After the DC National Guard Shooting Comes the Big Lie

Over the holiday weekend in Washington, DC, two members of the West Virginia National Guard, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom and 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, were shot at a short metro ride from my house. Beckstrom died from her injuries and, as of this writing, Wolfe remains in critical condition. The news quickly spread that the shooter was a CIA-trained Afghan man named Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who seems to have been psychologically ravaged by his experience in a death squad underwritten with our tax dollars. The moment his national identity hit social media, the Trump regime did what it loves most: collectively punish brown immigrants. There would be no national assessment of imperial blowback—just Stephen Miller and his White House mob turning up the xenophobic racism to 11.

In the shooting’s aftermath, there have been many Big Lies circulated, but I think we must begin with the person whose hands are most stained with Beckstrom’s and Wolfe’s blood: West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey.

Morrisey, the governor of one of the poorest states in the country and who has spent much of his time attacking “the woke mind virus,” is pushing the following line across the media: “When the evildoers step up, we have to make sure that we do everything in our power to push back against them. We have to stand strong for basic principles like protecting our nation’s capital, for eliminating violence for reducing crime. These should not be controversial topics.”

Not controversial? Leave aside that “evildoers” in his mind does not include the CIA agents training and arming torture squads amid a 20-year war whose purpose seems ever more incomprehensible. Leave that aside, because we must take on “the Big Lie” being spewed across the political spectrum: that the National Guard has been protecting the people of Washington, DC. The idea that the Guard morphed into trained neighborhood crime-stoppers once West Virginians got off the bus at the DC Armory is a lie. Even the idea that reducing crime was a goal of this authoritarian occupation is a lie, and we cannot let these lies take hold.

First—and we cannot say this loudly enough—there was no crisis of violent crime in DC. In fact, crime was at a 30-year low. (Note that this link goes to Trump’s Justice Department’s webpage.) This was step one in Trump’s fulfilling a promise to the MAGA base: During the campaign, he vowed repeatedly to occupy blue cities militarily and uproot “the enemy within.” Forget the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement. This was about taking advantage of the non-statehood of Washington, DC, and normalizing the use of the military against US citizens—as Trump said in his instantly infamous emergency meeting of US generals. His endgame, again openly expressed, is to occupy our cities just in time for the 2026 midterms.

We shouldn’t forget that the Reichstag-fire moment used as an excuse to essentially dissolve DC’s home rule was when adolescent children beat up a DOGE employee nicknamed Big Balls. This threatened the wounded masculinity of an entire administration: a Black-run city had taken its big balls.

So the Trump team invented a nonexistent crime crisis just in time for autumn. This was not a coincidence. Crime drops in DC every fall, because school is back in session. DC has cut youth summer jobs programs, and the structure of the school day causes a dip in street crimes. It doesn’t take a PhD in criminology to see this pattern.

Then there is the Morrisey Big Lie that these troops were “protecting the capital.” The National Guard has been picking up trash, mulching, and basically doing all the jobs that teenagers could have been doing over the summer if there were robustly funded summer-job opportunities. And it would be cheaper to hire kids than launch an unprecedented military occupation. The Guard also heard from countless DC folks, very politely and at great cost to their morale (including the morale of Beckstrom), that it would be so nice if they would just leave and stop brandishing heavy artillery at crime-infested areas like the Washington Monument.

The National Guard has protected nothing. All it has done is wreck the local economy and provide a tableau of what fascism would look like across the country. For months, residents have been warning that such a shooting was inevitable. Occupation breeds violence, and guns beget more guns. The Trump administration mocked these pleas. Now Beckstrom is dead because Governor Morrisey wanted to impress the great leader by being first in line to violate legal norms. She is dead because the Trump regime wanted to occupy “Democratic” cities. She is dead because Morrisey sent 300 National Guards people to DC as a sop to Trump’s effort to stage an authoritarian costume ball.

The military occupation has only ushered in more violence. Three other people were killed in DC this week. Say their names: Kevin Booker, Demetrius Alston, and David Warren Childs. Police shot Booker and Childs. Alston died in Metro PD custody. There have been vigils for all three. They are being mourned in part, as the organization Harriet’s Wildest Dreams put it, because

Since the occupation there has been an exponential uptick of terror on our communities, neighbors snatched, residents dragged through court and most recently heightened violent encounters with law enforcement.… Local police continue to coordinate with federal law enforcement for the sole purpose of enacting terror and compliance, but we will not comply. We will fight back.

One last comment from Morrisey needs to be vetted. After first speaking about the need to not politicize the shootings, he said, “We are not going to let the same kind of ideology that drove the defund the police movement—we’re not going to let that happen with respect to the Guardsmen.”

The point of defunding the police and defunding ICE was that untrained people with military-grade weaponry do not make communities safer and that they actually represent a threat to peace. Beckstrom and Wolfe should have been home with their families for the holidays. That goes for Booker, Alston, and Childs as well. To ensure public safety, the National Guard occupying DC should be sent home. CIA black ops—and the presidents who funded them—should be scrutinized for training killers. And this regime—offering only nihilism, collective punishment, and extrajudicial murder—should be tried in a criminal court. But that’s not all we need to see. Offering a different vision of public safety is a matter of life and death—and a federal occupation of our cities must have no role in this vision.