Jack Cashill, it seems, can’t stop ranting about how the Capitol riot was treated by non-right-wingers — it’s his new Barack Obama. He kept up his whining in his Dec. 25 column:
The Left stepped up their game in 2020. In the months before the election, their media routinely passed off violent riots as “mostly peaceful protests” and election integrity as “voter suppression.”
In the two months after the election, they launched a veritable shibboleth blitzkrieg, forcing the “big lie” and “free and fair election” down the throats of anyone desiring membership in the respectable kids’ club.
On Jan. 6, 2021, the master craftsmen at the shibboleth workshop outdid themselves. They introduced a new catchphrase and made it mandatory by day’s end.
In her indispensable book, “January 6,” Julie Kelly does a thorough job explaining how quickly “insurrection” emerged as the word of the day throughout the media and Democratic Party ranks.
Less than 90 minutes after the first bicycle rack fell, Rep. Ted Deutch tweeted, “This is a violent insurrection. An attempted coup by Trump supporters at his encouragement.”
At 4 p.m., Joe Biden gave the word his blessing. “It’s not protest,” he said. “It’s insurrection.”
Yes, Cashill is fixated on the “insurrection” term:
In her indispensable book, “January 6,” Julie Kelly does a thorough job explaining how quickly “insurrection” emerged as the word of the day throughout the media and Democratic Party ranks.
Less than 90 minutes after the first bicycle rack fell, Rep. Ted Deutch tweeted, “This is a violent insurrection. An attempted coup by Trump supporters at his encouragement.”
At 4 p.m., Joe Biden gave the word his blessing. “It’s not protest,” he said. “It’s insurrection.”
In the years ahead, leftists and their media allies would have to ignore all evidence to maintain “insurrection” as the term of art.
MAGA America understood what the media refused to, namely that if protesters had intended to “storm the Capitol” – another shibboleth – and stage an “insurrection,” they would have come armed.
They did not. As Ashli Babbitt’s mom, Micki Witthoeft, wryly observed, “The gun-toting populous of the United States showed up that day without guns.”
In fact, many rioters carried weapons. But Cashill doesn’t think things that aren’t guns count as weapons:
While still on Fox News, Tucker Carlson pointed out the obvious. “Just to be clear on terms, an insurrection is when people with guns try to overthrow the government,” Carlson said in June 2022.
“Not a single person in the crowd on January 6 was found to be carrying a firearm. Not one.” Honoring their role in the war on truth, the “fact-checkers” rushed into the breach.
“Tucker Carlson Is Wrong,” insisted PolitiFact in its headline. Its minions reviewed hundreds of case files and found “some” protesters who were “charged with having firearms on Capitol grounds while others stashed them nearby.” In other words, no protester brought a gun into the Capitol.
To maintain the illusion of an “armed insurrection,” the media had to expand “armed” to include the “weapons” most often cited in the DOJ’s charging documents, starting with “flagpole” and followed by chemical spray, baton, stick, pocketknife and baseball bat.
Cashill didn’t explain those things don’t count as weapons one can arm oneself with. They can be just as lethal, after all. He concluded by continuing to make a martyr out of Ashli Babbitt:
The wordsmiths, however, had one major semantic problem to overcome: the only person who fired a gun on January 6 was “the son of a bitch who murdered my daughter.”
Unlike the shibboleth shapers on the Left, Ashli’s mom doesn’t need to mince words.
Someone should tell Ashil’s mom that her daughter had a history of making violent threats, was consumed by pro-Trump conspiracy theories and posted angry screeds on social media.
In his Jan. 8 column, Cashill groused that law enforcement was injured severely enough to get treated as riot victims:
Four years after the events, you would expect someone of consequence to provide an accurate count of those killed on Jan. 6, 2021.
[…]Unwittingly, the New York Times put the nature of those injuries in perspective in a February 2021 article on January 6’s “Scope of Violence.”
The reporters began the article by listing the injuries suffered that day by the police. At the very top of the list? “One officer lost the tip of his right index finger.” A lost fingertip? No, not exactly the Holocaust.
And this injury may have been the result of friendly fire. In justifying the shooting of Ashli Babbitt – and more on that soon enough – the Justice Department explained the communications that shooter Lt. Michael Byrd was processing.
Cashill yet again rehashed the alleged sob stories of Babbitt and Rosanne Boyland, whom he had falsely claimed that authorities were blaming her death on a methamphetamine overdose — as we’ve noted, it’s entirely likely she took a larger-than-prescribed dose of Adderall, an amphetamine, which on top of other health issues such as obesity and diabetes contributed to her death.
Cashill concluded by taking a baseless shot at former Attorney General Merrick Garland: “In the weeks and months to follow, the truth will out. If I were Merrick Garland, I would start Googling, ‘countries without extradition treaties.'” Sounds like a threat, Jack.