Kyle Rittenhouse, American Vigilante

The proliferation of digital video has exposed abuses of power that in the past often remained hidden. It has also allowed people to watch shocking footage and make pronouncements about it on social media before knowing all the facts. Last summer, Americans were still reeling from the excruciating sight of a Minneapolis police officer slowly killing George Floyd when another violent encounter unfolded, with seemingly similar clarity. On the afternoon of Sunday, August 23rd, three police officers tried to arrest a man outside a fourplex in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A neighbor started recording on his phone when he saw the officers, who were white, scuffling with the man, who was Black. The confrontation began behind a parked S.U.V., so initially the neighbor couldn’t see everything. Then the man broke free, went around the vehicle, and opened the driver’s door. One officer grabbed him by his tank top and shot him seven times, from behind. Kenosha did not equip officers with body cameras, and so the neighbor’s footage was the primary visual documentation of the shooting. The victim, Jacob Blake, survived, but the incident was instantly seen as another grim example of an urgent problem: according to a recent Harvard study, Black people are more than three times as likely as white people to be killed during a police encounter. The comedian Kevin Hart tweeted, “What’s the justification for 7 shots ” After Floyd’s death, Kenosha was among the scores of American cities where citizens marched in protest. Hundreds of people now assembled for Blake, a lanky twenty-nine-year-old who had been staying at the fourplex with his fiancée, Laquisha Booker. They had several sons, and the shooting had occurred on the eighth birthday of the oldest, Izreal. Blake had decorated the apartment for a party, and was cooking hot dogs when he and Booker started quarrelling. Blake left in the S.U.V.—Booker’s rental car. “Me and my sisters just saw him skirt off in it,” Booker told a 911 dispatcher. Blake returned, but when the police arrived he was leaving again—this time with the children. His sons witnessed the shooting from the back seat. The protesters gathered outside the Kenosha County Courthouse, a limestone building facing Civic Center Park, an area surrounded by businesses and residences. Many people marched peacefully and held signs. But, that night and the next, rioters hurled bricks and fireworks at law-enforcement officers. Looters smashed shopwindows, and a Department of Corrections building was burned down. When an older man with a fire extinguisher confronted rioters, someone struck him with a hard object, splitting his nose and breaking his jaw. President Donald Trump had been highlighting the destructive aspects of such protests in order to malign the Black Lives Matter movement. At a Papa John’s, a man stood behind a shattered window and yelled, “Are they trying to get Trump reëlected?” A demonstrator replied, “These people don’t represent our movement!” But, at another moment, when a man told protesters, “What y’all don’t fucking understand is that people have their lives in these businesses,” a woman screamed back, “So what?” Right-wing news outlets packaged the fieriest images as evidence of ruinous policies in Democratic-run cities, and criticized the mainstream media’s refusal to acknowledge the violence. Joan Donovan, the chief of research at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, identified One America News Network, Glenn Beck on BlazeTV, and Fox News—particularly the hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity—as promulgators of “riot porn.” Writing in MIT Technology Review, Donovan said that such footage, designed to “overwhelm the sense-making capacity” of viewers, inspired militias and vigilantes to “live out fantasies of taking justice into their own hands.” After Kenosha’s march for George Floyd, on May 31st, Kevin Mathewson, a former city alderman who had sometimes brought a handgun to city-council meetings, decided that the police needed civilian reinforcements. He started the Kenosha Guard, which was less a militia than an impulse with a Facebook page. But on August 25th, as the city braced for a third night of protests in the wake of Blake’s shooting, Mathewson, who is a private investigator, posted a call for “Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property.” He invited “patriots” to meet him at the courthouse at 6 p.m., to defend Kenosha from “evil thugs.” Mathewson’s post caught the attention of Kristan Harris, a streamer whose work included conspiracy content of the Pizzagate variety. All summer, he had been live-streaming protests, calling himself a “citizen journalist.” Harris wrote a blurb about the Kenosha Guard, which got picked up by Infowars. On Facebook, thousands of people indicated interest in joining Mathewson at the courthouse. Mathewson posted an open letter to Kenosha’s police chief, calling himself the “commander” of the Kenosha Guard and warning, “Do NOT have your officers tell us to go home under threat of arrest.” Mathewson’s “Armed Citizens” post elicited such comments as “kill looters and rioters.” Facebook allowed the page to stand even after receiving well over four hundred complaints. A crowd was building when Mathewson, in a Chuck Norris T-shirt, showed up at the courthouse with a semi-automatic rifle. He soon went home, but throughout the evening others used his Facebook page, or similar ones, to spread rumors. One commenter predicted that if armed “untrained civilians” got scared, “someone’s getting shot.” That night in Kenosha, as at many racial-justice protests, the crowd was a confusing mélange: B.L.M. activists, antifascists in black bloc, right-wing extremists in camouflage. Across factions, people carried guns, some more visibly than others. It was often challenging to tell friend from foe. South of the courthouse, a group of libertarians flanked the gas pumps of the Ultimate Convenience Center. Dressed in camo, they were heavily armed, if not necessarily experienced: one member mocked another for holding his rifle wrong. Harris, the “citizen journalist,” had shown up, to live-stream. He praised militias as “cool,” but not everyone shared his enthusiasm. A muscular man from Chicago told Harris, “These dudes are LARPers.” “LARP” refers to “live-action role-playing” games. The guns, though, were real. Private militias and paramilitary organizations are illegal in every state, but throughout 2020 militia types inflamed about B.L.M. protests and pandemic lockdowns had been increasingly showing up armed on urban streets. Last June, a group called the New Mexico Civil Guard appeared at a protest in Albuquerque and “defended” a statue of a conquistador. According to the district attorney, the group’s members had trained in combat tactics and presented themselves at the protest as “indistinguishable from authorized military forces.” An armed man joined the militia in trying to drive protesters away, and then shot and injured one of them. Mike German, a former F.B.I. special agent who once worked undercover to expose neo-Nazis and is now a fellow at N.Y.U.’