On January 6, I along with most Americans watched in horror as a mob intent on disrupting certification of the 2020 presidential election results stormed the Capitol building in Washington. Their anger was fueled by months of false comments by many elected officials, including the President himself, that the election was stolen and the results were false. And this was occurring despite the fact that not a single instance of election fraud was presented to a court, anywhere, with all of the false claims thrown out by more than 60 judges including a number who were appointees of President Trump himself.

In my prior career in Texas state government, I spent more than 12 years in the Texas Department of Public Safety, more than a few of which were as a senior member of the director’s personal staff in Austin. I also served 27 years as a citizen-soldier and ended that career after nearly two years as commanding general of the Texas State Guard. I learned many things about people in those years, the most important of which was that our Constitutional guarantee of freedom doesn’t mean that we are free to do whatever we please. My rights for freedom of action end where your rights begin.

Yesterday reminded me of a day in 1970, soon after the National Guard shooting incident at Kent State University, when an unruly leftist mob temporarily invaded the Texas state Capitol and it was necessary to fire tear gas in that sacred building to disburse them. We also learned from intelligence sources that saboteurs from Louisiana were planning to use a student protest march the next day as cover to burn the Capitol building. We acted on that intelligence and during the night surrounded the Capitol complex with more than 1,000 State Troopers in full riot dress. We also intercepted the would be arsonists as they entered Texas and I still have two little red jacketed books on subversion they had brought by the caseload to hand out during the student march. The march went on peacefully as planned without incident, as was proper in a democratic society, but the terrorist threat was extinguished.

The acts of violence intended to desecrate and destroy our state Capitol on those two days in 1968 were the work of extreme leftists, but they are really no different or more abhorrent than what we witnessed on January 6 by misguided far right extremists in Washington. Both were wrong. Both were unacceptable in a free society.

Regardless of one’s political persuasion, their right to demonstrate for their cause ends where the rights of others begin, and nowhere in our system does there exist the right of violence.

We have let the genie of hatred and disrespect for constitutional norms out of the bottle. Unless we want the American experiment in democracy to fail and be replaced by the kind of totalitarianism our forefathers and generations of our troops shed their blood to fight against, it is incumbent on all of us, regardless of political affiliation, to put the genie back in his bottle. We must overcome hatred in America, recognize we are one people, and once more restore our nation to its place as the shining light on the hill.