A Woke Pizza Parlor in Memphis Is on the Guard

It wasn’t long ago that Elvis’s city, sleepy old Memphis on the Mississippi, was a raging, crime-ridden hellhole.

Last fall, as Trump was starting to push his safe cities agenda, to the Memphis mayor’s credit, when a National Guard deployment and task force were…well, let’s say ‘offered’? The young man admitted he wasn’t happy about it, but would take whatever help he could get if it was focused in the right direction.

The contrasts between Minneapolis and Memphis couldn’t have been any clearer.

…As my friend Willis Eschenbach pointed out, the biggest difference between the two cities from the beginning was the Memphis mayor’s attitude. He really did not want the federal government coming in, and that’s understandable. But he was also sanguine enough to accept that they were, not turn it into a hyperbolic war of words and deeds, and to make sure that those assets were being utilized in the best interests of his residents.

Two cities, same federal agency, totally different levels of sanity. 

In Memphis, the mayor looked at the political circus, looked at the crime stats, and basically said, “If ICE is coming anyway, I want them chasing killers and gangbangers, not doing drive‑by paperwork checks.” The idea is straightforward, grown‑up thinking: plug ICE into multi‑agency task forces, point them at the worst violent offenders, and when someone dangerous is already sitting in jail, hand them over there—disarmed, controlled, surrounded by bars and cameras. Quiet custody transfers, maximum bad guys removed, minimum drama.

A majority of residents, contrary to the pushback in a Trump-hostile media, were glad to see help coming in, if not outright thrilled. And it wasn’t long before there were tangible improvements.

By January of this year, crime was at an eight-year low, an astonishing improvement.

And according to the Memphis Crime Commission statistics for this year so far compared to 2025, the trajectory is still headed straight down.

Let that wash over you for a minute. I mean, that’s a success story, period.

Much of the credit goes to the Guard presence.

I was doing some Christmas Eve shopping at a Target in Memphis Tennessee and ran into the National Guard. I prayed over them for God’s protection and anointing in Jesus name. They said hello America and Merry Christmas! pic.twitter.com/o696s9UakA

— MemphiXs🔥WE THE PEOPLE🔥Jesus is Messiah (@Mrayray999) December 25, 2025

Of course, the task force itself hasn’t been without controversy, and these have been an especially rough couple of weeks. They have had four deadly shootings involving task force members and raids, which help feed the ‘occupation’ controversy, however much good they’ve actually done that the city could not do on its own.

Tennessee authorities are investigating the second fatal shooting in four days by a member of the federal task force dedicated to confronting crime in Memphis.

The shootings are likely to further exacerbate tensions within the city, which has been torn over the presence of hundreds of federal agents since October and their aggressive approach to targeting crime.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said on Wednesday that the shooting involved a Drug Enforcement Administration agent with a team of agents trying to serve an arrest warrant at a Memphis hotel on Wednesday morning.

A spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service said agents forced their way into the hotel room after commands to open the door were ignored. A man inside pointed a handgun at the group, and the agent shot and killed the man, the spokesman said. The state bureau said it would investigate the shooting, but did not identify the man or the agent involved.

“The Memphis Safe Task Force will remain in Memphis since dangerous criminals are still on the street,” Brady McCarron, the marshals spokesman, said. “Attempted violence against law enforcement will never be tolerated.”

The task force, he added, “has made the city of Memphis safer by arresting criminals, driving down crime, and locating missing children.”

The presence of the task force has ‘torn the city,’ and yet there are so many fewer dead people on the streets of Memphis than at this time last year.

Murders in Memphis are down 44% in the first six months of 2026, compared to the same time last year, and motor vehicle thefts are down 62%.

That’s according to statistics presented by Police Chief C.J. Davis to city council members on Tuesday. Numbers were down significantly across all seven categories of crime presented.

There have been 62 murders reported in the city through June 11 this year, compared to 110 at the same time last year.

You cannot win for losing with the progressive mindset, especially when it’s exacerbated by a raging case of TDS.

Three years ago, business owners were fleeing the city because of the crime.

Now they’re safe enough they can indulge their progressive fantasies by turning away four young National Guard troops who wanted to buy a pizza from their store.

This is on their instagram page pic.twitter.com/7fJ8QNW9Et

— Spare Me Your Selective Outrage! (@SomewhatHopeful) July 14, 2026

And then righteously defend themselves.

Principles and all, you see.

On Saturday night we declined to serve four uniformed members of the Memphis Safe Task Force, and I stand behind that decision completely.

I love this country and I love this city, and that is exactly why I made this call. I want Memphis to be safe. Every business owner does. And the honest truth is that Memphis was already getting safer before this Task Force ever arrived. Crime was at a 25-year low through the first eight months of 2025, according to the Memphis Police Department’s own data, later confirmed by an independent Tennessee Bureau of Investigation audit. That progress was earned by the people of this city. It was not delivered by soldiers.

What the Task Force has actually done is make this city harder to live in. Its own records show that the overwhelming majority of its arrests began with routine traffic stops, not violent crime. Families in this city are now afraid to drive to work, afraid to take their kids to school, afraid to be seen. Our own schools reported that fear drove children to stop showing up to class. And this month a 20-year-old Memphian named Tyrin Johnson was shot and killed by National Guard troops during a foot chase, with no body camera footage and no answers for his family. None of that makes us safer. It makes us less safe, and it does the most damage to the people who were already struggling.

Being pro-safety means telling the truth about what actually protects a community, and it is not soldiers trained for combat doing the work of police officers. That mismatch is dangerous for the people of Memphis and dangerous for the troops themselves, who were sent here to do a job they were never trained for. The founders wrote their objection to standing armies among the people into the Declaration of Independence itself, because they understood that a free country does not let the military police its own citizens. That principle is older than any political party, and I am not willing to abandon it because it became inconvenient.

Months ago I joined dozens of other local businesses in a public commitment to stand against the military policing our streets, an act of patriotism and conscience both, and I would make the same decision tomorrow.

They even got a little patriotic ‘We hate those people protecting us’- group together.

…Tamboli said a group of businesses is taking a “public commitment to stand against the military policing our streets, an act of patriotism.”

From one of the reports about the incident, the Guard members behaved perfectly, and the customers made complete asses of themselves. 

I don’t think I’d want to eat in a place like that in uniform in any event.

I’d far rather be asked to leave than have these twisted cretins mess with my food, which is something too many of them and their help are capable of.

…An eyewitness inside the restaurant said diners cheered when the National Guard troops were kicked out. Tamboli dismissed any concerns.  “Four young men were declined service, shrugged, and went to eat somewhere else. They were fine,” he told WREG-TV. 

The local Republican state representative wasn’t having any of the owner’s virtue-signaling BS, called them out by name, and good for him.

It’s a shame that there’s always going to be those people wherever you go, but the folks who will pray over you, or stop you to ask if you need an ice-cold water, or just to say thanks?

There are exponentially more of those Americans.

And there are lots of good places to eat in that town.

Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.

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