November 21, 2021

 

Kyle Rittenhouse was cleared on Friday of criminal culpability in the shooting of three white men, two of them fatally, during protests on August 25, 2020. A jury of his peers recognized that he had a right to defend himself against those attacking him. Whether we agree or not with the laws of Wisconsin or agree with what we assume Rittenhouse's politics are is irrelevant. He was cleared under the law. He’s not guilty.

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Most of the guilt should be piled on the shoulders of the media, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, and Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian. (And various other politicians and their blanket acceptance and encouragement of a summer of rioting as a campaign strategy. But I'll limit my critique here to the local Wisconsin politicians, or this essay would never end.)

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Mayor Antaramian has the lesser guilt. While he refused to allow the police to use the aggressive crowd control measures it takes to prevent, control, and/or end rioting, he must have been aware early during the first night of the four nights of rioting in Kenosha that Governor Evers was not going to have his back if he chose to do anything more than allowing 'protesters' to vent their anger over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man. In short, he decided to prostrate himself before the mob instead of doing his job and protecting the welfare of his citizens.

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Governor Tony Evers has the bigger load of responsibility. Big, bloody, burning gobs of it. His first wrong move, after the shooting of Blake by the police, was hurrying to tweet a combination white-guilt mea culpa/stab in the back of law enforcement before determining the facts of the case.

"While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country." – Governor Tony Evers on the evening of the day of the Jacob Blake shooting.

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We might assume he hoped to deflect any shooting-of-a-Black-man blowback from landing on his hands. Merciless, indeed.

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The Incitement to Riot

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On August 23, 2020, Jacob Blake was at the home of Laquisha Booker, the mother of three of his children, who had a restraining order against him and had accused Blake of rape, but was allowing Blake to be at her house for their son's birthday. A domestic dispute occurred. Over the length of their relationship, there had been multiple domestic disputes where the cops had been called by Booker. We can assume Blake was familiar with interacting with law enforcement. According to the police report, Laquisha Booker called the police and said Blake had taken the keys to her rental car, and she was afraid he would take it and crash it "like he'd done before."

 

When the police –aware there was a felony warrant for Blake's arrest - showed up at Booker's house, Booker said Blake was trying to take her car, and "her kids were in the car." One of the officers saw Blake put one of the kids in the back of an SUV Booker said was hers. Blake refused to comply with the cops' requests as they attempted to arrest him on the felony warrant. He resisted. They physically tried to restrain him, then attempted to taze him twice, but he tore out the tazer wires/prongs, making it ineffective. He continued to resist. He had a knife. He attempted to lean into or get into his girlfriend's car and presumably leave with the children. (There are varying accounts of how many of Blake and Booker's three children were in the car.)

 

One of the cops—not knowing if Blake intended to drive off in the vehicle, harm the children, or put others at risk—shot him after trying once more to bring him down physically. According to the officer, Blake was trying to cut him with the knife he held. Blake survived the shooting but was paralyzed. Recent reports say he is further recovering now, over a year later. He admitted to having the knife, although his story did evolve over several interviews with the police. You can read it for yourself in the police report.

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There are many cases of men harming or killing their children during domestic disputes. The cops would have been derelict in their duties to allow Blake to leave in the car with the kid(s). A non-Black man doing exactly what Blake had done would have garnered the same response from the police. Stupidity has no race. White men are killed by the police in greater numbers than Black men. Sometimes, men refuse to submit to arrest, fight the police, and attack them with weapons. Law-abiding people don't usually make much fuss over men getting shot in these circumstances. They typically say, "Look at that stupid ass doing stupid stuff and getting himself shot by the police." Then, they go back to whatever they're doing and carry on.

