by Jason Morgan, Mises Institute:

In late May we learned that, after a five-month deployment to one of the most dangerous cities in the world, the American military would finally be going home.

Well, not really. They already were home. The dangerous warzone was the American federal capital, Washington, DC. And the “danger” that the military was supposed to be countering was entirely government made. The military—the National Guard—was on a mission to “secure the capital” after a few hundred rowdies had a Jacksonian moment on Capitol Hill. People who obviously had no plan beyond their afternoon tear through the halls of Congress were somehow presented as an existential threat to the American government, and so the statists in Washington ordered the National Guard to remain deployed. Apparently, the guy who stole a piece of stationery from Nancy Pelosi’s office in January was so terrifying that it took thousands of troops to make sure he didn’t come back and do it again.