Aug. 23, 2020 is a night Kenosha residents can’t help but remember — but would rather forget. At the hands of vindictive Black Lives Matter groupies and other self-described racial justice activists, the Wisconsin town went up in flames two years ago today.
Rogues started fires at government buildings. They set ablaze garbage trucks and torched upwards of 100 vehicles in the car lot owned by an Indian immigrant, smashing the windows of those who escaped the inferno. They vandalized the post office and a high school, and their flames completely consumed a century-old camera shop.
That’s only a fraction of what followed the justified police shooting of Jacob Blake.
A whole car lot was set ablaze overnight in the #BlackLivesMatter riot in Kenosha, Wisc. pic.twitter.com/ZNGtqFEOa0
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) August 24, 2020
Boarded up windows were scrawled with messages begging rioters to pass over them: “PLEASE, KIDS ABOVE” and “THE ELDERLY LIVE HERE.” Demonstrators taunted the scant law enforcers posted outside the courthouse. And when Wisconsin’s Democrat Gov. Tony Evers refused to send enough National Guardsmen after a full 24 hours of rioting despite locals’ pleas for help — he sent more troops to Milwaukee during the NBA finals — armed citizens stepped up to defend property and ultimately themselves, resulting in the deaths of two people.
That was two years ago. Now we’re watching the House Jan. 6 Committee’s Stalinist show trial for Americans who participated in the riot at the U.S. Capitol — and many who didn’t — on Jan. 6, 2021. Last November, we witnessed a courtroom drama for a 17-year-old kid who defended his life with a firearm during the riots but was slandered by legacy media as a white supremacist and a murderer.
Now, after more than 60 people have been charged with crimes related to the Kenosha riots, with supposedly many more to come, why has there been no large-scale investigation into these deadly riots, the players behind them, and the destructive ideology that sparked it all? Despite Democrats’ constant talk about Donald Trump’s “big lie,” they fall silent when confronted with evidence their race obsession can spur lethal race revolutions.
That obsession and its effects are based on a lie. And it’s a big one.
The Big Lie
The entire Kenosha scene was sparked by one police shooting, which corporate media and other leftists instantly branded evidence of racism. Celebrities claimed, contrary to available evidence, that police “shoot first & detain second” and that Blake “could have been grabbed…he could have been tased….He could have immediately been stopped when he started walking around the car.” LeBron James characterized it as “police brutality towards my kind.”
Evers framed the incident as yet another “Black man or person” “shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement.” Joe Biden escalated the race-baiting with the same framing.
Of course, this was all a lie. Police were actually responding to an emergency call from Blake’s girlfriend, who said he wasn’t permitted on the property and had snatched her keys. Before officers even arrived at the scene, they knew Blake had a warrant out for his arrest for charges of disorderly conduct connected to domestic abuse, third-degree sexual assault, and trespassing. Before they ever fired a gun, officers had Tased him twice to no avail, and Blake had reached into the vehicle, where a weapon was later recovered on the floorboards and three kids were in the backseat, which police knew because their mom reportedly “kept screaming that.”
But this lie — that the Blake shooting represented routine police brutality toward black people — is not surprising because it’s all part of the left’s much bigger racism lie.
They lied about knife-wielding black teen Ma’Khia Bryant. They lied about armed 13-year-old Mexican-American Adam Toledo. They lied about Michael Brown. They lied about Bubba Wallace and Jussie Smollett. And they lie by omission when they refuse to cover violent crimes by black perpetrators against other racial groups, as with Pakistani immigrant Mohammad Anwar, who was brutally murdered by two black teenage girls when they violently carjacked him in D.C. in the middle of the day.
They perpetuate these lies with catchphrases, such as “hands up, don’t shoot.” They spread them in ahistorical accounts such as the “1619 Project” and profit from them with lectures lamenting “white fragility” and “systemic racism.” And they amplify them with clever branding such as “Black Lives Matter,” making violent demonstrations tricky to condemn for those afraid of false racism smears.
Corrupt media are the worst offenders, and Democrat politicos are nearly as bad. As I wrote last year about the left’s response to riots:
They said, ‘Destroying property … is not violence.’ They said protests don’t need to be peaceful and called riots a ‘proportionate response.’ They denied evidence of anarchy. They said violence works. They condemned the term ‘riot‘ as ‘loaded,’ instead calling it ‘democracy.’ They released a documentary claiming ‘Riots Built America.’ And they flat-out pretended cities weren’t being ravaged, with Gov. Jay Inslee saying ‘That’s news to me!‘ when asked about the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, and Rep. Jerry Nadler calling Antifa a ‘myth.’
