Kenosha Wisconsin Watch

‘I just killed somebody’

Vigilantes inject danger into police brutality protests in Kenosha, nationwide

A 17-year-old answering a call to arms faces murder charges after allegedly shooting two men to death during a protest over a police shooting

Kyle Rittenhouse

By Jim Malewitz and Vanessa Swales

Standing in front of a burned-out Kenosha business Tuesday night, Kyle Rittenhouse said he was there to quell violence and protect property in the southeastern Wisconsin city after a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, in the back Sunday.

“People are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business,” the 17-year-old told the conservative Daily Caller while wearing an Army-green T-shirt with a long gun slung across his back. “If there’s somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my weapon, because I need to protect myself.”

Rittenhouse, who lives 20 miles away in Antioch, Ill., arrived following a widely disseminated call to arms to protect property issued by the Kenosha Guard, a militia group whose leaders include a former Kenosha City Council Protesters argue with members of an armed militia group, right, as a dumpster burns near the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis., on Monday, Aug. 24, 2020. Members of the militia group had earlier said they arrived to protect the right to peaceful protest, but they confronted protesters as people began to damage property. The protest was sparked by the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha the night before. Photo by Will Cioci / Wisconsin Watch.

member. tured at the scene.

As police in armored Police have offered no vehicles exhorted protesters to leave because of an WISCONSIN clear explanation on why Rittenhouse was allowed 8 p.m. curfew aimed at curbing violence and WATCH to return to Antioch before being arrested. property damage, video By Wednesday morning, showed an officer thanking the teenager sat in a Lake the armed men and WIS. CENTER FOR County, Ill., jail, awaiting tossing a bottle of water to Rittenhouse. Just before midnight, INESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM a hearing on extradition to Wisconsin in 30 days on two charges of first-degree gunfire would echo, homicide, one charge of scattering bystanders and attempted murder for the leaving two Wisconsinites dead and a wounding of another protester and third injured. three other charges. The teen’s legal

“I just killed somebody,” Rittenhouse team says he acted in self defense. could be heard saying in a video capRittenhouse was among a group of armed vigilantes who descended Tuesday night on Uptown Kenosha, a business district in the city on Lake Michigan. Their presence added volatility to a third consecutive night of violent unrest after Officer Rusten Sheskey shot Blake seven times in the back as he walked away from police and tried to enter a vehicle with his children inside on Sunday, leaving him paralyzed.

Rittenhouse’s rapid descent to accused killer illustrated the stakes of what experts call a growing trend: Militias, far-right groups and other armed vigilantes — often mobilized on social media — showing up at racial justice protests, escalating chaos and

danger during showdowns between protesters and law enforcement.

“There have been a number of armed conflicts in the history of this movement with police, including recent killings by Boogaloo Boys,” said Chuck Tanner, research director for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. “There’s reason for officers to be very concerned about these organizations because of their willingness to make guns be the kind of solution to the issues that they see.”

ACLU to officials: Resign

The failure to immediately arrest the alleged shooter prompted condemnation from Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes on Thursday and calls by the ACLU for top law enforcement officials in Kenosha County to resign.

During an Aug. 27 press conference, Barnes said he found it “completely horrifying” that police allowed the suspected shooter to leave the scene. He added that militias are “nothing that we should accept as normal. It’s ridiculous – because you see the outcome of that sort of behavior.”

Kenosha has a controversial history of officers shooting civilians; the 2004 fatal shooting of Michael Bell led to a state law requiring all shootings by A protester stands in front of an armored Bearcat vehicle as law enforcement sought to clear an area on Aug. 26 in Kenosha, Wis. The city faced consecutive days of unrest after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back. Photo by Angela Major/WPR.

police officers to be investigated by outside agencies.

Three Kenosha officers, including Sheskey, have been placed on leave while the state Department of Justice investigates the shooting of Blake.

The hands-off, even chummy, interactions between police and the Kenosha militia is not unusual as such groups mobilize nationwide, said Tanner, whose group is based in Kansas City, Missouri.

The institute, which scrutinizes racist, anti-Semitic and far-right social movements, says it has confirmed at least 136 instances of “right-wing and far-right groups and actors” showing up to – or reacting to – racial justice protests since the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd on May 25. The research is current through late June, meaning the tally is likely much higher, Tanner said.

“I’m troubled by the general approach and lack of consistent law enforcement voice in condemning these organizations and making it clear that they don’t have a role to play in policing,” Tanner said.

‘Chaotic’ mix of ideology

Armed groups and individuals showing up to protests are increasingly difficult to delineate at a time when unclear and sometimes contradictory ideology leaves the far-right landscape in flux, said Carolyn Gallaher, a professor at American University and an expert on violence by non-state actors.

