“The judge. The jury. The defendant. It’s white supremacy in action,” Cori Bush (D-MO) declared following the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal. “This system isn’t built to hold white supremacists accountable. It’s why Black and brown folks are brutalized and put in cages while white supremacist murderers walk free. I’m hurt. I’m angry. I’m heartbroken.” She is also delusional. The world Cori Bush and her fellow progressives live in isn’t real. Kyle Rittenhouse is not a white supremacist murderer. The system not only holds white supremacists accountable, it abolished white supremacy over half a century ago.
Here’s a partial compilation of the deranged hot takes coming from progressive Democrats following the verdict. The remarks demonstrate how deranged the left has become in America. They truly live in an alternative universe.
Those of us who love liberty and understand the law are spending a lot of time correcting progressive Democrats about the facts and the law. Kyle Rittenhouse didn’t cross state lines with an AR-15 he was not allowed to possess in a car driven by his mother, Wendy Rittenhouse, to enter a far-away foreign city to shoot black people peacefully protesting the police shooting of a black man. None of this is true.
Kenosha was not foreign to Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse, seventeen at the time, was a lifeguard in Kenosha. His father and several relatives live in Kenosha. Kenosha is approximately 21 miles from Antioch where Rittenhouse’s mother lives. The AR-15 was in Wisconsin, in the possession of Rittenhouse’s friend Dominick Black, whose father lived in Kenosha. Rittenhouse is allowed to carry an AR-15 in Wisconsin (which means they charged the kid with a misdemeanor gun crime that doesn’t exist). All the men Rittenhouse shot were white. The protests were not peaceful. This was political violence that had turned Kenosha into a war zone. The man police shot, Jacob Blake, was armed with a knife. Police were arresting Blake on a warrant for sexual assault. He was leaving the scene with three small children in the backseat of his car. Rittenhouse was in Kenosha to clean graffiti off walls, administer first aid, put out fires, and show solidarity for the small business owners who property was being destroyed.
At the scene, Rittenhouse was the target of an unprovoked attack by a serial child rapist named Joseph Rosenbaum, who had earlier threatened to kill Rittenhouse if he got him alone. Rosenbaum was white. Rosenbaum was with a man named Joshua Ziminski, a man with an extensive criminal record, who appeared to instigate the attack and then fired his gun in the air to increase the threat perception. Ziminski was white (his firearm was conveniently stolen shortly afterwards). Thus Rittenhouse was threatened by two men, one of whom was armed, the other having threatened to kill him and who was chasing him. Attempting to turn himself into the police after neutralizing the threat Rosenbaum posed, Rittenhouse was attacked by three other men, one of whom broke off the attack after Rittenhouse fired in his direction (we think we know who this was, and, if so, he has a criminal record); another, Anthony Huber, a white man with a criminal record who was beating Rittenhouse over the head with a skateboard, Rittenhouse shot through the heart; a third, Gaige Grosskreutz, a white man with a criminal record, armed with a 9mm Glock 19 handgun, which he pointed at Rittenhouse’s head, was shot in the arm. Rittenhouse, as every other person, has a natural right to defend himself from aggressors. The force he used was proportional to the threat he faced. The extensive criminal records of his assailants testify to the threat he faced.
None of these facts matter to progressives and the establishment. From the standpoint of the contemporary left in America, the killings are racist because of who Rittenhouse is, not what he did. Progressives have centered race and see the world through that lens. Kyle Rittenhouse is guilty of being a conservative white male. That makes him a racist. So was the judge, Bruce Schroeder, a white supremacist. Rittenhouse was defended by two former prosecutors, Mark Richards and Corey Chirafisi. They, too, were white supremacists. So were the jury, twelve citizens who listened intently throughout the trial held in Kenosha County Circuit Court and deliberated for four days, carefully reviewing the evidence, in the face of a campaign to intimidate them. The prosecution, led by Thomas Binger, a Kenosha County assistant district attorney, a Democratic Party donor, despite engaging in apparent misconduct during the trial, including what appear to be evidence and witness tampering, despite recklessly handling an AR-15 in the courtroom, despite grossly misrepresenting basic facts and the law to the jury, received little criticism in the press. Nor did the press report on jury intimidation. Rittenhouse was guilty and a racist by virtue of being who he was. Racists have no right to self-defense. His assailants became heroes and martyrs for the cause of Black Lives Matter despite who they were and what they did.
To understand why facts don’t matter, one needs to understand prevailing politics in America. There are two basic worldviews in operation here. On one side are the populists, who are in the process of reclaiming the Republican Party from the globalist establishment. The Republican Party was founded as an abolitionist party. In the Civil War, Republicans were the righteous force fighting to emancipate blacks from slavery. During the Jim Crow Era, Dwight Eisenhower federalized the national guard to integrate public schools on the order of the Supreme Court. During the Civil Rights Era, Republicans in Congress overwhelmingly supported the abolition of Jim Crow (Democrats filibustered the legislation). Today, Republicans advocate for equality before the law regardless of one’s racial classification. The populists uphold civil liberties, including equality before the law (colorblindness), individual rights, including the rights to free speech and self-defense, and limited government. These are foundational republican ideals that emerge from the Enlightenment. The populists immediately understood what happened in Kenosha that night. Had the jury returned a guilty verdict, populists would have rightly criticized the decision as corrupted by ideology and intimidation.