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The Media Pile On

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Many published media reports of the incident stressed Blake's race above all else, even the facts of the case, and soft-peddled any of Blake's responsibility for the incident. The Kenosha Police did not have body cameras at the time. Almost instantly, there were widely circulated videos of the incident recorded by witnesses. None showed the whole incident from start to finish and were hard to interpret beyond seeing the police struggling with and then shooting a man getting into an SUV. It was hard to make out the knife in Blake's hand. Tempers flared in the community over the shooting. Most of the news media and political pundits on the left side of the political spectrum seemed eager to help paint a scenario that matched the theme of social justice, Black Lives Matter protests, and the riots that had set the mood and milieu of the pandemic summer after George Floyd's murder in May. Another unfair, unnecessary shooting of a Black man. Fervent accusations of excessive force and systematic racism in a country founded on racist ideals and steeped in white supremacy and demands to immediately bring charges against the officer who shot Blake.

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On the evening of Blake's shooting, Tony Evers jumped in and tweeted before the incident could be properly investigated, and tensions flared. Evers refused to call out the National Guard. There were peaceful protests, but a few hours after Tony Evers' tweet, three garbage trucks, a trolley car, and a hundred cars in a lot were already on fire in Kenosha. Protesters were rioting. Downtown Kenosha was a mess of broken windows and spray-painted graffiti. A small fire was set in the Kenosha County Firehouse. A video was circulated showing a police officer being knocked out by a brick thrown by a protester as the crowd chanted, "Fuck the police."

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Facing a second night of unrest on the 24th, Evers reversed himself and called out the National Guard to protest firefighters and critical infrastructure in Kenosha. Some citizens probably wondered if they were included in the critical infrastructure of Kenosha or were on their own in the face of civil unrest, arson fires, and perhaps violent beatings at the hands of whom Governor Evers and the media were categorizing as BLM protesters protesting Blake's shooting, instead of as angry mobs destroying stuff for the fun of destroying stuff. Potato, potahto, unless you're the one getting mashed.

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After peaceful protests in the afternoon, chaos returned. Among other damages, a furniture store, residential apartments, and several homes were set on fire. A seventy-one-year-old man defending his mattress store was beaten and his jaw broken. I guess the old guy wasn't infrastructure or worth protecting. To be fair, human infrastructure hadn't been invented yet, and he's an old white guy. Too bad for him.

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On the third night of unrest on August 25, Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum and James Huber and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz, after coming to Kenosha and agreeing to be part of a group guarding the car dealership where 100 cars had been burned on the first night of the riots. Multiple videos of the events that ensued that night were disseminated almost instantly across the media universe. Much of it was shown at Rittenhouse's televised trial (but in various resolutions, as we learned afterward). You can search on Google, pour over the videos and the trial coverage, and form (or correct) any opinion you want. Some people have chosen not to do this and instead have depended on social media or biased mainstream media to inform them of the facts—or the misinformation in some cases—of the case.

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So, back to August. What a mess, huh? Downtown in shambles, dead bodies, the media—both mainstream and social— happily blazing about the event, and vitriolic political pundits shouting on both sides. But there's an election coming up. It's maybe not looking extremely smart to have let riots rage and events get so out of hand that a 17-year-old even had the opportunity to shoot and kill two men and gravely wound another, no matter what your opinion is on the shooting and self-defense laws. Plus, the whole reason for the riots is looking a little murky since, after some investigation, Jacob Blake looks like an idiot who left the cops no choice other than to shoot him. The problem is, if you're always presenting the government as being daddy-of-the-people and treating the citizens like imbecilic children to be taken care of, the people might actually turn around to daddy and say, what gives? Shouldn't you have seen that coming, Dad?"

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Maybe it was time for the politicians and media to look around and find a scapegoat to take all the heat for this fiasco – maybe someone already in trouble up to his eyebrows. Someone already lined up in the crosshairs (gun pun) and being smeared by the main street media, the social media mobs, and even the Democratic Presidential candidate in a campaign ad.