The Boogaloo movement – which was also at Kenosha’s protest Tuesday – generally opposes the government and sometimes the police, while its largely white members express various opinions about Black Lives Matter and President Donald Trump, Gallaher said.

Meanwhile, more extreme members of the Back the Blue movement de-

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fend the police and bash politicians for allegedly impeding police efforts to maintain order. But even those movements are fluid.

Online participants sample bits and pieces of ideology as they gaze at their screens.

“It’s really chaotic right now,” she said. “The online ecosystem doesn’t have very clear boundaries. Or the boundaries are there, but people move across all the time.” Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth on Wednesday said his colleagues did not want help from armed citizens, citing the shootings that ensued late Tuesday.

“Yesterday, I had a person call me and say, ‘Why don’t you deputize citizens who have guns to come out and patrol the city of Kenosha?’, and I am like, ‘Oh, hell no’,” he said at a press conference.

Said Kenosha Police Chief Miskinis: “Across this nation, there have been armed civilians who have come out to exercise their constitutional right, and to potentially protect property. So if I’m aware that these groups exist? Yes. But they weren’t invited to come.”

Approach differs for militia

Beth also sought to avoid linking Rittenhouse to militia activity – or comment much at all on the Aug 25 killing of Anthony Huber, a 26-yearold from Silver Lake, and Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, of Kenosha. City police and the FBI are investigating.

Beth said he could not immediately explain why officers did not arrest Rittenhouse before he fled to Illinois, describing a high-stress scene of radio traffic, people screaming and massive armored vehicles idling nearby.

“You have such an incredible tunnel vision,” he said at the press conference. “I’m not making an excuse –— I’m just telling you from personal experience.” Protesters stand in front of an armored Bearcat vehicle as police attempt to disperse a crowd Aug. 25 in Kenosha, Wis. Photo by Angela Major/WPR.

Video later circulated showing a police officer thanking armed men and tossing a bottle of water to one who resembled Kyle Rittenhouse. The 17-year-old has been charged with killing two protesters and wounding a third.

But civil rights advocates drew a different impression from Tuesday

night’s events: That officers treated protesters of the Blake shooting far more harshly than the vigilantes who arrived with guns.

“The video shows officers thanking these armed people even as they are taking a completely different approach to the protesters – you know, ordering them to disperse and treating them pretty roughly,” said Chris Ott, executive director of ACLU Wisconsin. “So right there, that seems to be encouraging exactly what we don’t want more of.”

Online calls to arms

Evidence had not surfaced of a militia group claiming Rittenhouse as a member, according to a review of social media by First Draft, a nonprofit that helps journalists detect and report on disinformation.

But videos from Aug. 25 show the teenager congregating with other armed men who claimed to be protecting property.

Also unclear is whose messaging spurred Rittenhouse to leave home for Kenosha, where protests following Blake’s shooting left parts of Uptown engulfed in flames and a 71-year-old man brutally assaulted by looters.

The city faced consecutive days of unrest after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back as his children reportedly looked on. Video circulated showing a police officer thanking armed men and tossing a bottle of water to one who resembled Kyle Rittenhouse on the same night the 17-year-old allegedly killed two protesters and wounded a third.

Screenshots of Rittenhouse’s Facebook page, since removed from the platform, paint a young man fascinated with guns and police – plastering his account with “Blue Lives Matter” messaging. Buzzfeed also unearthed a TikTok video he posted from the front row of a President Donald Trump rally in Iowa. (A Trump spokesman told Buzzfeed: “This individual had nothing to do with our campaign.”)

Rittenhouse traveled across the Illinois-Wisconsin border while the Facebook group Kenosha Guard was urging its 3,500 followers to “take up arms and defend our city tonight from evil thugs.”

The conspiracy website InfoWars

amplified the message ahead of the protests. Similar calls circulated on the social media platform reddit, prompting replies such as “Going to cleanse the streets of rioters,” and “Time to purge,” according to research by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Facebook told The Verge on that it found no evidence that Rittenhouse followed the Kenosha Guard Facebook page or was invited to the group’s events. Before the page was taken down, the group issued a statement on the shootings, saying, “We are unaware if the armed citizen was answering the Kenosha Guard Militia’s call to arms.”

Former city official led the charge

One clear guard participant: former Kenosha Ald. Kevin Mathewson, who left office in 2017. On the afternoon of Aug. 25, he posted a call on Facebook to deputize citizens “and put them on the front line.” He posted photos and video of himself at the scene, standing alongside other armed Kenosha Guard members. He also appeared in a video on the Kenosha Guard page titled “We are here,” urging fellow militia to join them, and in a CBS Chicago interview.

Mathewson runs a private investigations and security firm. As an alderman, he pushed for police body cameras to fight against “b.s. complaints against officers.” He also repeatedly clashed with other city officials.

In an email to Wisconsin Watch, Mathewson distanced his group from Rittenhouse’s actions.

