Home » Who is rioting in Kenosha, Wisconsin?

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Who is rioting in Kenosha, Wisconsin? — 85 Comments

  1. I don’t understand why they target the police.
    It’s the politicians that order the police to take action.
    They should be the target of the mayhem.

  2. Got some FB reax from friends and relatives. Many of them speak as if the video is not available. As if the rest of us don’t know better.
    I suppose the question is what proportion of the people to whom they are speaking know better, do the speakers know others know better, and do they care?
    That said, the cops might have saved themselves a lot of trouble by doing the bad optics hand to hand. A baton butt to the tummy will fold a guy up and, unlike a bullet, can be more easily cured.

  3. Batons are deprecated by many police departments these days. Because they are intimidating.
    I think if I had a choice between being subdued by baton clubbing vs having a 40 cal magazine emptied into me, I’d go with the clubbing.

  4. In recent years batons have been discouraged: bad optics, a lot of training is needed, and I think part of the reason (not usually stated, but it makes sense) is that they require more muscle and women probably are not good with them.

    The use of batons also is just as likely to cause a rioting reaction – recall Rodney King, who was beaten with baton-type instruments rather than shot. It didn’t matter to the rioters.

    Apparently, Blake had already fought with 2 police officers (male, I’m pretty sure) and broken away from them, prior to his entering the car.

  5. I don’t have any idea on who these people are, but given Madison and nearby Chicago, you’re assumption that that is where they’re from is probably correct.

    On several places today relating to Kenosha I saw a substantial increase, to what looks like 80%, of the commenters saying it’s time to start shooting. Get your guns, ammo, and start taking them out. If it’s BLM/Antifa’s goal to start a shooting war, it’s getting close.

  6. When 3 cops point their weapons at you and tell you to stop…the ball is in your court.

  7. Zaphod:

    Here’s the warning you probably knew you’d get: your first sentence of the above comment is not acceptable here. I ban a lot of things on the blog, including gratuitous insults as well as outright, mindless name-calling racism – or outright, mindless name-calling of many sorts, actually.

    You’ve skirted the line here many times, and not just with black people by any means.

    As far as the last sentence of your comment goes – it’s technically correct that if a white person had received the same treatment at the hands of the Kenosha police, there would have been no riots, so in that sense it’s true that if no black people lived in Kenosha there would have been no riots. And of course some black people have been part of the riots. But in the clips I’ve seen – and not made or posted by people sympathetic to the rioters – I’ve seen more white people, and all look to be about college age.

  8. That is a question I’ve been wondering about since the rioting began. It’s clearly not spontaneous; they are organized and trained. I also wonder what motivates them to be so vicious, Marquise Love being a recent example but there are many. It seems it wouldn’t be that difficult for an enterprising, conservative journalist to do a little digging. Who are they? Where are they from? How do they coordinate and communicate. And who’s paying for this?

  9. If these rioters had any common sense then they would avoid crossing state lines because it changes the jurisdiction if I understand the US law correctly.

    As a non-American I am amazed at the whole police apparatus in US. Just do a web search on “police forfeiture abuse”. There are some real horror stories out there. As for the shootings, they really should carry non-lethal options like taser. There is no doubt Jacob Blake put up a fight just like there is no doubt that he was shot in the back. It is all in the videos that are out there. If somebody resists arrest then is shooting him justified? That is for politicians to decide.

  10. Neo: It’s a Fair Cop. Your blog, your standards, etc., etc. And I do have the greatest respect for your calm commentary and attention to forensic detail – facets I am somewhat deficient in.

    With the greatest respect, I must point out though that logic, reason, good manners, tolerance, turning the other cheek, etc. have gotten us to this point.

    The truth is 90% of us see these antics and think what I just put into words. We’re all like the one guy (same as the other million guys next to him) at Ceaucescu’s Last Speech. These things have to be said so that others have the courage to step up and say Enough!

    Sure there is no courage in saying it anonymously at your blog, and it’s very dangerous to do this in Real Life. But this ‘Tolerance’ has got to stop.

    Not that I am not saying they are not human. I am saying that to be considered human, or an adult for that matter, one must act like one. When no cooperation is forthcoming, acceptance, let alone polite indifference should be withdrawn. What’s left is contempt.

  11. Have not the police and elected officials sworn an oath to defend the US Constitution and we the people from all enemies, both foreign and domestic?

    The crossing of lines began with selective defense of our freedom of speech, and has continued with not protecting people, their property, their businesses, and public property.

    We seem to fear fully acknowledging the trajectory toward chaos and the lines already crossed in that direction. The police oath obligates them to disobey their bosses if necessary to defend the Constitution. It is past time for them to do so, lest the people judge them to have joined the enemy and begin taking matters into their own hands.

  12. Some quick observations with the proviso that my information is stale. I live in the Chicago NorthShore, having moved here from the Milwaukee area in 1998. I’ve been in and out of Kenosha for work and pleasure over the years. In the past, Racine was a “more desirable” area if one could live on the northern end of the city where the older homes are lovely. Kenosha was the more industrial of the two cites, home to both Chrysler and J I Case. Both businesses were hard hit like many of the other rust belt cities when manufacturing moved out of the region and country.

    Kenosha may have adapted better as people moved from Metro Chicago to the Kenosha area. I’m told that the city has “been doing better than Racine and is a much better place to live.” At one point, 15 years ago, I considered moving to Kenosha but found the city to another one of many aging and empty downtowns surrounded by a mix of neighborhoods. Kenosha was always a “tougher” town as many industrial cities were. Playing their teams in our “suburban conference” drew a different crowd. But to my knowledge, Kenosha doesn’t match the profile of other cities holding a core of angry, disaffected activists. It just was never that kind of city. It IS a crossroads right off the highway connecting Milwaukee and Chicago. It IS NOT a city with a police department accustomed to handling the level of violence I’m seeing.

