The next day, he joined several other young men in the defense of the dealership where Harris encountered him.
Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, who lived just across the state line in Illinois, arrived in Kenosha the night before. “Get my good angle,” one of them said, leaning nonchalantly against the driver’s side door. “They’re here to protect the local neighborhood and buildings, they said.” Out front, two young men stood sentry with rifles in front of a silver sedan. “We’ve got militia on the roof here, and it’s pretty neat,” Harris told his viewers. But it was immediately clear to him, in Kenosha, that something had shifted: “When people say, ‘Hey, take your positions, they’re coming our way’ - that, to me, sounds like war.”Ī handful of figures, rifles in hand, were visible in silhouette on the roof of a car dealership. “It’s a penis-measuring contest - let’s call it what it is,” he told me. An advocate for armed citizens’ groups (though not actually a gun owner himself), Harris had been at plenty of assemblies where military-style hardware was ostentatiously carried. Harris was also a prolific livestreamer, a frequent presence at protests and other happenings in the Upper Midwest. Harris, the Milwaukee-based host of a streamed talk show called “The Rundown Live” (“covering news and conspiracy that your local news won’t”), a sort of junior cousin of Alex Jones’s conspiracist Infowars media empire. One of the most extensive records of their appearance was made by Kristan T. “This,” he wrote to me in a Facebook message, “was what triggered us citizens that day!” When I asked one local man what possessed him to leave his home armed with a rifle and intent on defending a pizza place across town, whose owner he did not know, he directed me to the footage of the beating outside the Danish Brotherhood Lodge. 25, were convinced they had to do something - who, when reaching for an explanation of what they had done after the fact, would often reach for a video.
It ricocheted around the online platforms themselves, among people who, by the third day, Aug. It fueled rumors and conspiracy theories, outraged monologues on talk radio and conversations within the White House, which themselves spilled back onto Fox News. The footage ran in fiery loops on Fox News and Newsmax. A man in his 70s trying to defend the Danish Brotherhood Lodge and a store next door sprayed rioters in their faces with a fire extinguisher until a man hit him with a concrete-filled plastic bottle, breaking his jaw. Several streets’ worth of businesses and a parole office went up in flames. That night, police officers defending the county courthouse used a sound cannon and tear gas on demonstrators. The next day, the mayor attempted a news conference but was forced to retreat inside the public-safety building ahead of a furious crowd that broke the glass of the building’s front doors. Within hours, officers in riot gear were firing rubber bullets and pepper balls beneath a pall of smoke from torched municipal trucks, and black-masked arsonists were setting fire to public buildings. A demonstration at the site of the shooting grew larger and angrier and gave way to smashed police cruisers an officer was knocked unconscious with a brick. Over the following nights, Kenoshans found themselves inside a compressed version of the national experience since the killing of George Floyd three months earlier. It began with the video of a white police officer shooting a Black man named Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., a small lakefront manufacturing city, on Aug. Practically all of it happened on camera - many cameras, on phones held aloft like candles through the tear gas and firework smoke, feeding fragments of footage and livestreams to the many platforms.
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