Kyle Rittenhouse is a baby-faced 17-year-old who looks about as menacing as your couch-potato nephew. He wasn’t on the family sofa last night, though. He was in the middle of a street in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he used an AR-15 to murder two people and wound a third.

We’ve gotten used to school shootings. Rather than address their causes and restrict ultra-lethal weapons, we are “hardening” our schools and putting students the same age as Kyle Rittenhouse through shooter drills.

We’ve gotten used to openly racist and fascist statements coming regularly from the White House and White Supremacist Party leaders.

We’ve gotten used to armed people who brandish automatic rifles, storm state capitols, and threaten the lives of public servants in protest of Covid-19 restrictions.

We’ve gotten used to cell-phone videos of white Americans telling fellow Americans of color to “go back to your own country” and anti-maskers physically attacking retail employees.

We’ve gotten used to skyrocketing gun sales—10.3 million firearm transactions so far this year, up 95% over 2019—and even more staggering records in ammunition sales.

We’ve gotten used to the President of the United States flouting the rule of law daily while openly embracing violence and vigilantism. He bragged during his 2016 campaign that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters. Trump has wanted to “punch” protesters in the face. He wants his supportees to “knock the crap out of” demonstrators and offered to pay their legal fees. Trump claimed that there were “some very fine people” in the group of white supremacists who killed a protester by running her over. He called anti-Trump Republicans “human scum.” Trump retweeted a video including the statement that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” He praised a GOP politician who physically assaulted a reporter as “my kind of guy.” He laughed when he asked a crowd at one of his rallies what to do with immigrants and someone shouted out, “Shoot them!” “I have the support,” Trump has boasted, “of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” In response to the protests over George Floyd’s murder, Trump tweeted “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Trump used secret federal police to beat and tear gas peaceful protesters so that he could stage a photo opportunity. He sent secret federal police to several American cities to foment violence in order to help his re-election. Trump and Attorney General William Barr worked tirelessly to convince Americans that the protests against police violence are the work of antifa, even though none of the hundreds of protesters arrested by federal agents are linked to antifa.

“Trump is a little rough around the edges,” his supporters will tell you. “He was just joking,” they will say. “He just says those things to get the libs angry,” they will cluck.

We’ve forgotten that words matter. We can’t seem to recall Hitler’s grisly speeches, or remember Stanley Milgram’s classic electric-shock experiments and a ton of other data that proves that people are much more likely to inflict pain on others when an authority figure tells them to.

And so we don’t flinch when other White Supremacist Party members mimic the raw cruelty of their leader. It’s not a big deal when a state representative in Missouri posts that “Looters deserve to be shot. But not by the government. #2A.” Energy Secretary Rick Perry must have been just kidding when he suggested that the chairman of the Federal Reserve deserved to be beaten up. And Matt Gaetz was just engaging in harmless lyperbole when he tweeted, “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?”

We’re gotten used to solitary, lone-wolf white supremacists and alt-right extremists killing us—the racist Dylan Roof who gun downed nine black worshipers as they prayed, the anti-Semite who slaughtered eleven innocents in a Pittsburgh synagogue. The proud racist who killed two African Americans in a Kentucky supermarket. The Trump supporter in Florida who was convicted of mailing pipe bombs to journalists, politicians, and celebrity critics of the president. The alt-right maniac in Portland, Oregon who harassed two Muslim women on a commuter train and then slit the throats of two people who came to their aid. The racist white man who wrote a manifesto about “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” and then gunned down twenty people in El Paso.

We listen with straight faces to Trump and Barr as they downplay right-wing violence to focus on imaginary threats like antifa when statistics show that right-wing extremist violence is this country’s biggest threat. Those are the folks who have committed 70% of extremist-related killings over the past ten years. We don’t listen to the Anti-Defamation League when they point out that thirty-nine of the fifty killings committed by political extremists were carried out by white supremacists, or that another eight murders were committed by killers with anti-government views.

The history of the United States includes a long tradition of vigilante groups, predominantly in the West and South, that has often been used to protect white power—the Ku Klux Klan is the most famous of these. Three things make today’s version of white-supremacist vigilantism especially terrifying.

The first is the fact that the two political parties have become profoundly racialized. The White Supremacist Party is 85% white, and the ranks of its leaders are even whiter. There is a shit ton of data showing that the fear of white displacement is the bond that holds Trump supporters together. Trumpism isn’t a political platform, a collection of core beliefs, or a set of strategies—it’s a fascist cult populated by white people who believe that their racial dominance is coming to an end.

The second is Trump’s panic about the election that is only nine weeks away. Trump is an historically unpopular president who has been losing badly in the polls to Joe Biden all year. His polls are the worst of any incumbent President who ever sought re-election. Thanks to his racism, his totalitarianism, his misogyny, and his spectacular failure to contain the coronavirus, he will lose if the election is a referendum on him. Trump has failed to convince suburban voters that Joe Biden is a radical Marxists or that people of color and illegal immigrants will “destroy the suburbs. Trump needs something big to happen, something that changes the subject, and he needs it to happen now. He’s not going to wait for that something.

The third thing that makes it seem that today we are on the cusp of something far more horrific than the sickening events I’ve already touched on is what we saw last night in Kenosha—a deadly partnership between law enforcement and armed civilians. Kenosah, Wisconsin erupted in violence two days ago after police officers shot an unarmed black man seven times in the back. Last night, a Facebook page belonging to a militia group called the Kenosha Guard called on its 3,000 members to “take up arms and defend our city tonight from evil thugs.”  Kyle Rittenhouse may have been part of a right-wing group that asked the Kenosha police chief on Tuesday to deputize them to assist in keeping the peace in Kenosha. The police chief turned them down, but they showed up anyway. Rittenhouse drove from his home in another state to join a group of armed civilians who were ostensibly guarding a gas station. There is a video showing Kenosha police offering water to the militia members and thanking them for there help. There is also another video, This one shows Rittenhouse, armed with an AR-15, is chased by protesters and falls down. He sits there, right in the middle of the street—not Fifth Avenue in Manhattan but Sheridan Road in Kenosha—and quickly shoots one protestor in the stomach and another in the head. He fires more shots, wounding another protester, and then turns towards police vehicles arriving from the other direction, his AR-15 strapped to his chest and his hands in the air. Rittenhouse is surrendering. The police vehicles go right past him. Nobody lifts a finger against him. After they pass, Rittenhouse realizes he is still a free man and escapes back to his home in Illinois. The next morning he is arrested, without incident and without violence, by the same police who were thanking him the previous night. This evening he will be a poster child for every Trumpist and white-supremacist militia member.

The spectre of a civil war between the police and vigilante militias on the one hand and the rest of the population on the other became very real last night.

We either stop Trump or we get used to his Trumpilantes. No middle ground on this one.