Ooops. She didn’t get the memo that riots aren’t polling well and she should start referring to being unsafe in Trumps America as the talking point.
— JT (@jamiesdreamteam) August 28, 2020
THEY’RE BEYOND SMART POLITICS; THEY’RE DRUNK ON STREET POWER:
Biden voters threatening to burn down a church the day after the media went to bat for his catholicism will be a good photo op. t.co/wsuNvfQOyx
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) August 28, 2020
As you watch all the videos of Trump supporters getting targeted and attacked outside the White House tonight, here’s a reminder that one of the Democrats’ leading voices, Maxine Waters, literally encouraged this behavior. pic.twitter.com/v5o4bxWpKO
— Kelb Hull (@CalebJHull) August 28, 2020
John Geraghty, a 41-year-old worker in a tractor factory, has barely paid attention to the presidential race or the conventions. Every day he focuses on survival: getting his son to sports practice, working at his job where he now wears a mask, and getting home to sleep, only to start over again the next day.
But when he woke up on Monday morning to images of his hometown, Kenosha, Wis., in flames, he could not stop watching. The unrest in faraway places like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis had arrived at his doorstep, after a white police officer on Sunday shot a Black man in the back multiple times. And after feeling “100 percent on the fence” about which candidates he will vote for in November, he is increasingly nervous that Democratic state leaders seem unable to contain the spiraling crisis.
“It’s crazy that it’s now happening in my home city,” he said. “We have to have a serious conversation about what are we going to do about it. It doesn’t seem like the powers that be want to do much.” . . .
Don Biehn, 62, owner of a flooring company, was standing in line at a gun store on Tuesday afternoon. He said that he had never bought a pistol before, but that he had a business to protect. A former county board supervisor, Mr. Biehn said he had been calling county and state officials for days, trying to explain how grave the situation was.
Neither John Antaramian, the mayor of Kenosha, nor Jim Kreuser, the county executive, responded to requests for comment. (The positions are nonpartisan, but both men previously served in the State Assembly as Democrats.)
“There’s people running all over with guns — it’s like some Wild West town,” Mr. Biehn said. “We are just waiting here like sitting ducks waiting to get picked off.”
He added: “It’s chaos — everybody is afraid.”
Mr. Trump, he said, “was not my man,” but now he is grateful he is president.
He said he seemed to understand in a way that other politicians did not. . . .
Mr. Haight, 59, said he was a “lifelong Democrat” but had decided not to vote this year.
“It’s not worth it,” he said. “One’s as bad as the other.”
Priscella Gazda, a waitress at a pizza restaurant in Kenosha, was having the opposite reaction. She said she had voted only once in her life — for Mr. Obama in 2008. Her son has Type 1 diabetes and was hoping for health insurance.
“I’m not the one who would ever vote,” she said.
But after the chaos in her town, this year is different.
“I am going to vote for Trump,” she said. “He seems to be more about the American people and what we need.”
Chaser: Remember When a Democratic Polling Firm Fired the Guy Who Thought Violent Protests Could Backfire Politically? “Shor had publicized research from the social scientist Omar Wasow showing that violent protests tend to backfire on progressive goals—tipping the 1968 election in favor of the law-and-order candidate, Richard Nixon, for instance—whereas peaceful protests often succeed. In response, Shor was widely derided by the left. On Twitter, the progressive activist Ari Trujillo Wesler accused him of using his ‘anxiety and ‘intellect’ as a vehicle for anti-blackness. Employees and clients of Civis Analytics said Shor’s statement—which, to be clear, was merely an endorsement of well-grounded social science research that says nonviolent protest is strategically superior—had threatened their very safety, according to New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. As a result, Shor was terminated. The exact reason for the firing was never specified, but it spoke to concerns among many liberal thinkers—Chait, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, and others—that certain sects of the left are unwilling to have difficult conversations about tactics. This is a concern shared by many libertarians, and supporters of free speech culture more broadly.”