Mathewson’s “Armed Citizens” post elicited such comments as “kill looters and rioters.” Facebook allowed the page to stand even after receiving well over four hundred complaints. Mathewson posted an open letter to Kenosha’s police chief, calling himself the “commander” of the Kenosha Guard and warning, “Do NOT have your officers tell us to go home under threat of arrest.” On Facebook, thousands of people indicated interest in joining Mathewson at the courthouse.
All summer, he had been live-streaming protests, calling himself a “citizen journalist.” Harris wrote a blurb about the Kenosha Guard, which got picked up by Infowars. Mathewson’s post caught the attention of Kristan Harris, a streamer whose work included conspiracy content of the Pizzagate variety. But on August 25th, as the city braced for a third night of protests in the wake of Blake’s shooting, Mathewson, who is a private investigator, posted a call for “Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property.” He invited “patriots” to meet him at the courthouse at 6 p.m., to defend Kenosha from “evil thugs.” He started the Kenosha Guard, which was less a militia than an impulse with a Facebook page. Joan Donovan, the chief of research at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, identified One America News Network, Glenn Beck on BlazeTV, and Fox News-particularly the hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity-as promulgators of “riot porn.” Writing in MIT Technology Review, Donovan said that such footage, designed to “overwhelm the sense-making capacity” of viewers, inspired militias and vigilantes to “live out fantasies of taking justice into their own hands.”Īfter Kenosha’s march for George Floyd, on May 31st, Kevin Mathewson, a former city alderman who had sometimes brought a handgun to city-council meetings, decided that the police needed civilian reinforcements. Right-wing news outlets packaged the fieriest images as evidence of ruinous policies in Democratic-run cities, and criticized the mainstream media’s refusal to acknowledge the violence. At a Papa John’s, a man stood behind a shattered window and yelled, “Are they trying to get Trump reëlected?” A demonstrator replied, “These people don’t represent our movement!” But, at another moment, when a man told protesters, “What y’all don’t fucking understand is that people have their lives in these businesses,” a woman screamed back, “So what?” President Donald Trump had been highlighting the destructive aspects of such protests in order to malign the Black Lives Matter movement. When an older man with a fire extinguisher confronted rioters, someone struck him with a hard object, splitting his nose and breaking his jaw.
Looters smashed shopwindows, and a Department of Corrections building was burned down. But, that night and the next, rioters hurled bricks and fireworks at law-enforcement officers. Many people marched peacefully and held signs. The protesters gathered outside the Kenosha County Courthouse, a limestone building facing Civic Center Park, an area surrounded by businesses and residences. His sons witnessed the shooting from the back seat. Blake returned, but when the police arrived he was leaving again-this time with the children. “Me and my sisters just saw him skirt off in it,” Booker told a 911 dispatcher. Blake left in the S.U.V.-Booker’s rental car. Blake had decorated the apartment for a party, and was cooking hot dogs when he and Booker started quarrelling. They had several sons, and the shooting had occurred on the eighth birthday of the oldest, Izreal. Hundreds of people now assembled for Blake, a lanky twenty-nine-year-old who had been staying at the fourplex with his fiancée, Laquisha Booker.
The comedian Kevin Hart tweeted, “What’s the justification for 7 shots?”Īfter Floyd’s death, Kenosha was among the scores of American cities where citizens marched in protest. The victim, Jacob Blake, survived, but the incident was instantly seen as another grim example of an urgent problem: according to a recent Harvard study, Black people are more than three times as likely as white people to be killed during a police encounter. Kenosha did not equip officers with body cameras, and so the neighbor’s footage was the primary visual documentation of the shooting. Update: On Friday, Rittenhouse was acquitted of homicide and other charges. The Outsized Meaning of the Rittenhouse Verdict
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