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A brief, condensed version of the Rittenhouse shootings:

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The night of August 25, Rittenhouse walks away from the property he is helping to guard in a misguided and seemingly naïve attempt to see if any of the protestors in the area need medical help after self-styling himself as a paramedic. Which he is not, although he does have first-aid training. Rioting can be rough on one's physical being. Since he's a 17-year-old boy, it might be assumed it's also exciting for him to be in the middle of a real-life riot and carrying a firearm around. This is legal (again, not against the law), but it doesn't seem like a good idea. Most adults do not think seventeen-year-old boys should be carrying guns around without supervision, especially in the midst of tense situations. But bad ideas are not illegal unless they specifically involve breaking the law, and people can't be charged with violating the law just for having bad ideas.

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Rittenhouse gets separated from his group and is alone.

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Rittenhouse comes in contact with Joseph Rosenbaum, who has an extensive police record and several convictions for raping young boys, and has just been released from a mental facility after a suicide attempt. Earlier in the evening, Rosenbaum threatened Rittenhouse and the person he was with, Ryan Balch, saying if he caught either of them alone, he would kill them. This was later testified to in court by Balch, who backed up Rittenhouse's account of the threat. Another witness, Jason Lackowski, a former Marine, testified that Rosenbaum was acting belligerently but was not a serious threat. Perhaps a threat is perceived differently by a 17-year-old boy than by a former Marine.

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After Rosenbaum chases Rittenhouse into a parking lot, Joshua Ziminski, who on video seems to have followed Rittenhouse and Rosenbaum into the parking lot, fires a gun in the air. This causes Rittenhouse to turn around as Rosembaum catches up to him and grabs for Rittenhouse's gun. Rittenhouse shoots Rosenbaum. Rittenhouse starts to run down the road toward the police line as Richard McGuinness, a video journalist with the Daily Caller who witnessed the shooting, tries to tend to Rosenbaum's wounds. Rosenbaum dies in the parking lot. Rioters/protesters chase Rittenhouse down the road. He's overtaken and hit on the head by one man who seems to be swinging a rock, then again in the neck/head by James Hubert swinging a skateboard. Rittenhouse keeps running but then stumbles and falls. A few dozen people are either chasing Rittenhouse or in the general vicinity of the street. A guy runs up and dropkicks Rittenhouse in the face, who is now on the ground. Hubert, a convicted domestic abuser, comes back for another shot and hits Rittenhouse in the head with his skateboard again, and Rittenhouse shoots him, killing him. Gaige Grosskreutz, who has also been chasing Rittenhouse and is approaching him with a Glock pistol it was illegal for him to be conceal-carrying that night, backs off with his gun in his hand and his hands up when Huber is shot, but then advances and brings his arm down and points the pistol at Rittenhouse's head. Rittenhouse shoots, vaporizing Grosskreutz's bicep. Grosskeutz later testifies in court that Rittenhouse did not shoot him until he, Grosskreutz, pointed his pistol at Rittenhouse's head. Rittenhouse gets up and continues to walk down the street toward where the police line is located.

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Rittenhouse tries to turn himself in to the police, but they have other things on their plate with an ongoing mob scene and tell him to go home. It's unclear whether they realize Rittenhouse was telling them he killed somebody. Rittenhouse gets a ride home to Antioch from his friend, and shortly afterward goes to the police station there with his mother and turns himself in. He spends the next two and half months in juvenile detention. Go Fund Me refuses to allow a fundraiser on their website for Rittenhouse's defense fund because—according to critics—they only believe in innocent until proven guilty for those whom they agree with politically. Eventually, Rittenhouse is released on two million dollars of donated bail.

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Most of the media spends the next 15 months continuing to talk about Kyle Rittenhouse being a white supremacist, maybe Neo Nazi militia member, and espousing some variation about how the events in Kenosha prove white supremacy and systematic racism are still rampant in America and blah, blah, racist, blah, racism, blah, white supremacy, blah, blah. There are many warnings by the professional race-baiters extraordinaire that if Rittenhouse is not proven guilty of first-degree intentional homicide and sentenced to spend his life in prison, the we-have-a-right-to-be-politically-violent protesters will rise up, and cities will burn. Media pundits decry Rittenhouse for crossing a state line with a rifle that it was illegal for him to have, into a community he had no right to be in, damning him as a vigilante who traveled to another state to hunt down and shoot Black people.

