More than seven months after the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt during the January 6 riot, the Capitol Police Department officer who shot her is speaking out. “I know that day I saved countless lives,” Lt. Michael Byrd tells NBC News’s Lester Holt.

Maybe he’s right, maybe not, but he’s going farther than he has to go. The standard for use of deadly force — not just in the Capitol Police Department but generally — is not certain knowledge but rather, as the department’s policy puts it, a reasonable belief that said use of force “is in the defense of human life, including the officer’s own life, or in the defense of any person in immediate danger of serious physical injury.”

Did Byrd’s actions meet that standard? The events of the day, and the video record of the shooting, say yes.

Even setting aside the question of whether the 2020 presidential election was “stolen,” as many Trump supporters believe, and the bizarre theories of “QAnon,” with which she seems to have been affiliated, the story of Babbitt’s death is a story of  reasonable versus unreasonable beliefs.

It was unreasonable for Babbitt — especially given her description in online biographies as a 14-year Air Force veteran and former security guard at a nuclear power plant — to believe that she and the mob she joined could walk into the US Capitol and violently prevent Congress’s certification of the election without armed Capitol Police officers contesting the matter.

It was even more unreasonable for Babbitt to believe that when her fellow rioters began smashing the windows of the barricaded doors to the Speaker’s Lobby, and that when she attempted to crawl through one of those windows, the armed officers charged with protecting Congress wouldn’t respond with deadly force. Frankly it’s surprising that they didn’t do so as soon as the window-smashing began.

On the other hand, whether or not one likes the Capitol Police, or Lt. Byrd, or Congress, or the outcome of the election, it was entirely — and obviously — reasonable for Lt. Byrd to believe that members of a mob attempting to force their way through those barricaded doors represented a danger of “immediate danger of serious physical injury” or even death to himself and those he guarded.

Ashli Babbitt is neither a martyr nor an innocent victim of police abuse (of which there are far too many). She willingly joined a violent mob. She willingly took part in that mob’s violent actions. She willingly went an extra foot or two beyond the actions of most of that mob’s members. And that extra foot or two was fatal.

Had Ashli Babbitt not put her unreasonable beliefs into motion against Michael Byrd’s reasonable beliefs, she’d almost certainly still be alive.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“President Joe Biden continues to humiliate the United States,” Joseph Klein whines at neoconservative rag FrontPageMag, “by letting the Taliban terrorists dictate the terms of his surrender.”

Furthermore, writes Klein, “the president is clearly willfully blind to ISIS in Afghanistan being a long-term threat to the American homeland. … Biden has shown zero concern for any al Qaeda threat emerging from Afghanistan.”

Oddly missing: Any mea culpas for the neoconservative policy pillars that created,  and fueled the rise of, al Qaeda. And of the Taliban. And of ISIS.

In the 1970s, former Trotskyites like David Horowitz (founder of FrontPageMag), Jean Kirkpatrick (Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations), and Paul Wolfowitz (deputy Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush) wormed their  way from “the New Left”  into  the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party and on into the GOP, transforming themselves from prophets of Trotsky’s “global socialist revolution” into  advocates for “global democratic revolution.”

Their support — as expressed from positions in the American foreign policy bureaucracy — for giving the Soviet Union “its own Vietnam” in Afghanistan resulted in the birth of al Qaeda and the rise of the Taliban. Their support for a continued US presence in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War led directly to the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan. Their support for the US invasion of Iraq led directly to the birth of ISIS.

With predictable regularity, every jar of pickles neoconservatives touch at the foreign policy grocery store falls off the shelf and bursts on the floor.

It takes a lot of nerve to scream at the janitor tasked with the unsavory job of cleaning up their gory messes that he’s missing a spot. And more nerve yet to insist that if the janitor will just help them spill more blood — American, Afghan, and Arab — on the floor, surely all their wildest dreams will eventually magically come true.

American politicians have spent the last 40 years chasing the fantasies of the younger crop of Republican Trotskyites. And before that, they followed a previous generation, led by James Burnham (former leader of America’s Trotskyite sect, later co-founder of “conservative” journal National Review) down the primrose path in Vietnam.

In every instance and without exception, the results of American politicians listening to neoconservatives have been disastrous for Americans and for the world.

They’ll never sit down and shut up, but we can and should tune them out.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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We’re still hearing a lot about “mask mandates” in COVID-19 era America, but my experiences (and those of acquaintances) over the last few days suggest that the supposed mandates have functionally become mere advisories.

In my opinion, that’s a good thing. Generally speaking, we’re all better off when personal health decisions are left to individuals than when government presumes to make those decisions for everyone.

Many Americans began voluntarily donning masks when “public health authorities” were still yelling at us not to, and drastically reducing our outings and interactions before governments started trying to put us all (well, all of us toffs who could stay home and watch Netflix while “essential” peons delivered our groceries) under house arrest. Policy is a trailing, not leading, indicator.

Grain of salt warning: “The plural of the word anecdote,”  Kenneth Kernaghan and P. K. Kuruvilla wisely noted in 1982, “is not data.” I’m not equipped to conduct a nationwide, well-controlled, peer-reviewed study on the subject. I can only tell you what I’ve noticed and what others I know have seen.

New Mexico blogger Kent McManigal notes at  “Hooligan Libertarian” that, although that state’s government has re-imposed its previous mask mandate, about 25% of shoppers seem to be ignoring it, and that stores aren’t hassling those shoppers about it.

I follow the news closely by profession, but I didn’t even notice when my county’ s government (Alachua County, Florida) re-imposed its mask mandate. My wife mentioned it to me just as we were about to walk into our neighborhood grocery store.

I didn’t have a mask with me, and was about to return to the car, when I noticed two things: First, the store hadn’t put up signs at the door advising shoppers of the re-imposed mandate. Those signs had been there throughout the first mandate. Second, looking through the door, I could see unmasked shoppers inside, and nobody appeared to be giving them any trouble. So I just went in. My experience matched Kent’s. More than half the shoppers were masked, but nobody gave the unmasked so much as a cross look.

On our next outing, I brought a mask with me, just in case.

At one store, the proprietor had been clear through the pandemic that it was not his job to enforce county mask mandates. The county government sign wasn’t back up, and the “masks optional” sign still was. I shopped unmasked without incident.

At another, the county government sign WAS up, but I saw not a single employee, and only a few customers, wearing masks. When in Rome …

A third store had its own — not government-printed or referencing any law — “masks required” sign. I masked up, went inside, and noticed that most (not all) customers were complying, and that nobody was beating anyone up over it.

I don’t much care whether people choose to wear masks or not. If it makes you feel better, knock yourself out.

But it’s good to see Americans deciding for themselves instead of just doing as they’re told.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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