BFT Pod: You're Missing The Point Of D.C.'s Permanent Troop Deployment
Regime officials never meant what they said about occupying the nation's capital
Let's be real about why there have been – for almost a year now – thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington, D.C.: Because one of the boys who helped Elon Musk stage a coup against the United States government got wrecked by two teenagers in the nation's capital.
Edward Coristine, one of Musk's more prominent DOGE hackers, otherwise known as Big Balls, was assaulted in the middle of the night last August during an alleged carjacking, and in response the Trump regime occupied D.C. with thousands of troops, many of them heavily armed. This was never meant to be a temporary measure. It is, by any definition, a permanent troop deployment within a major American city.
Ten months after Big Balls was supposedly attacked by kids on a dark D.C. street in the wee hours of the morning, all of this has been normalized. It is a frog-in-boiling-water situation. It is part of our democratic decline.
Denny Carter
The permanent National Guard deployment in Washington is a prime and infuriating example of major media outlets granting the presumption of good faith to a regime that has never even pretended to operate in good faith. Regime officials, all the way up to the president himself, say they occupied Washington to address an unprecedented crime wave the likes of which we've frankly never seen, or some other Trumpian phrase.
This was interpreted by the mainstream press as a good-faith effort because a neutered media operating within the confines of capital has no choice but to operate this way. What we need is a press that rejects political bad faith and holds power to account; what we have is a press that accepts everything in good faith and paves the road to hell with a firehose of bothsidesism.
And so nearly a year after the National Guard was sent to take over D.C., regime opponents point furiously to new crime statistics showing the permanent troop deployment has had no effect on crime rates. NPR and cable news and various online outlets trumpet these stats as a Gotcha Moment for a political movement that can't be got. Because they never meant what they said about unleashing the National Guard in D.C. (with plans to double Guard presence in the coming weeks).
Ha, liberals and media types say. You claimed the deployment would lower crime, yet it did no such thing! As BFT readers know, this can only be said with the presumption of good faith, something the right can never be granted, for fascism can't survive without this presumption.
Denny Carter
"What the Guard brought was a massive, sudden shock from the visible presence of uniformed military personnel on the streets of Washington almost overnight," said researchers who published the new report on D.C. crime data. They called the deployment of the National Guard a "blunt and expensive instrument" unleashed by the regime.
Highlighting crime stats misses the point entirely. The regime sent the National Guard troops as a show of power against a majority-Black city it hates. They sent the troops not to improve the lives of D.C. residents – as one regime official claimed with a straight face this week in a statement to NPR – but to flex its muscles and to say plainly and clearly that you cannot attack one of ours without consequences. Big Balls getting punched in the face early one morning was just an excuse to do what the regime wants to do to every opposition stronghold: Occupy them, demoralize them, terrorize them. That it didn't work in Minnesota – that it created real fascist resistance among political normies – was a devastating blow to the regime, and a profound strategic and political error.
In today's BFT podcast, I talked about how the presumption of good faith allows that American right to manipulate the press and voters, and creates the conditions for a never-ending gaslighting campaign against liberals and leftists. Become a BFT supporter today and check it out!