    I suspect that the officers are by-in-large very average hard-working cops used to dealing with the kinds of problems typical you might see in similar rust-belt towns. (I offer no insight into the shooting. Not my brief here.)

    I really don’t see Kenosha as a hot-bed of violence. I don’t expect the kind of simmering ager I see in Chicago. I think the police — bless them — are out of their depth, lacking the tools they need. And I see a governor sending far too few resources while making the case for the looters in his social media postings. My sense is that this will be a “let it burn” situation, meaning that no one yet has developed and/or embraced a policy beyond containment.

    Eventually, the downtown will simply be burned out. Individuals parading Kenosha’s street publicly brandishing arms (AR style rifles) in support of rioters has not changed moved the policy meter a single notch. None of these behaviors strikes me as something I’d see developing out of “backwater” Kenosha, Wisconsin.

    My personal conclusion – no facts in hand – favors outsiders organizers. Traditional law enforcement DOES have tools to address this, but it is a slow process. Arrest, turn, track the paymasters and uncover the source … That may require federal help.

    I think it’s critically important that we see who is funneling money into these situations. The public right to know and understand is key. And we need to cut off the source(s) at the root.

  13. Just do a web search on “police forfeiture abuse”. There are some real horror stories out there.

    Libertarians who want free trade in street drugs are painting you a picture. Don’t be a mark.

    As for the shootings, they really should carry non-lethal options like taser. There is no doubt Jacob Blake put up a fight just like there is no doubt that he was shot in the back.

    TASER’s are only effective at certain ranges. They were too close to him for that to work.

  14. Still, if no blacks lived there there would be no problem.

    If you had a serious person in the mayor’s chair and the governor’s chair and the DA’s office, the riots wouldn’t have lasted three hours. The governor is a lapsed school administrator with an EdD degree.

  15. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to find that activists came in from Madison or Chicago to instigate these riots.

  16. More discussion of these issues.

    https://andmagazine.com/talk/2020/08/25/the-next-phase-of-the-revolution-is-in-full-motion-stop-it-now/
    Nationwide the violence has also moved into suburban areas and residential neighborhoods. … Much of the mass media, -which is ideologically aligned with the rioters and anarchists – continues to refer to the mobs as “protesters” and describe scenes of mass violence and destruction as “peaceful protests.” This is not an oversight. This is not a case of a difference in interpretation.
    This is a deliberate effort to prevent the American people from understanding what is happening. This is an intentional tactic designed to keep the population as a whole quiet, compliant, and defenseless.
    Until it is too late.
    … there are three phases to the struggle for the establishment of a Communist state. In the first stage, the revolutionaries organize and consolidate in base areas. … The second phase of the Maoist revolution involves the progressive expansion of the use of terror and the initiation of attacks on isolated “enemy” units. The goals in this phase are to obtain arms, acquire supplies, and gain political support. Symbols of “regime” authority like police stations and government facilities are typical targets for Maoists during this phase.

    (read the whole thing, if interested)

  17. Zaphod:

    Racial slurs are not okay and they also add absolutely nothing to whatever argument you might be attempting to mount. In fact, they take away from it.

    Generalizations take away from it, as well. Most black people in Kenosha are probably very upset by the riots and disapproving as well. It is a minority that cause trouble, and in the case of the riots of 2020, that trouble-causing minority happens to include a LOT of young white people as well as black people. I’ve watched videos of people smashing up a car dealership in Kenosha, for example, and most of the people doing the smashing are white.

  18. Andy:

    Plenty of cops have tasers. In the recent Atlanta shooting at the burger place, you may recall, the perp took the taser from the cop and was trying to taser the cop when the perp was shot. In the Blake case, I have read preliminary reports that they tasered Blake earlier or tried to, and it didn’t work. Tasers are not foolproof by any means, they’re just another tool that sometimes fails but is often tried.

    You may discover if you really study it in depth that police departments have been wrestling with very difficult problems for years about how to subdue violent people without killing them or harming them much. It is nowhere near as easy as most people think.

    And in the Blake case, as I wrote in an earlier post or comment, they were too close for a taser to work.

  19. “Business owner beaten and left bloody after defending his business in Kenosha, Wisconsin.”
    Looks to me like he used a fire extinguisher to startle the rioters? He paid for not being less armed than necessary.
    https://twitter.com/after_theaction/status/1298210964018429952

    Are others coming to different conclusions?
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-blm-protesters-shot-homeowners-while-marching-through-rural-pennsylvania-town
    Dramatic video has emerged from the latest incident involving Black Lives Matter protesters entering a residential neighborhood — a trend which is increasingly resulting in worried and anxious homeowners brandishing guns, as happened with the most famous such incident of the gun-toting McCloskey’s defending their mansion in St. Louis over a month ago. Rarely have such tense encounters resulted in shootings, but that appears to have changed.
    Late Monday night a homeowner in a suburban neighborhood of the small rural town of Schellsburg in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, reportedly fired upon Black Lives Matter marchers as they entered a residential area.
    Social media video appeared to show at least two or possibly three local men confronting the marchers, telling them to exit the neighborhood, after which shots ring out. Local media confirmed a person from among the BLM activists was indeed wounded by gunshot

    Everyone should stand up and accept jury duty for the foreseeable future, IMO.

  20. JImNorCal:

    The demonstrators haven’t gotten what they wanted so now they are escalating to try to provoke exactly that sort of confrontation.

  21. Serious question. Though it may seem incredible to some.

    Is, “chimping out” a racially directed or exclusive term?

    Seriously, I know that it is a term one uses to express contempt for the target’s lack of behavioral control, irrational nature, and even lack of moral reasoning capacity, but Honest to Gaia, I was unaware of an inherent racial thrust to the term.

