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DC Held Hostage
My workplace and the immediate area is already boarding up in anticipation of Election Day violence.
Office space all over is already largely empty as a result of DC’s economic suicide in response to COVID. The Metro has about 5% of its usual ridership. My wife is required to “quarantine” and work remotely for her DC job because she took a “non-essential” trip to a family funeral last weekend that was held in one of the 39 randomly selected states from which DC bans immediate entry. [The reader is invited to imagine what I wrote about that policy here, then deleted for reasons of space, taste, and tone.] Most restaurants and small shops in town are closed, many forever. But we still need to board up and protect what’s left because the half-wit hordes are due to visit us again on Election Day to finish the job.
A couple of blocks away, the venerable old St. John’s church looks like something in a war zone. The offensive AFL-CIO giant banner with ‘Black Lives Matter’ apparently did not create an expectation of goodwill from the mobs—the CIO-AFL building around the corner is also tightly boarded up but in an inspired thematic triumph, they did paint all the wood black.
The reinforced fences with concrete base along the street are inspired by anti-suicide car bomb terrorist barriers now in common use around the western world. I am told that the section of the church complex set on fire during the riots after George Floyd’s drug overdose death while in police custody has been repaired. But I don’t think it is open for use yet.
Lafayette Square in front of the White House is now fortified with layers of reinforced fence.
Attackers who get over one fence will find themselves between fences, cut off from the rest of the mob, and subject to arrest or possibly non-lethal projectiles. It has the feel of a motte and bailey defensive design which is consonant with the kinds of early medieval threats re-emerging today.
I wonder if the DC Police, Park Police, uniformed Secret Service at the center of the fortified position as the last line against the frontal assault on the White House itself will be all volunteers or perhaps an elite cadre of latter-day Immortals. Will they embed a combat journalist to record the saga?
Below is a shot from a (now very outdated) Google Earth picture from happier times of that same NE corner of Lafayette Square.
The capital of the United States is held hostage by blindingly stupid COVID policy, asinine racial politics, and undue deference to small hordes of defectives who think violence is a valid form of political expression. America is not suffering from an ideological assault or an actual plague so much as our nation has been damaged by a massive collective failure to respond to an outbreak of sheer stupidity of epidemic proportions.
How on earth did our betters let us get here?
Oh that’s easy! They were never actually our betters!
Now to just convince them of that.
The problem isn’t really to convince THEM of that. It’s more important to convince the people who believed them when they said they were.
OldB,
The COVID Commandos have attained new vistas of sheer stupidity.
I think these guys are far more rational.
Regards,
Jim
It was the educated elites that chose Lenin and Hitler. The elites think the strongman will be their pet, but they are promoting a monster.
Perhaps the Feds will be smart and distribute some of the largess around the country and Congress will spend more time back home.
Some days I think it would be best if I never return to the places I loved, because the modern iteration would be too depressing. I lived in DC during the bad patch of the early 90s,. This is a different species of decline. Willful. Aided and abetted.
Downtown Raleigh is boarding up for the protest/riot tonight because of the latest “police brutality” in Philly. I should say what’s left of downtown is boarding up. They may as well just leave the boards up for a few weeks. In all the news stories I read, the business owners are again voicing their frustrations with city, county and state leaders (all demoncrats, as if you didn’t know). Well, most of you elected these $0bs. Votes matter. Start voting for the ones who will stand up to these thugs.
Downtown Raleigh is quite nice. It was gritty and kinda ugly when I was first there 50 years ago but is quite nice now. Great restaurants, too. You get nice shopping and restaurants in a university town but the price is that you also get hordes of kneejerk lefty voters. Trade-offs can be a bitch as Thomas Sowell might have said privately.
@oldbathos, I’m afraid all of your observations have to be in the past tense (except the knee-jerk lefty voter part). Several restaurants have close permanently, like those you mention in DC. There are a few businesses that have moved out of the downtown area to try and make a go of it in another part of town. Briggs Hardware, whose family owned business had been downtown since 1865, shut the doors and moved to the beach.
