The Second Amendment contains the term "a well-regulated militia." In Kenosha, Wisconsin, August 25, a so-called militia of White dudes carrying semi-automatic rifles entered the city to "protect property" with the tacit as well as overt support of that community's police department.
Multiple iPhone videos shot by citizens from different angles at different times reveal cooperation and coordination between cops and "militia" members. Protests occurred in direct response to the outrageous shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black citizen who had just broken up a fight between family members. As he tried to enter his car where his children waited he was tased, and then a cop shot him in the back seven times, paralyzing him below the waist in a country where Medicare For All is opposed by the current President and Joe Biden.
Someone, the would-be killer cop, perhaps, yelled, "He's got a knife!" before the shots came. With his back to the cop, Jacob Blake was in no position, even if he had a knife, to represent an equal threat to a well-armed trigger happy policeman.
If the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis wasn't bad enough for comfortable onlooking Americans, is Jacob Blake's devastating wounding by an irresponsible shithead cop lacking self-control an indication there's a serious race relations problem in America?
Is it enough that Kenosha cops allowed and encouraged a "militia," hardly a "well-regulated one," to take on policing in a city where they don't even live? The seventeen year old dumbass with a gun who did the murdering and maiming on August 25, Kyle Rittenhouse, drove from his home in Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha, a trip of just over twenty miles. He carried an "AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle" he's not allowed to possess, being a minor, so right there the Kenosha Police Department could've arrested him on that alone.
Rittenhouse, though, was part of a group of armed men given free rein by a criminally irresponsible police department, criminal from the top down given the magnitude of its folding to vigilante justice. Recall Charlottesville, Virginia, 2017, when protester Heather Heyer was run down in a vehicular homicide by a White supremacist. Trump received appropriate criticism for saying, "There were good people on both sides," implying that the Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were among the "good people." A less examined part of the Charlottesville incidents that summer was the behavior of that city's police department. They stood back behind barricades and allowed much of the violence to happen. In Kenosha, according to a "militia" member disenchanted with Tuesday night's fiasco, cops enabled the pseudo-militia by telling them they would push protestors back towards the unofficial armed group, the very same group the cops are seen giving water to and thanking for their presence before the shit hit the fan.
Rittenhouse, showing up several times in videos before and after his "heroic" act of "protecting property," did his killing and maiming in the street, shooting one man in the head, blowing another man's arm off, and shooting another in the chest (this man died later on).
Amazingly, this isn't the worst part.
After he finished his killing, Rittenhouse can be seen on a video talking on his phone. He says, "I just killed somebody."
Other videos then show him walking to a line of policemen, arms raised, gun barrel pointing downward, seemingly surrendering, but the cops yell at him not to approach. It's as if they don't want to be associated with him now. He vanishes behind a police line and it was found that he returned that night to his home in Antioch, Illinois. As he approached the cops, bystanders yelled, "He just killed someone!" This elicited no positive, as in lawful, police action. Had a Black man armed with a semi-automatic rifle approached a line of cops would he have been met with a fusillade of bullets?
We're supposed to believe the Kenosha cops on the scene were unaware that shots had been fired and that the man with the rifle walking towards them wasn't someone to at least question, but they didn't even do that. They allowed a minor with a deadly weapon used to murder and maim three people to go free into the Wisconsin and Illinois nights. I don't know what pressure may have been applied to this wretched police force to investigate these homicides, to locate the perpetrator, but I suspect, given the chumminess of the cops with the so-called militia, they knew Rittenhouse's name and whereabouts, for the coordination between Kenosha Police and the "militia" men seems to have been a move towards handling protestors in a punishing manner, much as the Charlottesville cops did in 2017 by allowing Neo-Nazis to bash in the heads of official enemies, i.e. Americans who want justice for all.
This horrible shit happened during the Republican National Convention, an event I haven't watched due to my desire to not throw objects at my television set. Like with the Democratic National Convention I did see some clips, including a one-eyed Congressman standing on the deck of a warship. In my mind's eye I simultaneously saw a recently viewed photo of a Somali mother with her young son as they're forced to live in a refugee camp near Mogadishu, their lives uprooted by U.S. drone strikes.
Vice President Pence spoke, demonstrating how a devout Christian can be a dark sack of nothing while pretending to care about the unborn, even as he supports Israel's self-alleged right to defend itself against rock-throwing Palestinians by using U.S.-made fighter jets and their formidable weapons platforms.
Our Republican and Democratic leaders have nothing for us. They are like garbage stinking up your homes. Don't vote.
Vic Neptune
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