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Ten years ago this month, a nation teetering on the edge of tyranny seemed to get its final push when, on Oct. 7, 2016, the Washington Post dropped the infamous Access Hollywood tapes. In newsrooms and boardrooms and teachers’ lounges across America, the enemies of Donald Trump celebrated, convinced that they had been liberated from their own imagined Hitler.
“When you’re a star, they let you do it …,” Trump was heard telling television host Billy Bush on this 11-year-old tape. Democrats popped corks and RINOs stampeded for the exits. “I am sickened by what I heard today. Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified,” said Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan. Ryan promptly withdrew from a campaign appearance with Trump the following day in his home state of Wisconsin.
That same Saturday, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus hit Trump with a sobering assessment. “I’m hearing,” said Priebus, “that you can either withdraw or you can lose in the biggest landslide that’s ever been had.” With the RINOs in full stampede, Trump squared off all but una – ided against the assembled forces of Jacobin America. Love him or hate him, there was – and is – no denying Trump’s nearly superhuman will to power.
A word on the Jacobins. In 1789, the same year George Washington was sworn in as America’s first president, a caucus of increasingly radical deputies from the National Assembly met in a former convent in Paris. In the days to come, the deputies added new members from the commercial elite and formed the Society of the Friends of the Constitution. The group became better known by the name of the convent in which they met, “The Jacobins.”
In 1791, the National Assembly drafted the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.” Although democratic in its concept, one clause would forever distinguish this declaration from America’s founding documents: “The source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body, no individual can exercise authority that does not expressly proceed from the latter.”
While Jacobin-led mobs were asserting their sovereignty in the streets of Paris, here at home the separate states were peacefully deliberating on a Bill of Rights, one crafted by the very first Congress to protect the citizen’s God-given freedoms.
Although America endured and prospered, by 2016 it had developed its own increasingly faithless elite, one that eerily mimicked the French Jacobins. Thinking themselves wiser than the God that humbled the nation’s founders, these new Jacobins had set out to “fundamentally transform” America in their own light and all but succeeded.
How this class evolved is a subject for another day, but its existence was hard to deny. In late 2023, pollster Scott Rasmussen conducted an extensive survey comparing the attitudes of the “elite” to those of ordinary citizens. Rasmussen defined the elite as those having a household income of at least $150,000, one or more graduate degrees, and an urban residence.
Although the results were startling across the board, the response to one question stood out. Rasmussen asked whether the United States “provides too much individual freedom, too much government control, or is the balance about right?” A stunning 47 percent of the elite said “too much freedom.” Among the elite with Ivy League educations, an ominous 57 percent said “too much freedom.” Among ordinary citizens that figure was 16 percent. Among Trump’s supporters, that number approached zero.
If not a perfect match with the French original, “Jacobin” serves as a useful shorthand for Rasmussen’s “elite” and their fellow travelers. Despite their vast ideological divergence from ordinary citizens, these people held enormous power.
By 2016, every elected Democrat, some elected Republicans, much of the intelligence community, and most of the administrative state belonged to the Jacobin club in Washington. Jacobin clubs in Hollywood and Silicon Valley exercised nearly monopolistic control over their respective industries.
Jacobins ruled higher education and increasingly, through their fully owned teacher unions, the public education establishment. Jacobins controlled the health care industry, almost every major newsroom and most corporate boardrooms. Under President Barack Obama, they greased their way into strategic positions in the military.
The Jacobins had moved well beyond the liberalism that once defined the American left. Most paid lip service to the progressivism they used as bait to attract the woke among their intersectional ranks – the blacks, the browns, the greens, the gays, the lesbians, the trans, the feminists, the Muslims and any other “marginalized” group willing to make noise in the street. But for club members in the know, the ultimate goal was power, global power. Having transcended the nation state, they allied themselves with Jacobin elites throughout the world.
For the original French Jacobins to succeed, the ancien regime – the old order headed by the king and the nobility and buttressed by the aristocracy and the clergy – had to fall. For the globalist Jacobins to succeed, the old America – grounded in faith, family, Judeo-Christian morality, property rights and the freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution – had to yield to the Jacobins’ “new America,” the cornerstone of a “new world order.”
If Donald Trump lacked some of the pieties of the old America, he understood the battle at hand more clearly than did his faltering allies. With a major boost from Providence, he somehow triumphed over this brooding evil in 2016 and again in 2024.
In May 2017, meanwhile, France elected as its president – and reelected in 2022 – the spineless Jacobin Emmanuel Macron. Instead of resisting evil, he, like Robespierre before him, tried to accommodate it. As recent events make clear, he has not succeeded. When the tumbrils start rolling, he will be lucky to keep his head.
In America, the success of the Trump-led counter-revolution is hardly guaranteed. Trump has constrained the Jacobins but not converted them. That task will fall to his successor. In the days ahead, Trump and his allies will need all the help they can get to keep the Jacobins and their “marginalized” mobs at bay. So put your cowboy hats on, folks, and get out there and kick some electoral butt.
Note: This column first appeared on Cashill’s substack. Please subscribe.
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[ H/T WorldNetDaily ]