In one year, this insidious virus, the riots and destruction by these hate groups have turned our country upside down. I hope a year from now we are right side up again because it’s been the year from hell.
I have to ask: how does DC know about the travel of its citizens, and how do they enforce it?
I’m so sorry, OB. It must be a combination of frustrating and concerning to be so close. We’ve got to find a way to take our country back.
This is so gross.
I haven’t been downtown in months (I live and work in Fairfax County). I had no idea things had deteriorated to this degree.
I guess that’s one way of dealing with antifa’s pogroms.
She works for a DC parochial school that is open but under logistical limits. The education authorities were not pleased with the re-opening because that makes the public school authorities look bad for not implementing similar policies. In the nearby suburban Montgomery County, for example, there was an initial mandate that private schools not re-open even in part unless public schools did. Teachers unions, education bureaucrats, and the entire panoply of lockdown-lovers realized they over-reached so they backed off that mandate. But they are watching.
Anyway, the parochial schools in DC are going to great lengths not to trigger the authorities in these authoritarian times. Lots of visible spectacularly stupid permutations of social distancing are in place and staggered attendance. All of this nonsense is written down on paper in binders in case the authorities decide to visit.
In the case of my wife leaving town for “non-essential” travel, the thinking was that if anybody in the school later tested positive and it was known that a faculty member had unlawfully re-entered DC from a blacklisted state, that would create grounds for some sanction against that teacher and the school. So the school directed her to comply with the quarantine and work remotely.
How does DC enforce this silliness? They can’t. People from Maryland and Virginia come and go as do thousands of other people with out-of-state license plates. There is no way to seal off the city with checkpoints on the Maryland borders. The nearest airports are in Virginia and Maryland so DC cannot station men in trenchcoats to check your papers and take your temperature when you deplane.
Even tougher to enforce is the “non-essential” part. How am I less at risk of infection if I travel to the same places as you but I am on “essential” business and you are not? The stupid. It hurts.
Here are the states that do NOT require a quarantine:
Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, Washington
If you can find some common COVID statistical or policy link that separates these from other states, please let me know.
Originally the quarantine was a political stunt mostly to punish Florida for not locking down unlike NY under the wise and noble Democrat Gov. Cuomo but now the quarantine is an actual braindead policy. Written down and probably in binders somewhere.
What line of work are you in?
I work at a public library.
More boarding up preparations today in downtown DC near McPherson Square.
I wonder if the ACLU will be advocating for arrested rioters next week?
The Corner Bakery location at Vermont & K is gone but some new protections were added nevertheless.
Some guys boarding up the historic BF Saul Building (1924) built when that area was the financial center of DC. The finger on the right is that of a notoriously incompetent photographer.
I think the time has come to respond to the rioters with a whiff of canister and grapeshot.
Basta.
Interesting Twitter-thread on the subject.
I plan on going into DC about 6:00 pm election night and staying all night. I think it would be good to have about 100,000 more people there who wanted a peaceful election. It would be good to have enough people there to physically displace the rioters.
Be sure to have your health insurance info on you. And remember, in DC it is never self-defense if you are a white Republican and the attacker is not.
And “counter-protestors” might very well be arrested just for showing up. BLM et al, on the other hand, can expect bottled water, snacks, maybe pizza and ice cream after…
If counter-protesters show up, even if they just stand there and get beaten by leftists, the press will tell us that the violence was all from right-wing white supremacist groups.
And unless most of the counter-protestors fail to survive, it will still be ‘mostly peaceful’.
I was treated to a typical liberal hand wringing over the election the other day by a group of friends in DC, they finished by worrying over election day violence. Being the kind charitable person I am I refrained from informing them they reaped that which they sowed.
You can take advantage of the situation.
Grab some frens to assist, take this graphic, print up 100 of them large, attach them to the plywood boards with spray adhesive.
Do the DC police have some inside information that Biden is going to lose? Because if Biden wins, I’d expect the pogroms to move out of the capitol to the red states.