"City under siege" feel as buildings stay boarded up over fears of MAGAt violence
As 2020 draws to an end, many buildings downtown remain boarded up. For all the city government's begging building owners to remove the boards, the recent bouts of MAGA/Proud Boys violence and fears of Inauguration street battles are keeping the boards up, and more buildings have boarded up since the brutal Dec 12 MAGA/Proud Boys mess.
When the far-right extremists come, they defy any and all city laws that inconvenience them, such as covid-19 precautions all the way down to refusing to wear masks. They wave "thin blue line flags" but defy the very police they worship, to the point of throwing things at police until they got maced on Dec 12. They shout slogans like "back the blue," yet one of them apparently stabbed a cop on Dec 12, all because they were not able to get to Black Lives Matter Plaza and destroy it. There is the sense that DC is a city under siege that cannot control its own fate anymore. This can only be compared to living in a small country watching a violent and aggressive neighbor build up their troops on the border, knowing invasion is sure to come.
Jan 6, 17, and 20 are all days the extreme-right has promised to return to DC, and many fear these days will be messy and even bloody. There are even fears that Trump will first order the Proud Boys to get as violent as possible ("be wild") on Jan 6 as Congress meets to certify Biden's election, then turn around and use that very violence in an attempt to invoke the Insurrection Act. Newsweek cited sources inside the Pentagon, saying the military has been on "red alert" trying to find a way out of being dragged into this fight. If Trump can get the military to deploy, his next steps are suspected of being an attempt to sieze votiong machines and re-run the vote in a number of swing states. If this occurs, voter suppression could be as simple as having National Guard roadblocks between neighborhoods of color and polling places, or just having enough troops stationed there to deter all but right-wing white male voters.
