Rittenhouse and the Racists

Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on 5 counts of homicide yesterday.

Good.

He should never have been charged in the first place. An arms-length assessment of the facts, once the fog of biased and tendentious reporting got cleared, made that obvious.

To all but the Left’s racists and race-baiters. But, I repeat myself.

And, truth be told, even to some of them, with one commentator headlining ‘he should have been acquitted, and that’s the problem.’

In the Left’s vision of America, individual justice is subordinate to cultural demands. Rittenhouse was dubbed a “white supremacist” by a cadre of people who should know better (including the President). Their basis? He decided to stand in defense of property during a period of protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29 year old black man. Protests in the wake of that incident degenerated to violence, clashes with the cops, arson, and other property damage. Blake’s shooting was on August 23, 2020, the Rittenhouse incident took place two days later.

From the outset, the facts presented by the media were wrong. Yes, this is my shocked face. Unfortunately, absent credible alternate sources, all we have to go on is what they give us, and even the cynical among us are sometimes shocked by the inaccuracies. As I followed the story, I figured that Rittenhouse would end up convicted on a gun charge, given that it was reported that he, 17 years old at the time, transported a firearm across state lines in contravention of the law, and that he wasn’t legally permitted to bear that firearm. Both untrue, not only in the reporting of the law (which can be a matter of interpretation, more on that later), but in the facts themselves. He did not bring his AR-15 from Illinois – he picked it up in Kenosha, where a friend stored it for him. He was not driven to the protest site by his mother, as was asserted by a Congresswoman. The judge, after spending hours reading the law, ultimately dismissed the firearms charge – both because he concluded Rittenhouse had not violated any statute or regulation, and because the law was so convoluted that a 17 year old could easily read it and conclude he was acting legally (see: Rule of Lenity).

Fortunately, demagogues and the press aren’t the decision makers in trials, no matter how much they try to influence outcomes. And, make no mistake, the desire to influence a verdict no matter the facts ran far and wide. A man claiming to be a producer for MSNBC actually attempted to follow the jury bus, possibly to abet in doxxing jurors and thus intimidate them into a guilty verdict. A jury of plain-Jane Americans decided Rittenhouse’s fate, and by all accounts they acted responsibly and deliberately. That they took three and a half days to return the verdict every rational observer expected speaks to the seriousness with which they took their duty.

Unfortunately, those same demagogues and “journalists” immediately lashed out at the injustice of the verdict. Even President Joe Biden, who advanced the ‘white supremacist’ pejorative before and during the trial, commented that “the verdict in Kenosha will leave many Americans feeling angry and concerned, myself included,” before stating that “we must acknowledge that the jury has spoken.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement, nor is it in keeping with his avowed intent toward unity.

From his inaugural address:
“I ran on a promise to bring Americans together.”
“With unity we can do great things, important things.”
“Without unity, there is no peace. Only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos.”

He didn’t exactly offer a ringing echo of those words, uttered a mere 10 months ago. Instead, his message appears carefully crafted to avoid the semblance of instigation while still serving as a sop to his partisan supporters. In this, he does echo his former boss, who ran as a unifier but spoken ad acted as a divider throughout his tenure.

Meanwhile, all over the left-o-sphere, the phrase “white supremacist” was uttered over and over and over again, almost as if some provider of special revelation proffered “by these words shalt thou condemn” to the woke-priest class.

No matter that the three Rittenhouse shot were white, of course. His mere decision to travel to an area where people protesting racism is sufficient proof that he is not only a racist, but a white supremacist.

In psychology, “projection” is the misinterpretation that what is “inside” as coming from “outside.” We are prone to presuming in others that which we think ourselves, especially when it comes to bad or uncomfortable thoughts and behaviors. Someone who assumes everyone is out to steal from him may be deflecting that he’d steal were the roles reversed.

So it goes with too many who scream “racism!” at everyone who isn’t part of their political tribe. Especially our modern agitators, many of whom have embraced the “judge everyone by the color of their skin” premise of Critical Race Theory and other forms of modern social activism.

Rittenhouse’s decision to go and stand in defense of a business can be questioned, and I for one am no fan of his choice. However, there is ample precedent for such an act in American history. When police abandon their role and duty to protect and serve, civilians have many times stepped in to fill the void. In 1992, Koreans in Los Angeles stood, armed, on the roofs of the buildings in which their businesses were housed, to defend them against looting, destruction, and arson. These “rooftop Koreans” have been declared as either a proxy for racists or as racist themselves… for the audacity of rejecting the “right to pillage” that is implicit in the Left’s messaging regarding violent protests in the wake of racially-charged incidents. From arguments that the store owners are insured, so they shouldn’t mind some righteous looting, to a generalized “the oppressed have the right to vent their rage via theft from whomever is convenient,” the Left finds every opportunity to excuse injustice, if that injustice flows in a particular direction.

Remember OJ Simpson? He was acquitted despite strong evidence of his guilt. It’s widely concluded that Simpson was acquitted as a form of protest against a system perceived as unjust and unfair, no matter that he did the crime. The Rittenhouse aftermath is awash in people that feel he should have been convicted, no matter that he didn’t do the crime, as a matter of racial justice (and/or the straw man that his acquittal would be an endorsement of vigilantism). Acquitting OJ denied justice for Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, or more accurately their families, but it did not put an innocent person in jail. The Rittenhouse caterwaulers would do just that – throw an 18 year old into jail for life to serve their political agenda, facts be damned. That this aligns with the Left’s collectivist worldview and the rejection of respect for the individual is neither coincidence nor surprise. Individual injustices matter not to those who seek to remedy collective injustice. Breaking a few eggs to make an omelet, and all that.

Rittenhouse was declared a white supremacist for having the temerity to reject the Left’s narrative of a ‘right to riot.’ That he refused to permit his own injury or murder by three white aggressors is further proof, we are to believe. In their eyes, Rittenhouse’s only possible motive is racism.

This is all projection, of course. Racists are very quick to assume that everyone else is a racist.