On the other side are the progressives who have long comprised the core of the Democratic Party. Progressive Democrats are advocates of mass immigration, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and corporate governance. Progressivism is the ideology of the administrative state and technocratic order it manages. Historically, the Democrats have been the party of racism, serving in the nineteenth century as the party of chattel slavery, in the twentieth century as the party of racial segregation, and in the twenty-first century as the party advocating what John McWhorter calls “woke racism.” Today’s Democrats, just as Democrats of yesterday, base their politics on identity groups and racial politics. They see individuals as personification of abstract categories. They use race strategically to divide the working class to secure their rule.
As the party of the slavocracy and Jim Crow, Democrats have always seen individuals in grouped racial terms. This is same ideology that lies behind the party’s decades-long advocacy of cultural pluralism, what today we call multiculturalism, and mass immigration. Long ago progressives declared that assimilation, which is the integration of individuals into a shared national consciousness and culture without regard to race and ethnicity, is racist. Using the language of “diversity” and “inclusion,” Progressives argue instead for the integrity of racial and ethnic groups and the subordination of whites to the goals and results of “antiracism.” This is a disorganizing tactic. It obscures social class. Progressives do not believe in equality before the law regardless of race, but rather advocate “equity,” the redistribution of alleged privileges based on group membership that has a back of it a cracked theory of systemic (institutional or structural) racism, in which whites are collectively depicted as oppressors who enjoy race privilege and operate from a “perpetrator’s perspective,” while blacks are portrayed as the oppressed victims of a pervasive white supremacy—the white supremacy that, according to the left, lets racist killers go free.
Why was Kyle Rittenhouse even charged? There’s a phrase we use in criminal justice studies (I am a professor of crime and criminal justice), “the process is the punishment.” The phrase was made famous by Malcolm Feeley in his 1979 book The Process is the Punishment. The phrase means that, even if the person put through the criminal court process has a favorable outcome, he is still punished by the process in its arduousness. The process thus becomes an effective deterrent to engaging in conduct that will likely be found in the end to have not been criminal. Rittenhouse was charged with first-degree reckless homicide against Rosenbaum, punishable by imprisonment of up to 65 years, first-degree reckless endangerment of Richard McGinnis (a reporter at the scene), punishable by imprisonment for up to 17 years, first-degree intentional homicide against Anthony Huber, punishable by a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole, attempted first-degree intentional homicide against against Gaige Grosskreutz, punishable by imprisonment of up to 65 years, and first-degree reckless endangerment of an unknown male, punishable by imprisonment of up to 17 years. Rittenhouse, already daily reliving the trauma of having to save his own life that night by killing people he did not want to kill, had to experience of the monumental stress of possibly never living freely in society again.
This is the problem with the state pursuing a case against Rittenhouse. Even if found not guilty (which he was on all counts), those seeing what was put through (and it won’t be over with the verdict) will be wary of arming themselves in self defense despite that being their right. This problem is the point of prosecuting this case: to affirm the progressive belief that conservative white men have no right to self-defense.
Everything Amber Ruffin says in the above clip is wrong. This is where the left is today, dwelling in a thorough unreality. At least they want you to wander lost on that terrain. For the record, most murders in America are committed by black males. Black males comprise only six percent of the population. When are we going to confront the horror of that? These murders mostly occur in American cities run by progressive Democrats. Without a radical change in the character of urban politics, the death toll in black-majority neighborhoods will continue to mount. The problem is not just intraracial homicide. Black males kill more whites than whites kill blacks. The three assailants Rittenhouse shot were all white. Rittenhouse did not cross state lines with a gun. Rittenhouse did not break Wisconsin gun laws. There was no peaceful protest in Kenosha. There was political violence instigated by a false narrative about a criminal named Jacob Blake.
The disconnect is not accidental. Ruffin’s words are more than wrong. They’re lies conveyed through faked emotion designed to dispossess the listener of the capacity to reason. Ruffin is an entertainer. Joy Reid, another entertainer, mocks Rittenhouse for his “white tears.” The media finds white tears to be those of crocodiles. The lies and dramatic sentiment are coordinated. They’re portraying white people as the enemies of a just society. They’re demonizing conservative white males. This is racist and sinister.
The man standing over the kid on the ground is holding a gun in his right hand that he illegally possesses. He is aiming the gun at the kid’s head. The kid, who is being chased by a mob, is attempting to reach police officers. He is in a comprised position and facing almost certain death. He has already fought off three assailants—all with criminal records. He fires his weapon, which he is legally carrying, striking the armed assailant, thus neutralizing the threat. Textbook self-defense. If you couldn’t get this one right it goes to your judgment generally. If you can’t see this for what it plainly is, then I hope to God that you never sit on a jury. But those jurors in the Rittenhouse case? They tell us that justice is not lost. Not yet. America still has a fighting chance.
I leave you with authentic tears of joy. I was deeply moved by this moment. It reaffirmed my faith in American justice.
freedom and reason 