One of the hyperbolic Resist movement’s favorite reporters going back to her days with The Washington Post, Ashley Parker — who joined Laurene Powell Jobs’s The Atlantic in December — wrote a piece Friday huffing and puffing about the presence of the National Guard in Washington D.C. as part of President Trump’s efforts to address crime in the nation’s capital.
Lamenting the “torrent of coverage, criticism, and fear” and that “the occupation has chilled life in the city,” Parker leveled these claims despite an uncomfortable reality that, just over two months ago, Parker lamented having a bike stolen from her D.C. home she shares with husband and fellow journalist Michael Bender of The New York Times:
Parker uncorked the nearly-2,300-word piece with colleague Nancy A. Youssef under the title and subhead: “Why Is the National Guard in D.C.? Even They Don’t Know; Their presence has terrified some, relieved others, and left even the troops themselves confused.”
Parker and Youssef showed either a purposeful omission or ignorance of how deterrence works in law enforcement, suggesting the presence of the Guard was a waste because they’ve come across as “flummoxed, at times, over what exactly they were supposed to be doing in the nation’s capital.”
Similar to the liberal media oscillating between Trump being a ruthless dictator or a man in failing health, the two flipped from the Guard being a waste to something sinister, arguing “Trump’s decision this month to deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington, D.C., unleashed a torrent of coverage, criticism, and fear, along with a smattering of muted praise from some residents.”
“Their mission is ostensibly to stop violent crime, but many here and beyond fear that Washington is being used as a test case—the blueprint for Trump to deploy the National Guard across the country as a paramilitary police force—and that Americans are being conditioned to accept authoritarianism,” they added.
Like good liberal women in D.C., they huffed like core viewers of MSNBC’s Deadline: White House in kvetching the Guard and other law enforcement officials bolstering the D.C. police ranks has resulted in “[s]ocial media [having] been flooded with alarming videos: masked federal officers violently wrestling a food-delivery driver to the ground, kids having to push through heavily armed officers on their way to elementary school.”
Shortly thereafter came yet another money graphs:
The occupation has chilled life in the city, especially in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations: quiet playgrounds, empty restaurants, fewer street vendors, fewer food-delivery scooters. Nannies have stayed home, and house cleaners have canceled. Some mixed-status families are keeping their children home from school or skipping work until the federal focus moves on, or they’re leaving home only when absolutely necessary. As D.C. Public Schools reopened this week, some local parent-teacher groups organized impromptu “walking buses”—volunteers willing to help walk to and from school kids whose parents don’t feel safe doing so.
The National Guard has become the face of the occupation even though, for those who feel afraid, it’s in many respects the least of their worries. The Guardsmen themselves have generally behaved more like a notional guard than a national one.
Their sudden appearance brings with it an absurdist sheen—their tasks quotidian (“beautification”), their backdrops farcical (a Dupont Circle Krispy Kreme), their very presence sitcom-esque (as if lifted from an episode of Veep).
And there it was from The Atlantic, a beloved magazine of the wealthy elites who’ve come to make up the liberal base, that illegal immigrants make their lives go: “[A]bsent nannies and house cleaners are a frustrating inconvenience for the families who employ them, but a physical manifestation of the sense of menace that those employees feel.”
But who will raise our kids for us, they wonder! But who will clean our toilets, they cry!
Now switch those roles with cotton, cooking, and other roles slaves played during the Confederacy.
Parker and Youssef also made sure to praise the infamous sandwicher tosser, fawning over him as “an icon of D.C. resistance, his act seeming, in its own implausible way, to epitomize the city’s collective reaction.”
Only then in paragraph 11 did they make a passing reference to high-profile incidents like a 2021 shooting outside Le Diplomate and a June stabbing near Pride celebrations, but brushed them off as “disconcertingly...personal crime anecdotes.”
This went on with more silliness, ranging from insisting they feel bad for these National Guard members to lamenting they are being seen by “undocumented immigrants” as “disconcerting” and “terrifying” while “others” see them as “more curiosity than conquerors, more tourists than tormentors.”
“Often, the Guard presents with a certain Boy Scout earnestness. On Tuesday, military officials shared that the troops had completed ‘beautification projects,’ describing the efforts not unlike a merit-badge mission,” they boasted.
The paywalled-article wound down with more lunacy, including a concession guardsmen are human, admitting increased presence of the military deters fare evasion on the metro, and touting a group of women holding up motivational signs for students in front of guardsmen (click “expand”):
[T]he reality is far more complicated. Yes, the Guard has demonstrated instances of admirable sweetness; one Capitol Hill resident and father of two recounted to us how troops on the Mall allowed his 4-year-old son to press the buttons on their walkie-talkies. But, this person continued, on Monday he had gotten off the Metro at the Eastern Market stop and found that a group of fare-jumping teens who regularly hop the turnstiles had been halted by a combination of Guardsmen and police officers. He said that he’s long found the fare-hoppers to be a frustration of city living, yet added, “I don’t know that this was a problem that rose to the level of Let’s deploy the National Guard with their long guns.”
A lawyer who lives on Capitol Hill told us that she had observed something different at the Eastern Market stop Monday, when most D.C. public schools opened for the new year: A scrum of moms—or possibly teachers—standing in front of the Guard, holding up signs. “At first I thought the group of women were protesting the Guard,” she told us. “But then I looked at the signs and they literally said things like First day of school! and You got this!”
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[A]fter several hours spent wandering the city’s various quadrants, it was clear that almost no one felt particularly good about the arrangement: not the National Guardsmen, many of whom clearly didn’t want to be there, leaving their families and jobs...and not the residents, many of whom were furious with the occupation of their city or, worse, terrified of what the military’s presence portended for them and their loved ones. Even those residents who welcomed the troops did so from a place of discontent, so fed up with crime and quality-of-life issues that they felt relieved that someone was finally doing something, anything to help.
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