The president is in a bunker.

National monuments are defaced.

Dozens upon dozens of Secret Service personnel are wounded and injured.

Cops have been shot all around the country. Some are dead.

Citizens watch as their life’s work—their hearts and souls—are burned to the ground.

People are being beaten by the hordes.

Communities are in fear.

Who is committing all of this violence, all this destruction, and spreading the fear?

CRIMINALS! ANARCHISTS!

Not protesters. Not people concerned with what they perceive to be systemic racial issues within the criminal justice system peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.

No, I’m talking about the obvious CRIMINALS and ANARCHISTS!

I use capitalization because I want to make this point: Many of those in the protesting throngs are organized criminals with an intent to profit through illegal actions or radicals who are trying to create a new world order.

Those smashing and grabbing other people’s property aren’t looting! Looting sounds like a bunch of overly-enthusiastic suburbanites clamoring for new big screen TVs during a holiday sale. 

These people aren’t looting. They are committing burglary and robbery—sometimes armed robbery or strong-armed robbery.

The individuals planning and executing coordinated attacks aren’t protesting! They are committing criminal conspiracy. Antifa and other anarchist groups today have social media platforms which instruct followers in ways to commit crimes and terrorize citizens, politicians, and the police.

They are anarchists.

But it seems there are too many politicians reluctant to use that real language and commit to punishing the evil-doers. Many are just as reluctant to call criminal acts crimes—even the throwing of bricks at the heads of police officers!

Instead, they use such phraseology as “An external manifestation of internal conflict…” which seems to both ignore and excuse the violence.

As a guy who ran homicide investigations, let me be clear: If you throw a brick at the head of a police officer from 10 feet away, hit, and injure her, that’s attempted murder! Look up the definition if you don’t believe me: “actions that may cause death and/or great/serious bodily harm.” A brick to the head absolutely meets that criteria.

How Is This Happening in America?

My phone was blowing up yesterday. Friends, relatives, and colleagues were calling and texting nonstop. Many were asking the exact same questions: Why is this happening? Why isn’t it being stopped?

One asked, “How is this happening in America?”

My answer was, “We are allowing it.”

“Huh?” was his response.

I continued, “This country, our states and cities, seriously lack leadership! This was inevitable.”

Too many leaders in this country have lost his or her way. Their rhetoric, from the president to the governors to the big city mayors, is not just juvenile and disgusting—it’s dangerous!

This has been going on for years, and it’s only getting worse for everyone—no matter what side of the aisle you stand on. Grown people, educated, sworn to protect the constitution, given sacred and honorable positions, behaving like spoiled and entitled children sticking their tongues out, pointing fingers, and blaming one another?

It’s the exact opposite of what you would hope our leaders would be doing in the midst of these national emergencies.

The language used on both sides in the media and on Twitter—the way they speak about and towards one another—would not be tolerated by any decent parent in this country if their children spoke and acted the same way.

“He did it to me first, so I did the same thing to her.”

“She called me a name so now I get to call him a name.”

“I know you are but what am I?!”

“Yeah, I know I said it, but what he said is much worse!”

“He started it!”

“It’s their fault!”

Are you kidding me!?

My kids would have found themselves locked in an enclosed room together immediately, tasked to work out their ridiculous differences. And you know what? At three and four years old, their little pre-educated walnut brains were mature enough to calculate the reality: “Hey, if we don’t work together then we’re stuck here for a long time, so let’s get to it and move forward for the betterment of the both of us.”

They grasped that concept at three and four years old!

What do we have now? Politicians arguing and calling each other immature names while cities literally burn.

Politicians who, by the way, are more worried about political fallout than stopping the mayhem.

Today’s front page of the Chicago Sun Times included a summary of a conversation between aldermen and the mayor:

“Ald. Ray Lopez said he warned the mayor communities were at risk, and ‘she said I was full of s**t for saying that all she cared about was downtown. … I told her, ‘F**k you. You don’t know what’s going on. You need to come out from wherever you’re hiding and see what’s going on in the neighborhoods.’“

Grown men and women. Representatives of the third-largest city in the country.

Meanwhile, the city is in utter chaos.

Who’s in Charge? Where Are the Police?

Too many politicians are acting exactly like permissive parents afraid to hurt the feelings of their children (no matter how bad their children are behaving) because “punishing them may make the matter worse.”

Some examples:

“We want the police to use a light hand…”

“We need to give them room to express their feelings…”

“It’s only a small percentage of the crowds who are…”

“They’re not from around here…” (All of the cities are saying this. So where are they coming from? Are cities trading anarchists?)

And my personal favorite:

“It’s important that the protesters wear masks, as we don’t want a spike in coronavirus cases…” (And every cop in America hears that as “mandatory disguises for the criminals.”)

Why are the police in some cities not grabbing people and arresting them when they are openly busting through windows, throwing Molotov cocktails, defacing property, and stealing?

It’s complicated. Knowing when to move in and arrest and when not to in situations like these is tricky. That said, several officers have flat out told me that they’re handcuffed by the political fears of elected officials. “Acceptable losses,” as one Midwest officer told me. “We literally have to give up parts of the city.”

I asked a simple question: “What parts?”

He laughed, “Well, not the parts the politicians live in.”

Is This Our D-Day?

I’m a student of history, especially World War II. I’ve read dozens of books about leadership, especially on Eisenhower, Patton, and Easy Company’s Dick Winters. They were all faced with the most difficult of choices when lives were on the line—and they made those choices!

Eisenhower believed he was going to send 10,000 men to their deaths on June 6th, 1944: D-Day.

Thankfully, Ike was wrong. The numbers were much lower. But he made the decision to go forward because he knew that evil may never have surrendered its unholy power if it were allowed to advance.

We are three days away from June 6th, 2020. 76 years ago, we had the leadership to make the tough decisions and weather the ensuing second-guessers, naysayers, and the politically-motivated. They weren’t whining and worrying about politics; they acted to save lives and to save our way of life.

If the police move in to stop the riots and criminality, the fear is that the media will be filled with use-of-force optics that may cause more angst.

Yeah, maybe.

But one of my sons—a homeowner, husband, and father of three—said something interesting to me yesterday I want to share (and I am paraphrasing):

“You know, the people doing all this (rioting) are actually the vocal minority.  There is a more silent majority out there that has common sense. Most people like and trust the police, and they know that this thing that happened in Minneapolis isn’t really most cops. Most people know the difference between protesters and rioters. And most people want the police to stop the rioting. But the loudest voices are getting all of the attention on social media. The politicians are afraid of them. That’s nuts. Most reasonable people don’t want rioting or police brutality.  It’s that simple.  They are not mutually exclusive concepts.”

He is beyond right.

The criminals cannot be allowed to take over, but they most definitely are. The only way to stop the insanity is for those in leadership positions to put aside their differences, stop thinking politically, make the hard decisions, and lead!

Almost every politician says the same thing: they aren’t interested in power, only in helping their communities. Well, now is the time to prove that.

The people breaking windows, burning, stealing—they are criminals.

The ones defacing monuments, organizing mayhem, plotting attacks and murders, and aiming to overthrow the government (such as Antifa) are not protesting police abuse. They are using this incident to create a new world order.

Any sane person can see these realities.

This is, in many ways, our D-Day.

Do we have any leaders mature and unselfish enough to lead us through the current crisis?

We’ll see.