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“Do you have enough ammo?” Asked Vicki McKenna, a popular radio host in Wiscosin, on Wednesday. In that same state the day before, a 17-year-old boy, Kyle Rittenhouse, an admirer of the police and of Donald Trump, had been armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle for the chaotic streets of Kenosha. Three people protesting police violence and racism were filmed shooting. Two of them died. “Are you ready to defend your property, your people, against the imminent violence unleashed by people whose ultimate goal is the total destruction of our way of life?” McKenna continued.
Rittenhouse, a cadet in a police youth program, traveled from Illinois to Kenosha on purpose for the protests. He was interviewed a few hours before opening fire. “People are being hurt, our job is to protect these businesses,” he told the Daily Caller, in front of a burned-out store.
Rittenhouse was not the only armed citizen on the streets of Kenosha. In a country with a huge network of heavily armed militias, which tend to be white and right-wing, many responded to calls from the self-proclaimed Kenosha Guard in Facebook posts, which would eventually be removed. It was neither the first nor the second time that such a group had mobilized against riots or anti-racist protests, even left and black militias have appeared in response. It seemed a matter of time before a tragedy occurred.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen next. But Kyle Rittenhouse is already a hero to many patriots,” says journalist John Temple, author of the 2019 book Up in Arms, on the growth of American militias. “I see a lot of such posts on social media, among the people I met when I was writing.”
“The militia movement has been around for decades, but it exploded with the help of social media after the election of Barack Obama in 2008,” explains Temple. “It has become very easy to make your views known; you don’t have to be a good writer, all you have to do is plug in the camera and start talking.”
“Being connected in this way also allowed them to better communicate and organize important events, as they do now, in Kenosha,” adds Temple. “Vast networks of like-minded people have sprung up across the country and can be coordinated.” In these troubled times, the danger seems immense.
A strange collusion
It is important to note that the militia movements in the United States are confusing, complex, changing, and full of contradictions. The motivation of some groups “is, above all, the fear of the excesses of the Government and the fear of the abolition of their right to own arms,” says John Temple. In this case, they look down on federal law enforcement agencies, but may have a close relationship with local law enforcement. “Other groups have anti-immigration positions, and there is also an element of white supremacy,” counters the journalist. There, anti-racist activists are the enemy to kill and the police a convenient ally.
By the way, this Friday, an analyst and former FBI agent, Michael German, presented a report that shows that, in recent decades, there have been infiltrations by militias and white supremacist groups in the police of dozens of states. Cases have increased since George Floyd’s death, but “no one is collecting this data, no one is actively looking for these agents,” German told The Guardian.
You don’t have to look far to find a strange collusion between the police and armed groups of guards in the streets. Both Rittenhouse and the Kenosha Guard patrolled the city with the blessing of some policemen, who were filmed throwing bottles of water and incentives from atop an armored vehicle. “We thank you guys,” an agent said through the megaphone. “Really”. Hours later, with his hands in the air after hitting three people and an AR-15 in the chest, the 17-year-old was filmed walking peacefully through a police barrier, as if nothing was happening, as protesters shouted: “You just shot a person!”
Ahead of millions of people
It was not just on the shores of the American right that Rittenhouse apologized, portrayed as an unlucky patriot child. Faced with a resurgence of racial tensions, fueled by cases like that of Jacob Blake, shot seven times in the back by Kenosha police, in front of his children, conservative personalities like Vicki McKenna use a tone that touches the apocalyptic. This fear was present in practically all the speeches of the Republican National Convention (see text beside), or in channels like Fox News, by far the most watched in the United States.
“Kenosha fell into anarchy because city officials abandoned it,” said Tucker Carlson, one of President Donald Trump’s favorite presenters, the day after the killings. “They backed off and let Kenosha burn. So are we really surprised that looting and arson has accelerated to homicides?” Carlson asked on his show, which is attended by about four million people. each night. “How surprised are we that 17-year-olds with shotguns decide they have to maintain order when no one else would?”
“He just justified the murder,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times reporter, tweeted in surprise. It remains to be seen what the effect of this conservative discourse is on extremist networks on the fringes of American politics, steeped in paranoia, conspiracies, having nightmares of crowds of communists and vengeful blacks.
“Many members of the patriotic militias are afraid of these things that consume them, and some probably have a diagnosable paranoia. I have seen it several times,” says John Temple. For the American journalist, if in Obama’s time it was fear of tyranny that mobilized the militias, now “they are moved by the feeling that someone who agrees with them on many issues is in command.”
