Why the Left’s Long March Might End on Nov. 5

If President Donald Trump prevails on Nov. 5, the Left’s long march through the institutions grinds to a halt. Ever the optimist, I am prepared to speculate that, after an initial period of disorder, the halt will be more enduring than most now believe possible.

Two items of interest have prompted this speculation. The first is a powerful book I am reviewing by esteemed scientist and survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution, Jilong Rao. Titled Déjà Vu: Confronting the Cultural Distortion Caused by Communism, Rao’s memoir documents the outspoken Rao’s life as a “pariah” before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution.

The second is a tweet directed at me while I was reviewing Rao’s book. In said tweet, a fellow named Corey Cullington critiqued an unnamed podcast I had done on the subject of my book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6. It reads as follows:

I’m listening to the podcast you appeared on a few weeks back. You misstate the timeline multiple times throughout the interview. Wrong about the time CS gas was deployed (1:21pm, not 1:06pm). Wrong about the first time “He’s got a gun!” was yelled at the Speaker’s Lobby (not “a split second”).

On his X page, Cullington suggests he is affiliated with an entity known as the “Sedition Hunters.” These junior G-men describe themselves as “a global community of open-source intelligence investigators (OSINT) working together to assist the U.S. FBI and Washington D.C. Capitol Police in finding people who allegedly committed crimes in the January 6 capitol riots.”

As an added bonus, they “are able to identify other crimes and pass that information along to law enforcement officers.” Rao has seen it all before. In China, sedition hunters of various stripes kept independent-minded souls like himself in a constant state of anxiety.

The public face of the Sedition Hunters is a German–American living in Switzerland named Forrest Rogers. On a Jan. 5, 2022, episode of NPR’s Morning Edition, Rogers bragged about how he and his comrades had sifted through social media sites identifying J6ers, among them a Pennsylvania mother of eight who helped break a window at the Capitol.

“They sent that information to the FBI,” said the approving host, “and [Rachel] Powell was arrested a few weeks later.” Powell, whom I profile in Ashli, is serving four and a half years in a federal prison. Of the eight living women I cover, all of whom have been incarcerated, Powell is the only one who committed something resembling a crime. I tweeted Cullington back:

The greatest mass injustice against American citizens since Japanese internment, two women killed, one [beaten] while dying, other women beaten bloody, a fake cop-killing sold to the media, and you’re quibbling about my timeline? I guess it’s cool now to be a narc, oh, excuse me, “Sedition Hunter.”

If I thought that the betrayal of one’s fellow citizens for thought crimes, real or imagined, represented something of an end stage in America’s cultural revolution, Cullington proved me wrong. The end stage was his quibble.

I double-checked: my timeline was correct. The 15-minute differential didn’t matter in any case. What mattered was that the Capitol Police lobbed munitions into the midst of a peaceful crowd, turning a protest into a riot, a riot that Cullington’s powerful allies alchemized into the political gold of an “insurrection.” This word was used to justify the prosecution of some 1,500 protestors, 90 percent of whom did nothing worse than take selfies in the Capitol Rotunda. Aware of this massive injustice, Cullington attacked my timeline, further evidence, if more were needed, that liberalism is dead.

None of this surprised Rao. “The J6 Committee established political forbidden areas to cover up the truth of the 2020 election fraud,” he wrote. “[T]hey jailed people who questioned the integrity of the election and peacefully expressed their opinions.” He had not only seen oppression before, but he had also experienced it. As a student, the CCP assigned him hard labor in the coal mines for asking an impertinent question.

America has not reached the coal mine phase quite yet, but for the past four years, the Left has had us on a fast track. The cultural revolution, American style, launched years earlier but accelerated in the late 1980s. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Soviet Union, America’s Marxist–Leninist groups had to find a new mission.

The hard Left saw not “the end of history” but rather a new beginning. Much as the Comintern shifted in the 1930s from revolution to the more popular “anti-fascism,” our homegrown Marxists shifted from a worker’s revolution to the always popular anti-racism.

From anti-racism, the Left quickly expanded its protection racket to other “marginalized” groups — gays, Muslims, women, other “people of color,” and, in time, the transgendered. In my 1991 book of essays, Snake Handling in Mid-America, I documented my first real encounter with America’s nascent Red Guard.

While visiting a friend, I happened to say something favorable about a movie starring black comedian Eddie Murphy. My host’s daughter, a student at the uber-liberal University of Wisconsin, shot me a withering look and informed me that Murphy, a known “homophobe,” was not to be praised in her presence.

In the way of explanation, my host clarified that Murphy was not considered “politically correct”— the first time I had heard that phrase. I assumed political correctness to be a phase that one’s children’s outgrew. I assumed wrong. The radical young did not mature. They metastasized.

In 2020, leftists let their inner fascist out, first with the COVID lockdowns, then with the George Floyd uprisings, and finally with the open suppression of speech after a corrupt election. In January 2021, they cooperated with federal authorities to sell a largely peaceful protest as a rebellion against the state, our very own Tiananmen Square. “These people who have stolen power,” writes Rao, “obviously want to hide something and do whatever it takes. This is the J6 effect.”

As Rao observes, China has not moved beyond the government’s bloody suppression of dissent at Tiananmen Square 35 years ago. “Those who died on June 4 cannot rest in peace,” he writes. “The peaceful path of gradual political reform within the PRC has been completely blocked; the historical opportunity for the rejuvenation of Chinese civilization has been destroyed.”

The United States is not China. We have been protesting “abuses and usurpations” literally since day 1. We have been inspired in our protest by a divine spark, and that fire still burns. Although the jury is still out on America’s future, I remain hopeful.

In my 2015 book, Scarlet Letters: The Ever-Increasing Intolerance of the Cult of Liberalism, I highlighted the efforts of those Americans who successfully resisted media cancel culture. A common denominator among them was a strong faith in God. The Robertsons of Duck Dynasty fame, for instance, knew what they were fighting for.

“Almost uniquely among those who were assigned a scarlet letter,” I wrote of family patriarch Phil, “Robertson understood the nature of the religious war being waged. The struggle was not between left and right in any political sense. It was a struggle between the politically correct and the ‘biblically correct,’ between the ‘new man’ of the progressive imagination and the ‘new creation’ in Christ” that Robertson had become.”

The Left: Heroes or Losers?

The future will be known in two weeks. If Kamala Harris prevails on Nov. 5, in Rao’s words, “This page of history remains unturned.” The Left, he adds, might succeed in “extinguishing the beacon of freedom.” In this craven new world, citizens will remember Liz Cheney as a patriot, the Sedition Hunters as heroes, and Jan. 6 as Sept. 11.

If Trump prevails, we turn a page on history. We uncover the truth of Jan. 6 and remember that day not the way the Chinese do Tiananmen Square but the way the French do the Bastille.  If so, our success will be due in large part to the recognition by an unexpected alliance of high-powered influencers that Phil Robertson was right: the battle is a spiritual one.

In finding or rediscovering their faith, these people — Russell Brand, Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Naomi Wolf, even, in his own way, Elon Musk — have come to appreciate the wisdom of America’s founders: freedom is God’s gift to man, and not even a Mao can take that away.

“You’ll never hear me say I’m on God’s side or God’s with me, or even I’m with God,” said Tucker Carlson in concluding his speech at the Republican National Convention. “I want to be; not sure I am. But I will say this, unequivocally and conclusively, God is among us right now. And I think that’s enough. God bless you.”

READ MORE from Jack Cashill:

Jack Smith Shamelessly Withholds Evidence

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

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

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