This is one of those days when I’m about 50/50 on whether we’re living in a simulation. A rampaging mob starts torching a neighborhood…

…in one of the country’s foremost swing states…

…on night one of the GOP convention, literally at the very moment Republican speakers are on TV warning swing voters that urban violence will spread if Biden’s elected?

Nothing lines up that neatly except in fiction.

This isn’t fiction, though. Many lives in Kenosha are ruined this morning:

Residents emerged from their houses overnight to gape at billowing smoke that could be seen for miles. Lost in the blaze, neighbors said, was a mattress store, a storefront church, a Mexican restaurant and a cellphone store. Less than a mile away, a probation and parole office was also on fire…

“This is our town,” said Mike Mehlan, 33, a chef, as he stared at the buildings, stunned. “People have lost their damn minds.”

Mr. Mehlan said that just a half-hour before, he saw at least 20 cars pull up to a nearby gas station, break in and then head to the stores one block away. They entered the mattress store and set it on fire, he said…

One resident said he had little problem with burning businesses to spur social change and reform to policing. “It’s unfortunate, but it has to be done,” said Wayne Gardner, who lives around the corner.

Woke all-star Shaun King shared that sentiment on Twitter early yesterday. “I’m not going to call for peace. We’ve tried peace. For years. Y’all don’t understand that language,” he tweeted, according to Newsweek. “We are calling for a complete dismantling of American policing. It’s NOT broken. It was built to work this way. And mayhem is the consequence. You earned it.”

Reporters were on the scene last night watching as degenerates made Shaun King’s dream come true. Daily Caller reporter Shelby Talcott was there when a furniture store was broken into and torched with extreme care and deliberation:

Here’s that furniture store right now: pic.twitter.com/8bZx1KYSN2

— Shelby Talcott (@ShelbyTalcott) August 25, 2020

Later she caught this exchange between a passerby and some rioters (the language is NSFW):

He got into a fight with a group of people and later sped off, daring them to come for his business. Said people shouldn’t be destroying their own neighborhoods: pic.twitter.com/3O4FFmLnY8

— Shelby Talcott (@ShelbyTalcott) August 25, 2020

It wasn’t just buildings. Our Townhall cousin, Julio Rosas, was also reporting from the scene:

A rioter poured gasoline on a Kenosha garbage truck and set it on fire. pic.twitter.com/sjf7A6np03

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) August 25, 2020

BREAKING: arson caught on camera as #BLM rioter lights a city dump truck on fire using a Molotov cocktail

He had several failed attempts to ignite the vehicle, though he successfully destroyed a nearby truck a few minute earlier

National guard are now here in #Kinosha pic.twitter.com/vbGaa8xlkL

— ELIJAH SCHAFFER (@ElijahSchaffer) August 25, 2020

If you can spare the time, I highly recommended watching all of Rosas’s and Talcott’s threads of clips. Just click their names and keep scrolling. Meanwhile, remember that Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, mobilized a small deployment of National Guard troops last night in hopes of deterring further confrontations with police. Didn’t work:

The situation degraded as a large BLM protest group showed up at the Kenosha County Courthouse. Rioters in the crowd started to throw projectiles at the officers, who responded with tear gas. pic.twitter.com/KvVwm3GA6N

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) August 25, 2020

Some citizens took to arming themselves as the mob advanced. One hobby-shop owner carried a shotgun when he told the Kenosha News that rioters had thrown firebombs at the nearby Danish Brotherhood Lodge, which went up in flames. Rosas caught up with a few locals who headed out into the streets ready for battle if need be:

This is the moment I mentioned earlier. These armed citizens said they support the protests but not the riots because people are hurting their own community.

Later on, as a car dealership was under attack by rioters, one of the armed men stepped in and stopped it. pic.twitter.com/uSqprPXkSW

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) August 25, 2020

The smart move for Democrats right now would be to have Biden fly to Kenosha and take a socially distanced tour of the rubble, then declare emphatically for the cameras that he opposes destruction in the name of wokeness. But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards: He and his party were conspicuously quiet about riots at last week’s convention and he’s said nothing about the arson in Kenosha last night as I write this at 11 a.m. ET. A noteworthy pair of tweets:

This is why Trump is leaning so hard into the LAW AND ORDER message. It’s starting to resonate—and beyond Trump’s base. And my guess is you’ll hear a lot about violence at the convention as R’s want to make sure they connect it to Democratic lead cities and not Trump’s America.

— Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) August 24, 2020

Longwell isn’t a Trumper. Rather the opposite — she’s a founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, spending most of her time nowadays working to get Biden elected. She’s telling her own allies here that they’re blowing it by not being more forceful in condemning the violence. I guess Sleepy Joe has calculated that there are simply too many Shaun-King-style woke dipsh*ts to whom he needs to cater that a firm denunciation is untenable. “America deserves better,” writes Freddy Gray today at Spectator USA. “It deserves a major political party that doesn’t leave itself open to suspicions that it supports criminality. Fortunately for Donald Trump, and perhaps unfortunately for everyone else: the Democrats are not that party.”

It’s political malpractice if Republicans don’t incorporate Kenosha into tonight’s convention proceedings. Or better yet, invite this woman to speak. I’ll make this your exit quotation.

One woman who works in the part of Kenosha that was heavily damaged last night, including where she works, said the rioting is “sickening” and that the rioters shouldn’t take it out on innocent people. pic.twitter.com/X2pusck8JA

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) August 25, 2020