
A citywide curfew and the threat of arrest had been in place several days here when the inflammatory state of politics and protest in Kenosha began to reveal itself.
Take, for instance, the sword-wielding white woman who arrived in the heart of the protest zone alone on Monday, joining about a dozen stragglers. She banged her two swords against the steel gates encircling the Kenosha County Courthouse. She chatted with a white man in fatigues with a chest-length beard and a holstered gun. She took swigs from a bottle of Jack Daniel's and banged her swords against a nearby lamppost, creating a kind of carillon past curfew.
The National Guard and local police descended in armored vehicles and SUVs a few moments later, and a team wrestled her into an unmarked van. The man in fatigues began to applaud her arrest and then to heckle Black Lives Matter and its aims.