Rittenhouse Verdict and its Implications

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

Introduction by dmorista:

These three articles take a look at the Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty verdict from perspective that range from a solid leftist position for the WSWS article “The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse: A judicial travesty”, to Left/Liberal positions for the Politico article ““The lionization of Kyle Rittenhouse by the right”, and The Atlantic article ““Of Course Kyle Rittenhouse Was Acquitted”.

The WSWS article has the best class based analysis, as is to be expected from an article posted at a leftwing site like tthe WSWS. The article points out the fact that the U.S. ruling class was extremely alarmed by the 15 – 26 million people, a majority of them being young Whites, who came out to protest the never-ending stream of police killings and other shootings. The protests were aimed at shootings and killings of African Americans, but plenty of poor whites are also killed by our violent trigger-happy police. In their growing fear and desperation the U.S. ruling class is turning to vigilantes and para military types, to reinforce the paid police and military forces that our ruling class uses to enforce their increasingly harsh Capitalist rule. As the U.S. slides downward into Third World status economically the social conditions also reflect these declining fortunes of U.S. based Capital. The Phoenix Program comes home.

The Politico article does a good job of analyzing and chronicling the way the U.S. right, and their various Corporate Controlled Media operations have tried to put the gloss on their latest “golden Boy” the Kenosha Killer, Kyle Rittenhouse. The Atlantic article is more engrossed in emphasizing the racial aspects of the case. It does a good job of recalling the original incident of this type the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin by the Latino killer, George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida (Zimmerman was from the Dominican Republic and had some forbear from Germany hence the last name). The article develops the idea that Whites are permitted and encouraged to take direct violent action against people that they feel are being coddled by the state apparatus but that are menacing to them and their families.

All three articles are justifiably alarmed, over the prospects for increasingly violent armed actions by “the right”, against time honored traditions of protest and against the collective action of voting, or at least of having their votes counted, by “the wrong kind”of people.

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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/20/pers-n20.html

The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse: A judicial travesty

Tom Carter@CarterWSWS

12 hours agoOn Friday, after four days of deliberations, a Kenosha jury returned a verdict of “not guilty on all counts” against Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse had been charged with wrongfully killing two people, wounding a third, and nearly striking a fourth with an AR-15 rifle during protests against police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 25 last year.

Rittenhouse displays a white supremacist hand gesture while meeting with members of the Proud Boys

Rittenhouse, 17 at the time of the shootings, had traveled to Kenosha from Illinois to join a far-right “patriot” vigilante militia calling itself the “Kenosha Guard,” which had been mobilized to “defend property” and assist the police with crushing the protests that had erupted two days earlier following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Blake was shot seven times in the back at point-blank range in front of his children, leaving him paralyzed.

The Kenosha shootings occurred in the midst of the reverberations of the largest demonstrations in American history, during which an estimated 15 to 26 million people took to the streets following the murder of George Floyd to protest the epidemic of police killings and official cover-ups.

During these protests, armed far-right vigilante militias, which had been mobilized months earlier in opposition to measures to stop the spread of COVID-19, were brought forward to assist the police in the brutal nationwide crackdown orchestrated by the Trump administration. The Kenosha shootings, which occurred on the eve of the Republican National Convention, were embraced by Trump and the Republicans in the period leading up to the violent coup attempt on January 6, during which the Proud Boys and other paramilitary groups constituted the shock troops for the assault on the Capitol.

The Rittenhouse verdict will embolden these violent paramilitary forces that have been cultivated in the orbit of Trump and the Republican Party.

The acquittal of Rittenhouse follows a travesty of a trial in which a right-wing judge systematically undermined the prosecution by excluding all of the evidence that would have rebutted Rittenhouse’s claim that he was acting in “self-defense.”

Kenosha County Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder did not permit the jury to hear that after Rittenhouse posted bail, he celebrated the killings at a pub with top Proud Boys members, where he flashed “white power” signs, belted out the Proud Boys anthem and grinned for selfies with other Proud Boys members.

Nor did the judge permit the jury to hear that before the shooting, Rittenhouse was recorded saying that he wanted to shoot people he thought were shoplifting. “Bro, I wish I had my f—ing AR,” he said. “I’d start shooting rounds at them.”

The judge ordered that prosecutors would not be allowed to refer to the men shot by Rittenhouse as “victims” or even “alleged victims.” At the same time, Rittenhouse’s defense attorneys were given free rein to refer to the victims as “arsonists,” “looters” and “rioters.”

