Those of you who are reading this post are the type of people who pay attention to things.  That's why you already know that 26,000 National Guard troops drawn from all over America and from Puerto Rico have assembled in Washington, D.C. in advance of Joe Biden's inauguration on Wednesday.  (That's about three divisions' worth of troops.)  But have you given serious thought to what the troops' presence means?

I've heard from some optimistic people who believe that the troops are the last phase in a Trumpian plan to reclaim America and maintain it as a true constitutional republic, rather than the socialist tyranny the Democrats seem to have planned.  I'm a perennial pessimist, so I'm sorry to say I don't believe that the troops' presence means anything good.

Instead, I'm inclined to agree with Tucker Carlson's brilliant Monday-night opening monologue regarding the deeper meaning behind a massive D.C. lockdown that makes it look like Baghdad circa 2003.  As Tucker noted, this troop build-up is five times the number of military personnel currently stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

In April 1968, when Washington, D.C. was in flames following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, with a riot that injured more than 1,000 people, killed more than 13, and devastated D.C. for the next thirty years, President Johnson called in only half that number of National Guard troops to protect the nation's capital.  Even during the Civil War, at the height of the fighting, there weren't 26,000 troops in D.C.

What's the justification for the current troop build-up?  According to the Democrats, it's because of a dangerous insurrection.  If you're thinking that means an armed, murderous, determined attempt to overthrow the U.S. government and put a new government in its place, think again.  Instead, the Democrats are referring to January 6, when a small number of people — a minute fraction of the 500,000 to 1,000,000 Americans who gathered to hear Trump speak — entered the Capitol without arms or a plan.

An even smaller number of those people committed property violence, and an even smaller subset of those people assaulted police officers with bear spray, fists, or heavy objects.  Three people died, one at the hands of an unidentified government shooter.

I cannot condemn the violence strongly enough.  I detest violence, political or otherwise.  However, when the events on January 6 are compared to the riots that caused billions of dollars of damage across America over the summer and took at least two dozen lives, January 6 wasn't even small potatoes; it was small lentils, at most.

Nevertheless, it is that unfocused, semi-spontaneous event that Democrats are using to justify turning D.C. into a military occupation.  The Congress critters are the heroes of their own drama, and they are willingly abandoning even a pretense of being a free, democratic republic to heighten the magnitude of their over-the-top histrionic response.

As a reminder, when Trump was inaugurated, the video below, which contains newly released footage of events in 2017, shows the kind of violence that leftists visited on the city because they lost the election to a man who promised to — and did — govern within the rule of law and for the greatest good of the greatest number of people:

What's even more disturbing about the military presence is that, as Tucker points out, it appears that the Pentagon has thrown its weight entirely to the Democrat party.  Certainly, it is following the ludicrous "insurrection" narrative.  We see clearly that the one institution in America that was entirely non-partisan, at least at the upper levels, has become just another part of the Deep State.  It seems that Obama succeeded in changing management in the Pentagon.

Apparently, though, not all troops are viewed with the same degree of trustworthiness as their Pentagon superiors.  The most disturbing part of the Tucker monologue, below, comes at 3:00, when Tucker plays footage of Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Memphis.  According to Cohen, because 70% of the Guard troops are white males (as is Cohen himself), they are dangerous and must be vetted.

On Monday, Nancy Pelosi, who criticized Trump for offering National Guard troops to protect America's burning cities last summer, tried to help get the troops in the correct frame of mind.  She did that by telling them that President Trump, who is still their commander in chief, is a "clear and present danger to the nation that we all love."

Kevin D. Zuban's cartoon perfectly sums up the attitude of our Democrat-run military, working in alliance with the Democrat-party takeover of the federal government:

In 2020, something went badly wrong in America.  It became a warped simulacrum of itself, and nothing demonstrates that more in 2021 than seeing that America’s most trusted institution — the United States military — has chosen sides.

Image: Nancy Pelosi reviews National Guard.  YouTube screen grab.