There are several layers to peel back in each of the racially charged police encounters in 2020 that each led to riots in the cities where they occurred.
Has enough time passed for us to concede that there was a pattern with regard to the individuals shot in those cases? That is, can we acknowledge certain facts about them without having the charge of racism lobbed at us?
George Floyd was full of meth and fentanyl and resisted arrest. Among the convictions on his criminal record was one for holding a loaded gun to the belly of a pregnant woman whose home he'd burglarized.
Rayshard Brooks was cooperative with police until he realized that an arrest on his fateful night would squelch his probation and send him back to prison. For what?
Rayshard Brooks drove drunk, resisted arrest, assaulted two cops, stole a taser, used that taser on a cop, and has a long and extensive criminal history. He’s been charged with false imprisonment, battery on a family member, cruelty to children, theft, receiving stolen property, interference with custody, obstruction of an officer, and a handful of other misunderstandings.
Even Breanna Taylor was making poor decisions right up to her death. She was the caretaker for her drug-dealing ex-boyfriend's finances even up to that day.
Which brings us to Jacob Blake, the young Kenosha, Wisconsin man whose shooting and subsequent paralysis set blocks of that city ablaze - and brought Kyle Rittenhouse to town. He has pleaded guilty to two charges of disorderly conduct and domestic abuse stemming from an incident at his ex-girlfriend's home.
Here's the pattern among these situations: these were people with long track records of unsavory behavior who were made martyrs and heroes by a sizable swath of the public by virtue of their having been shot by police.
Now, let us summarize Kyle Rittenhouse's role in the aftermath of Blake's shooting. He lived in Illinois, but decided, upon hearing about the Kenosha riot, to cross the state line, transporting an AR-15 he was too young to legally possess. He didn't have a driver's license. He violated Kenosha's public-safety curfew. He behaved like a yay-hoo and a hot dog. What he did was extremely foolish.
But there are more layers of consideration to peel back. Jason Whitlock offers a glimpse into the background of the two guys - white guys - that Rittenhouse shot:
Rosenbaum was a convicted pedophile. A decade ago, a grand jury in Arizona indicted him on 11 counts of child molestation involving five boys ranging in age from 9 to 11. The charges included anal rape. He copped a plea and was convicted of two of the 11 counts. He suffered bipolar disorder. He attempted suicide. He was released from a mental institution hours before confronting Rittenhouse, threatening to kill Rittenhouse, and trying to take Rittenhouse's AR-15 rifle.
Huber was a serial domestic abuser. He pled guilty to strangulation, suffocation, and false imprisonment. He had been charged with disorderly conduct and use of a dangerous weapon. In the moments before Rittenhouse shot him, Huber clubbed Rittenhouse with a skateboard.
Whitlock goes on to point out the irony of the attempt to confer martyrdom on these characters:
Rosenbaum and Huber are the new O.J. Simpson. They are the stars of "White Is the New Black," a docu-series airing on CNN, MSNBC, and across all social media platforms illustrating the utter lunacy of a "racial justice" agenda built around irritating conservative white people.
That's the point of racial justice. Irritating white people.
We, black people, are so confused, so misled, so lacking in strategy, leadership, integrity, and substance that we've reduced black progress to trolling white people. We replaced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with "Black Twitter."
How does convicting Rittenhouse of murder for defending himself against the attack of psychotic criminals advance the cause of black people?
It doesn't. It's no different from the acquittal of O.J. Simpson. A handful of black comedians made money cracking O.J. jokes. Johnnie Cochran burnished his reputation as America's best trial lawyer. And black people got to giggle among themselves about how irate their co-workers were that O.J. walked.
But nothing changed for the betterment of black people. The biggest winners were the cable news channels. O.J. launched TV careers and networks. Fox News and MSNBC launched in the aftermath of the Simpson trial. Greta Van Susteren, Geraldo Rivera, Dan Abrams, David Gregory, Nancy Grace, Harvey Levin, Jeffrey Toobin, and Eliot Spitzer all rode the Trial of the Century to fame and fortune.
O.J. benefited the white people who were willing to go on TV and lie about what was happening inside the courtroom. The O.J. trial is the only trial I watched start to finish. Cochran and his dream team of attorneys destroyed the prosecution from voir dire to closing arguments. The TV experts pretended that prosecutors Marcia Clark and Chris Darden were holding their own.
The same thing is playing out in the Rittenhouse trial. Corporate media are pretending the prosecution is proving Rittenhouse is guilty of murder, and black people are foolishly anticipating a moment of frustrated-white-people satisfaction.
Black people are Charlie Brown kicking a football that white people keep pulling at the last second. The frustration of white people does not improve the lives of black people.
If we want to be taken seriously, we need a far more tangible goal. The current one is embarrassing and counterproductive. It makes black people look weak, illogical, and immoral. The current goal forces us to turn O.J. Simpson, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, Joseph Rosenbaum, and Anthony Huber into martyrs and heroes.
A guy in Oregon hs used the situation to gin up and legitimize black fragility over this:
A Black Lives Matter clown from Portland, Oregon — Greg McKelvey — tweeted yesterday that employers should give their black employees a day or two off from work after the Rittenhouse verdict… regardless of the verdict. McKelvey says it's going to be hard for us to work and it isn't fair for our employers to expect us to.
The deaths of a white pedophile and a white domestic abuser have shaken black people to the point that we need time off work to recover? McKelvey is insane. He suffers racial dysphoria. He's half black and half white, born to a black dad and a white mom. He's married to a white woman. His children look whiter than Mike Pence in the dead of winter.
McKelvey is the worst kind of half-white liberal. He absolutely loves the white fruit, but his blue-check public persona is based on pretending to hate the white tree that produced it.
Let's return for a moment to this matter of a pattern. As we all know, each of the 2020 situations resulted in block after block of the cities involved (as well as other cities) going up in flames.
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.
Something odd happened with that story after I filed it. It didn’t run. It sat and sat.
Now it could be that the piece was just bad. I’ve sent in bad ones before, and I’ll do it again. A few weeks after I filed, an editor told me: The Times wouldn’t be able to run my Kenosha insurance debacle piece until after the 2020 election, so sorry.
There were a variety of reasons given—space, timing, tweaks here or there.
Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran. Whatever the reason for holding the piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority. The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore. The old man who tried to put out a blaze at a Kenosha store had his jaw broken. The top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to resign in June 2020 amid staff outcry for publishing a piece with the headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.”
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.
To summarize:
- Kenosha burned as an expression of rage over a guy with a domestic-abuse warrant resisting arrest and getting shot as a result.
- Kyle Rittenhouse was an overheated yay-hoo who shouldn't have been anywhere near Kenosha.
- He was rightly found innocent of charges of murder in the shootings of Rosenbaum and Huber.
This is why post-America can't have nice things. Something happens that lends itself to an identity-politics angle, which is immediately exploited by hustlers, there's a reaction to that, and everyone hardens his or her position based on an incomplete presentation of facts.
There is no one who comes anywhere close to being a hero here. Not Rittenhouse, not Rosenbbaum or Huber, not Jacob Blake, and certainly not Tucker Carlson and most definitely not the chunks of dog vomit posing as human beings a rung below even Carlson.
It is so very late in the day.
KR's first victim was psychotic, wreaking random mayhem and nearly became armed with a fully-loaded assault rifle which means a much more disastrous outcome was narrowly averted. His second two victims were attacking an active shooter -- Kyle.
ReplyDeleteThe suggestion that he was "rightly found innocent" is nonsense, and while the prosecution's performance was underwhelming to say the least, the Judge might as well have taken a seat at the Defense table.