National Guard troops couching curfew in the Macarena are the ‘dancing nurses’ of the George Floyd crackdown

As US cities tiptoe toward martial law, the National Guard has tried to sweeten the deal by couching curfew enforcement in a synchronized dance routine – putting the pandemic’s dancing nurses into perspective.

The country has slipped with surprisingly little fanfare from the de facto medical martial law imposed in the name of the coronavirus pandemic into the real thing, deploying actual soldiers onto the streets of American cities to rein in unruly protesters, rioters, and looters with nary a peep from the heavily armed political factions that promised to fight for their rights if any of President Donald Trump’s predecessors had tried such a thing.

Power seized isn’t necessarily power kept, however, and Americans aren’t used to seeing military uniforms on the streets of their cities. In a climate where the police are so unpopular even the ruling class who gives them their marching orders wants to defund them, the National Guard are, for all intents and purposes, cops on steroids. On top of that, they’re weighed down by the guilt built up over two decades of War on Terror atrocities committed by their brethren fighting in the Middle East.

Hence: dancing. A few dozen National Guardsmen in Atlanta were apparently filmed gyrating to ‘90s party anthem the ‘Macarena’ on Friday night as the city’s 8pm curfew loomed. Skeptics declared they were recycling a trick played on Iraqi kids in the early years of the most recent invasion, posting a video appearing to show a US soldier demonstrating the same dance moves to a group of scared-looking children. 

The parallels between the martial law being gradually imposed in the wake of the massive anti-police-brutality protests of the past two weeks and the medical martial law rolled out in response to Covid-19 are obvious for anyone who cares to look. 

Not only are Americans once again – through no fault of their own – locked into their homes, told breaking curfew is risking their and others’ lives, but the people enforcing the rules are clearly not the people making the rules. The same sort of forced, awkward camaraderie that gave us “We stay at work for you, you stay home for us” is now spawning countless images of cops and soldiers kneeling alongside civilians, as if these can possibly drown out the videos posted nightly of other uniformed goons beating and tear-gassing peaceful demonstrators.

As Trump recycled the wartime rhetoric deployed so effectively by his predecessor George W. Bush in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks to sell two catastrophically misguided wars, holding up the coronavirus as the invisible enemy America was about to crush, the nurses “fighting” Covid-19 were declared “heroes” for merely doing their jobs and given the kind of hagiographic media treatment formerly reserved for, well, soldiers. After years laboring in the shadow of glory-hogging doctors, it’s entirely possible they were merely grateful for some recognition and unaware of how offensive their TikTok gyrations would look to Americans succumbing to cabin fever in their homes.

But seeing hundreds of the same medical professionals who were supposedly swamped with Covid-19 cases – most throwing “social distancing” to the wind, even while demanding the common folk adhere to it religiously – shaking their rears in clearly-choreographed routines fueled the popular rage that ultimately erupted in anti-lockdown demonstrations in many states. Here, nurses flexed their muscles as enforcers, meeting the protesters in the streets in what it was hard to believe were not staged photo-ops. Regardless of their authenticity, the media left no doubt as to who was the hero and who was the villain in these confrontations.

Totally not staged © Reuters / Alyson McClaran

It’s no great stretch to suggest that the frustrations of lockdown have found a more socially-acceptable outlet in the George Floyd protests, which have by some epidemiological trick been declared “safe” by thousands of newly-woke “medical experts.”

But the National Guard and police officers staging synchronized dance numbers in the midst of these protests are reopening old wounds. If the situation is truly so dire that the Constitution must be temporarily set aside in order to unleash the military on American citizens, how do the troops have time to practice their dance routines? The US military is accustomed to being in the spotlight – they must know the kind of impunity they enjoyed in Iraq or Afghanistan isn’t going to fly back home. Unlike the nurses, they can’t plead ignorance.

It isn’t just the military trying to dance their way into American’s hearts – police in Lincoln, Nebraska were filmed dancing the ‘Cupid Shuffle’ alongside protesters on Wednesday in a video that was widely shared as proof that police were on the side of the demonstrators they were supposedly brutalizing.

Scenes of cops in several other cities acting in solidarity with protesters cropped up, pushing a warmer, fuzzier narrative. But the day after Buffalo police were filmed kneeling alongside protesters, two officers were filmed attacking a 75-year-old activist who – according to video of the incident – was merely trying to hand them a police helmet that had fallen to the ground. Not to be outdone, nurses who had scolded anti-lockdown demonstrators as reprehensible grandma-killers a month ago were just last week filmed cheering Black Lives Matter protesters as they filed past a New York University hospital building.

The Centers for Disease Control has already hinted that any future “second wave” of Covid-19 will be laid squarely at the feet of the George Floyd protesters. That they waited until Americans had thronged the protests for two weeks – many in their first group activity since March – is telling.

But the nurses – the ones enforcing medical martial law, at least – aren’t listening. Joining the George Floyd protests with the #WhiteCoatsforBlackLives hashtag, they’re almost daring Americans to call the bluff of the narrative managers gleefully forcing contradictory realities to collide. What are we going to do, protest? These nurses will be there for the re-imposition of medical lockdown – and this time, they’ll be backed by the guys with the guns.

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