If you’re looking for a preview to the mayhem likely to play out later this summer and into the fall of this election year, pick up a copy of Jack Cashill’s Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6.

“Ashli” is Ashli Babbitt, the petite 35-year-old Army veteran shot and killed on Jan. 6, 2021 by Capitol Hill Police Officer Michael Byrd while she was protesting election fraud. In addition to writing extensively about Babbitt, Cashill delves into the lives of nine other women present at that protest on Capitol Hill, including Rosanne Boyland, who also died under suspicious circumstances in the lower west tunnel of the Capitol that day.

The passage of time and several investigations by conservative news outlets have laid bare the manifold deliberate lies spread about that riot. We now know how provocateurs in the crowd and the misuse of force by the police whipped up the chaos of that day.

Equally disturbing were the deliberate lies told by officials at the Capitol. U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, for example, was reported as having been beaten to death with a fire extinguisher and was given a state funeral in the Capitol Rotunda. We now know that Officer Sicknick, who was possibly a Donald Trump supporter himself, died of a stroke the following day. Yet even now the United States Capitol Police maintains an online post suggesting Sicknick died from wounds delivered by the protesters.

But the most sickening revelations of Ashli are those demonstrating the depths to which the deep state and the left will sink to win elections. Not only was the 2020 election probably stolen—Cashill and others offer plenty of evidence of that grand theft—the thieves then had the gall to declare it the most secure election in our history. About the Jan. 6 protest in particular, these same people have repeatedly lied and smeared Trump supporters—as white supremacists, naturally.          

Afterwards, these same officials and bureaucrats used intimidation and slander to silence any further objections to the election. Consider, for instance, the case of J6 protester Dr. Simone Gold, a physician who had also earned a law degree. Two weeks after the D.C. election protest, FBI agents battered down the door of her Los Angeles home, aimed loaded weapons at Gold and her husband and arrested her.

The media piled on without hesitation. Gold was the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that opposed the federal government’s COVID policies. As Cashill tells us about the media’s coverage, “They were downright gleeful. They had something better than QAnon to pin on Gold—quackery. Dr. Gold, the media assured their audiences, ‘pushed Trump’s favored COVID drug,’ ‘promoted false hydroxychloroquine claims,’ and was ‘anti-vaxx.’”

Gold later had to mount a defense to keep her medical license, not only against the COVID misinformation charges, but about her presence in the Capitol. She prevailed, but would later say, “One important lesson I’ve learned over the last few years, when they try to discredit you by labeling you a conspiracy theorist, it’s probably because they’re hiding a conspiracy.”

And right there in Gold’s words is just one of the warnings Cashill’s book unintentionally gives us regarding the upcoming 2024 election. The lies, slanders, and plots of the 2020 election will continue, if for no other reason than that they go unpunished. The tactics may change, but the strategy will remain the same. In 2020, for instance, we heard that if Trump won the election, there would be violence in the streets. This past week, U.S. Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) declared that if Trump wins the election, there will be violence and killing in the streets, most of it committed by Trump supporters. Waters is being disingenuous. Yes, there will likely be violence and riots if Trump wins, but it will come from the left. Is Waters telegraphing a plan to blame it on the right?

In his first chapter of Ashli, Cashill writes of the J6 patriots, “More attentive than the rest of us, they understood just how indifferent to the rule of law were the people with the power to enforce it.” Nothing has changed. They are still indifferent to the rule of law. For those who now command our government agencies, power is all that counts.

Forewarned is forearmed. Read Cashill’s book, then buckle up. It’s going to be a rough ride. But if we keep our eyes open, at least we won’t be fooled again.