Not sharing the content for obvious reasons but there's video of a bunch of armed guys "guarding" Kenosha businesses getting bottled water & "we appreciate you" direct from a cop Bearcat and then later at least one guy with seemingly the same apparel/bag/rifle shooting 3+ people

Also at one point earlier in the night a guy who appeared to be rolling with this crowd were interviewed on a stream talking about how they needed to guard a gas station bc it was "dangerous" while one of his armed companions appeared to light a cig up right next to the pumps

Don't wanna overstate sophistication/cohesion here by saying they're a "paramilitary" or even "militia" but again, it's easy to call it "LARPing" up until the dumbass in over his head starts actually shooting people. And it's state tolerated bc it lets cops prioritize repression

Letting a bunch of guys who may or may not decide to kill a bunch of human beings is an acceptable price to pay to free up resources that might be stretched thin defending private property so they can focus on the primary requirement for resources/manpower: dispersing protesters

Sorry this tweet is missing some words but you get the idea. When people talk about danger of "armed gangs" and vigilantism and whatnot that'd come with defunding the police, just know that tolerating vigilantism during periods of crisis is already part of many existing models

And as much as it might be a counterweight to some form of vigilante organization, historically, the privileges/authorities of law enforcement have provided the legitimacy and sometimes infrastructure to enable politically tolerable forms of vigilantism

Read RF Williams or any other accounts of armed resistance during the Civil Rights movement and you'll find the idea that policing and vigilantism are "alternatives" quite alien to large swathes of the country during moments of predominantly nonviolent social unrest