As Chaos Reigns, More Blood In The Streets

There is chaos across the globe. Not just with the Pandemic, not just with nations wrapped in a decade's worth of civil wars, not just with the caging and pain of minority groups in both China and the United States...

There's a Category 4 Hurricane about to hit the coast of Louisiana, we're about to get another replay of 2005's Katrina, and it's not even in the top five stories tonight.

This weekend saw yet another Cop-on-Black shooting, this time in Kenosha Wisconsin, prompting a fresh round of protests because the cops are still abusing their power and still piling up a body count of unarmed victims.

Only this time, the cops in Kenosha allowed a number of Far Right white supremacists with their own firearms to show up and confront the Black Lives Matter protesters, and things got bloody. Via Adam Mahoney, Julia Wong, and Victoria Bekiempis in the Guardian:

Hours before a 17-year-old white man allegedly killed two people and injured a third at protests over a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a local militia group posted a call on Facebook: “Any patriots willing to take up arms and defend our city tonight from evil thugs?”

It’s not yet clear if Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois teenager arrested on suspicion of murder after last night’s shootings in Kenosha, was among the people who responded to the call the militia group had posted, which was later featured on the conspiracy theory site InfoWars.

A Facebook account listed under Rittenhouse’s name included images of the young white man posting with a military-style rifle, as well as multiple posts expressing support for law enforcement.

It's been confirmed for years - Adam L. Silverman over at Balloon Juice has been writing about the Right-Wing terrorism that's been building in this nation since 2016 - that the Far Right militias have been spoiling for a fight, convinced they're at war with the librul commies and dark-skinned Others (encompassing Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, even Hindus and Greeks). The recent rash of law enforcement killings of unarmed Blacks has been their clarion call, and they've been rushing out to each protest eager to show off their AR-15 murdersticks.

Well, in Kenosha not only did the gun-toting wingnuts find protesters to threaten, they found a police force willing to look the other way regarding their efforts to destabilize peaceful protests... and worse. Back to the Guardian article:

Before the shooting, the presence of armed white men at the Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha on Tuesday night prompted criticism from protesters – and some support from law enforcement.

In a widely circulating video from Tuesday night, Kenosha police can be heard thanking and tossing bottled water from an armored vehicle to what appear to be armed civilians walking the streets.

“We appreciate you being here,” an officer is heard saying over a loudspeaker.

But David Best, the county sheriff, told media outlets after the shooting that people patrolling the streets in Kenosha were a “like a vigilante group”, and said that the shooting was evidence of why suggestions to deputize citizens to help law enforcement contain the unrest in the city had been a bad idea.

YA THINK?!

It's like the local law enforcement still hasn't grasped the idea that the best way to keep protests peaceful is to reduce the presence of weapons and means of vandalism, rather than encouraging trigger-happy extremists who WANT to start a fight and earn their blood-stripes.

This incident is more evidence that our police forces across the United States are in bed with - or at least comfortable hanging out with - a Far Right group composed of racists and neo-Nazis who want to increase violence (even against the cops who are all so chummy with them).

The wingnuts are presenting every sign of wanting to go to literal civil war with everyone they hate in America. Even the guys in Homeland Security on trump's payroll tried to warn him and the Republican leadership. Here's how Betsy Swan at Politico reported it:

For Neumann, her nightmare scenario of globalized white supremacist terrorism was coming to life. Meanwhile, the U.S. government was doing far too little about its own homegrown extremists — often "lone wolves" radicalized online by white supremacist websites and fueled by hostility toward immigrants and minorities. But White House officials didn’t want to talk about the rising domestic extremist threat or even use the phrase “domestic terrorism.” The administration’s relentless, single-minded focus on immigration enforcement — coupled with nonstop turnover on the National Security Council — constantly pulled senior DHS leadership away from everything else. And her ultimate boss, President Donald Trump, was part of the problem...

Trump often expressed irritation when he saw the DHS secretary anywhere other than the border. Miles Taylor, who was Nielsen’s chief of staff, told POLITICO Trump used to lambaste her if she didn’t physically spend enough of her time there...

Early in Nielsen’s tenure as secretary, she and Taylor discussed the domestic terror threat at length. In the months before her confirmation, a far-right extremist named Jeremy Christian had murdered two men on a train after harassing two Black teenage girls. One of the girls wore a hijab, according to news reports, and Christian yelled “fuck Muslims” at them. Just days after Nielsen was confirmed, a man with a swastika marking on his leg murdered two students at a high school in New Mexico before killing himself.

“I said, ‘Look this is a pretty big deal right now, it’s getting serious, a lot of it’s racially motivated,’” Taylor recalled telling Nielsen. “‘I don’t think we are well positioned against it. We’ve got to do more, but it’s really got to start with the president.’”

At the time, then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster was overseeing the drafting of a new national counterterrorism strategy. The document would lay out priorities for using resources from across the U.S. government to combat terrorism.

Taylor wrote a “dream draft” emphasizing everything DHS would want from the strategy document — including a focus on domestic terrorist threats, along with threats from radical Islamist terrorism and other foreign actors. Four months after Nielsen started as DHS secretary, Trump replaced McMaster with John Bolton. The process of drafting the counterterrorism strategy continued under Bolton’s leadership.

“What ended up getting significantly dropped was all the stuff we talked about on domestic terrorism,” Taylor said. “We got a draft back from John Bolton that barely referenced domestic terrorism...”

Part of this is the Republicans' obsession against immigration - which is racially-tinged to begin with - blinding them to the problems of domestic violence, and a lot of this is the Republicans' refusal to clean their own house of Far Right extremism they rely on to keep their voting base happy. There is no other way to explain this inaction.

And it's this inaction that keeps ending up with more American blood spilling into our American streets. The wingnut in Kenosha left behind two dead and one severely wounded, and more than just that community torn apart by the escalation of hostilities.

This is not going to end well, not even if Biden wins this November.

And yet, we dare not let the gun-toting militia extremists win. Damn them. We have better things to live for than their goddamned rage and fear.