Kenosha riots highlight everything the US 2020 election is about
Residents of Kenosha, Wisconsin have been forced to watch their city be apart through senseless violence. But it’s the visits from Donald Trump and Joe Biden that are really dividing the people.
Uptown Kenosha is still a mess, many of the businesses that haven’t been torched by arsonists boarded up and closed.
Graffiti is everywhere, splashed on fast after last week’s chaos. Some messages are hopeful, about coming together, about peace, urging passers-by to smile and stay positive. But some are heartbreaking, and they are the same painted-on pleas that you can see addressed to the thugs who are terrorising cities across America.
The people who live there, many of them already crushed by the job losses and shutdowns of the coronavirus, are asking that their homes be spared.
“Families live here”
“Black owned business”
“Blind, Disabled, 2nd Floor”
“Disabled Veteran lives here”
There is a lot of sadness in this small midwestern city, but there is also a lot of anger that things got so out of control.
Many say the troublemakers came from out of town or even out of state, drawn to the unrest that is only being stoked by having been wound into the presidential campaign trail.
Some of those I encountered who were the most irritated yesterday weren’t talking about Democrat candidate Joe Biden or President Donald Trump.
John, a retired firefighter from Chicago, took a day off from fishing nearby Lake Michigan to poke around the edges of the crowd outside a church Joe Biden was speaking in.
He increasingly doesn’t believe the TV news he’s watched his whole life so wanted to see what was going on for himself.
John believes Trump will win again, as do most people I spoke with in Wisconsin last week.
A swing voter who supported Trump last time, he had been thinking of going for Biden until recently, turned off by the way Trump sometimes acts.
But seeing Kenosha burn as the state’s Democratic governor refused to call in the National Guard made him think again.
And when Washington’s most senior Democrat refused to apologise for not just breaching regulations by getting her hair done in a shutdown salon, but also for not wearing a mask after regularly scolding Americans for not covering their faces, his mind was made up.
“That Nancy Pelosi is everything that’s wrong with the Democrats,” said John, not wanting to give his last name because he doesn’t want to be “cancelled”.
“Telling everyone what to do all the time. One rule for them and other rules for everyone else. I can’t support that.
“The President isn’t perfect, that’s for sure. But he gets things done. And the way the whole media is against him no matter what, it makes me think they’re working with the Democrats and that’s just not right.”
Originally published as Kenosha riots highlight everything the US 2020 election is about
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