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There is an old joke that the Irish tell on themselves. It goes, “Did you hear about the Irishman with Alzheimers: he forgot everything but the grudges.” In the case of President Joe Biden, as his dementia worsens, he will forget everything but the lies.

If Joe Biden merely padded his stats the way Donald Trump routinely does, he could be forgiven, but Biden’s lies cut deep and leave scars. It is too early to tell how much stock shooter Thomas Crooks put in those lies, but it would be naive to think that the anti-Trump mania that Biden helped foster did not influence this would-be assassin. If so, Trump would not be the first victim of this mass psychosis. That tragic place in history belongs to January 6 protestor, Ashli Babbitt.

Indeed, no major candidate has ever begun a presidential campaign with a more divisive and slanderous opening gambit than did Biden. The first words he uttered in his April 2019 video launch were “Charlottesville, Virginia.”

Biden continued, “[Trump] said there were quote some very fine people on both sides. With those words, the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.” Right from the jump, Biden was peddling the notion that Trump was not just a bad president, but “a threat to this nation.”

In his first live speech — this in Pittsburgh, just miles from Crook’s home in Bethel Park — Biden again began by speaking of Charlottesville. “Folks we saw hate in Charlottesville,” said Biden, “we saw it again in Pittsburgh, at the Tree of Life synagogue and attack — the deadliest in American history on a Jewish community, and we’re reminded again, that that we are in a battle. We are in a battle for America’s soul.”

To sell the deception, Biden shamelessly ignored Trump’s earlier comment about Charlottesville, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists,” Trump had said. “They should be condemned totally.” Rarely, if ever, did the media rein in Biden’s dissembling.

A convenient month before the 2020 election the FBI blew open the Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnap plot, a plot scandalously orchestrated by FBI agents and confidential sources. Race-baiter Biden jumped right in. “There is a through line from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one,” said Biden on the occasion. “He is giving oxygen to the bigotry and hate we see on the march in our country.”

The “through line” of Biden’s candidacy and presidency has been defaming Trump and his followers as Nazis and white supremacists. Panicked by their own propaganda, House Democrats feared the worst from Trump supporters on January 6. “Just remember, we’re on the right side of history,” Rep. Val Demings told a colleague. “If we all die today, another group will come in and certify those ballots.”

Something of a narcissist,  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez personalized her own anticipated torture at the hands of the J6 mob in a hair-raising interview she did with CNN’s Dana Bash.

“White supremacy and patriarchy are very linked in a lot of ways,” AOC told Bash. “There’s a lot of sexualizing of that violence. And I didn’t think that I was just going to be killed. I thought other things were going to happen to me as well.” When Bash asked AOC if she thought she was going to be raped, AOC answered, “Yea, yeah. I thought I was.”

The musings of Ocasio-Cortez raised no eyebrows in progressive circles. Her way of thinking, such as it is, permeates America’s newsrooms. The steady stream of toxic nonsense the media produce has clouded the minds and frozen the hearts of millions.

On January 6, 2021, the lies told by Biden and his allies had deadly consequences. When Trump supporters descended on the Capitol, more than a few police officers harbored the same fears as did Demings and AOC.

USCP lieutenant — now captain — Michael Byrd responded to the perceived threat with lethal force. The incident commander for the House on January 6, Byrd had positioned himself with several other armed officers behind the heavily barricaded doors to the Speaker’s Lobby.

At the sight of a boisterous crowd on the far side of the lobby doors, Byrd panicked. Without a word of warning, he shot and killed unarmed Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt the moment she squeezed her 110-pound body into a broken window frame. Within a minute of the shooting Babbitt, the frightened Byrd made an astonishing radio call:

405B. We got shots fired in the lobby. We got shots shots fired in the lobby of the House Chamber. Shots are being fired at us and we’re sh, uhh, prepared to fire back at them. We have guns drawn. Please don’t leave that end. Don’t leave that end.

Byrd’s, of course, was the only shot fired that day. No police officers were killed or serious injured. No members of Congress or staff were molested. In clearing Byrd of criminal action, Biden’s DoJ insulted him, arguing that “fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment” do not elevate a police shooting to the level of crime. Like the Democrats in Congress, Byrd had fallen prey to the media scare stories about the MAGA hordes. As he would later tell NBC’s Lester Holt, “I know that day I saved countless lives,” and he seemed to actually believe what he was saying.

Byrd was not the only cop to panic. Metropolitan Police Department officer Lila Morris beat the unconscious Rosanne Boyland repeatedly over the head with a stick. Boyland subsequently died. Both Babbitt and Borland were white, Byrd and Morris black. Rep. Demings is black as well. AOC is Puerto Rican. Biden and his fellow travelers had nurtured an anxiety on the left, especially among minorities, that transcended the rational.

In the wake of January 6, President Biden continued to spread his monstrous propaganda. “The violent, deadly insurrection on the Capitol nine months ago,” he said in October 2021, “it was about white supremacy, in my opinion.” Unchastened, he has made white supremacy the focus of his 2024 campaign.

During his disastrous debate performance in June, if he forgot most of what he was supposed to say, Biden remembered to his go-to lie. “What American president would ever say Nazis coming out of fields, carrying torches, singing the same antisemitic bile, carrying swastikas, were fine people,” asked Biden, adding, “This is a guy who says Hitler’s done some good things.”

We may never know what fears muddied the thinking of 20-year-old Thomas Crooks in his final days and moments. If, however, Michael Byrd thought he “saved countless lives” by killing Ashli Babbitt, Crooks may well have thought he’d save millions by killing that Hitler-loving white supremacist Donald Trump.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is available in all formats.

Image: Gage Skidmore