By Dan O’Donnell
Tuesday, September 01, 2020
After a summer of seemingly unending chaos in America’s
cities, Kenosha just may have been the tipping point.
For three nights, the city burned in rioting after the
officer-involved shooting of Jacob Blake, while Democratic governor Tony Evers
refused to deploy a Wisconsin National Guard contingent large enough to quell
the violence.
For three days, Evers issued inflammatory statement after
inflammatory statement — even going so far as to say that a
Kenosha police officer “mercilessly” shot Blake — and refused to either
condemn the violence or urge calm. Laughably, the sternest warning he gave
rioters was to remind them to “wear your mask and keep social distance as best
you can.”
Local leaders and law-enforcement officials in Kenosha
begged Evers to deploy the Guard in numbers sufficient to restore order, asking
for a total of 750 soldiers. On Monday, Evers sent 150. Kenosha continued to
burn.
So adamant was Evers that he rejected the Trump
administration’s offer of help.
“We have a National Guard standing by that if the general
for the National Guard needs additional help, we’re there to do it,” White
House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Tuesday. “But today, that request
was denied by the governor.”
Evers upped the deployment to just 250 soldiers the same
day, and still, Kenosha burned.
Amid the chaos, a 17-year-old from Illinois shot two men
to death and injured a third in what may have been an act of self-defense. This
seemed to be the wake-up call that Evers needed, and while he still couldn’t
bring himself to condemn the rioting, he finally issued a statement indicating
that he was prepared to do something to stop it.
“A senseless tragedy like this cannot happen again,” he
said. “We must turn from violence and remember that any single act of injustice
against one person is less justice for us all.” In a surprising about-face, he
accepted the White House’s offer of more troops and allowed a deployment
sufficient to stop the lawlessness.
Unsurprisingly, it worked. Kenosha stopped burning and
has remained relatively calm ever since, thereby proving what rational
observers have always known: that a show of force is the only thing that will
stop the rioting and that Democratic mayors and governors can make such a show
any time they choose. They just have to want to, or at least be forced to, as
Evers clearly was.
“The rioting has to stop,” CNN anchor Don Lemon gravely
intoned Tuesday night before dropping the veneer of objectivity altogether.
“It’s showing up in the polling. It’s showing up in focus groups. It is the
only thing — it is the only thing right now that is sticking [to Democratic
presidential nominee Joe Biden].”
The following morning, the New
York Times used a bold headline to warn that “Kenosha Is Already
Swaying Some Voters in Wisconsin.” One of them, Priscilla Gazda, said she’d
voted only once in her life — for Barack Obama in 2008 — but would be voting
for Trump in November, because “he seems to be more about the American people
and what we need.”
Evers apparently took notice of these warning signs. In
that sense, he is emblematic of a Democratic Party that has suddenly awakened
to just how devastating this summer’s widespread rioting has been. The physical
destruction of Democrat-controlled cities was not enough to spur such an
awakening — it took political blowback — but it has thankfully happened
nonetheless.
While no one should hold their breath that radical
Democratic leaders in Portland and Seattle will follow Evers’s lead, his sudden
change of heart is a tell that Kenosha just may have changed the politics of
this summer’s riots. For the first time since the chaos started, it had spread
outside of far-left megacities, reaching Anytown, USA. If it could happen in
Kenosha, it could happen anywhere else that Democratic leaders are seen as
allowing it to happen. That more than anything is what prompted Evers to act,
and what might finally force Democratic leaders across the country to act as
well.
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