    Accusing someone of chimping out, may be so contemptuous, and derogatory that it constitutes something of a near mortal insult and fighting words. Which, still, should not stop one from pulling the verbal trigger so to speak.

    But I think that I first saw it applied to drunken skinny white revelers/rioters celebrating their hometown champion’s victories from atop the roofs of cars others were trying to tip over and burn..

    I must be living in a meme bubble of sorts.

  22. DNW:

    Any use of words like “chimp” or “monkey” singular or plural, if used to describe a black person or people, is generally considered racist. If used for a white person, not really. The reason is that there is a tradition of racists comparing black people to monkeys, etc..

    Personally, I don’t compare any people to monkeys or apes.

  23. DNW…
    It’s like in another generation in Australia…

    Bert Newton (major league Aussie TV personality) interviewed Muhammad Ali & at the end of the interview was gushing praise on Ali & then said, “I like this boy! I really like the boy.” Completely oblivious that “boy” was about the worst thing you could call a black American man…The TV audience however caught the error & raised some jeers to which Ali play-threatened to punch Newton…

    It was quickly apologized for & smoothed over & all went their merry way…but yeah…any reference to one of the 4 great non-human primates is most likely to be interpreted racially.

  24. Have had a lot of time lately to read and to investigate various ideas, and to put some things together, and here is what has struck me.

    To paraphrase Jung, “to deprive a a man of his History is a mutilation.”

    And I think that a lot of the violence and anarchy and, as well, the passive response to that violence and anarchy that we are seeing has to do with that very deliberate “mutilation,” that deliberate deprivation.

    Up through the Medieval period men lived in an understandable, God-filled world; people were secure in knowing that there was purpose and order in the Universe, and that they were a part of God’s plan for that Universe—they had direction, they had a place, and an ultimate destination.

    Come the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and then, science and modernity, and later on the philosopher’s shout that “God was dead,” and all of that certainty and security slowly drained away, and disappearing right along with it was a lot of historical memory.

    Slowly and then, more and more quickly, we were cut off from our roots.

    Came the great violence and destruction of WWI, and the disillusionment that followed.

    Then, after the even greater and more widespread upheaval of WWII, Antonio Gramsci’s “Long March” intensified this cutting, as it did it’s destructive and subversive work, and what little cultural and historical memory remained was increasingly not taught, or was taught to us as unimportant, and either deliberately destroyed, or twisted out of all recognition, and made repellent.

    Science, meanwhile, has most often and increasingly told us that we lived in a cold Universe, one driven by random, impersonal forces and, ultimately, a Universe without meaning.

    Mush of contemporary Philosophy has added its weight, and taught us that there are no standards, that there is no Right or Wrong, merely power relationships.

    Is it any wonder, then, that—as so many of us have been taught–bereft of God, History, order, direction, and security, disoriented and assured of meaninglessness, and with power the only consideration–rootless–with nothing apparently worthwhile or lasting to defend, that violence and anarchy should increasingly be the order of the day?

  25. “DNW:

    Any use of words like “chimp” or “monkey” singular or plural, if used to describe a black person or people, is generally considered racist. If used for a white person, not really. The reason is that there is a tradition of racists comparing black people to monkeys, etc..

    Personally, I don’t compare any people to monkeys or apes.”

    I don’t usually either. But in the case of collectivists, I think it is probably fair for me to admit that I see, nothing, absolutely nothing, of fellow humanity in them; and the same pretty much goes for highly emotional, though taxonomically still human, “people”. In both cases moral limits and right reason have fled the actor. And if Man is a rational animal, then what is a human organism devoid of right reason and possessing only appetites and some ability to calculate one means or another to satisfy them?

    There comes a point when you have to ask whether the game [affiliation without any moral affinity whatsoever] is still worth the candle.

    It is fast approaching the point where the obvious answer is “no”.

    Say what you will about the content of the link (which I reviewed only after asking the question) and it has become apparent that merely eating instead of shrieking in solidarity, is enough to get you assaulted according to any historic definition of assault.

    The white guy leaning over and shouting in the face of the seated woman a video down, is fortunate he did not get what he deserved, which was a steak knife in the neck.

    The authorities however, in this degraded excuse for a legal culture, would probably involve the real victim, the diner, in years of life lost through litigation.

    Thus, if a collectivist attacks someone in public, the only solution they are likely to see, is to retaliate against a like and enabling kind in private; i.e., from cover. In other words, revenge motivated murder.

    These people are tearing down all interpersonal boundaries, making civil life impossible, and near to making indiscriminate social violence unavoidable.

  26. Snow on Pine,

    No it is not any wonder. And this process of de-moralization, first intellectual and then emotional, is as we all know no accident, but a somewhat philosophically based [if in essence anti-philosophy, and anti reason] program of reconstituting humanity, “by any means necessary”

    The Peterson video Neo posted does contain an apt observation just where she said it was. There really is, as Peterson notes, no excuse for pursuing Marxism nowadays except as mask for a post-modernist expressing his rage and resentment against a reality, both natural, and human, which does not bow to his will and celebrate his existence at every moment.

  27. In our various recent military actions against terrorists our military has reportedly developed various techniques and computer systems which allow us to pinpoint the actors involved, and to trace their contacts, couriers, handlers, those who facilitate and bankroll their efforts, and their ultimate leaders; to create a pretty comprehensive picture of the entire network supporting terrorism, and then take them down.

    What I am wondering is, why isn’t our government/military employing these same techniques and systems against the urban terrorists who are infesting our cities, their supporting networks, those who organize and bankroll their violence and disruption, and their ultimate leaders?

  28. P.S. I see that I’ve typed “”Mush” of contemporary Philosophy..”. above, and perhaps that was not a mistake after all.

  29. Diversity dogma (i.e. color judgment, a class-based taxonomic system, process, or belief from low-information attributes), not limited to racism, sexism, normalizes adversity. Hopefully, people will think outside of that quasi-religious exclusive frame of reference.