Kenosha Guard Facebook page

Former Kenosha Ald. Kevin Mathewson urges armed militia members to join him on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2020 in protecting the city against protesters. Later that evening, two protesters were shot to death and a third seriously wounded. Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, of Antioch, Ill., has been charged in connection with those shootings.

“He is a child. The second amendment has some restrictions,” Mathewson wrote. “You cannot process (sic) a gun if you are a child. The only one responsible for his actions are himself. I do not know him and I have never spolek (sic) to him.”

Mathewson criticized Beth and Miskinis as “anti-second amendment” but said the “hard-working” police officers and sheriff’s deputies “welcomed us well and thanked us all night.” He bristled at those who said his militia made Kenosha more dangerous.

“People felt more safe. Law enforcement was outnumbered,” he wrote. “The second amendment was meant for scenarios like this. My community is at war and we are under siege.”

Hateful messages fill Facebook

Facebook shut down the Kenosha Guard group’s page Wednesday morning. But calls to gun down protesters continue to flood other pages. Administrators of Wisconsinites Against Excessive Quarantine, a private group of nearly 121,000, have not formally mobilized vigilantes to Kenosha. But the group has morphed into a space for members to advocate violence.

“Snipers on rooftops take out 60 this will be over by midnight,” wrote one Facebook user who says he lives in Delafield, Wis., responding to a posting of a live feed from Kenosha Tuesday night.

“Guns and ammo!!!!! And go! Cmon patriots in the area! Show up and do your job,” another user replied.

On Thursday, a group member posted a link to a legal defense fund for Rittenhouse. It raised more than $100,000 as of Friday morning.

The Facebook group was among hundreds that mobilized national protests this spring against shutdowns of businesses and public spaces to control the spread of the coronavirus.

Administrators of the Wisconsin group, who have ties to the pro-gun movement, helped mobilize people to a protest in April – short on masks but with ample imagery backing Trump and attacking Evers’ handling of the pandemic – that brought an estimated 1,500 people to the state Capitol.

Tanner said militia and far-right activity has morphed nationwide from protesting coronavirus restrictions to playing a quasi-policing role in the racial justice protests.

“The transition from the reopen events to the George Floyd protests was kind of the perfect storm for expanding that,” Tanner said.

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Politicizing the U.S. Postal Service in an election year

Letters are usually just delivered by STATE the United States Postal Service, not NEWS sent by them. But at the end of July, Minnesota’s MINN POST Secretary of State got a letter from the Postmaster General of the USPS. And it came with a warning: Vote-by-mail might not be fully covered by election day.

“To the extent that mail is used to transmit ballots to and from voters, there is a significant risk that, at least in certain circumstances, ballots may be requested in a manner that is consistent with your election rules and returned promptly, and yet not be returned in time to be counted,” wrote Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

Republicans say there is nothing to worry about. But Minnesota’s elected DFLers have been concerned for months about President Donald Trump’s rhetoric on voting by mail,

specifically after he threatened pandemic recovery funding for the postal service and erroneously suggested, multiple times, that voting by mail is prone to fraud. And DeJoy, a major Trump donor, has only confirmed their fears by reducing service around the country and suggesting voting by mail, during an unprecedented effort to increase vote by mail during a pandemic, might not work well this election cycle.

“I don’t know what the purpose was, but really it didn’t make much sense,” Secretary of State Steve Simon said about the letter from DeJoy. “Other than perhaps to send a message to convince people that it was somehow too risky to vote from home.”

So what do we know about the changes to the postal service capacity? And will voting by mail be impacted? What’s happened so far?

Within eight weeks of taking office in June, DeJoy started implementing major changes to USPS.

Republicans in Congress have long sought to privatize USPS, arguing that the agency loses money each year. (The Pentagon, Centers for Disease Control and Federal Emergency Management Agency also lose money.)

DeJoy, the first postmaster general without experience at USPS in almost three decades, is also the first postmaster general to follow through with major cuts. In July, he effectively eliminated overtime for postal workers. A memo sent to staff suggests that the changes were only “the first wave” and staff will have to think differently to “keep USPS alive.”

It took until August for many of the changes to be made visible around

the country, captured in photos and acknowledged in officials’ emails: mailboxes were removed and trucked away and mail sorting machines were disconnected. People also began to complain about shipping delays, which in one case, resulted in thousands of baby chickens dying as they were shipped to Maine.

In early August, Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith requested DeJoy explain why USPS reduced mail services at the Charles Horn Towers, a public housing complex in Minneapolis, and asked him to commit to notifying Minnesota’s Congressional delegation of any future mail stoppages.

“Not only am I concerned about how this decision is restricting access to voting for low-income households and people of color in Minneapolis, but I am also deeply concerned about nationwide mail delays and the impact of these delays on the integrity of the 2020 elections,” Smith wrote in a letter to DeJoy. “The growing inability of USPS to maintain service levels will jeopardize participation in the upcoming elections. USPS leadership should be focused on ensuring timely mail delivery; now is not the time for internal reorganization.”

