Just this past week, the DC establishment deployed literally tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of miles of concertina wire to defend their presidential inauguration against a reportedly grave security threat. This impressive mobilization of more than 25,000 National Guardsmen and women, plus an untold number of active duty service members, were all there to defend Washingtonian elites from a motley band of smelly buffalo-horned and coonskin cap-wearing malcontents, mixed in with a handful of mask-less confederate flag-waving buffoons and Antifa agitators. Before you chastise me for downplaying the threat, consider this. For comparison purposes, that's 3 or 4 thousand more troops than President Lincoln required to defend the city against the very real threat of a military siege at it's peak in 1863 by Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. (1)
Homeland Security's Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli even revealed that Speaker Pelosi wanted to further play up the police state imagery by requesting the deployment of machine guns in the Capitol. Apparently in this bold new age of one-party rule, Democrats are of the opinion that nothing says national unity quite like belt-fed M2 .50 caliber machine gun nests on every street corner.
Does it really take more than two divisions of armed National Guard-members, being transported at great expense to Washington to sufficiently enforce Biden's inaugural themes of and 'healing' and 'unity'? Or did they leave jobs, communities, and families behind, only to serve as expensive pawns in a dystopian photo op designed to stigmatize the previous administration?
It has been widely reported that a military presence was needed for security... perhaps so. Please don't misunderstand me. The events of January 6 were abhorrent. I'm all for maintaining law and order. It is a sad reality that given the current state of cultural decline, there was and will be an ever-increasing need for enhanced security - and in the current political divisiveness, that need shows no signs of lessening. So in a practical sense, some measure of military presence certainly served a deterrence purpose. (2)
This sudden and newfound repudiation of political violence by elected Democrats is refreshing - albeit 8 or 9 months too late. (As was their confession that fences and walls really do work.) But for whatever was accomplished to deter a real or potential security threat, I humbly suggest that deploying the equivalent of more than two military divisions of armed troops may have been a bit of overkill to subdue a rather pitiful mob of unruly thugs.
And yet, evoking images of Cold War-era Leningrad or current-day Pyongyang during our national day of ceremony did serve other purposes, albeit ones that are at odds with the stated goal of American Unity. Far more insidious ones, I fear.
For one, the dark militaristic theme served very nicely to advance their disingenuous narrative that the 75,000,000 Trump voters are to be feared. Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, advocates of free markets, and the Midwestern working class people are “dangerous”, “enemies of the state”, “fascists”, and “insurrectionists”. Every sort of ad-hominem label has already been applied to Trump, his appointees, and his devotees going on four years now, so the obvious next step is guilt by association: Trump is evil, those several hundred insurrectionists are evil, therefore you people who supported Trump are evil, capable of anything, and can't be trusted. So we had to call in the troops.
Mark my words, those images of Capitol Hill ringed by armed troops and surrounded with razor-wire topped fences will be used by Democrats to smear their opponents in election ads for years to come.
Of course, it also sets the stage for their bogus impeachment and subsequent Senate trial proceedings. Look there, Trump and his devotees are so dangerous to the Republic that we now have more troops defending Washington D.C. than we did during the Civil War. Of course, this sort of political theater on the Democrats part also reinforces the view of National Guardsmen serving as mere political props in their perverse melodrama.
Perhaps worse, the over-the-top reaction is just another intimidation tactic clearly intended to send a signal to their political opponents. It can't be properly viewed without considering the history of FISA abuse by the Obama administration against their political enemies, the self-censoring of news damaging to Democrats by the institutional news media, and the current talk by the political left of unleashing the mechanisms of the state against its own citizens with amped up domestic spying operations. And it all combines to create a rather chilling effect against political speech.
All the more so, given the present context of the throttling and deplatforming of conservative voices and media-sponsored news censoring during and after the 2020 campaign, along with all the post-election talk of a need for the 'deprogramming' of Trump supporters, this extraordinary show of force was a subtle warning to any who don't want to unify under the boot of Biden's “very dark winter” agenda: that of oppressive regulation, job-killing environmental extremism, and unchecked hordes of illegal aliens streaming into our country.
It was an in-your-face proclamation, saying, "We are in charge now!"
If you don't join them and forsake your support for the policies of the past four years, you will be shamed, demonized, doxxed, silenced, deplatformed, unfunded, and perhaps even fired. You better watch yourself. It's Unify... or else.
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https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/washingtons-civil-war-defenses-and-battle-fort-stevens
Tangentially, it also significantly boosted attendance far above the usual dozen or so attendees we had become accustomed to see at Biden's campaign events.
Katie Couric on Real Time with Bill Maher, January 15, 2021. Steve Hassan on CNN January 19, 2021. Eugene Robinson and Nikole Hannah-Jones on Morning Joe - on MSNBC January 12, 2021. https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/12/washington-post-columnist-donald-eugene-robinson-trump-supporters-cult-deprogrammed/
