“Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.”
– Judges 12:6, King James Bible
The word “shibboleth” in English has come to mean a word or phrase that insiders know and use but that outsiders do not. For the last few decades, leftists have been rolling out new shibboleths like Apple rolls out iPhones.
They redefined gay marriage as “marriage equality,” abortion rights as “reproductive rights,” and the sexual mutilation of children as “gender affirming care.”
In their most effective gambit, when temperatures started to flatline two decades ago, their alchemists converted “global warming” into “climate change.”
In so doing, they gave school children a whole new range of climate horrors to spice up their nightmares. Creating anxiety was in the game plan.
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.”
Before the day was through, certain Republicans rushed to the nearest mic to prove their respectability. Said Sen. Mitt Romney, “What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States.”
On that same January 6, before the OC gas had yet to settle at the Capitol, George Bush used the imprimatur of the “George W. Bush Presidential Center” to affirm his and wife Laura’s respectability.
“The violent assault on the Capitol – and disruption of a Constitutionally-mandated meeting of Congress – was undertaken by people whose passions have been inflamed by falsehoods and false hopes,” said Bush, speaking for himself and Laura.
Lest anyone be confused about where Bush stood, his remarks were headlined, “Statement by President George W. Bush on Insurrection at the Capitol.”
Bush and Romney might have checked the definition of the word before rushing to use it. Britannica defines “insurrection” as “an organized and usually violent act of revolt or rebellion against an established government or governing authority of a nation-state or other political entity by a group of its citizens or subjects.”
If there was anything “organized” that day, the Feds were the ones doing the organizing. The real protesters were anything but organized. If they had a common mission, it was not to subvert the rule of law but to persuade Congress to honor it.
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.”
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.
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.
Jack Cashill’s newest book, “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” is available in all formats.
