Some believe Kyle Rittenhouse is simply a good kid who defended himself. Others see him as an “armed teenage vigilante school-shooting militia-type who is a deeply racist white Trump-supporting, MAGA-loving partisan with Blue Lives Matter sentiments who rushed to Kenosha with an intent to kill.”
It’s impossible to agree on what to make of Rittenhouse when one side deliberately ignores the context. This stuff used to be common sense.
Think of it this way: If a ship’s captain just willy-nilly orders his crew to wake up hundreds of guests at midnight and herd them into tiny lifeboats in frigid seawater in the middle of nowhere, the captain would rightly be called a psychopath. But if that ship is the sinking Titanic, he’s a hero.
The threat of death activates a survival response that would be abnormal in normal situations. Ignoring risk of injury and death from mobs is what made it easy for history professor Peniel Joseph to jump to conclusions about the Rittenhouse case in a CNN opinion piece. The case, he wrote, is the “epitome of White privilege run amok in America.”
Issac Bailey, professor of public policy at Davidson College, was just as flippant. “I mean, look at his red, tear-stained face on the stand, so compelling that the judge stopped the trial for 10 minutes …,” he wrote in a column for NBC News THINK. “He was trying to do good, to protect this dying nation. And that’s the same nonsense claim people have been using throughout the U.S.”
Bailey then stirred Rittenhouse in with a generic mix of whites who he said, “feels guilt about America’s violent racist history.”
The problem with this lazy narrative? Kenosha, for a few days in August 2020, sank into complete lawlessness. When police did nothing, it opened the doors for the messiness of civilians fending for themselves against looting, burning, violence and death.
It is devilishly disingenuous to look at the Rittenhouse case from comfortable lazy boys, biased newsrooms and theatrical courtrooms, and pontificate on the case as if Kenosha – after police shot Jacob Blake – was just cruising along in calm waters.
The chaos was horrific! Especially for people who had nothing to do with Blake’s shooting.
On Aug. 25, Robert Cobb, 71, grabbed the first thing he could find – a fire extinguisher – to protect a mattress shop owned by his dear friends, and the Danish Brotherhood Lodge #14 next door. Rioters had already looted both buildings. Cobb sprayed rioters to force them to unmask so their faces are captured by surveillance cameras.
“If they could see their face, they could identify who did this,” said Cobb. “I’m not a vengeful person, but at any time (there’s) an act of that nature, they have to be prosecuted. They have to be held accountable, as everybody does in life.”
Rioters pulled a gun on Cobb, hit him in the head with a plastic bottle full of concrete, which knocked him to the ground. He ended up with a broken jaw in two places, a split nose, deep cuts in his head, and a tooth knocked out. Cobb, who was “drowning in his blood” as one witness described it, could’ve been murdered.
The Danish lodge and his friends’ mattress shop were both reduced to rubble. The lodge had been there for 100 years.
When the mayhem ended, rioters destroyed $2 million worth of city property. The Kenosha Area Business Alliance estimated private property damage to be $50 million, the 11th costliest civil disorder in U.S. history. Forty buildings were destroyed and 100 were damaged. Kenosha was one of 140 cities in 20 states to be marred by senseless post-George Floyd rioting in 2020.
Pontificating about Rittenhouse without taking the mob into account is viciously dishonest.
“It’s a mob – they are rioters,” insisted Judge Joe Brown, commenting on the judge in the Rittenhouse case on "Unfiltered With Dan Bongino" on Saturday. “They are committing what amounts to an aggravated assault – or an attempt thereto – on Rittenhouse, which allows him to use deadly force. An ordinary person is allowed to go immediately to deadly force, even if the mob is unarmed, because that many people can overpower the strongest man and kill him with no weapon.”
There’s a lot of blame to go around for starting and stoking the Kenosha mess but, for me, two men stand out: Jacob Blake, who refused to comply with police; and Gov. Tony Evers, who refused to stop “protesters” once they crossed over into tactical mayhem.
Blake, like many young blacks, resisted arrest and threatened police after his girlfriend, Laquisha Booker (who Blake digitally raped the previous May), called 911 to report that he took her car keys. If Blake had simply complied, his name would never have bubbled up to public note, except in police blotters. This is where pressure from the “black community” should be focused – compelling young blacks to comply when confronted by police. “Police brutality” would all but disappear.
Instead, Blake and others are sickeningly immortalized as symbols of the imaginary struggle against white oppression. Delinquency gets rewarded. Race-baiters get rewarded. What gets rewarded, gets repeated. What gets repeated becomes culture. And that culture has reproduced itself into a force to be reckoned with. Thuggish BLM leaders like Hawk Newsome can now openly threaten New York with riots, fire, and bloodshed with no whiff of a threatening memo from Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Gov. Evers was all but absent during the mayhem engulfing Kenosha. He acted in slow-motion to fast-moving events, publicly refused Trump’s help, and when he finally did “too little, too late,” he kowtowed to the mob.
“We’ve got 400 years of systemic racism in this country,” said Evers, “and if we don’t do something about it, we’ll be repeating Kenosha in cities all over our country and in our state.”
Rittenhouse will likely be acquitted, but the teenager will be watching over his shoulder for the rest of his life because of adults who failed to enforce the law, and maniacal race-baiters who use him as a symbol to cash in on some cheap political point.