 

The men shot are reported as being Black multiple times by various media outlets. Some of the confusion that arises may be because the races of Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz are not stressed in reports, nor are Grosskreutz's ties to Communist/Anarchist/Antifa groups, and some people—especially outside of the United States—read the rioters being referred to as Black Lives Matter protesters and assume they're Black.

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"This case has nothing to do with race. It never had anything to do with race. It had to do with the right to self-defense." Kyle Rittenhouse.

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There is no evidence that Kyle Rittenhouse was or is a Neo-Nazi, a white supremacist, or a militia member. The DA obtained a warrant for his phone; it was searched. According to Rittenhouse's attorney, more than half a dozen other warrants were also executed. No evidence was found tying Rittenhouse to any white supremacist group. No witnesses testified to him belonging to any such group or having any such ideology, and you can be sure if the prosecution had been able to find a witness who would testify to that, they would have placed them on the stand.

 

The only thing anyone could point to was proof of Rittenhouse's attendance at one Trump rally and his support of the police and Blue Lives Matter. Kyle Rittenhouse was not and is not a white supremacist unless he is only a secret one in his heart, the same place Jimmy Carter told Playboy he kept his lust in 1976. The three men he shot were white. Everybody involved in the case is white. Even if Rittenhouse were a Neo-Nazi fan, which—once again—there is no evidence of, he would still have a right to defend himself from attackers. Even if he was naïve, stupid, or unwise in being a 17-year-old boy in Kenosha with a rifle, walking the streets during a riot, he still had a right, specifically under Wisconsin law, to defend himself from attackers.

 

He did not cross a state line with the rifle. There is no restriction against a seventeen-year-old boy crossing a state line if he chooses to. The rifle was in Kenosha. His mother did not drive him to Kenosha. It was legal in Wisconsin for him to be carrying a long rifle at the age of seventeen. He did not go to Kenosha to provoke Black people in order to have a reason to shoot them. He had as much right to be there as the rioters on the street. His father, grandmother, aunt, uncle, cousins, and best friend live in Kenosha. He worked in Kenosha. He had a right to be there.

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If you are reading this and any information written here is a surprise and contrary to what you believed to be true about the incident, it's either because I'm a liar and a poor researcher or because the media has more of an interest in selling you a story about Rittenhouse and the events in Kenosha that coincides with their world view than they have in telling the truth. (Or a least a more objective truth.)

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I have no agenda except to write what I believe to be true. I'm a lowly writer, sitting on my couch at 1:30 in the morning, writing about politics and listening to news reports of an SUV running down people at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Weirdo outlier that I am, I do not crave the approval of mobs or need validation of my beliefs from strangers. My purpose isn't to rev up the public with misinformation to get likes on social media and beat whomever I'm competing against in my time slot. I've been accused of being a racist Nazi for saying that protecting even offensive speech is necessary, and encouraging the "punching of Nazis" on the street by Antifa revolutionaries who laughably compare themselves to the soldier heroes of WWII is not a good societal goal. I'm not afraid of people disagreeing with me.

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In the last few days, I have seen people putting forth many half-assed, fever-dream hypotheses about America's coming demise and/or burning, or theories that Kyle Rittenhouse is a product of the Republican martyr machine, or that his white supremacy can be proven—now that it's been widely corrected where it had been widely presumed that the men he shot were Black—by the fact that Rosenbaum and Huber were Jews. The last is easily disproved by the fact that Rittenhouse was not acquainted with Rosenbaum and Huber. If he didn't know their names, we can assume he didn't know any of their religious or cultural affiliations unless Rosenbaum and Huber were running around telling everybody they were Jews that night while they were setting arson fires.

