A critique of elitism and the essential work of the U.S. military in ensuring safety.
Jane Mayer of The New Yorker had a remarkably tone-deaf take on the tragic shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., a moment that should have united the country in grief. Instead, she chose to sneer, using the moment to diminish the very people who were shot.
This is so tragic, so unnecessary, these poor guardsmen should never have been deployed. I live in DC and watched as they had virtually nothing to do but pick up trash. It was for political show and at what a cost. https://t.co/ABkOHNHAvG— Jane Mayer (@JaneMayerNYer) November 26, 2025
The backlash was immediate and well-deserved, not because she expressed an unpopular opinion, but because she showcased a deeper truth about the prestige press: its snobbishness, its detachment from ordinary Americans, and its total lack of understanding of how the U.S. military actually works.
Mayer attempted to shame Guardsmen for performing the kinds of everyday tasks every American service member has done since the founding of the republic, and she read those tasks entirely through her own elitist lens. She assumed others shared her sense of shame. They don’t. She assumed humble work is humiliating. It isn’t. She assumed the presence of the Guard was theatrical. It wasn’t. And she assumed their trash pickup meant they were doing nothing meaningful, when in fact their deployment corresponded with one of the most dramatic drops in violent crime D.C. has seen in years. Her reaction didn’t merely misread the moment; it misread the people she tried to judge.The Military Work Ethic
What Mayer could not grasp, and what millions of ordinary Americans understand instinctively, is that the U.S. military doesn’t treat any task as beneath its members. If a unit is deployed, on standby, or between assignments, they are going to pick up trash, sweep debris, police a perimeter, clean gear, and maintain their surroundings. This isn’t humiliation. It’s discipline. It’s responsibility. It’s part of readiness. Officers participate as well, in smaller doses, because leadership in the military is modeled through example, not through caste.
But Mayer’s biggest blind spot was assuming these small tasks represented the totality of the Guard’s function. They didn’t. Their presence in D.C. was not decorative. It wasn’t a “political show.” The proof is in the data. After years of crime being quietly underreported through bad classification practices, the city finally corrected the numbers. Once accurate reporting kicked in, violent crime spiked to its real level, and then dropped sharply after the Guard was deployed. That doesn’t happen when soldiers are out there doing nothing. It happens when trained personnel provide stability, deterrence, and a visible presence that criminals know better than to test.
So yes, the Guard picked up trash while simultaneously making the city safer. The very task Mayer mocked was only possible because the Guard had the discipline and bandwidth to handle maintenance and deterrence at the same time. The military doesn’t stop doing small jobs just because they’re doing big ones. They do both, because both matter. The trash pickup was not evidence of uselessness. It was evidence of competence.Why This Ethic Makes the U.S. Military the Most Effective on Earth
This is where the American military distinguishes itself from much of the world. It succeeds not simply because of strategy or technology, but because of culture. The U.S. military embodies a work ethic rooted in the American ideal that no honest task is beneath you, that shared labor builds shared strength, and that responsibility extends to the smallest detail.
A personal story illustrates this better than any analysis could.
