Five summers ago, with no end to the coronavirus pandemic in sight and a pent-up desire to rebel against the spectacle of police violence in the wake of George Floyd’s videotaped death, cities across the country exploded in rioting and arson. With the confluence of the threat of COVID-19, the ongoing racial reckoning, and the specter of President Trump’s re-election campaign rendering even the smallest considerations and disagreements hyper-partisan, the nation’s media, political and cultural institutions grew single-mindedly focused on an overly simplistic story of “social justice” and “antiracism.” In “Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse,” (Knopf, out August 5) Thomas Chatterton Williams, a staff writer at The Atlantic, paints a clear and detailed picture of the pivotal ideas and events that paved the way for the dramatic paradigm shift that changed the country in the summer of 2020 and helped make possible the astonishing backlash still unfolding today. Here, an excerpt.
When a doughy 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse, too young to purchase the AR-15 he’d strapped across himself, ventured into the burning streets of Kenosha, Wis., he was doing many things simultaneously. He was placing himself in a deranged situation that shouldn’t have unfolded to begin with. And, in doing so, his very armed presence became a further provocation, heightening the danger for himself and everyone around him. But he was also attempting, however misguidedly, to make his community safer.
On the morning of Aug. 25, 2020, two drastically divergent white lives inched inexorably closer to conflict. As Rittenhouse took up with a makeshift cleanup crew, Joseph Rosenbaum was discharged from the Aurora psychiatric hospital, outside Milwaukee.
A deeply troubled 36-year-old with an extensive criminal record — including recent domestic violence against his fiancée and prior sexual assault of minors — whom the hospital had deposited in the middle of Kenosha’s pandemonium, Rosenbaum attempted to retrieve his belongings from the police station, only to find it shuttered because of the ongoing melee. He continued on to Walgreens to procure his medication, but the store had also been closed due to the protests. Meanwhile, Rittenhouse prepared to join another crew that evening at the Car Source auto lot, which had been set ablaze the previous evening.
As night descended, Rosenbaum left the motel where his fiancée was living and Rittenhouse was filmed standing guard outside the dealership with a gathering group of armed men, people he describes as complete strangers who had also come to protect local businesses.
Rittenhouse speaks affably with citizen journalists live streaming the protests on social media. “People are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business, and part of my job is also to help people,” he says unaffectedly. “If there’s somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle, because I need to protect myself obviously. But I also have my med kit.” Mid-conversation, he looks up and shouts, “Medical, EMS right here, do you need assistance? I am an EMT,” and rushes out of frame.
An hour before midnight, in the claustrophobic lot of the Ultimate Convenience Center, Rosenbaum emerges for the first time on video. Head shaved to a polish, fluorescent stud jutting from his earlobe, and a look of fury tinged on his troubled countenance, his compact figure berates and even butts into much larger men with long guns.
Rosenbaum looks and sounds not fearless but reckless. “Don’t point no motherf–king gun at me, homey!” he screams one moment before quickly changing tacks: “Shoot me, n—a! Shoot me, n—a! Bust on me, n—a! For real!” he taunts the militia members without getting a rise, in the process embodying some of the strangest, most thoroughly American racial alchemy that is as familiar to me as it would be inscrutable to someone foreign born.
It is the kind of subtlety the blunt mainstream narrative around blackness, whiteness and antiracism is so ill-equipped to convey accurately, or even to recognize in the first place, and so it is ignored. I have seen no evidence in the hours of footage from that night to indicate the militiamen themselves had treated the protesters they encountered with racial prejudice.
It is Rosenbaum alone who has deployed the n-word. But he does not do so pejoratively, at least not regarding black people. Many of the black men standing nearby register the epithet yet take no exception to it, even as they protectively move to restrain him — a white man who is out of control and in conflict solely with other white men.
Soon Rosenbaum is shoving a flaming dumpster toward the idle gas pumps, as scores of bystanders do nothing, filming this act of patent lunacy from a distance. One young man has the sense to douse the flames with a fire extinguisher.
