As protests honoring Jacob Blake -- who remains paralyzed from the waist down following yet another police shooting -- sent thousands into the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, a 17-year-old teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse decided to take up arms in retaliation. Video footage from earlier in the night depicts Rittenhouse standing guard in front of a boarded-up building, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and stating his intended purpose. "Our job is to protect this business, and part of my job is to help people," explains Rittenhouse, speaking with The Daily Caller. "If there's somebody hurt, I'm running into harm's way."
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Reports indicate that several police officers, seemingly appreciative of Rittenhouse's cause, drove by and provided him with water bottles. The New York Times indicates that fifteen minutes prior to the first shooting, Rittenhouse was actively conversing with police. The shooting transpired later that night, after Rittenhouse seemingly found himself in a confrontation and opened fire, shooting a man in the head. As word spread of his fatal action, many attempted to subdue and pursue him, prompting him to flee while firing further shots into the crowd; by the end of the night, two were dead at his hand. In a now-viral clip, police can be seen driving by an armed Rittenhouse as he quickly distances himself from the scene. He was later arrested and charged with first-degree intentional homicide.
Given how divisive politics have become in the United States, protests centering around race can prove particularly incendiary to certain pundits, especially those who veer closer to provocateur territory. For Tucker Carlson, no stranger to stoking the flames exactly like the leftist media he professes to despise, Rittenhouse was not an outlier, but an inevitability. Speaking on his Fox News show, the host issued a lengthy statement on the protest, seemingly casting the blame on the authorities present.
"Kenosha has devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it," he declares. "People in charge from the Governor on down refused to enforce the law. They stood back and watched Kenosha burn. So are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided that they needed to maintain order when no one else would. Everyone could see what was happening in Kenosha, it was getting crazier by the hour."
As for a solution, Carlson presents one as follows: "The justice department could have stopped all of this months ago. If federal prosecutors had treated the organizers of BLM and Antifa the way they treated Roger Stone, our cities wouldn't look like Kosovo tonight." Check out his full segment, which has already gone a long way in further stoking the divide, below.