In late December, the incoming vice-president, Kamala Harris, tweeted about her plans for the first hundred days of the Biden administration. She promised “to ensure Americans mask up, distribute 100M shots, and get students safely back to school”.
Among the thousands of responses was an angry tweet from a 35-year-old air force veteran in San Diego.
“No the fuck you will not!” Ashli Babbitt replied to Harris. “No masks, no you, no Biden the kid raper, no vaccines...sit your fraudulent ass down…we the ppl bitch!”
Babbitt wasn’t just tweeting. She had a plan to fly to Washington DC the very next week to take part in a major public demonstration demanding that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, be sworn in as president.
Babbitt was shot to death during Trump supporters’ chaotic invasion of the Capitol, officials said, while four other people, including a Capitol police officer, also died.
In the days since Babbitt and other Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building on 6 January, forcing lawmakers to flee or hide, her social media has been scoured for insights into her radicalization.
Babbitt’s Twitter account shows a woman deeply engaged for months with a conspiracy theory that painted Democratic lawmakers as evil pedophiles, and then persuaded, and infuriated, by Trump and his allies’ lies about election fraud.
For weeks before she joined the mob in Washington, Babbitt had been retweeting false claims from Trump himself, as well as the pro-Trump lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, alleging massive voter fraud and asserting that Trump had won the 2020 election.
Many of Babbitt’s tweets, according to extremism experts, also marked her as a believer in QAnon, a conspiracy theory that claims Donald Trump has been trying to save the world from a cabal of satanic pedophiles, including Democratic politicians like Biden and Hollywood celebrities, and that he will soon bring his enemies to justice.
Babbitt had not been a leader or major influencer within the QAnon movement, according to Marc-André Argentino, a researcher who studies QAnon and other extremist groups. She had not posted a lot of original content or sold QAnon-themed merchandise. But she had tweeted regularly about the conspiracy theory since February 2020, and she had posted a lot on Twitter in general, about 50 posts a day, he said. On election day, she had posted 77 times.
Her social media also showed posts skeptical of masks and public health measures. She had responded with fury to an alert in early December that California public health officials were reinstating a stay-at-home order to prevent the spread of coronavirus, which was surging in southern California: “This is that commie bullshit.”
The QAnon conspiracy theory, although lurid in its claims about the torture of children, is very much a political movement, not just a personal delusion, experts say.
“The people that went to the Capitol weren’t just trying to save Trump, they were trying to stop the coming multiracial democracy” which they believed would institute “a radical leftist globalist agenda”, Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said.
On Twitter, Babbitt had been sharing messages urging people like herself to take action, with messages like: “Your government doesn’t fear you anymore. That needs to change. ASAP.”
Babbitt was a small business owner and self-described libertarian. She owned a San Diego-based business, Fowler’s Pool Service and Supply, according to California business records. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as the company owner since May 2017.
In one tweet, first reported by Bellingcat, Babbitt said that she had voted for Barack Obama before voting for Trump. In recent months, she had become a devoted adherent of conspiracy theories boosted by Trump and others.
Babbitt also had a history of confrontational behavior. In 2016, she was charged with reckless endangerment, dangerous driving and malicious property damage in Maryland, but she was later acquitted, according to court records. A former girlfriend of Babbitt’s husband wrote in the application for a protection order against Babbitt that Babbitt had followed her in a car and rear-ended her three times, multiple news outlets reported.
“She was screaming at me and verbally threatening,” the complaint states.
Attempts to reach Babbitt’s family were unsuccessful.
Babbitt wrote that she believed the 6 January protest she was joining would be a pivotal moment for the country, and a fulfillment of some of the key events that QAnon believers had been expecting: “Nothing will stop us....they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours....dark to light!” she tweeted the day before the rally, referencing key QAnon slogans.
Since 2018, QAnon has been identified as a potential domestic terror threat and linked to a series of violent and criminal acts.
Travis View, the host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, said posts showed that Babbitt was “100% a dedicated QAnon follower. She was not casual about it. She was deep into it.”
The scene at the Capitol
At that 6 January rally, Babbitt would listen as Trump urged his supporters to march over to the Capitol building as lawmakers were in the process of officially certifying the 2020 election results, and confirming Biden’s victory.
“You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” Trump told them.
“It was amazing to get to see the president talk,” Babbitt said afterwards, in a Facebook video obtained by TMZ. “We are walking to the Capitol in a mob. There is a sea of nothing but red, white and blue patriots.” She was grinning.
At the Capitol, Babbitt would be among the crowds of Trump supporters who pushed and fought their way past the Capitol police and into the building itself, forcing lawmakers to flee or hide, and temporarily halting the certification of Biden’s election victory.
Multiple videos would capture the moment in a Capitol hallway where Babbitt was at the front of a crowd stopped at a door to the Speaker’s Lobby, which has been shut and barricaded. On the other side of the door were members of Congress and Capitol police protecting them, according to news reports.
Video obtained by the Washington Post shows Babbitt and other members of the mob shouting at a cluster of officers who are guarding the door, telling them to step aside, as other Trump supporters pound on the door’s glass, shattering it. The video shows the officers moving away from the door, and members of the crowd surging forward, shouting “Break it down” and “Let’s fucking go” as they try to break through the door.
Other widely circulated videos show Babbitt hopping up to push herself through one of the door’s glass panels, towards the legislators at the other end of the hallway, as a man shouts “Bust it down!” The footage shows a shot ringing out, and Babbitt falling to the ground. Officials would later confirm that she had been shot by a Capitol police officer, and that the shooting is under investigation.
Lawmakers from both parties who were present at the moment when Babbitt was shot have spoken out about the dangerous behavior of the crowd.
“The mob was going to come through the door; there was a lot of members and staff that were in danger at the time,” the Oklahoma Republican congressman Markwayne Mullin said, according to Fox News.
He defended the police officer’s decision to shoot Babbitt: “His actions will be judged in a lot of different ways moving forward, but his actions I believe saved people’s lives even more. Unfortunately, it did take one, though.”
In interviews, members of Babbitt’s family have defended her political views, and her anger.
“My sister was a normal Californian,” her brother, Roger Witthoeft, told the New York Times. “The issues she was mad about were the things all of us are mad about.”
Babbitt had served in the military for 14 years, Witthoeft said. “If you feel like you gave the majority of your life to your country and you’re not being listened to, that is a hard pill to swallow. That’s why she was upset.”