This double-standard was on full display during closing arguments earlier this week. While the prosecutors were admonished not to make the case “political,” Rittenhouse’s attorney was permitted to deliver a full-throated fascistic diatribe.

Midway through his closing arguments, Rittenhouse’s attorney Mark Richards effectively dispensed with the fiction of “self-defense” and suggested that Rittenhouse’s victims had it coming because “they were rioters.”

While prosecutors could not mention that Rittenhouse was affiliated with the Proud Boys, Richards specifically emphasized that Gaige Grosskreutz, a volunteer medic Rittenhouse shot in the arm, was affiliated with “People’s Revolution.”

Richards made every effort to dehumanize the people whom Rittenhouse killed. “I’m glad he shot him,” Richards declared, referring to Joseph Rosenbaum, who was mentally ill, as “a crazy person.”

The trial was a right-wing spectacle from beginning to end. At one point the judge, wearing an American flag tie, led the jury in a round of applause for one of Rittenhouse’s experts on the grounds that he was a “veteran” who “served our country.” At another point the judge’s cellphone rang with a Trump rally ring tone. At the end of the trial, he let Rittenhouse pick the jurors’ names out of a tumbler like it was a circus raffle.

The argument that Rittenhouse was acting in “self-defense” turns reality upside-down. If anyone had a right to self-defense, it was the protesters who collectively confronted a right-wing vigilante who appeared at their protest pointing a loaded military-style rifle at them.

When Rittenhouse opened fire, Gaige Grosskreutz and other protesters believed that he was an “active shooter.” Like a soldier who jumps on a grenade to save his comrades, Anthony Huber pushed his girlfriend out of the way and charged Rittenhouse, armed only with a skateboard in an effort to protect the other protesters. Rittenhouse shot him dead.

“We are heartbroken and angry,” Huber’s parents wrote in a statement after the verdict. “Today’s verdict means there is no accountability for the person who murdered our son. It sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street.”

The “self-defense” framework within which Rittenhouse’s actions were presented was a mechanism for airbrushing all of the political content and context out of the picture. It was a way of dissolving all of the broader political and historical questions involved into the sole question of the propriety of Rittenhouse’s conduct as an individual in the split-second during which he allegedly decided to pull the trigger.

Even on its own terms, the “self-defense” argument was illegitimate, since it was Rittenhouse who recklessly provoked the confrontation by carrying his rifle into a hostile protest as a member of a far-right vigilante militia.

Where the law was clearly against Rittenhouse, the judge simply moved the goal posts. While countless left-wing protesters were subjected to violent attacks and the threat of arrests by police for violating the curfew in Kenosha, the judge threw out the curfew charge against Rittenhouse on a flimsy evidentiary technicality. While Wisconsin law prohibits juveniles from carrying firearms, the judge threw out the underage firearms charge on the basis of laws that permit juveniles to go hunting.

After the verdict was announced, Trump immediately issued a statement congratulating Rittenhouse. The violent and fascistic elements around him joined the chorus. “Today is a great day for the Second Amendment and the right to self-defense,” tweeted Republican representative and January 6 conspirator Lauren Boebert. “Glory to God!”

Biden, meanwhile, set the tone for the Democrats’ response by solemnly declaring that “the jury system works”—a remarkable statement given the legal travesty that had just unfolded in broad daylight on live television.

Joining the open fascists in their celebrations of the verdict are a collection of pseudo-left and libertarian figures like Glenn Greenwald and Jimmy Dore, who worked throughout the trial to present Rittenhouse as a sympathetic figure.

In contrast to those seeking to blind the population to the political issues involved, the World Socialist Web Site warned that the campaign around Rittenhouse is an effort to normalize and legitimize far-right vigilante terror.

The aim of this campaign is to create conditions where Proud Boys and other far-right vigilante groups can march into future left-wing demonstrations and brandish loaded guns. Unchecked and undeterred, they will come to strikes, to lectures at universities and to socialist political meetings. They will wave guns in the faces of journalists and school board officials. And if anyone tries to disarm or evict them, they will open fire and yell “self-defense,” knowing that there are cops and judges who will bend and twist the law to shield them.

The Proud Boys and other violent far-right militias are being brought forward not because American capitalism is in a position of strength but because it is in a position of weakness.

These forces are being elevated under specific conditions: In the midst of a pandemic in which millions of people have died as a result of policies that have prioritized profits over human life and amid a social, economic and political crisis to which capitalism has no solution except war and repression.

