WASHINGTON — My city has been occupied for more than eight weeks. Major thoroughfares blocked, thousands of armed soldiers, armored vehicles, seven-foot fencing, concertina wire.
What’s it all for? An invading army across the Potomac? Rising far-right militias, ready to strike at any moment?
Nope. It’s because when angry rioters and protesters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, a Capitol Police force hobbled by its leadership’s poor training regimens, nearly non-existent fitness standards, and fecklessness in the face of crisis were incapable of protecting the building or even shutting the big doors on time.
It’s because those idiot rioters had finally — after months and years of left-wing riots here and across the country — finally given Democratic lawmakers and the corporate media the right-wing riot they always claimed was around the corner.
It’s because panic porn and agitprop are useful tools when you’re working as hard as you can to spread fear and distrust against the half of the country that disagrees with your policies.
And it’s because acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman is perfectly content to use her own men and women as political pawns and scapegoats to please her new Democratic bosses.
Just as with “two weeks to slow the spread,” on Capitol Hill we were told one month to stop the “insurrection.” Then three weeks in, the acting Capitol Police chief requested that fencing remain permanently, a sort of replacement for providing the training and enforcing the standards that are expected of police departments across America.
In the following weeks, reporters at outlets like Politico thirstily spread rumors from unnamed “Guard members” that March 4 was the day the militias would finally come back. Except this time, instead of tens of thousands of people flying and driving to the capital for a widely advertised protest with nearly zero preparation for crowd control, there was internet “chatter” about something maybe happening to a building people can’t walk within 100 yards of because it’s surrounded with razor wire and thousands of National Guardsmen.