The professional police forces appear sporadically in armored vehicles and weakly address the combustible crowd through loudspeakers. Whereas Rittenhouse and the other armed civilians are physically present in the streets, inserting their bodies into the commotion, law enforcement officers are just as good as absent. Both Rittenhouse and Rosenbaum, who has now removed his shirt and wrapped it around his head like a desert nomad, are among the hundreds of men and women told to disperse on Sheridan Road, the main artery.
“Back away from the business, back away from the business,” an officer commands from the safety of his tank’s interior. Rosenbaum is seen among the crowd, swinging a metal chain. Officers slow to a crawl and toss Rittenhouse and his colleagues bottled water through the roof hatch of an armored truck. “We appreciate you guys, we really do,” the disembodied voice from the loudspeaker intones.
There is something shameful, darkly comical and infuriating about this exchange. Law enforcement has outsourced the task of keeping fuel pumps from exploding to improvising adolescents. These police are spectators, watching a 17-year-old attempt to save them.
Fifteen minutes later, the streets still buzz, protesters linger, restlessly scrolling their phones. Rittenhouse walks among this multiracial assembly and asks, “Medical, does anybody need medical?” He is rebuffed by a couple of men in masks and continues onward to an intersection. Officers, who have used their vehicles to corral the mob southward, prevent him from resuming his post in front of Car Source. At 11:44, reports that rioters are trying to set on fire yet more cars at another lot come across the scanners. “We’ve seen at least four people with handguns running around here,” a dispatcher warns.
Two minutes after that, Rittenhouse is filmed holding a fire extinguisher, running from the gas station before slowing to a walk. Rosenbaum follows, picking up his pace, closing the distance between them. He throws his bag of belongings at him. Then the night cracks with a nearby gunshot. Four more shots in quick succession scatter the crowd into a frenzy. The camera shakes. Rittenhouse, who’s been separated from his colleagues, runs in circles around a parked car. Another three-round burst, and as the focus resumes, he remains standing and Rosenbaum has fallen.
The latter’s limp body is hoisted into an SUV. Rittenhouse makes a phone call, then begins to flee. The crowd has grown attuned to him in unison, with tragically imperfect information, reacting to the presence of what seems to be an active shooter, as rumor pulses through it. “What did he do?” one man shouts, chasing after Rittenhouse, who stumbles onto his back in the middle of the thoroughfare. Four masked white men are upon him, one drop-kicking him in the chest before another smacks his head with a skateboard. Rittenhouse receives the blows and shoots the skater in the process, killing him. A third approaches, raising a handgun, and Rittenhouse fires another round, blowing apart his forearm. He stands. The remaining bystanders give a wide berth now, and he shuffles down the street back to the gas station, where a cluster of police vehicles, lights flashing, slowly approach — far too late to be of use to anyone. Hands raised, he attempts to turn himself in, but the armored vehicles drive right past him.
Even though the shooter and each of his three targets, as well as the instigating crowd around them, are white, dispatchers relay a description of the gunman as “black.” Rittenhouse leaves the scene, returning home to his mother. She drives him to the police department in Antioch at 1:20 a.m., where he attempts to turn himself in a second time, vomiting in the precinct lobby and telling officers that he had “shot two white kids.”
“Kenosha: Teen Charged with Murder After Two Black Lives Matter Protesters Killed,” read one headline in The Guardian. In the context of the summer of 2020, what had happened among four white men could never be understood as unfortunate or tragic or even simply illegal; it was racist.
Rosenbaum had been elevated posthumously to the status of “a Black Lives Matter activist.” The specific and complicated causes and effects that produced the awful violence of August 25 — all of which contradict the notion that these were primarily peaceful demonstrations — much like the particularities of the police shooting of Jacob Blake that had preceded it, had been reconfigured into a tidier narrative.
Excerpted from “Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse” (Knopf, August 5, 2025). Copyright © 2025 by Thomas Chatterton Williams
