Rioters set fire to more buildings in Kenosha during another night of protests over Blake shooting

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…

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…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.”

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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:

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

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

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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:

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:

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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:

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.”

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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.

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John Sexton 3:20 PM | November 07, 2024
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