Since the Jan. 6 riots on the U.S. Capitol building, troops have descended on Washington, D.C., in mass numbers, for President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
While lawmakers and the establishment media say the troops are meant to protect the capital city from violence, Fox News host Tucker Carlson is not so sure.
“So no matter what they are telling you, those 26,000 federal troops are not there for your safety,” Carlson said on Monday night’s segment of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
“Instead, unmistakably, the Democratic Party is using those troops to send the rest of us a message about power: ‘We’re in charge now.’”
This quote is sure to stir up controversy, but Carlson has a point. It’s a point that he goes on to back up with facts and logical reasoning.
The number of troops in Washington, D.C., currently, according to Carlson, is “more than twice the number of troops that President Lyndon Johnson ordered to Washington in April of 1968.”
As many Americans are aware, April 1968 was a month in which massive riots took place in the capital city in response to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination.
“More than a thousand people were injured in those riots, and at least 13 of them died,” Carlson said.
In comparison, he said there are three confirmed deaths from the Jan. 6 riots, one of which was an unarmed protester being shot by police.
From purely a numbers standpoint, Carlson is right. Washington, D.C., was in far more danger in April 1968 than it is now, and yet lawmakers have ordered double the number of troops this time around.
Unfortunately, we don’t even have to go all the way back to 1968 to see the hypocrisy of lawmakers’ responses to riots.
Just a few months ago, Washington, D.C., was one of many major American cities under siege due to riots in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
According to the Military Times, the number of troops deployed to the capital city during the summer was much lower than the number scheduled to be at Biden’s inauguration.
The outlet reported that there were about 4,900 National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., on June 7 during the Floyd riots, and “only about 1,500 troops were on the streets at any given time.”