While Republicans have characterized the effort to block changes to the USPS as a distraction during the 2020 election, a number of Democrats have said their fears have not been alleviated by DeJoy’s recent statements about vote-by-mail. Democrats in the Senate and in the House have peppered DeJoy with questions in hearings ranging from his recent changes to the USPS to his understanding of how much it costs to mail a postcard (he did not know).

On Aug. 22, the House voted to appropriate $25 billion in emergency funding to the USPS and block the changes DeJoy had made. Trump has threatened to veto the measure and it’s unlikely it will be taken up in the Republican-led Senate.

All Minnesotans in Congress voted along party lines, with Republicans voting against it.

Republicans, like First District Rep. Jim Hagedorn, have said the entire focus on USPS is a sideshow. Hagedorn called the concerns in the bill about USPS changes a “conspiracy theory,” criticizing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“Instead of negotiating in good faith to deliver needed and sensible relief to our farmers, workers, small businesses and families, the speaker has chosen to peddle a baseless conspiracy theory that is meant to deteriorate the American people’s confidence in our system of free and fair elections,” said Hagedorn, who represents Minnesota’s First, said in a statement after the vote. “Her actions are nothing short of despicable.”

In Minnesota, Attorney General Keith Ellison announced a lawsuit (along with 13 other states) against USPS on Aug. 18, saying that mail sorting capacity in the Twin Cities had been reduced from 200,000 pieces of mail per hour to 100,000 pieces of mail per hour. The attorney general’s office also said that three mail sorting machines may have been deactivated and that six more, at the time the lawsuit was announced, may be deactivated as well.

Only after the condemnation did DeJoy say that he would delay the changes until after the election. But emails sent to branch managers around the U.S in late August, obtained by VICE, show that the USPS will not be reconnecting machines they have already disconnected.

“If true, that’s why we haven’t just dropped our lawsuit based on what DeJoy said, because we need to have a specific agreement that is enforceable before we back off,” Ellison said in an interview.

The Attorney General said he believes the reasoning for the changes are twofold: “The most immediate one is to advantage the president in the upcoming election. But then it’s a part of a longer term trend where they’ve been trying to privatize the post office for years,” he said.

While disadvantaging those that vote-by-mail is a concern, so are the everyday implications of the changes at USPS. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, typically an advocate expanding ballot access, is also concerned about how the changes have impacted shipping.

“One small business owner in St. Paul, who designs hats, faced an unprecedented delay in receiving a shipment of supplies and as a result nearly missed her own delivery deadline for her customers,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “These sole proprietors cannot reach their customers without the USPS, and their business model is directly threatened by needless delivery delays.”

Klobuchar’s concerns are shared with Minnesota’s postal workers unions, who have suggested that the greatest impact to mail services may be around the December holidays, with a reduction of service diminishing their ability to deliver packages on time. Union leaders said that some people are only getting mail a few days a week, even when postal workers stay out until 8 and 9 p.m. But the same leaders, during a virtual roundtable of Minnesota postal workers hosted by Rep. Dean Phillips, Democrat of Minnesota’s Third District, also said they were confident that election mail will be delivered.

Regional representatives for the USPS in Minnesota, western Wisconsin, Iowa and the Quad Cities Area in Illinois agreed, saying the postal service has more than enough capacity to handle voting by mail, contradicting DeJoy’s initial letter.

But union members are worried about how these changes will impact shipping. “I’m more worried about the long term effect, the holidays and further out,” said Peggy Wheeler from the American Postal Workers Union.

Samantha Hartwig, president of the Minneapolis branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said in an interview that mail received by the city’s post offices, before the changes, was typically sent out the next day. That pace has slowed, but the city is not experiencing huge stacks of mail backed up.

But even then, some affiliated with USPS suggested that they are very concerned about voting by mail.

“Do I believe that the intentions are to destroy the mail service, destroy the unions and create havoc with our backbone of our democracy, our right to vote?” former St. Paul Postal Workers Union President Tom Edwards asked at a rally in support of USPS last Saturday. “Yes, I really do.”

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How will it impact voting by mail in Minnesota?

Republican political strategists have long tried to restrict voting rights, with some, including Trump, outright suggesting that the current barriers to voting help them win.

Trump’s own words lend credibility to the idea that he aims to prevent voters from using vote by mail. Last Saturday the president tweeted that vote by mail would allow people to vote multiple times (it does not). “So now the Democrats are using Mail Drop Boxes, which are a voter security disaster,” he said in part. White House staff have also devoted their time to trying to discredit vote-by-mail, saying that universal mail-in voting would lead to fraud (research suggests it would not).