7-11-25

If you’ve been watching the news even a little bit you are seeing images out of

California that just boggle the mind……left wing agitators and immigration

apologists are constantly, and even violently, attempting to interfere with federal

law enforcement for daring to actually work to enforce the laws related to illegal

immigration…..yesterday, in a tear-gas filled full-on riot, left wing protestors

swarmed to a Pot Farm….a Pot Farm!.....where armed ICE agents with National

Guard support, were serving immigration warrants and seeking to arrest illegals

that were working the Pot farm…..it got out of hand quick as pink-haired libs

waving foreign flags blocked roads, climbed on law enforcement vehicles, and

assaulted officers……helicopter video shows one individual in the crowd who

appears to have pulled a gun and fired it at law enforcement as he ran

away……We’ve seen repeats of this anarchy in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and

Portland…..At the same time California Governor Gavin Newsom was all the way

across the nation in South Carolina campaigning against Trump for reasons no one

could fathom……LA Mayor Karen Bass, a woman so out of her league that she has

become a living meme, held a press conference like Baghdad Bob and announced

that these riots never happened…….meanwhile the Mayor of Chicago has

announced that he is directing City officials not to cooperate with ICE, and asking

for the City Council to pass a resolution to that effect……multiple arrests have

been made of anarchists who recently conducted a coordinate ambush of law

enforcement attempting to round up illegals……let’s be clear, the reasons why we

are seeing a 500% increase in assaults on federal law enforcement is because the

progressive left is willing to commit violence….and the progressive left leadership

is willing to turn a blind eye at best, and encourage it at worst…..this is all

preventable……but left wing leaders have to weigh in and make themselves heard

and tell the agitators in their party’s base that violence and mayhem are never

acceptable……in these great American cities liberal leftwing lunatics are burning

things down while liberal leftwing leaders are fiddling…….

It is possible to be in a bad situation and still keep order…..it is…..but it takes

leadership and the will of the people to do so……

I had an experience once during the early days of the war in Afghanistan…..I was

there just after the invasion on a small special operations team living for a year

among the Afghan people…..my six-man team and a US Army Special Forces team

were together in a remote region, hours away from any military base…. In

Afghanistan everywhere we looked there was devastation……if it wasn’t

destruction caused by a near decade of Taliban thuggery then it was leftover

destruction from the days of the Soviet occupation….land mines were

everywhere…..old destroyed tanks and armored vehicles lay by the sides of roads

and in ditches……scraps of weapons here and there and farmers choosing to plow

or not plow based on where they remembered that bombs might still be in the

ground in their fields……basically the detritus of war was commonplace, so much

so that the people of the country just lived among it…..the people got numb to

it…..I once saw a full sized bridge spanning the Kowkcha River and the abutments

were made out of former Soviet tanks whose hulls had been filled with dirt and

concrete to make the base for the bridge to stand on…..I have pictures of kids

playing on an old destroyed armored personnel carrier like it was part of a

playground……My headquarters was well to the south in Kabul…..my team’s area

of operations was in the north past the Hindu Kush mountains…..Hindu Kush is

Dari for “the blood of the Hindus” because it was said that in centuries past that

invaders from the south in what is not India and Pakistan died trying to get over

those mountains…..epic snow covered peaks so high that the rarified air made it

nearly impossible to fly military helicopters over them…….But on a few occasions I

had to come in from the field for headquarters business……it was no small thing

to get there but on one occasion one of my guys and I made it down…..and then

we got stuck. No air assets could move us back north. We were locked down with

my team still out there…..after 5 days I finally convinced my commander that if he

would give me two old Toyota pickup trucks from the motor pool that I would

head north overland…..this was no small thing but we did it…..and for quite

awhile we were some of the only Americans to have traveled the length of that

route over the Hindu Kush by way of the highest tunnel complex in world built by

the Soviets called the Salang Pass tunnel……it was high adventure let me tell

you…..no interpreter….just a handful of Americans including one intrepid reporter

from the NY Times who heard what we were doing and wanted to tag along…..we

passed through every war torn village and bombed out structure as we made our

way north……but I will never forget one village high in the mountains…..well

above the rest of the world it seemed, with beautiful fields of cultivated

sunflowers and crops growing beside rushing mountain streams with little ornate

foot bridges…..even the traditional small brown mud brick homes that stacked the

hillsides and perched above streams seemed well kept and beautiful……I told one

of my guys that it was like the war had never even been to that village…..and it

felt like we had discovered the legendary Shangri-La….but you know what the real

difference was?.....the people cared…and their leaders cared…...they cared

enough to not live amongst the debris of the lowlands….the villagers there cared

and would not succumb to the mindset that “this is just how it is”…….they took

care, they had pride in their homes, they lived with the understanding that they

could not change the world but they could change where they lived…..and it was

so evident….I would love to go back and see it again one day under different

circumstances…..

But here’s the thing….here’s my point in telling you that story…..the point is that

the people of any community do not have to just settle for disruption and

disorder……they don’t……while I’m not a fan of big government and attempts by

too many in office to expand the scope of government I can tell you that I fully

acknowledge that there is a role for government…..and to provide for the

common defense, support the general welfare, and ensure domestic

tranquility….those are written into our founding documents……and too often now

liberals especially feel that their role in various positions is to make life easier for

the criminals and harder for the law abiding citizens……and too often the law

abiding citizens become like the vast number of Afghan citizens I knew who just

accepted that they were to live amongst the spoils of societal upheaval….but that

village in the mountains? They got it….they knew…..they did not have to settle…..

That’s why I’m a fan of what some refer to as broken windows policing……the

social science theory known as broken windows holds that that if a window in a

building is broken and not repaired, then before you know it the rest of the

windows will be broken. …. Just one un-repaired broken window is a signal that

no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing, and there are no

penalties…….that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil

disorder create an environment that encourages further crime and disorder, and

eventually leads to more serious and even deadly crime….. The theory suggests

that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering, public

drinking, jaywalking, and fare evasion help to create an atmosphere of order and

lawfulness…..it was this theory that Mayor Rudy Giuliani used to clean up New

York and return it to the jewel of the world…..and just the opposite was done by

Mayor DeBlasio to tear law and order apart and make it hard for tourists to want

to go there now…….basically the broken windows theory is a community saying to

the criminal element that disorder, crime and violence will not be tolerated

……because we live here, this is our home, and we care…… you can see the effects

of soft-on-crime policies in places like Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, and yes,

right here in Birmingham……and for too long the people of these great America

cities have just capitulated, believing that there is nothing they can do…..they live

with it…..because….well, just because……law and order matters…..it is about

quality of life……

And if a village in the high places of Afghanistan can make itself look like a

postcard then we can right here at home……it’s about leadership…..the left has to

speak out and call crime a crime….that’s what it takes……

Because this is our house……and it matters……

And that’s a wrap for the Rightside Way