ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY MY ONLY POST ABOUT THE RITTENHOUSE MURDERS
Well, we all knew how that was going to go, I suppose.
And I do have a few thoughts that I have time to write down:
1. As is often the case with trials like this, people wanted this case to be about more than what it was. Liberals saw it as a referendum against an increasingly violent right-wing push for fascist white supremacy, while conservatives saw it as a referendum in favor of shooting liberal protesters. In reality, the case wasn’t a referendum on anything - it was a very narrow legal question over self defense. In this case, Wisconsin’s self defense law (like many others across the US) is permissive enough that Rittenhouse’s claim was good enough for the jury - and the prosecution wasn’t able to overcome that. For better or worse, that’s how the judiciary process works - you can’t determine a man’s guilt or innocence solely on what the sociopolitical consequences might be.
2. What Rittenhouse did that night was dangerous, stupid, malicious and likely motivated by racism. Showing up with a gun undoubtedly escalated the violence to the point where he felt he needed to use it - and it’s a fair bet he was counting on that. Like Trevor Noah, I don’t really buy that he went there genuinely hoping to defend a business - I think he went there to play cop, hoping he’d get to use his gun.
The thing is, none of that is illegal in Wisconsin, and in most of the country. Neither is deliberately putting yourself in a position where you will have to shoot people who might attack you.
(The unwritten caveat, of course, is that it helps to be white when you do these things. As much as I hate “what if” alternate-timeline arguments, it is more than reasonable to assume that if a black man showed up in Kenosha with an AR-15 to “help”, he wouldn’t have been welcomed by the police and handed a water bottle. He likely would have been shot on sight.)
So for my money, it’s worth stepping back to ponder about why this is - and why many Americans (most of them white) seem to want to live in a country where it’s legal to do what Rittenhouse did, because they clearly do.
3. Meanwhile, the even bigger problem is that the GOP is generally hailing Rittenhouse as a hero and a victim of liberal media witch hunts, and we all know why - he represents the current GOP fantasy that liberal antifa creeps who stole the election from Trump are out to kill all the white people, and (white) good guys with guns are exactly what we need to stop them. Put another way, they LOVE the idea of ordinary white Americans showing up at BLM protests and killing some of them.
And of course now this is going to get worse, because the Proud Boys and all these other pro-Trump militias and white supremacist groups and the January 6 bunch and whoever are celebrating this as a green light to open fire at the next protest that gets out of control. I take little comfort in the fact that a big chunk of the online support is probably via overseas bot farms - real mainstream conservatives are offering him internships and jobs, while others are chuffed that it’s officially legal to shoot liberal protesters as long as you yell “it’s coming right for us!” before opening fire.
4. As for the obvious question - are we now going to see more right-wing gun violence at liberal protests ? - I think we probably will, though not at the scale some people are imagining. I do think it will be limited in scope initially, similar to the Rittenhouse incident. But some more people are probably going to be killed as a result, and it may well escalate from there, especially as we get closer to the 2024 elections.
The ugly truth is that this has gone beyond the usual fringe groups of far-right extremists and neo-Nazis rattling sabres - as we found out on January 6, the GOP is mainstreaming violent rhetoric in the hopes that the hardcore guys will go out and do some in the name of defending White America from the godless non-white liberal hordes. And the more that deadly political violence becomes socially acceptable (and deemed legal under the right circumstances), the more likely we’re going to see another January 6, only this time it may well be better organized and more heavily armed.
I should add I don’t think the embracing of political violence will be limited to the right wing. The more the GOP endorses political violence, the more likely the left may respond in kind, if only in self defense (ironically). Violence is cyclical because it invites a response. I shoot your guys, you respond by shooting my guys in retaliation self defense, and over and over it goes.
That will be Rittenhouse’s legacy, whether he understands that or not. And sadly, a guilty verdict wouldn't have changed that.
Guns are drawn,
This is dF
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