Notes from the Half-Assed Occupation
Trump dips his toe into military occupation and his troops nearly cause an incident.
A note: I’m working towards moving to DC to be able to cover stories like this more often, and have many larger pieces on the far right in the works. So please consider subscribing to this newsletter, I literally cannot continue doing this work without your support.
I finally got to witness the half-assed occupation of an American City myself. I say ‘half-assed’ not to downplay the use of military forces to do basic policing but that the presence of the National Guard was few and far between. They were only in tourist locations, by far the safest and emptiest parts of the city. According to the DOJ just DC saw a 30 year low for violent crime. Add that to the fact that the federal law enforcement that has been terrorizing people on the streets of DC don’t even seem to know what the fuck they are doing (for coverage of them, I recommend following Amanda Moore’s feeds twitter/Substack).
It’s a mess and it only seems to be hurting DC residents, not theoretical criminals. Journalist and documentary filmmaker Ford Fischer got this interview with a bartenders who says business is cratering as no one wants to be around the feds.
It was Labor Day Labor day weekend in Washington DC and crowds on the National Mall was pretty sparse. Tourism was already down nation wide thanks to Trump’s terror campaign against anyone foreign. Now with Trump issuing executive orders calling the city a “cesspool” tourism is down in a city that was already hurting from massive layoffs and government budget cuts.
DC’s Mayor Bowser made a deal with the devil, supporting Federal agents to continue working in the city as long as they “adhere to established policing practices that maintain community confidence in law enforcement officers, such as not wearing masks, clearly identifying their agency, and providing identification during arrests and encounters with the public.” No idea what the enforcement abilities are of this order, as the DC Metro PD seems to be continuing to work with them.
My assignment in DC on August 30th, was to cover how the city has been countering the occupation, that will be in the print issue next month. Along the way though, I witnessed a moment showing just how quickly things could go sideways.
There’s dozens of videos of DHS, FBI, ATF, and even IRS agents acting wildly unprofessional. You just have to search Tiktok for them. What I haven’t seen is National Guardsmen interacting poorly in front of cameras, until I was in DC.
At the end of a long protest march I came upon a squad of Guardsmen surrounded by Metro Police Department officers. Truly one of the oddest things I’ve seen in my work. Heavily armed, supposedly well trained members of the military being protected by the guys that let J6th happen.
I was talking photos of this surreal moment in the shadow of the Washington Monument one of the soldiers broke rank and grabbed a teenager… or at least that’s what I saw. Here’s the sequence of events as I saw it in the gallery below.
This is when I switched to video. There seemed to have been an non-physical interaction with a protester who was telling them to go home, or that they weren’t welcome. The soldiers family inexplicably was not only in DC but standing nearby watching him. The wife was crying, causing the young daughter to cry and the teenage son was trying to pull them away. What specifically caused the soldier to break rank, other than this emotional showing from his family, I couldn’t tell. I asked several other journalists and they were at a loss as well.
To review - a National Guardsmen with a loaded rifle rushed out of rank to grab his family without telling his fellow soldiers or the police surrounding them.
Looking at the photos I took of the Guardsmen it’s a reminder that many of them are kids. But they are the same kids that were sent to war in Afghanistan and Iraq with high-powered weapons and told that everyone is out to kill them. We saw what happened there with civilian casualties so one would thing that we shouldn’t be so relaxed with the idea of having them armed and bored in our nation’s cities.
