Where I Defend Kyle Rittenhouse

 

Let me take a departure for a minute from what you know are my stances to acknowledge a handful of things: the overlap between justice and the law is not a perfect circle. A judgement can be legally accurate while still being ethically or morally disappointing at best and supporting a dangerous or untimely precedent at worst. We don't have to love the outcome of the Rittenhouse decision to come away with the idea that the right to self-defense, even if it is broad and subject to conjecture about state of mind on the part of a person who has taken life, isn't something that should be denied someone just because their background doesn't comport with our ideas of the ideal self-defense scenario. 

I'm going to perform a teeth-gritting exercise about what we can know from this case, and I don't think anyone will be happy with it, not even myself. Kyle Rittenhouse is an under-parented kid who thought he was doing something he needed to that he entirely did not. He was on the side, to the best of his teenage education, of law and order. The side where the cops were. He was not any more racist than the people he was surrounded with (you know, regular white folks). He considered the city of Kenosha his community even though he did not live there, because he had family there and had worked there. And he acquired an AR-15 because guns are for self-defense, and he was in a place he competently understood to be dangerous based on his understanding of what he had read and seen on the news, and wanted to also be dangerous. Because self-defense. The thing he went into danger to do. 

To be exact, even if no son of mine would ever, etc., Kyle Rittenhouse looks like he could be my kid. So I get what his sources of information were and the biases he grew up with. And this isn't a privileged kid in spite of his whiteness. He was only privileged in that our laws were so constructed to be very broad with respects to self-defense and the Castle doctrine has, over the years with the help of the NRA and other pressure groups, made the frontier logic of the Wild West, the duty to never retreat anywhere if you happen to be armed, the law of the land. In a gunfight, it privileges the one who lives and can take the stand to testify to his state of mind, As the survivor of a gunfight, Rittenhouse has emerged from a gantlet to arrive at another kind of challenge. 

His lionization by the actually worst people. Like the Proud Boys, the association with which, while Rittenhouse was out on bail, was something not viewed by the jury, and also, it was irrelevant to his case, having happened afterwards. 

This doesn't mean the Proud Boys aren't having an entire moment right now. And instead of being pleased at this outcome, some conservatives are still mad. They didn't even think deaths warranted a trial--so much for victims' (I guess we can call them this now, right?) rights. He got a day (more than) in court--what due process actually means. 

The unnatural thing is the embrace by RW politicians and  RW media. Tucker Carlson had a camera team embedded with Rittenhouse. Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar are ready to arm wrestle over who gets to have him as an intern. Madison Cawthorn thinks this is the time to tell his followers they really should be armed and dangerous (I think Cawthorn's post-traumatic overcompensation is a thing we could stand to talk about someday). He is still open to civil charges, as I understand it so his time in court might not even be through. But I have no doubt his conservative supporters will pass the hat.

Despite the silver linings' hope of Chris Hayes that this young man try to do something right with his freedom, he's been given every opportunity and incentive in the world to take away the exact wrong message from this event, as have so many others, that gun violence is an answer. That a license to kill people who don't conform on a pretext that they will defend themselves will be pretext enough to skate despite taking a life or lives. Because they were capable of raising a hand. Because it was them or the shooter. Because. Because. 

After this trial, and the bad lessons, it would be great if we didn't hear from Rittenhouse for a good long while if ever, if he could go back to a normal world, if he could not pal around with problematic people like the "expert" who gave testimony at his trial. 

But we will. We will hear from him again and I don't think the news will be great because this impressionable person just got all the support he ever needed to become more radical. Not because of anything the law or the system or liberals and bad media coverage did. His own bad choices and the desire of the right to excuse and even valorize them have. 

The law protected Rittenhouse, when there are many it hasn't protected, we can be mad about that. We can be mad at the narrative that increases the likelihood of violence against protestors. I never stop being mad at things that are not just. But Rittenhouse's freedom is something that doesn't exactly make me mad, because it won't be freedom. I see a shit-ton of problems ahead with this one. And I am mad that there are no good lessons to derive from all of this, but that nothing is satisfactory, we all see things differently, and still and all, he should have never have been there nor with that gun. And the people who say he did "nothing wrong" just because he was found legally innocent are also wrong--he did things that were not right. And people died. 

The people who say he did "nothing wrong" are okay with people being dead--that's the only way I can see it. And I will never defend them. Because unlike Rittenhouse, they promote this view with more perspective than his overgrown kid ass has.