Consequences

During public protests and unrest in Wisconsin on Tuesday night, three people were shot by someone in the crowd. Two of them died shortly afterwards.

This is a cycle that has repeated several times this year. Police shoot an unarmed Black man, either seriously wounding or killing him, and public outrage immediately follows. This leads to large-scale protests, which are primarily peaceful but are sometimes followed by looting after dark. Far-right militia often show up in the mix sometimes during this sequence, sometimes attacking peaceful protesters or instigating looting.

Throughout all this, Donald Trump has tried to capitalize on these events, insisting this kind of thing will happen if he's not reelected. This inflammatory rhetoric conveniently sidesteps the fact that it's already happening and during his presidency.

Trump also peppers his rhetoric with encouragement to "you Second Amendment people" to do something and veiled white supremacy coded phrases directed at the heavily armed far-right white supremacy militia that overwhelmingly supports him.

And now it turns out the suspect arrested for the shooting and double homicide on Tuesday was a seventeen-year-old die-hard militia advocate and enthusiastic Trump supporter (details here).

Now Trump's people are trying to distance themselves from this support, saying they have nothing to do with him and praising the police who arrested the young man.

But this conveniently overlooks the fact that Trump regularly and grossly over-exaggerates urban unrest while concurrently encouraging his supporters to "do something." When you traffic in hate, you can't be surprised when someone turns around and pays it forward.