If Liberals Don’t Stop Supporting Riots, Kyle Rittenhouse May Be the First of Many
If the government chooses not to maintain order, other people will fill the gap
Martin Luther King said a lot of profound things, but this is not one of them:
Yes, you could say that “a riot is the language of the unheard,” but you could similarly say that the gunshots of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Rooftop Koreans during the LA riots, and the National Guard at Kent State were also the “language of the unheard.” They were telling violent rioters to stay away from them and since they weren’t being heard, they let their guns do the talking. That’s what happens where there are riots. Property gets destroyed. People get hurt. A lot of people still remember poor Reginald Denny getting his head bashed in by cackling animals during the LA riots:
Crazy things happen during riots. You get unstable people and wild, potentially dangerous situations. Things can go sideways and get out of hand in a hurry. Back in 2011, the Occupy movement was in full swing. They weren’t as violent and didn’t do as much damage as the BLM/Antifa rioters, but they regularly broke the law and started trouble. I was at a conservative event in Denver, not far away from a park that the Occupy movement had taken over. They showed up at our event and some of their loopier members got a little out of hand:
We heard that the police were going to throw them out of the park that night and decided to cover it. Most of the people I was with covered it from across the street, but I wanted to be right in the middle of the whole melee between the cops and protesters to get a better view of what was going on for the story I wrote. I had a cop point a gun at me (the one with the flashlight):
There was also a nutjob screaming at the cops that he had a gun:
…We moved away from the main mass a bit and back from the riot line. That's where we ran across this guy screaming at the police. In fairness to the Denver Occupy crowd, although he wasn't the only one being abusive, he was by far the worst one we heard. Near the end, you'll hear him say, "I got a gun, too!" and I say, "Don't yell that" because I was afraid the cops would hear "gun" and a dozen of them would fly in and dogpile everyone in the area on general principle. Right after that, you hear a cop tell us to move -- and we did -- for a bit.
What you see there is NOTHING compared to the chaos that has gone on during the BLM/Antifa riots. There has been looting, arson, people being beaten, cars being attacked, attacks on cops, and yes, as we saw in Kenosha, criminals that were fully willing to bring a skateboard to a gunfight.
People DIE in environments like that, and everyone is well aware of that fact. It’s ironic that liberals across the country, including Democratic members of Congress, basically just shrugged off the rioting from the safety of their gated communities:
Tom Elliott @tomselliott
Rep. @AOC: Rep. Gosar’s video “part of a larger trend” of “racist misogyny” against me https://t.co/fKuJeStoKhThen, after Democrats in Congress got a taste on January 6th of what regular people had been dealing with in cities like Seattle, Portland, and Kenosha, they brought in 25,000 National Guard troops to protect them. Ordinary citizens can’t just call up the National Guard to guarantee their security. They rely on their local governments and police to do it. What happens if the local government and police decide to allow the barbarians to terrorize and sack anything they want and you’re just a regular guy, who can’t call in the National Guard? You buy a gun. You may even decide that if the police aren’t going to protect your community, that people like you will need to do it.
In other words, if you defund the police, prevent them from stopping rioters or, as we’ve seen in many Democrat-run cities, refuse to prosecute the rioters even if they’re arrested, then more ordinary people like Kyle Rittenhouse will feel the pressure to step up and do what the government refuses to do. You hear a lot of people complain about the Proud Boys, who, contrary to what the liberal media says, are absolutely not white supremacists, even if they’re not always a responsible group. Do you know how the Proud Boys first made a name for themselves? By providing unofficial security to conservative speakers when liberal and campus-run police departments refused to do it. Do you think the Proud Boys are horrible? Do you find militias scary? Do you think it’s frightening that a 17-year-old like Kyle Rittenhouse was running around a riot with an AR-15? Then, you shouldn’t be supporting riots and you should be demanding that the police be allowed to do their damn jobs. God bless you if you want to peacefully protest because that is a thoroughly American activity. However, if you want to riot and loot, at best you deserve to end up on the wrong end of a baton or serving a long jail sentence. Some people disagree with that. They’ll even tell you that “lives are more important than property” to justify rioting and looting. Of course, it actually makes more sense to flip that around. If you value your life, you shouldn’t be doing something that may potentially put your life in jeopardy like trying to destroy, burn, or loot property that doesn’t belong to you. The police should be allowed and encouraged to use as little force as possible, but as much force as necessary to protect the public and prevent rioting. If the choice is between hurting rioters or allowing them to harm the public, hurt the rioters. The more rioters and looters are allowed to get away with creating mayhem, the more the general public is going to feel compelled to step up to defend themselves and their neighbors.
So far, believe it or not, we’ve been very lucky that a lot more blood hasn’t been spilled during these riots. The primary reason it hasn’t is that they’ve occurred in liberal cities where people are generally supportive of the rioters and aren’t as likely to be armed. That can very quickly and easily go in a different direction. If the police won’t protect the citizenry, other people will eventually do the job themselves. A lot of liberals got very upset when this happened in Indiana:
However, there are an awful lot of places in America where that kind of reaction would be the norm. I still remember last summer when some little old lady on Nextdoor suggested that we form a militia to be prepared to fight back JUST IN CASE rioters came to our area. That kind of mentality is far from an anomaly in many parts of the country.
The problem is not Kyle Rittenhouse. He defended himself from some bad guys that were looking for someone to hurt and made a poor choice of who to victimize. The real problem is that someone like Kyle Rittenhouse felt compelled to try to step up and do a job that the police, the National Guard, and the government of Kenosha weren’t doing. Quite frankly, a government that can’t even do a halfway decent job of maintaining order is worse than worthless because it puts pressure on untrained civilians to do the job the police aren’t being allowed to do. It boggles the mind that there are people who claim to be scared of the police, but who aren’t scared of what happens when civilians with no training or qualifications start feeling as if they have to protect themselves and other people because the police aren’t going to do it. Nor do those people worry about what happens when the rioters that are menacing the public start carrying weapons ostensibly to “protect themselves” from the people they’re harassing. We’re actually getting to the point where there are political gunfights in Portland now between the Proud Boys and Antifa:
The longer this goes on, the more dangerous the rioters will become to the public, the more the public will feel the need to defend themselves from the rioters since the government isn’t doing it, and the more politicized justice will become in these cases. We’re already seeing many people on the Right CHEERING members of BLM and Antifa being run over by the cars they’re attacking. That’s not healthy, but again, it’s a result of the government not doing their first and most important job, which is enforcing law and order. If our choice is between trained police officers enforcing the law and lone wolves with AR-15s, we should all choose the police officers. However, if the choice is between being at the mercy of the mob or some random guys who seem to mean well with AR-15s, then the armed random guys may be your best option. Let’s hope the government doesn’t continue to keep putting American citizens in that position because the body count could escalate much faster and higher than anyone expects.
Locked and loaded, maybe these rioters will think twice if they know citizens will defend our cities and states when the police won’t!!!
The wise thing for black people to do would be to try to work peacefully. The more violent things get ... well, black people are like 13% of the population and white people are 58%. If it comes to a violent confrontation between whites and blacks, the blacks are outnumbered over 4 to 1. And I don't have statistics but I suspect more white people own guns. A race war would likely end very badly for black people. Let me quickly make clear that I'm not saying that I want such a thing to happen. I most definitely do not. I'm just saying that trying to spark a race war would be a very foolish thing for black people to do.
And of course, the majority of black people don't want a race war. I don't know a lot of black people, but I've known a few, and all were decent, law-abiding, peace-loving people. I'd guess that the number of black people who want violence and confrontation is similar to the number of white people who want violence and confrontation -- very few.