The Atlantic ’s Hanna Rosin Brings Woke Gospel to MAGA Country

If there were a Bartlett’s dedicated to the most cluelessly smug quotes ever spoken by the Left, journalist Hanna Rosin would have her own entry. In a recent article in the venerable Atlantic, “The Insurrectionists Next Door,” Rosin tells how her partner Lauren Ober tried to enlighten her new neighbors in southeast Washington, D.C. 

Writes Rosin for the ages, “Lauren gives a delicate but effective lesson on how white privilege works, and explains that having had to work hard doesn’t exempt you from it.”

The recipient of Ober’s wisdom is one of her new neighbors, Micki Witthoeft. Other than perhaps the mother of Derek Chauvin, it is hard to imagine any woman less deserving of a lecture on white privilege than Witthoeft. 

Without warning, on January 6, 2021, black police lieutenant Michael Byrd shot and killed her daughter, a 14-year Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt. A suit brought by Ashli’s husband Aaron Babbitt suggests why Witthoeft has abandoned her home and husband in California to crusade for justice in Rosin’s DC neighborhood, a crusade that includes a nightly vigil at the DC jail, “the Gulag.”

According to the suit, Byrd, who was masked and out of uniform, did not identify himself as a police officer, did not give Ashli verbal orders to stop, did not give her a chance to comply, did not “diligently assess” the situation before firing, and never considered any other compliance techniques. 

Most critically, the 5’ 2” Ashli did not pose “an imminent danger of death or serious injury.” After a cursory internal review, Byrd was promoted to captain. In its 800-page report, the House January 6 committee did not so much as mention Byrd by name. Micki Witthoeft won’t stop saying it.

Rosin describes Witthoeft as “the anchor of the house, of this whole universe.” Like Conrad’s Charles Marlow, Ober and Rosin are fascinated by “the blank spaces” on their map. For the cocooned Left, MAGA country is blank enough, but no space within it is as blank as Witthoeft’s universe, a universe peopled by the victims of the judicial tyranny unleashed on January 6, 2021. 

These victims include the 1,500 or so people prosecuted to date and their friends and families. To sustain their self-image as champions of social justice, Rosin and her fellow travelers have to ignore how uniformly and egregiously the arrested J6ers have been overcharged. To sustain that ignorance they have to reject all evidence that presents January 6 as something other than an insurrection. 

It troubles the Atlantic reporters that Ashli Babbitt has emerged as a martyr for her fellow insurrectionists, but it does not surprise them. Rosin accuses the jailed J6ers, for instance, of having “created a mythology — effectively a set of alternative facts — about who they were.” She writes this, alas, unaware of the mythology she and her allies have created about themselves. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: Who Had Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick ‘Murdered’?)

Rosin and Ober interact with the “insurrectionists” next door with the patient paternalism Dr. Livingstone did with Kololo in Central Africa. The difference is that Livingstone and other missionaries worked from a consistent philosophy whose Judeo-Christian principles had been honed over the centuries. They had wisdom to share. The woke, by contrast, improvise on the fly. They have bromides to share, bromides about such ephemera as, say, “white privilege.” As Kamala Harris has shown, those bromides can be ditched overnight and, if need be, by the bushelful.

To sustain their jerry-rigged world view, the Left routinely create their own alternative sets of facts as Rosin does in describing Babbitt’s death. For Rosin’s story line to work, Babbitt has to be an insurrectionist. Tailoring the evidence accordingly, Rosin pictures Babbitt marching down the hallway “at the front of a column of rioters.” 

In fact, Babbitt avoided a large group jawing with a handful of Republican congressman at the entrance to the House floor and walked down the empty hallway followed by one other person, Tayler Hansen, a young citizen journalist who recorded the encounter. 

“She strides down the hallway,” Rosin adds, “like she knows where she’s going.” Implied in this remark is that Babbitt had a plan. Rosin ignores the reality that Babbitt had come to DC by herself, entered the Capitol 90 minutes after the riot started, and wandered around the building as cluelessly as everyone else for the 20 minutes before dead-ending at the doors to the Speaker’s lobby.

As Hansen reports, he and Babbitt joked with the three Capitol Police officers guarding the doors. Having served most of her Air Force career in police work, she identified with the police. After a minute or two, a swarm of protesters made their way to these same doors.

In that crowd was an ex-con named Zachary Alam. In October 2023, former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson did a feature on Alam and two other potential provocateurs for her show “Full Measure.” Attkisson explained. “I didn’t see key provocateurs removed from the crowd. In fact, the key provocateurs in this case seem to be sort of tolerated, if not encouraged, by some of the police officers on the front line.”

Free to roam, Alam moved to the front of the crowd, reached between the officers, and began punching the doors’ glass panels while yelling, “Fuck the blue.” Appalled by Alam’s behavior, Ashli shouted at the feckless officers over the din. “She was basically yelling at these officers telling them to do their jobs,” said Hansen. 

Hansen meanwhile chastised Alam, “Chill out! Chill the fuck out, bro!” For more than a minute after the first window was cracked, protestors argued with the officers but did not touch them or threaten them. Nor did they smash any more windows. At one point, Alam stood with his back to the officers keeping the crowd at bay.

Writes Rosin, “The policemen guarding the doors, overwhelmed by the sheer number of rioters, abandon their post” The video does not bear this out at all. The officers were not in any imminent danger. They appear to have noticed a Capitol Police emergency response team mount the stairs to the lobby and left before the response team could reach them.

As soon as the officers pulled away, Alam grabbed a helmet from another protestor and broke out all the glass from the transom on far the right side. “Ashli was actively trying to disarm these people,” Hansen observed, “trying to calm them down through this entire kind of confrontation with these police officers.” 

So frustrated was Babbitt by Alam’s action that she punched him in the face, knocking his glasses off. It was then that she climbed into the window frame — most likely to escape the crowd, but certainly not to lead an insurrection — and Byrd promptly shot her. (READ MORE: First, They Came for the J6ers)

Rosin has no excuse for not reporting any of this. On Memorial Day of this year I met her during the Annual Ashli Babbitt Freedom March. As we marched through Rosin’s neighborhood on the way to DC “Gulag,” I encouraged her to stake out new territory by being the first “mainstream” reporter to tell the true story of January 6. To make her job easier, I gave her a copy of my newly published book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6.

In the book, I explain what motivated these women and other protestors to go to Washington on that fateful day: the Russia collusion hoax, the internet censorship, the COVID lockdowns, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop, the 51 intel officers coup, and, yes, an intentionally chaotic election whose announced results only the brain dead could trust. 

Unwilling to confront the protestors’ real motivations, Rosin seems to include all these injustices under the Orwellian rubric, “the Big Lie,” a phrase she uses without irony. She concludes her article with the wishful thought, “But the Big Lie’s hold on Mamma Micki may be loosening.”

I don’t think so. The tweet Witthoeft posted on October 1 reveals just how futile was the Atlantic’s effort to enlighten the natives: “Day 1364 of the Political Hostage Crisis. Day 792 of the Continuous J6 Nightly Vigils on #Freedom Corner.”

The struggle continues.

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

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