Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

And today, we want to dig into what's happening around the increasing military presence in several of America's cities.

This summer, President Donald Trump started mobilizing and deploying the National Guard,

first in Los Angeles, then here in Washington, D.C.

And now more cities and states are set to see Guard members out and about in their communities.

Now, in some cases, the Trump administration is saying it's

about fighting crimes in others to support ICE and immigration crackdowns. Advocacy groups in some

states are fighting back in the courts and in some cases winning, which has President Trump

now exploring even more ways to deploy the military on American soil.

To help us get smart about all of this, we've got Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow in Homeland Security and Civil Liberties at the Cato Institute, an author of The Triumph of Fear,

Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression from McKinley to Eisenhower. Patrick, welcome to the show.

Kimberly, thanks so much.

It's great to be with you.

So let's start with a bit of a refresher here.

Historically speaking, what is the National Guard actually for?

Over the course of the last two and a half centuries,

what we've had essentially is a codification of the last, you know, two and a half centuries, what we've had essentially is a codification

of the National Guard's presence, essentially, in our national life. And this was especially

true with a lot of the legal changes that took place first in the post-World War II era,

but especially in the post-Vietnam era,

when the National Guard formerly became part of what was known

and what is still known as the so-called all-volunteer force.

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