  30. Snow on Pine:

    Those military techniques require the use of surveillance of specific areas for sufficient duration so that patterns of behavior can be established and quantified and collection of biometric information (iris scans DNA swabs) to identify perps and suspects. Who knows if the military is doing such surveillance in Portland for instance?

    Pattern analysis for behavior and the biometrics worked and was developed to deal with the IED tactics (just one part of the problem). While the JAGs and ROEs limited the droning and other kinetic methods involved it was still not an easy task (think about the Iranians and their supply of Explosively Forged Projectiles (EFPs) in Iraq for example or the Pakis in Afghanistan).

    We have domestic terrorist organizations BLM and Antifa (and its various offshoots) that are fully supported by the media, the National Lawyers Guild, selected Governors and some DAs (Multnoma Co OR for example). Are they getting funds from the CCP or just the “progressive” Americans with big and not so big bucks? Implementing pattern analysis and biometrics may be applicable in a limited way but RICCO (sic) and other legal means. Sorry for the rambling …..

  31. So much talk. It is really simple. Kill a few and the rest flee to mommy’s basement. These are not serious people. They think they are revolutionary foot soldiers, but they are actually punks.

    They are funded by Soros, the dnc, and others. Follow the money.

  32. Chases Eagles–Because I haven’t seen a thing about any actions by our government to take down what is obviously a pre-planned, very well-funded, well organized, and coordinated campaign of Insurrection.

    If such an organized strike by our government against this campaign of Insurrection had taken place I ‘d think that a whole slew of government types would be in front of the cameras, taking credit for it, and they aren’t.

    Of course, it could be that this is Trump’s tough love “let them stew in their own juice” gambit, one in which he doesn’t take the bait. and send in the Military a la President Eisenhower sending the 101st Airborne to Little Rock in 1957, because he knows that that misstep is what the Left so fervently desires.

    So, when these Democrat office holders keep refusing the federal troops President Trump has continually offered, he lets those Leftists/Democrats in power in these cities–ruled by Democrats for a solid 50 years or more–enable, in effect cheer on–the destruction of their own cities, so that President Trump can then point to this destruction, and say–with no credible available contradiction–that “the Left/Democrats deliberately did this.”

  33. I’d like to know how many of them and which ones are out on bail or defaulting on outstanding warrants

  34. Arguably, only the Federal gov. at the direction of Pres. Trump can end these riots. It’s also arguable that it would be politically premature for Trump to act decisively at this time.

    To act now would give the democrats and their propaganda organs the MSM, a huge opportunity to more persuasively lie and portray Trump and the GOP as fascist monsters. Propaganda that might well sway independents and old school democrat voters.

    Whereas, forcefully condemning the violence while allowing the democrats the political rope to hang themselves is entirely to his and our advantage.

    Once reelected I strongly suspect that Trump will bring down the hammer on the rioters, the politicians and the media that are enabling the Left’s chaos. And he will start by declaring the Insurrection Act in force followed by if necessary, nationwide Martial Law.

  35. I live in the neighboring city to the north, Racine, and I have been watching this situation closely. Reportedly (Racine County News Scanner on Facebook) a few hundred cars arrived after exiting Highway 94 in Racine. Kenosha authorities had closed the Kenosha exits. These cars reportedly had covered their license plates. It is unclear if they came from the north (Milwaukee or Madison) or the south (Chicago).

  36. There is at least one software program for phones that allegedly allows riot participants to communicate effectively with no traces. It is also alleged that the “no traces” claim is untrue.

    I am quite sure there are social networks that are not obvious.

    https://tinyurl.com/y5cbeunh

    A link to a very good analysis of how the Antifa/BLM troops in Portland are operating. They depend on the unwillingness of the police to fight back, and organize their movements to make police reactions ineffective. They are very, very well organized. They learn and refine their weapons and tactics. They use screening groups to engage and delay police, allowing the more violent operators to escape.

    In Minneapolis we saw young middle class 20-something women joining in looting.

  37. Oh, and this will continue as long as police allow the violent operators to act from within shielding crowds.

    If, the first time a frozen water bottle is thrown, the police announce that a riot is underway, and start arresting *everyone* in the crowd, and not allowing bail for the maximum time, and even perhaps making bail a bit inconvenient, then it will stop.

    Tell the person who shows up to bail them out that due to overcrowding, your guy is being held in the Lake of the Woods county lockup in Baudette. Where’s Baudette? Oh, about six hours north. That’s where the bail hearing is happening. Bring your passport, because they might have overflowed themselves to their auxiliary lockup in Angle Inlet, and you can only get there through Canada. What’s that? The border is closed? Those crazy Canucks, eh? LotW County has a boat that’s authorized to cross the lake, but the Mounties don’t treat other boaters who try to cross gently. Best of luck to you!

  38. The police have been put into a ‘No Win’ situation. The insistence on less-than-lethal force weapons and methodology has won the criminal’s respect in the field that is directly proportional to the fear of injury that accompanies them. If a cop deploys lethal force, he’s jettisoned from his department, placed in legal limbo, and condemned by local political poohbahs, no matter how righteous the kill is. No Win.

    The elected officials (Mayors, City Councils, Governors etc) that support these ‘mostly peaceful protestors’ are simply taking the sworn power of their elected offices and transferring it to the rioters. With the support of the media, with the police forces told to stand down, the rioters are thus made into legitimate political forces that create real public conditions and real cultural change. There is NO OTHER source to their political power. It has all come from the officials setting the table for them, who not only have shown their contempt for their populace, but have also really stuck it to those citizens that voted for them in the first place. Even if you are a flaming liberal, there’s no way to conclude that burning down your city and incinerating its economy, and terrorizing your neighbors, is anything but a reckless folly.

