I’ve been to Kenosha. The C&NW (Chicago & Northwestern) commuter rail line ran past the Great Lakes Navy Base from Chicago and all the way up to Kenosha. When I was there in 1980, Kenosha saw a lot of Sailors because at that time, in Illinois you had to be 21 to drink alcohol, but 18 was the legal age in Wisconsin. Kenosha is a working-class town, middle-class and below. Nothing flashy or special about it.
If you haven’t heard, Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on November 19th of all charges against him for shooting three people, two of whom succumbed to their injuries.
There are no winners here. Two men are dead, leaving grieving friends and family. One is missing an arm. Kyle himself will live with that fact for the rest of his life that he did that. The circumstances or level of justification do not matter, ending the life of another person changes you. I pray for everyone involved to heal and get past this.
This was not a criminal trial. This was a political trial. It was political because all of the Pravdas and the Leftists actively encouraged and supported the riots like the one in Kenosha. Since Kyle stood up to the riots by saying “Not in my community” he had to be excoriated to discourage anyone else from trying this ever again. Kyle had to be demonized, ridiculed, and destroyed.
To objectively look at this through the lens of the law, Kyle should have never been forced to fight for his future in the courtroom because of this. He obeyed the law and acted appropriately all the way through it.
He had a legal right to be there (he worked and had family in Kenosha), and was legally armed (17-year-olds can carry a rifle in public in WI). He was there with a first-aid kit to help wounded people, rioters, civilians and police alike, he was cleaning up the damages and graffiti from the riots, and was protecting property by standing guard.
When it came to the actual shooting, Kyle attempted to deescalate (shouting “Friendly! Friendly! Friendly!”), and retreated until he fell. The people he shot were attacking him and from every indicator, an immediate and a grave threat to Kyle’s life.
But you never heard about any of that from the Pravdas.
Why was Kyle protecting property? Let Nelle Bowles tell you from Bari Weiss’s Substack:
A note on Kenosha in light of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial: Until quite recently, the mainstream liberal argument was that burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy. Burnings allowed for the expression of righteous rage, and the businesses all had insurance to rebuild.
When I was at the New York Times, I went to Kenosha to see about this, and it turned out to be not true. The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots. It was very sad to see and to hear from people who had suffered. Beyond the financial loss, small storefronts are quite meaningful to their owners and communities, which continuously baffles the Zoom-class.
[…]
If you lived in those neighborhoods on fire, you were not supposed to get an extinguisher. The proper response — the only acceptable response — was to see the brick and mortar torn down, to watch the fires burn and to say: thank you.
Read this to learn the true aftermath of the riots: Skyrocketing demolition costs for riot-damaged Minneapolis, St. Paul properties delay rebuilding.
One day after rioters destroyed the Sports Dome retail complex in St. Paul, a construction crew hired by the city knocked the building down because it was dangerously unstable.
Then the city presented the property owners with a $140,000 bill for what it would cost to haul away the debris.
“We were really upset about that,” said property owner Jay Kim, whose insurance policy covers a maximum of $25,000 in demolition costs. “We thought that was high. But we didn’t know how much demolition would cost at the time.”
Of course, after the rubble was removed, a new building would have to be built, furniture would have to be purchased, installed and stocked. And there was no money to do so. And these stories are repeated every time a Leftist-controlled city burns. If you want to know why inner cities look like warzones, answer this question: “Why would anyone want to invest their life’s savings into a small business that’s in an area likely to be burned to the ground if there’s a riot?” The answer should be pretty clear.
Back to Kyle. The DA must have been pressured to press these charges, because they should have never been filed in the first place. I can’t tell you if the prosecuting attorney is inept beyond all relief or intentionally threw this case. The defense had no reason to present their side of things, as the prosecution never met the burden of proof and actually validated the defense’s claims of self-defense. The prosecution committed every possible strategic and tactical blunder you can commit in a courtroom. From asking questions of their own witnesses they didn’t know the answer to, charging Kyle with offenses that they should never have (failing to measure the rifle to determine if it’s a “short-barreled rifle” before charging him with having a SBR), to berating Kyle to dare to exert his Fifth Amendment Right to not self-incriminate. Then you have the “hiding and distorting of exculpatory evidence” thing, by texting a critical exculpatory (proving innocence) video rather than hand-delivery of the video on a USB drive or DVD, thereby destroying the quality of the video and destroying its’ value to the defense. And there’s more, a lot more. This case will end up in a book for potential lawyers, “Egregious Courtroom Fuck-ups: What Not To Do as a Prosecuting Attorney.”
Despite Leftist fears of armed people showing up to counter-protest and mow the protesters down under the pretext of “self-defense,” That’s not what this means.
What this does mean is we have been inspired by a 17-year-old man, who had the testicles to wade into a volatile situation, a rifle in one hand and a medical kit in the other, who was not content to let those who sought to destroy lives and his town not get away with it. He was there to help and prepared for the worst. May we all have the moral character he has.
Kyle will also never have to work a day in his life again. After all of the Pravdas and President Biden viciously maligned Kyle and maliciously distorted the facts to fit the agenda, there will be many multi-million dollar settlements coming shortly. The Covington Kid should team up with the Kenosha Kid to start or fund a news agency that actually upholds journalistic standards, that doesn’t write opinion and present it as hard news, that upholds truth and accuracy over “breaking news” and an agenda.