This is just getting started:
Kenosha Police said early Wednesday morning that two people had been shot and killed and a third injured during protests over the shooting of Jacob Blake; authorities were looking for a man armed with a long gun.
He walked right past the police. With the weapon slung in front of him. With his hands in the air. With bystanders screaming that he had just shot multiple people. But he was not black. He may as well have been invisible.
Social media posts contain multiple images and video of the alleged shooter. It is not clear what happened, although the shooting seems to have broken out near people vandalizing a car lot. Social media posts suggest there were multiple armed groups on the ground: some in support of people protesting the shooting Sunday of Jacob Blake by Kenosha police, and some claiming they came armed to protect other people’s property.
The shooting occurred about 11:45 p.m. local time in an area where protests have occurred since Sunday night. After declaring an emergency curfew on Sunday, county officials extended it Tuesday night.
Jacob Blake, who was shot shot multiple times by police in Wisconsin, is paralyzed, and it would “take a miracle” for him to walk again, his family’s attorney said Tuesday, while calling for the officer who opened fire to be arrested and others involved to lose their jobs.
The shooting of Blake on Sunday in Kenosha — apparently in the back while three of his children looked on — was captured on cellphone video and ignited new protests over racial injustice in several cities, coming just three months after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police touched off a wider reckoning on race.
Kenosha police, this armed militia man said, welcomed help from white vigilantes:
“We appreciate you guys. We really do,” police in an armored vehicle said after tossing bottles of water to a group of armed men.
Minneapolis police arrested 11 people early Tuesday after people there protesting the Blake police shooting in Kenosha tried to breach the Hennepin County jail.
People were going to die. That much has been clear since racial tensions exploded this summer after the police killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd. People have died.
Throwing armed civilians into the mix just makes things worse, whatever “side” they are on. This is as insane as the clowns who frequent bars where people regularly get shot, so they bring pistols in case they might need to defend themselves after several beers.
But it is darker than that. Donald Trump and RNC convention speakers are conjuring for their dwindling, white base images of cities in flames across the country and black mobs committing mayhem from sea to shining sea.
Donald Trump & Co. say Sleepy Joe and his citified, woke-topian, MS-13 radicals mean to imprison them in their four-grain-elevator towns and reduce them to unchurched, Marxist, burned-out, gun-free wasteland of socialist anarchy.
Just the suggestion of that, the suggestion of loss of white control once led to a reign of white terror. It led to the KKK and to decades of lynchings. To white mobs in Wilmington. And in Tulsa.
Trump is preparing to go scorched earth is he loses control, and he has white men with guns ready to take to the streets. They are already there. And in too many places, events suggest, the police sympathize.
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