Media Didn’t Report What It’s Really Like In Kenosha, Wisconsin, So I Will
Indeed, the scene on Tuesday night was something I had only seen in photos of war-torn countries. Men and women stood with baseball bats, hand-guns, semi-automatic rifles, and shotguns in front of their businesses and homes. Many Kenoshans explained to me that law enforcement lacked the necessary numbers of officers to control the situation, forcing them to focus on defending public buildings, such as the courthouse, leaving citizens to fend for themselves.
Pretty obviously, I think, much of the violence is deliberate provocation by persons Rand Paul called semi-professional rioters. Their goals are essentially to foment communist revolution in this swell old country of ours. It will fail, of course, or so one must hope, but they can do much damage before it does.
Many other people support or are in sympathy with some version of liberal racial justice, which seems to me a good thing. But the hard left has been thinking a long time about how one can turn these widespread liberal convictions into social instability, especially with the help of the media and culture. And that’s what’s been going on. I personally think it’s high time to impose order on the situation, as Andrew Sullivan suggested recently. It speaks ill of Trump that he could have come down hard on this disorder already instead of fomenting it and stirring the pot, presumably for political purposes. He’s a great fomenter but a decisive leader, less than optimally. Without basic order, you have tyranny and nobody except our communist friends wants that.
I know, I sound to some like a nut, but as I’ve grown older I realize, gosh, there really are quite a few (though a tiny minority relatively speaking) evil people out there trying to change the world in a way that suits them better than the imperfect world we unfortunately must live in. It’s more of a blob than a centrally organized conspiracy behind these troubles, but blobs can be effective organizations. Lots of just awful ideas can end up transforming societies, with working people and entrepreneurs suffering the most. Just look at the last 200 years or so. As to believing in their own goodness, of course the communists do. Everybody does, reportedly even the Devil him, her or themself.
Trump is a bad man, like so many others, or so it seems to me, but he’s found himself defending at least some of the basic liberal verities, while poor old Joe has stumbled into the head of the big Red march, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Some like Andrew Sullivan see Biden as our best hope, but says Biden will have to resist the left within his supporters. But that seems like wishful thinking in the extreme. I see only faint hints of fascism within the Trump camp, at least until recently. But there may be more than I realize within some military veterans, law enforcement officers and their extended families and fellow travelers. The USA does bear some similarity to Wiemar Germany, as Sullivan noted. It will be an interesting decade.