    Now it is time to start asking yourself: “What will this become with a decisive Trump win? What will this become if the election is not decisively won, and there is a problem counting votes?” It’s hard to imagine either one of these being anything other than escalation.

  39. JimNorCal- thank you for the AND link.
    Gordon Scott ditto for the CSP link.
    Very interesting.

  40. “There is at least one software program for phones that allegedly allows riot participants to communicate effectively with no traces.”

    Is that “signal.org” and the “signal” app for phones? It allows encrypted text messages that are, at least, hard to decode. The web site has glowing accolades from various lefties.

  41. Great question! I’ve been wondering the same. Millennial Millie highlighted the Sunrise Movement (climate change teenagers) as providing the useful idiot ‘protesters’ in one of her videos, and today I found something intriguing:

    https://threader.app/thread/1297867296451497985

    Plus I remember Project Veritas uncovering the protesters paid by Bob Creamer (who was paid by Hillary) in the 2016 election.

    All of this is AstroTurf.

  42. “All of this is AstroTurf.” – MNslacker
    You can still get a bad case of grass burn if you slide on it face-first.

    But in the sense that this is a top-down organized insurrection rather than a grass-roots organically-arisen protest-gone-bad, you are correct.

  43. This is pretty much what happened in N*** germany..
    once the right politicians were in place, fear let the common people who knew who was boss, and which side they were on… that the people who were causing the fear were not going to end up in jail or prosecuted, and the common folk who would push back, were punished or would have things done in which there was no recourse… so they put signs in the windows, looked the other way at things, and eventually that became their way of life…

    as i said long ago, we never study mechanics and how things functionally got anywhere…. we like dates, and large ideas, and never about the key things that would explain or show easily how things get from Z to R… we magically jump and mentally dont ask the question of how did they get all those people to move along under the idea that they didnt really like… later it was easy… but when it started how did it start and continue… study that, and this stuff will have you wonder how it will turn out given how well it worked

  44. “Much of the mass media, -which is ideologically aligned with the rioters and anarchists – continues to refer to the mobs as “protesters” and describe scenes of mass violence and destruction as “peaceful protests.” This is not an oversight. This is not a case of a difference in interpretation.
    This is a deliberate effort to prevent the American people from understanding what is happening.” – JimNorCal

    I linked some stories about Denver’s Saturday riot in another thread, but want to point out one important thing the Mayor said, among other important policy announcements: city officials will no longer call riots “protests” — but will name them for what they are.

    https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/08/24/now-its-kenosha-wisconsin-the-recipe-is-phone-video-plus-social-media-plus-mob-plus-msm-plus-rush-to-judgment-governor/#comment-2512248

  45. to Snow on Pine & Chases Eagles re: terrorist network mapping.

    Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
    Since Barr became AG, there have been no (or vanishingly few) leaks about what the DOJ, & the intel community in general, is doing.
    He has previously announced that the Feds are going after the rioters any way they can, so I hope that includes using all the tools available.

  46. And yet Detroit, which has seen three recent police shootings, has experienced no looting or rioting. That’s because Detroit has a police chief who won’t allow rioting, and because most Detroiters understand what happens when you burn your city down. The people in Kenosha and Minneapolis and Portland will learn that it takes generations for new growth to happen and even then the scars will still show.

  47. Who would have thought Kenosha WI might become the 21st century Ft Sumter? 2 people killed last night by armed gunman, many others armed confronting the rioters. So it begins. I thought it would begin Nov 4th, especially after yesterday Hillary announced no matter what the results Biden will not concede. She just laid down the gauntlet. As much as viscerally I’d like to see the rioters get some lead, I tremble at the thought of an outright civil war. I see no good coming out of such a situation.

  48. A follow-up after last evening’s shootings in Kenosha.

    IF it is true that the shooter was a local resident “protecting property” and that this individual was “caught” by the crowd as one video appears to suggest, I would NOT be surprised.

    Kenosha is the perfect kind of middle-American town to provoke this kind of death: semi-rural, a significant population of hunters and weapons owners, largely red, and lacking the police resources to deal with prolonged rioting. Note also how the state Governor provides the appearance of help (150 National Guards) but no meaningful substance.

    As law and order break down, individuals with little to no training attempt to fill the gap – rightly or wrongly – and escalation follows. The mob overwhelms an individual and the individual engages his weapon in desperation. There is absolutely no mystery about the process. Kenosha is a laboratory of violence, confirming what we already know to be true when public law and order break down.

    The way to end this cycle is to go after those who incite. They need to be exposed, arrested, and imprisoned, for long periods of time. Likewise for their sponsors and patrons. This network of violence can be broken in the courts and cleaned up on the streets.

  49. It is worth remembering that Marx, who idolized the French Revolution, was bitterly disappointed by the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and put a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how the make a successful revolution. He didn’t live to see Lenin’s great success, but these people do plot and plan to succeed the next time. Like Mr Gramsci did. So I saw the 60s riots in Chicago and the destruction in Detroit shortly after it happened. Current rioting feels better organized this time around and may even succeed, but I don’t think so. I think suburban homeowners would be well advised to hold their fire for the reasons Neo stated. I do think the American people don’t understand the degree to which these Marxists represent a completely different worldview that would destroy both America’s core values and would not give up power through elections. A Social Democratic party is one that will give up power when they lose an election. That’s the tell. Sweden’s socialist party gives up power when it loses and election. But that is precisely what the US Democratic party has not been willing to do since 2016. They need to be permanently denied power.

  50. My brother-in-law is joining a neighborhood defense group in a town between Milwaukee and Madison. I can’t disagree with him, and after this outbreak of rioting in Kenosha of all places, his town may be right to be organizing.

