Marjorie Taylor Greene made a shaky comparison between the killings of Tyre Nichols and Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt which sickened many on social media this week in the wake of video being released depicting the unarmed motorist’s brutal killing by a gang of police officers.
Speaking during a committee hearing, the Georgia congresswoman went on an extended tangent about Ms Babbitt being “murdered” by police.
Noting that Ms Babbitt’s mother was in attendance, Ms Greene went on to say that Congress was doing nothing to address the treatment of other participants in the attack, many of whom remain incarcerated ahead of their respective trials.
“There has never been a trial. In fact, no one has cared about the person who shot and killed her,” Ms Greene argued.
There’s a simple reason for that: Ms Babbitt was part of a crowd that was actively trying to breach a door that had been barricaded in a restricted area of the US Capitol. She herself was shot by police while attempting to climb through a window that her fellow rioters had broken.
Mr Nichols’s death occurred in a much different manner, and one crucial difference stands out above all others: there’s no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Mr Nichols committed or was even suspected of committing a crime. Police initially said that he was pulled over for reckless driving, a ticketable offence, but even that flimsy reasoning has evaporated in recent days.
And rather than being shot while attempting to breach a police barricade, Mr Nichols was instead killed as he lay on the ground clearly complying with police orders despite their savage treatment of him. He died after medics refused to render aid for several minutes after arriving on scene.
The comparisons between the two cases appear to begin and end at the involvement of police, though that appeared to be of little concern to Ms Greene.
Predictably, her words drew angry reactions on Twitter.
“That lady who in broad daylight was breaking and entering through a window in a door while law enforcement on the other side warned her 100,000,000 times to stop. Yeah, real comparable,” one Twitter user wrote.
“She’s right on two accounts. A) No one in Congress addressed it. And B) No one cares. One person was minding his business, driving his car home. The other one, in the midst of a blood freezing war cry hurled herself through a shattered window to stop a government proceeding,” wrote another commenter.
Ms Greene previously drew ridicule from the Daily Show and others last year when she stopped by the DC jail late into the evening of the one-year anniversary of January 6 and held a candlelight vigil for those incarcerated within.
The sparsely attended vigil was outnumbered by protesters and even local DC residents who stopped by the scene to mock the attendees.
