Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Hill policeman who died the day after the Jan. 6 riots from a stroke, remains the subject of reports of his death that are greatly exaggerated — at least in terms of the manner of his passing.
“The man who killed my brother is now president,” Craig Sicknick told Reuters. He added: “What [Donald] Trump did is despicable, and it proves that the United States no longer has anything that resembles a justice system.”
Trump comes as but the latest murderer of Brian Sicknick. Four years ago, the leading press outfits in the United States blamed not Trump but unnamed rioters for killing the policeman.
The New York Times reported that Jan. 6 rioters had “attacked the Citadel of Democracy, overpowered Brian Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher according to two law enforcement officials. With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”
“Sicknick,” the Associated Press reported, “died Thursday night from injuries suffered during the riot. … Sicknick, 42, was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher during a struggle, two law enforcement officials said, although it was not clear if he was the officer shown in the video.”
He wasn’t in the video. He wasn’t struck in the head with a fire extinguisher. He displayed no bloody gash. The fact that “two law enforcement officials” refused to go on record looks like, in retrospect, what those in law enforcement call a “clue.”
One grasps why Craig Sicknick expresses frustrations over the pardons Donald Trump provided those protesting and rioting on Jan. 6. His brother, who worked to keep order in the Capitol, died in the aftermath of Jan. 6. It does not seem outside of the realm of probability that the stress of that day — psychological, physical, or otherwise — contributed to the medical event that took his life. But his death certificate indicates natural causes and if somebody really did bludgeon him to death with a fire extinguisher then indictments — given that Trump pardoned hundreds for offenses as trivial as “stealing” an envelope from Nancy Pelosi’s office — would have swiftly followed. They didn’t.
But false reports of other victims of the Jan. 6 rioters — including cops who committed suicide months later and a woman not “trampled” to death but killed by a drug overdose — indicate that utility rather than truth advanced many stories on both sides that day.
The indignation regarding the pardons from outside of the Sicknick family seems rich. The fact that Joe Biden had granted clemency to Leonard Peltier, who murdered two FBI agents and remains suspected by many of the involvement in the murder of a fellow Native American activist, without objection (and in some cases support) from the Left exposes the politicized nature of outrage.
And that seems like one lesson from Jan. 6, 2021. Yes, people delusional enough to think they could reverse a settled election and morally crippled enough to try, behaved, in large part, disgracefully (though not all illegally) at the national meeting place for our representatives. Then their political opposites tried to use the event to redact Donald Trump’s name from future ballots for federal office through an impeachment, illegal election-meddling by officials in Maine and Colorado, and numerous indictments. Action and reaction seemed like two sides of the same anti-democratic coin.
In a general sense by calling a riot an insurrection, in a trivial sense by parsing video footage to show Senator Josh Hawley fleeing like a coward when the longer clip shows cops rushing him and the others out of the building, and in a specific sense by portraying Capitol Hill policeman Brian Sicknick as a murder victim, the enemies of Donald Trump propagandized Jan. 6 for their own political benefit. The lies and overkill were foolish and eroded their standing on an issue for which they initially enjoyed widespread support.
Everything done that day, and in reaction to it, partisans did to get their political way. In a two-party system, not everybody gets their way. That seems harder for people to accept in 2025 than it was in, say, 1975.
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