  51. Artfldgr: “so they put signs in the windows, looked the other way at things, and eventually that became their way of life…as i said long ago, we never study mechanics and how things functionally got anywhere…. we like dates, and large ideas, and never about the key things that would explain or show easily how things get from Z to R… ”

    I guess you don’t read Rod Dreher’s blog. Exactly that progression of acquiescence has been one of his constant themes for a long time now. He tends to be very long-winded but, for instance, the latter part of this post:

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/baylor-why-wokeness-is-a-big-deal-live-not-by-lies/

  52. LeClerc on August 26, 2020 at 7:29 am said:
    Meanwhile…, another payday for Ben Crump.

    Yeah, and it’s amazing how fast he gets the families signed up, hours before he could even get there. He probably has a directory of black attorneys, and calls up three or four, and tells them they’ll collect $10K for getting the family to sign the agreement. First one wins, and perhaps gets to be “at counsel.” Then he can travel at leisure.

  53. I was a doctoral student at U C Berkeley in 1969. So, as Yogi Berra is known to have said: ‘It’s like Deja Vu all over again. Reasoning by analogy, there is a committed left wing group orchestrating things, and no shortage of useful idiots willing to stand next to the police line while the instigators lob rocks and G_d knows what at the police over their heads. At Berkeley long ago, the instigators were the folks at PL(Progressive Labor…Trotskyites). The useful idiots were SDS(Students for a Democratic Society…Marxists). The feds surely know who is behind this current mess but that information is going to be highly classified due to the fact that they’ve infiltrated the current groups. We don’t need to lose any undercover guys.

    We probably remain in stasis with the feds doing not much until after the election. After that, all bets are off.

  54. It’s obvious that many of these “protesters” are in it as much for the rush, and thrill of lashing out it gives them, as for anything else.

    Who can atheistic nihilists lash out at anyway, if not other people? Some God they don’t believe in? Life, or existence itself? Other people who don’t take what they believe is sufficient notice of them, is to them is the obvious solution and target.

    You see these skinny white boys armed with AR 15 style rifles prancing along, just panting for the moment to arrive when they finally attain a murderous social significance which they have never otherwise experienced in their short, life-incompetent, diversion chasing, slacker lives.

    The fact that some of these attackers are turning out to be youngish academics and inhabitants of the legal professions, does nothing to change that characterization.

    Now this does not mean that they do not have an ideology that some of them can recite. It just means that it is not really thinking which has brought them to this point, and supplied the motivation and drive.

    They cannot really tell you what they are doing. Not at any depth. “Chimping out” is a perfectly good description of their emotion driven activities. And the wreckage strewn basements which constitute the setting and furnishings of their “minds” are enough to convince you that Hell is a real thing, and that that is precisely where they belong.

    There is one thing that would be useful to know, though. And that is how many of these organizing punks are 2nd and 3rd or 4th or more generation activists or subversives, whose families have been inhabiting institutional America as far back as you can trace their lineages here.

    Of course given the way in which social wars sometimes develop into wars of extermination, it may be better for our souls if we don’t know.

  55. “The feds surely know who is behind this current mess but that information is going to be highly classified due to the fact that they’ve infiltrated the current groups.”

    1969, I was in high school and one of my boyhood buddy’s father was a Army Reserve colonel, who was working as a government accountant. He was making numerous trips to Madison, WI supposedly to do accounting on university government grants. He later told me that he was actually doing investigation into the UW SDS, etc.

    “We probably remain in stasis with the feds doing not much until after the election. After that, all bets are off.” If the Dems follow through on Hillary’s threat to ignore the election results, then all hell is going to break loose.

  56. I was “up at the farm” this last weekend. Finally getting around to some maintenance that had, for various inescapable reasons, been neglected for years.

    It’s amazing how just getting the brush chopped down and the extended lawns cut gives you a different take. To bring back the old 5 acre greensward around the house, with its towering oaks and maples and Norway pines is pretty satisfying … it looks like an old park once again. And the thought that the red oaks are aging and hollowing out and dying is somewhat offset by the white oaks and the black walnuts I planted just out of college. For 20 years they struggled in the sandy loam and Dakotas-like winters. But all of the sudden they have shot up and become estimable specimens – not like a 35 year old walnut planted in northern Ohio black soil, but not the scraggly barely surviving thing your worst fears might lead to expect, either.

    Running the well through a cycle, reestablishing the point pocket, and purging the lines of super fine sand and oxides, also is rewarding in its own way.

    The Ford diesel needs some work; probably a new rear wheel, as the calcium chloride used to add mass and balance to the rear of the rig, has probably accelerated the corrosion of the wheel rims, and degraded the bead seal.

    But getting down on your knees with a wrench to work on some plumbing, or even just changing out tire valve stems leaves one with a feeling of accomplishment.

    It also reminds one that directly interacting with the material world in a productive way, is not only rewarding but psychologically grounding.

    Many of us have discussed the interesting indifference of many youth nowadays to outdoors activities. A typical father will remark that, “Yeah, I’d like to take the boys hunting, if I could get their noses out of the computer for a day”

    Neo has commented on how not long ago, members of a household knew pretty much how all the things that impacted their lives were done. And that they were responsible for much of it.

    I’m willing to bet that most of the more ideologically motivated of these junior revolutionaries have never wielded a hammer or an axe for a day, never constructed anything of material value, and never even engaged in competitive athletics except possibly under cosseted conditions of special privilege.

    These are people who don’t know how to live, except off of others – who they see as forming part of an ecology they feel entitled to exploit and mold – or what to make of their own lives.

    And so in frustration, resentment, and anxiety driven rage, they have focused instead, on you, as the villain of the piece.

    Funny thing, I drove 70 miles to get back to the freeway, and saw nothing but Trump signs, even where I recall seeing Obama signs in the past. It was gratifying to see, though given how much of the remainder of the American population lives and what these institution dwelling people value, I would not read too much into it.

