En clair, unmistakable, no interpretation needed.

Our capital city is currently under military occupation. By Inauguration Day, there are expected to be more than 26,000 armed federal troops in Washington. No living American has seen a moment like the one we’re watching now.

For comparison, Lyndon Johnson sent a total of 13,600 federal troops and D.C. Army National Guardsmen to quell the race riots in Washington that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Those riots injured hundreds of people and killed at least 13. In 1864, as the Civil War raged on the other side of the Potomac and Americans died every day in large numbers on the battlefield, there were fewer federal troops protecting Washington, D.C., than there are right now.

But according to our leaders, the so-called “insurrection” of Jan. 6 was much worse than any of that. So in response, they have assembled the largest military presence in Washington in all of American history during peacetime. It’s truly a national force, with Guardsmen from every state in the Union as well as Puerto Rico. The question is, why?

For decades, Washington, D.C., had the highest per-capita law enforcement presence in the country and one of the highest in the world. There was no need to fly in troops from Alaska to keep the city safe. But keeping the city safe is hardly the point of this exercise. The murder rate in the District of Columbia has risen with terrifying speed over the last six months. Men, women and children have been shot to death in the streets, but no one in charge seems to care about that or even notice. So no matter what they are telling you, those 26,000 federal troops are not there for your safety.

Instead, unmistakably, the Democratic Party is using those troops to send the rest of us a message about power: “We’re in charge now. We run this nation, from Honolulu to our colony in the Caribbean and everywhere in between, very much including where you and your family live. Do not question us men with guns. We control the Pentagon.” And indeed, they do.

“We’re in control now” is one part, sure. There’s more to it, though, revealing a more troubling problem.

Republicans have spent years ignoring the leftward drift of our officer corps, but we can’t ignore it now. The mask is off our military leadership. The very same generals who howled at the idea of deploying American troops to stop an invasion of our southern border sent tens of thousands of soldiers with rifles to Washington purely as a show of force on behalf of the political party they support. Once they did that, they allowed Democratic politicians to degrade and politicize the military itself.

Democrats in Congress demanded that the troops sent to Washington this week submit to a political purity test — “ideological vetting, as they put it — to make certain that every soldier professed loyalty to the new regime. Not loyalty to our country, not loyalty to our Constitution, but loyalty to the aims of a specific political party. Nothing like that has ever happened in America and just a few months ago, it would have been unimaginable. Suddenly it’s compulsory.

In the meantime, you’ve got to wonder what the Guardsmen themselves think of all of this. Serving in the National Guard is not easy work. Guardsmen aren’t paid much. Some, you’ve got to imagine, are doing it for love of country. Now, they’ve been deployed to their country’s own capital city and they’ve been given orders to shoot their fellow Americans if necessary. That’s a lot to ask.

If you wanted to stoke an irreparable civil conflict, you would talk this way and you would keep talking that way. So where’s the pushback from our defenders? “Tucker Carlson Tonight” didn’t get any calls Monday from Republican senators begging to come on this show to talk about any of this. The Democratic Party is using the military of the United States as a political weapon. But Republicans in Congress just can’t be bothered to notice that.

You’d also think officers at the Pentagon would be outraged by this, but as far as we know, not a single one has resigned in protest of conducting background checks on people because of their race or sex or their political views. We can’t say we know entirely why, but some clearly agree with all of this, and they’d like to see it accelerate. 

These Oathbreakers, and that’s exactly what they are, are Exhibit A demonstrating that the noisome waters of the Swamp have seeped into more of FederalGovCo than just Congress, State, and the DoJ. The military is also a part of FederalGovCo; none of us can afford to just blithely assume that it is somehow exempt from immersion in the broader flood of systemic corruption. Ahh, but Exhibit B is the really frightening one:

“I was Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo for over 2 years,” a former Air Force colonel called Moe Davis announced on Twitter Monday, “and there’s far more evidence of Congressman Madison Cawthorn’s guilt than there was of guilt for 95+ percent [sic] of the detainees. It’s time we start a domestic war on sedition by American terrorists.”

Once again: A career American military officer has called for “a domestic war on sedition by American terrorists”. According to Col. Moe Davis, 25-year-old wheelchair-bound Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C. — who was just elected by American voters to the United States Congress — and the millions of Americans who agree with him and voted Republican in November, must be subdued by force.

Has Twitter seen Moe Davis’ tweet? Has the Secret Service? Do they care? Will a single one of Col. Moe Davis’ many allies in the Democratic Party denounce what he said or even tell him to cool it a little bit?

Why on earth would they? They’re all players on the same goddamned team.

So how long will this cycle go on? If you’re hoping America will revert to normal on Wednesday afternoon after Joe Biden is sworn in as president, you are an optimist. You probably assumed the quarantines and mandatory face coverings were temporary, too. Something awful has been unleashed on our country. Unchecked, it will inevitably lead to more awful things. Every action provokes a reaction. That is both physics and human nature.

Sometimes, though, just once in a great while, it is also justice.