [ https://xkcd.com/386/ ] but I will point out that President Barack Obama issued fewer executive orders than President George W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. In each of his terms President Obama issued fewer executive orders than President Donald J. Trump did in both President Trump’s first term and the first *year* of President Trump’s second term.
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-orders
There’s also a lot of whataboutism going on here!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
While Obama and Biden and all modern presidents have abused executive power, the levels of overreach we are seeing now are more frequent, more severe, and escalatory. It is established fact that the left critiqued Obama and Biden. A more meaningful exercise may be to compare the contrast the right’s reaction to the Jade Helm exercises of 2015 with the current deployments of ICE and DHS.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Helm_15_conspiracy_theories
We now have New York Times infographics on “How to Make Sense of the Federal Forces on the Streets”
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/24/us/us-federal-agents-national-guard-ice-fbi.html
And the Minnesota Star Tribune can help you identify the crowd control munitions that are being deployed in the neighborhood
www.startribune.com/federal-agents-are-deploying-clouds-streams-and-spatters-of-chemical-irritants-what-are-their-health-consequences/601568140
ICE has internal memos that say it no longer needs a warrant signed by a judge to enter a home.
apnews.com/article/ice-arrests-warrants-minneapolis-trump-00d0ab0338e82341fd91b160758aeb2d
I will be standing along Highway 101 at the next No Kings rally on March 28th. US politics is currently a two party game, unfortunately, but we’re at a heady moment of change. While most of the party leadership is center-right technocrats, there is a real and tangible shift for the Democratic Party towards rejecting the billionaire and oligarch class and moving towards progressive ideals that will help the vast majority of Americans, with inroads being made with Democratic Socialist candidates like Zohran Mamdani, and AOC. The Republican Party, however, has decided to go all in on the far right, Christian nationalism, and neosegregationists. I can pull the Democratic Party to the left. The Republican Party wants to exile, harass, and eliminate my friends, family, and community members. Team Blue might not be always right, but right now Team Red is dead wrong.
That’s enough out of me for now, your friendly local idealist solarpunk socialist. I’m glad to have a discussion by email if you like, but am more inclined to forum lurking than posting.
I am including links to media literacy guides from both the University of Oregon as well as Oregon State University so as to avoid any appearance of bias in that regard. =)
researchguides.uoregon.edu/medialiteracy/evaluating-sources
guides.library.oregonstate.edu/newsliteracy
A better world is possible.
Jeremiah Shepersky