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me that domestic extremists have learned that they can receive more “aboveground” support by calling themselves patriots and peacekeepers. Yet, German emphasized, “you can’t just nominate yourself as a security provider.” He compared this approach to tactics in prewar Germany, “when Nazi thugs rallied where they knew they had political opposition—they could attack and get media coverage, and gain a reputation for being tough and scary.” Militias often outfit themselves with variants of the AR-15, a high-velocity rifle that has become both a popular sporting gun and a favored weapon of mass shooters. Since 2017, such firearms have been used in at least thirteen mass-casualty incidents. Only a handful of states prohibit citizens from openly carrying AR-style weapons. Even the National Rifle Association once called it unsettling to “see someone sidle up next to you in line for lunch with a 7.62 rifle.” This observation was published on the N.R.A.’s Web site in 2014, at a moment when Texans were ordering coffee at cafés while carrying battle-grade firearms. Two years later, a sniper in Dallas shot and killed five police officers during a B.L.M. demonstration. The city’s police chief publicly reiterated the reason that so many law-enforcement officials oppose open-carry laws: the profusion of visibly armed civilians complicated the task of quickly identifying the shooter. An Army veteran named Ryan Balch, who lived near Milwaukee, heard about the Blake protests and decided that he was needed in Kenosha. The Kenosha Guard appeared frivolous to him, so on August 25th he drove to town on his own, equipped with an AR-type rifle. Balch later said that he and some friends had to “infiltrate” the city by circumventing roadblocks: “We were sittin’ low, trying to get past the cops, to get in there and do what we needed to do.” Balch spotted a small group of armed volunteers at Car Source, a dealership whose main sales lot was now a landscape of smoldering metal. Despite an eight-o’clock curfew, the volunteers planned to guard the dealership’s two nearby mechanic shops. As Balch later explained in detail online, he “inserted” himself as a “tactical” adviser. He claimed that a Car Source owner “deputized” the group, but civilians have no such power, and law-enforcement agencies don’t grant that authority. (“What a scary, scary thought,” Kenosha County’s sheriff, David Beth, has said.) Balch and several others positioned themselves at one of the mechanic shops, a low, flat-topped building. Men with rifles set up on the roof. Balch, who described himself as “anti-establishment,” had been immersed in far-right circles on social media. He seemed to view the police as the enemy, and said that “the cops wouldn’t have been able to defend themselves” against some of the weapons on the roof. According to him, when a police officer stopped and remarked on all the “friendly guns,” he replied, “We’re not here to be friendly to you.” After dark, the crowd streamed away from the courthouse, where the police were firing tear gas and rubber bullets. As armored vehicles herded the protesters toward the mechanic shop, one of them said, “We in Call of Duty!” Harris and other live-streamers had been chatting on camera with Balch and a member of his cohort: a talkative teen-ager in a backward baseball cap, with a semi-automatic rifle slung across his chest. A videographer said, “So you guys are full-on ready to defend the property?” The teen-ager, whose name was Kyle Rittenhouse, replied, “Yes, we are,” adding, officiously, “Now, if I can ask—can you guys step back?” Rittenhouse’s chubby cheeks and high, arched eyebrows gave his face a bemused, childish quality. A first-aid kit dangled at his hip. He explained that he planned to provide first aid to anyone needing it, and said that his gun was for self-protection—“obviously.” He wasn’t old enough to be a certified E.M.T., yet he shouted, “I am an E.M.T.!,” and proclaimed, “If you are injured, come to me! ” Adopting the language of first responders, he told a streamer, “If there’s somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way.” Rittenhouse’s intentions may well have been lost on demonstrators. In addition to the rifle, he wore an Army-green T-shirt and the Sport Patriot style of Ariat boots: part camouflage, part American flag. For all anyone knew, he or others at Car Source were among the Facebook users who had made such threats as “I have my suppressor on my AR, these fools won’t even know what hit them.” According to a theory of social psychology called the “weapons effect,” the mere sight of a gun inspires aggression. In 1967, the psychologists Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage wrote, “In essence, the gun helps pull the trigger.” Their methodology had flaws, but later studies verified their premise. In one U.K. study, people were more inclined to assault a police officer who was visibly armed with a Taser. Brad Bushman, an Ohio State researcher who served on President Barack Obama’s committee on gun violence, told me, “We’ve found that it really doesn’t matter if a good guy or a bad guy is carrying the gun—it creates the bias to interpret things in a hostile way.” Citizens who openly carry firearms “think that they are making the situation safer, but they are making it much more dangerous.”

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