  57. Earlier, Parker put it a bit more explicitly than I would. But, I understand his point. Make mob thuggery a dangerous activity; and see how quickly it is stripped of its pretend revolutionary support. That would expose the core. See how they like that.

    I have been thinking about the situation that law abiding Americans find themselves in; and I have come to a conclusion that may also be a bit controversial. So?

    First, an episode among many that helped crystalize my thinking was minor in comparison, but chilling. In DC where people were dining peacefully, outdoors because that is required, when the BLM mob/thugs showed up and started intimidating them. They demanded that the diners raise their right fist in a gesture of solidarity (remember that one?). Most complied; acquiescing like sheep to the cowardly mob (they don’t confront people one on one). One woman refused and they turned on her like a pack of jackals. What grabbed my attention was the statement in the report that police were standing by, but did not intervene.

    So, my conclusion is that since the police no longer intervene to protect innocent people or property (unless a mayor’s residence is involved), go ahead, defund the police. Shut ’em down if they aren’t going to do what they are paid to do. Make it explicit that each citizen is on her/his own. Progressives want us to live like it is the 19th century, so let’s go all the way. Arm up. Form vigilance committees for community defense. Back to the future.

    I have mentioned before that I witnessed that kind of life as a boy in Suwanee County, Florida back before the cops were allegedly a phone call away. No phones. Most people thought when organized “law and order” came, it would be a step forward.

  58. The video of a BLM/Antifa “peaceful” Kenosha protestor with a good part of his bicep shredded/missing may convince some that it is not a good game to play.

    They can attempt to kill the police in their “protests” and generally get away with it. Try it with an armed citizen, not so much; if you aren’t killed you may be permanently disabled/disfigured (how’s that for a body piercing?). BLM/Antifa then calling for the police is both ironic and moronic.

  59. Oldflyer…exactly! That incident is more disturbing to me than Kenosha. 1) People letting themselves be intimidated by a bunch of 20 something thugs. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of us. I would have ignored them, then laughed at them, and if one just barely touched me I would have punched immediately. Of course I would have probably ended up in ICU, but at what point do stop taking this BS?

    2) your point about the police is correct and just sad. No wonder gun sales are through the roof. All those years of university faculty indoctrinating the students is certainly paying dividends.

  60. Kenosha shooting stills from the video show that the man with the rifle was run down and thrown to the ground.

    On the ground the man that was shot first by the rifleman is shown in a still landing the edge of a skateboard onto the man’s neck and shoulder area. The rifleman then (according to state law) felt his person was threatened and blew a hole in the skateboarder clubbers gut.

    Right after that when the rifleman was still on the ground another rioter ran up to him with a pistol and pointed it at the man from a distance of less than a yard.  The pistol is seen clearly pointing at the rifleman on the ground. The rifleman (according to state law) felt his person to be in immediate danger and he blew a large chunk of flesh and tendon from the rioter’s gun arm eliminating that threat.

  61. As to the thought that there are a lot of “outside agitators” making up a significant part of the rioters, I don’t buy it.

    It could be that black folks and white tweaker trash in Kenosha are a large proportion of the residents of Kenosha. Once the fear of consequences by police is removed it is probably the case that these individuals just like to riot and loot and burn.

    It may be that the majority of blacks and whites in Kenosha may be decent law-abiding people, the remnant of these groups are more than enough to burn the town. And the others just stay out of the way.

  62. I come late, but…
    Neo’s does not seem to believe in evolution, with her objection to comparing humans to chimps and apes. It is done all the time, by critter lovers, scientists et al., and it is not racist, IMO. In point of fact, we share >90% of our DNA with them.

    The Blake video is a pretty scathing indictment of Blake’s conduct in the presence of three armed officers whom he ignored. Opening the driver’s door and reaching under the front seat? The cops had a second or less to make a decision at that point. You, all of you, try making a life or death decision in such a tiny time window! That his kids (by several mothers ?) were in the car is more condemnatory of his conduct.

  63. Here’s the complete video and it pretty clear that he’s well within the self-defense defense.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRa3h7RHHvg

    Benshapiro has cited the law that applies. I’ll try to dig it up.

    It’s not what you can charge. It’s what you can prove. And as we have seen of late the cops arrested in the George Floyd death will pretty much be found not guilty.

    Here’s the law clips from Ben Shapiro:

    https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1298654245588279296

  64. Cicero:

    As you no doubt know – or perhaps you don’t – according to evolution, humans did not descend from chimps or any ape today. Humans and today’s apes had a common ape ancestor; see this:

    Humans and monkeys are both primates. But humans are not descended from monkeys or any other primate living today. We do share a common ape ancestor with chimpanzees. It lived between 8 and 6 million years ago. But humans and chimpanzees evolved differently from that same ancestor. All apes and monkeys share a more distant relative, which lived about 25 million years ago.

    All of which is of course irrelevant to whether humans should be compared to apes – or whether it is racist to do so. I wrote that the comparison has a racist history and tradition, which it does (something you also probably know). I also said I don’t compare human actions to animals. Humans are humans, and they have plenty of evil in them without invoking animals.

  65. Gerard Vanderleun:

    See my most recent post on the matter.

    I believe it’s the first shooting that will be the bigger issue. You are talking about the second.

  66. If you mean the shooting at the gas station there’s also a video of the shooter first being pursued and attacked with a molotov cocktail.

    In both cases, the shooter is the same.

  67. Vanderleun:

    Yes, I discussed that already in my addendum to my new post. Take a look and you’ll see.

  68. “People letting themselves be intimidated by a bunch of 20 something thugs.” – physicsguy

    What we don’t know is how many raised their fists because they actually agreed with the solidarity-unity agenda.

