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. My own brother was among the first National Guardsmen deployed to Afghanistan. When he arrived, he was horrified to discover that the vehicles being sent out on patrol were severely under-armored, especially underneath, where they were most vulnerable to IEDs. In many militaries, this would have triggered weeks of paperwork, or been dismissed as “not our department.” In rigid, class-stratified systems, only designated specialists would be allowed to touch the issue at all. But he didn’t come from that tradition. He came from the American one, the good ol’ redneck tradition in particular, where you solve the problem with what you have. He scavenged scrap metal, welded it onto the vulnerable spots, and taught others to do the same. They improved the vehicles in real time, saving lives long before better equipment arrived from the Pentagon. That is the U.S. military ethic in its purest form: see the danger, take ownership, fix the problem, share the knowledge.
This ethic keeps soldiers grounded and cohesive. When everyone does grunt work, no one is allowed to cultivate aristocratic habits, or the snobbery that corrodes so many foreign forces. Cleanliness, maintenance, and environmental order are not neuroses, but preparation; clean gear works, clean barracks prevent disease, and clean perimeters reduce hazards. Decentralized command, the American hallmark, works only because American troops are trained to act rather than wait for instructions. A military that believes “some tasks are beneath us” cannot execute decentralized decision-making. Ours can. And that is why, far more than hardware, the American work ethic is the secret weapon behind our military strength.
How Other Militaries Treat “Dirty Work”
Most militaries do not behave this way. In much of Europe, cleaning and maintenance are outsourced, officers maintain distance from grunt tasks, and enlisted members stay narrowly specialized. The result is a competent but rigid system, with weaker cohesion and slower adaptation. Russia and China take this even further, building extreme hierarchies where officers never touch basic labor, initiative is punished, and conscripts in particular are treated as disposable. The brittleness of that model has been on display for the world to see in the Russia-Ukraine war, where a lack of initiative to maintain and preserve critical resources has led to battlefield breakdowns and rotten food.
In the Middle East, many militaries rely heavily on imported labor for basic upkeep and maintenance, creating a force that is socially stratified and operationally fragile. Even the British military, closer to us culturally, maintains sharper class distinctions than the American model. Only Israel’s IDF mirrors our ethos, but theirs is born of existential necessity. Ours is born of national character. When you outsource the little things, you outsource ownership. When you outsource ownership, you lose the cultural habits that make a fighting force resilient. A military that refuses dirty work is a military that expects the world to stay clean. The world rarely cooperates.
The real reason Mayer’s insult failed so completely is that she tried to shame the Guard using the wrong moral framework. To the U.S. military, tasks such as trash pickup, sweeping, and cleaning gear are normal, honorable, and universally shared. To Mayer’s prestige-class worldview, those same tasks are humiliating. She projected her own sense of shame onto people who don’t feel it and never have. Shame only works when accuser and accused share the same value system. Mayer tried to use prestige-culture shame on dignity-culture people. It was like trying to sink a ship with a water balloon.
Because of that mismatch, her comment backfired. Americans weren’t ashamed on the Guard’s behalf. They were offended. They saw her sneer not as a critique of policy, but as contempt for the kind of work most Americans have done at some point in their lives. Worse, she ignored the fact that the Guard’s presence corresponded with a dramatic reduction in D.C. crime, something the local residents noticed even if she didn’t. Her framing wasn’t just off; it was embarrassing.
The “Jobs Americans Won’t Do” Myth — and What It Really Reveals
This same blindness appears in the oft-repeated phrase “jobs Americans won’t do.” That line didn’t come from farmers or construction crews or anyone else who actually employs Americans in labor-intensive work. It came from elites, the same class that sneers at trash pickup, while relying heavily on the people who perform it. Americans will do every job elites consider beneath them. What they won’t do is perform those jobs under conditions of exploitation: sub-minimum wages, cartel-controlled labor, no recourse for abuse, or wages depressed by illegal hiring practices. The myth that Americans refuse labor is not descriptive, but projective. It reveals what self-styled elites think of work — not what average Americans think of work.
And there is a deeper hypocrisy. If elites believe certain jobs are shameful and Americans are “too good” for them, then who do they believe should do them? Their answer is always the same: illegal immigrants. They’ve simply rebuilt the old caste system with new language — Americans on top, immigrants doing the work elites don’t want to see Americans doing, and the elites themselves floating somewhere above it all. It’s not moral. It’s not compassionate. It’s condescension with a progressive coat of paint. And if it’s not racist, it certainly rhymes with racism.
The American Military Still Knows the Secret the Elites Forgot
Here’s the truth at the core of all of this. The American work ethic hasn’t disappeared. It hasn’t been destroyed by academia, or by media, or by the prestige professional class. It has simply concentrated itself in the places where Americans still do real work: in trades, in rural towns, in small businesses, in the National Guard, and above all, in the enlisted ranks of the U.S. military.
The military preserves the values that once defined the nation: humility, discipline, shared responsibility, practical competence, and respect for labor. These are not aesthetic preferences. They are survival virtues. They produce units that adapt, soldiers who act, teams that trust each other, and a fighting force that wins. They are the opposite of the prestige-class worldview that sees humble work as degrading and manual labor as a stain on one’s status.
If the military ever adopts that elite mindset — if it ever starts believing some work is beneath it — then we lose the very ethic that makes our armed forces effective and our country resilient. But for now, that ethic is alive and well. It beats strongest in the men and women who still believe that work is dignity and that service is honor. The National Guard proved it again in D.C., doing the unglamorous work elites mock while providing the security elites depend on, risking their lives in the process. Mayer sneered. The country saw right through it. And the people she mocked kept doing their jobs — the ones that keep the rest of us safe.