It’s this endless stream of lies that incites the sort of violence that overtook Kenosha. Years later, why hasn’t it been investigated?
We Need Answers
I’m not talking about the type of local investigations that led to charging a few dozen people with riot-related crimes. That should be a given. I’m talking about a large-scale probe that drags in media defamers, a negligent governor, elite race-baiters, and riot organizers to investigate their role in this violent scene, which has played out time and again with impunity across the country.
After all, there’s precedent for that sort of trial. It arose from a riot on Jan. 6, which was far less deadly than Kenosha and was used to destroy top political opponents whose hands are clean, unlike those of Wisconsin’s dud governor.
First, we still don’t know who was responsible for the rioting because it appears to be more than just individual Kenoshans. Kenosha locals were the first to tell The Federalist that the perpetrators were “out-of-towners.” As one local, Alvin, told The Federalist at the time, “All this destruction didn’t come from Kenosha. People came in here and did this.”
Alvin was with his young daughter, Kaya, after visiting and “shedding tears” with the son of a shop owner whose business was destroyed. “All this destruction didn’t come from Kenosha,” he said, “People came in here and did this.” pic.twitter.com/STk5wWTWaS
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) August 27, 2020
Police reports bear this out. According to a media release one week after the riots began, of the 175 people who had been arrested, 102 were out-of-towners. Leftist media, of course, sicced their fake fact-checkers on the information, with USA Today saying those figures are “missing context” because most of the arrestees were from other parts of Wisconsin or Illinois, “the border of which is about 6 miles from the heart of the protests.”
Leftist media discarded this “context,” however, when they attacked Kyle Rittenhouse for traveling “across state lines” from Illinois with a gun (This was a lie anyway. He didn’t bring the firearm across state lines, and both Rittenhouse’s father and lifeguarding job were reportedly in Kenosha.).
As Empower Wisconsin reporter Matt Kittle detailed, police also stopped a bus containing Seattle-based group Riot Kitchen in Kenosha after they filled up multiple gas cans. While media were quick to parrot the group’s excuse that they needed the gasoline to power generators, that leaves bigger questions unanswered.
“Police say the vehicles contained various items, including helmets, gas masks, protective vests, illegal fireworks, and suspected controlled substances. Nine individuals were arrested for disorderly conduct and are awaiting charging decisions by the Kenosha County district attorney, according to the incident report,” Kittle reported at the time. “…What the [media] stories couldn’t explain is why members of the organization were loading up so many cans of gas, and why the Riot Kitchen crew in the minivan fled from police.”
Sure sounds like something a Select Committee on Aug. 23 might want to get to the bottom of. What was Riot Kitchen really doing in Kenosha, what percentage of the rioters came from out of state, and who funded their activities? What about the rioters who descended from Oregon, California, Kentucky, Minnesota, Indiana, and California? Where else did demonstrators come from, and did someone send them?
If it’s true, as Molly Ball admitted in a jaw-dropping Time magazine article about the rigged 2020 election, that alliances of left-wing activists and corporate power players can control so-called “protests,” which of these puppet-masters were involved in coordinating the Kenosha riots? If none of those people actively instigated these riots, why didn’t they work to “curtail” them, as Ball says they’re able to do, before they turned violent?
Furthermore, partisans on the Jan. 6 Committee squeezed every last salacious soundbite possible out of texts to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, urging him to tell the president to stop the riots. But what about Evers’ text messages? Who advised the governor to twiddle his thumbs rather than call in reinforcements? What was the chatter like after that negligence led to shots fired?
And how about communication among members of the slanderous media? Which editors and producers greenlighted the framing of the Blake killing as police brutality and the ensuing violence as “fiery but mostly peaceful“? Which publishers have so far been held accountable for printing that Rittenhouse is a murderer? Perhaps President Joe Biden should be called to testify before a committee for labeling the teen a “white supremacist” — or have his home raided to fish for any scrap of paper where he might have scribbled a Kenosha-related note.
Justice for All
As the Jan. 6 Committee subpoenas fellow lawmakers, indicts political opponents, and throws 69-year-old grandmothers with cancer into federal prison for trespassing, two years have passed without any probe of the big racism lie that incited mob violence in Kenosha.
It’s clear what ideology led to the riots. It’s not clear to what extent individual players are responsible. Perhaps it’s time to assemble an Aug. 23 Select Committee that, instead of engaging in partisan theater, actually gets to the bottom of the violence to provide justice for victims and to prevent this nightmare from repeating itself.
The American people might actually tune in to a trial like that. They’ve been waiting a while for answers.
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Source: The Federalist