  69. Mac on August 26, 2020 at 10:11 am links to Rod Dreher’s long essay (repeated here). It is long because it covers a lot of very important territory, with the discussion on Baylor only as a kind of jumping-off point to discuss the entirety of why wokeness is a soft totalitarianism in practice (and a hard totalitarianism in theory). “Live Not by Lies” is the title of his newest book, which he quotes often.

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/baylor-why-wokeness-is-a-big-deal-live-not-by-lies/

    I quibble with only one part of his essay, which attributes the wokeyness of the flagship Southern Baptist University to “the Baylor football sexual assault scandal, which ran from 2011 to 2016.”
    That inflection point surprised me, because he has a long relationship with Baylor people and ought to know that the slide down the slippery slope began years before that. In fact the scandal is the result of the slide, not the genesis of it.

    My mother followed the insider-news of her beloved Southern Baptists for most of her life, and used to send me newspaper clippings (!!) detailing what the Board and administration were doing to water down the Christian principles and conservative policies of the college.
    It came to the point where bedrock Baptists began to question the college’s commitment not just to Baptist doctrine but also to basic Christian theology.
    Some churches – which all operate independently – also moved to disassociate and defund.
    I lost track of the situation when she passed away in 2010, and am rather glad she didn’t live to hear about the scandal.

  70. “Who would have thought Kenosha WI might become the 21st century Ft Sumter?” – physicsguy

    It hasn’t, yet.
    The thing about Ft Sumter IIRC is that it was known to be a possible flash-point in the secession controversy, and so the actual event precipitated the expected consequences.
    Kenosha, in and of itself, has no such predicted significance, but is kind of a random, could-have-happened-anywhere, location.

    It could become a tipping point into civil war, but it doesn’t have to – and Ft Sumter did.

  71. ” I also said I don’t compare human actions to animals. Humans are humans, and they have plenty of evil in them without invoking animals.”

    Well, good. That is a nice stance to take, and admirably idealistic. Truly.

    But, again: is the candle worth the game?: Specifically, this impossible, and lately unrewarding project played out so laboriously, and so hopelessly, with such uncongenial, antagonistic, and morally vicious “fellow” players who never relent, never back off, and are never satisfied??

    1. Man is an animal: 2. a rational animal being the specific difference; and 3. with the capacity for right reason being the attribute that entitles examples of the kind to moral/peer respect and possibly even intra-specific consideration. The rest is just emotionalism masquerading as “morals” … or morally content-less taxonomy.

    Without the second, the first affiliation is morally meaningless, and the imperatives concerning the last, are contingent upon its actual presence as an active faculty.

    Now, of course, some persons may have a religious view they wish to advance – something about all men being “made in the image and likeness …” regardless of their manifest depravity or animality; or, maybe about their having immortal souls which have an eternal fate or some such characteristic commanding our consideration and respect.

    And those views are, in my opinion, worth a hearing. If, that is, the one advancing them is clear and forthright about his premisses and what he views as the logical and moral entailments.

    But most modern people people who go on about respect for “hoomanity” per se, are either incapable of doing such, or, they do not wish to embarrass themselves by “appealing to superstition”: when they have in fact nothing to offer as an alternative but an empty and laughable utilitarianism to replace it. “If we want to save X we gotta do Y”. But what if we don’t gotta save X? LOL

    (That sagging faced piece of work Rorty was at least honest enough, or vainglorious enough, to admit as much.)

    Now, when unlike a couple years ago when we first had this discussion, we see men actually dying in the streets in gun battles, and hooting as they enjoy the orgy of violence – which imparts a sense of meaning to their otherwise meaningless lives – and we see their alt sex harpy allies on the sidelines screeching out their bloodlust too, well, then, utilitarian cant about preserving society, or most especially the society which the hopeful find congenial or familiar, seems, sadly, risible.

    Not that gratuitous insults are ever an admirable thing, or that we should ever call anyone a chimp except to their face and under such circumstances when one is willing to play that very hard and unpleasant hand out to the end, of course. I would prefer not to do it, but I admit that preference is emotional and not one I could convince a modern man as being wrong.

    Imagine for instance that you are standing over that dying Antifa dude as he’s lying there in what might very well be a puddle of his own piss (as anti-freeze), and he looks up at you moments before he winks out forever and you take the occasion to tell him his death now, as well as his life prior to it, is the meaningless, self-induced result, of him acting like a chimp rather than a man.

    Now, to send him off to an eternity in Hell like that, would not appeal to most people – including myself. But for, say, a good, solid, convinced atheist and nominalist, who did not happen to be a leftist, I doubt many of us could assemble a convincing argument persuading him he was wrong to do so.

  72. DNW,

    I’m thinking of how David referred to his enemies in the Psalms. There are different categories therein, I guess one could say. One interesting point is that it’s infrequent for him to threaten these enemies with death by his own hand. More often, he puts his trust in the Lord instead to be delivered from them and/or to exact the vengeance. I haven’t done a comprehensive breakdown of all instances, but this is my impression.

    (We use the Septuagint text in the Orthodox Church, btw. The translation from Holy Transfiguration in the Boston area has proven itself as an English-language standard, so I’ll use that – it’s also my personal favorite so far.)

    Here are a couple of examples:
    Ps VI – “Let all mine enemies be greatly put to shame and be troubled, let them be turned back, and speedily be greatly put to shame.”
    XXXVI – “Let their sword enter into their own hearts and let their bows be broken.” (which, btw, is one of the many examples of the most common prayer being that his enemies should fall victim to their own devices, not so much that they should be beaten down by someone else’s superiority – this is so that the enemies can’t blame anyone else for what happens to them, I think)

    In some cases, he is more definitely speaking of spiritual enemies, not necessarily physical ones merely, meaning the demons especially.

    Well, as I said, it’s a long list and I don’t have time right now to go through the entire text, though it would be a worthwhile project. It would take me a few days, I imagine.

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