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"I am not a racist person. I support the BLM movement…I support peacefully demonstrating." Kyle Rittenhouse

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Eventually, when the Rittenhouse trial starts in Kenosha, it goes badly for the prosecution, including when their star witness Gaige Grosskruetz—of the vaporized bicep—admits Rittenhouse didn't fire on him until Grosskruetz pointed his gun at Rittenhouse's head. It's hard to say if that was the culmination of the worst of the prosecution's flubs and flops because there were many of them, but it was pretty apparent to anyone watching how laughable—at least legally—the case against Rittenhouse was. When the prosecution has to point a rifle at the jury to get a little shock value in closing arguments, it's a pretty good tell that your case isn't going well. Most Americans think they have a right to defend themselves from someone trying to kill them.

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The defense, on the other hand, does well, even though every member of the leftist media, the vocal Hollywood glitterati, and the Twitter mob flock to social media or scream from their position in front of the camera—or both—about things like Kyle Rittenhouse's save-himself crocodile tears when he breaks down on the stand while testifying about being chased through the street by a mob seemingly hungry for his blood. Oddly enough, the big ol' tear faker Kyle also succumbs to his emotions after the jury announces their decision of not guilty on all of the five charges he was facing, which would have landed him in prison for life. Those convinced of Rittenhouse's guilt—he must be guilty of something!—don't seem to express any wonder about why, if his emotions were fake, he would bother to display them again when there is no longer a need to emotionally influence anyone because he is about to go home a free man. Free at last, free at last.

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The Aftermath

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There are news flashes, breaking news interruptions, and backtracking of name-calling from those afraid of being sued for slander. There are passionate decrying, exuberant celebrations, high-fiving, news bites from politicians and pundits, crocodile sympathies from celebrities to victims, press conferences, speeches, and press releases.

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But it's winter in Kenosha, and there are no riots. The rest of the country grumbles in protest, but not too much.

 

Marching in New York, they're still shouting about Black lives, although the Black-victims-of-Kyle-Rittenhouse propaganda seems to have been corrected in many places. The protests are weak, insipid copies of the Jacob Blake protests-turned-to-riots that brought Kyle Rittenhouse to Kenosha on August 26. The usual old-school race hustlers come out to complain about the verdict with dire predictions of the future and demands for whatever, and not surprisingly, the lies about Rittenhouse's motives continue.

 

The media is too invested to turn back now, even if their detractors speculate they're inciting people to violence with their dispatches of misinformation.

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Any planned feet-on-the-ground major demonstrations in the cold of winter right before Thanksgiving are suddenly less well-attended and less newsworthy than a string of flash-and-grab luxury store robberies that have cleaned out several Louis Vuitton stores and Nordstroms to the tune of a million dollars (retail) worth of luxury goods in the last weeks. The robberies consist of swarms of thieves—complete with getaway cars blocking traffic—that rush in, grab everything, and then rush out before the cops can show up.

 

From the videos circulating of the crimes-in-progress, the criminals participating in the recent flash-and-grabs seem like doppelgangers to the "BLM protesters" who looted stores in the summer of 2020, whom media and democratic politicians had been unwilling to differentiate from peaceful, law-abiding people exercising their first amendment right of protest. It's a sacred, established fact that stolen sneakers are sold for baby formula to feed starving children.

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It's not surprising that if you allow people to steal and loot and remove the penalties that deter such crimes, the number of those crimes increases. We can wonder how that will work out in the long run for cities that don't prosecute those crimes and all the law-abiding people living in them, especially after all the stores that get robbed every day finally close up shop or move somewhere else.

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On the positive side, these recent protests against retail seem better organized. At least their participants are engaging in a certain unique form of capitalism instead of embracing the Marxism that seems to imbue the ideologies of BLM and the Antifa crowd.

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The revolution is dead. Long live the revolution.