Trump's Brave Boy

There are documents from DHS that suggest that there was a policy recommending officials refer to Kyle Rittenhouse as "defending small businesses" and informed that the media were overstating the connection of racism with the group "Patriot Prayer". I'm casting a mild eye on the description of Kyle Rittenhouse because I'm going to actually give some space for the right of the accused not to be depicted in a necessarily inflammatory light and considering that the youth already has the full-throated support of a significant part of the right wing (his mama is depicted in the above picture with noted white supremacist Michelle Malkin and certain Christian groups have been assiduously fund-raising on his behalf), there are certain "equities" * going into assuring that he isn't placed in the worst possible light pending his trial.

Among them, the potential for litigation (I literally will say absolutely nothing about Lin Wood's case, but that discovery should include a dive into Rittenhouse's social media habits which, among some of the young these days, is quite eyebrow-raising. There almost certainly were racist and racism-adjacent folks he was being "fellow-travelers" with. This isn't nearly as clear-cut as the Sandemann civil case was.)

Conservative media has lionized him as having been brave to take up arms in a....completely unnecessary and fatal way. I can't imagine law enforcement being genuinely happy to have freelancers popping off rounds on their behalf and I can't imagine what benefit exists in creating an avenue for legitimizing vigilantism. We'd certainly look long and hard at the dangers of vigilantism against law enforcement deemed beyond the reach of the justice system--same here. He just did not belong there. He wasn't some Spartan soldier sent off by his mother to return with his shield or on it to defend the city-state of small businesses from hordes of barbarians. (But vigilantism is a strong component of the US Religion of the Gun.)

He was a kid. But now he's killed people.

He wasn't a "little boy" though, as Pam Bondi tried to imply. I'm really trying to fathom depicting the young Kyle, strapped into his Hush Puppies and Osh Kosh B'Gosh elastic waist jeans, with his Capri Sun juice and extra Lunchables and Fruit Rollups in his backpack, being armed with his Red Ryder AR-15 and driven by his ma to his first day at the race war.

"I charged your phone, so you be sure and call me first thing if you need me because you need a ride home or killed people or need a warm sweater!"

It's insulting to the intelligence of everyone who knows that young people are charged as adults and treated like adults all the time. The image of George Stinney sitting on a Bible in the electric chair because he was too small flits across my mind.

This young man isn't a mascot. He stands accused of murder, and his mental ecosystem seems to have been pretty fucked up. Trump seems at home with the idea of vigilantism and white supremacy. He denies the white supremacy is a bigger problem than antifa, even though he should have been briefed in what we all know.  I don't think Rittenhouse needs to be treated like a symbol of anything good, but a symptom of something gone wrong.

Trump is also only a symptom of something having gone really wrong, more than a symbol of anything good. But he is older and has more responsibility. He shouldn't use the tragedy of this kid being a killer to make any point at all. This wasn't a soldier in his culture/race war. We shouldn't even be having a culture or race war. There should just be justice under the law, and people using the democratic process to further policy goals.

That would be, after all, the American way.

* "Equities" are the things Senate Republicans are looking into regarding whether white supremacist terror can be considered bad, actually, and I am not sure I want to know whose equity they are thinking of.