While the US political establishment is moving ever further to the right, embracing mass death in the COVID-19 pandemic and legitimizing fascist violence, the great mass of the population is moving to the left, amid a major upsurge of working-class struggle.

In that context, the acquittal of Rittenhouse will only serve to further discredit the whole American political system in the eyes of millions of people.

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https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/19/the-lionization-of-kyle-rittenhouse-by-the-right-523054

The lionization of Kyle Rittenhouse by the right

A not guilty verdict wasn’t needed to turn the 18-year-old into a conservative cause célèbre. But he got one still.

Fox News commentators such as Sean Hannity have dedicated nightly monologues to blasting media coverage of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and defending the teen. | Julie Jacobson/AP PhotoA jury in Wisconsin found 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty on Friday for shooting and killing two men, and wounding a third, during the riots in Kenosha in the summer of 2020.

But well before he was acquitted on the five counts he faced, Rittenhouse had found absolution elsewhere. A wide swath of conservatives had turned his case into an example of a social justice system run amok and Rittenhouse himself into an avatar of Second Amendment virtuosity. They treated the trial outcome as vindication, perhaps divine.“This case has veins that go to every major political issue and contemporary political issue that we are facing as a nation right now,” said a spokesperson for the Rittenhouse family outside the courthouse in Wisconsin. “We are not going anywhere.”

Since Rittenhouse’s arrest, legal defense funds have been formed in his name, right-wing commentators have blasted media coverage for allegedly mishandling facts of the case, memes depicting Rittenhouse as a hero — or even Captain America — have cropped up on Twitter, and T-shirts have been made with the silhouette of Rittenhouse shooting his gun with the words, “Don’t Tread on Me,” and “Free Kyle.” Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz offered Rittenhouse an internship in Congress if acquitted.Republican strategist Gregg Keller said he could see a future in which Rittenhouse becomes a featured speaker at the conservative confabs where activists congregate. A CPAC invitation “would not surprise me. ... I think there will be every effort made to turn him into conservative hero,” Keller said. “I think given the situation he found himself in, what he did appears to be justified — but I would stop short of lionizing him as a hero, a 17-year-old kid who found himself in that situation.”

Neither CPAC nor Turning Point USA commented on any potential invitation to Rittenhouse.

The trial of Rittenhouse, who faced multiple felony charges for those fatal shootings in 2020, was the latest event to split a deeply divided country. According to a new Economist/YouGov poll, 76 percent of Democrats believed Rittenhouse should have been found guilty of homicide, while 65 percent Republicans did not. The left has painted the teen as reckless and even racist for going to Kenosha armed with an AR-15 as violence erupted in the wake of Jacob Blake’s shooting at the hands of the Kenosha police.

Rittenhouse found not guilty on all charges

The right, in response, largely and boisterously rallied around Rittenhouse. They argued that the media had mischaracterized his motives and the specifics of the case, largely by dismissing his claims that he feared for his life, was acting in self-defense, and that the men killed were white. Fox News commentators like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have dedicated nightly monologues to blasting media coverage of the Rittenhouse trial and defending the teen."This is what happens when powerful people in the media, in Washington, in the swamp … rush to judgment,” Hannity said. “And sadly, it happens every single time over and over again [with] the same cast of characters. The media mob … get it wrong and innocent people … pay the price."

Those same commentators seized on a Joe Biden campaign tweet from over a year ago casting Rittenhouse as a white supremacist. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she wouldn't comment on an ongoing trial or the president’s previous words. She also did not comment immediately on the verdict.

The totality of developments led conservatives to not just rally to Rittenhouse’s defense but portray him as a victim of a political hit job.

“Kyle is clearly innocent,” conservative activist Charlie Kirk told POLITICO. “But this trial is about more than just Kyle. It’s about the rule of law, it’s about the Constitution, the 2nd Amendment, and the right to defend yourself when a violent mob is attacking you. It’s about whether an American citizen will be afforded an impartial jury of their peers that won’t cow to threats of riots if they acquit an innocent man.”

Kirk announced he would be interviewing Rittenhouse for his radio show and podcast in the coming days.

Rittenhouse’s lionization on the right has not been universal. Some conservatives recoiled at the idea that they were celebrating, what they saw as, vigilantism. They have argued it is “dangerous” to paint Rittenhouse as anything but a teen whose reckless behavior resulted in the deaths of two men, and they have cautioned that while Rittenhouse may have acted in self-defense, killings are still morally wrong.

“When you turn a foolish young man into a hero, you’ll see more foolish young men try to emulate his example,” wrote conservative commentator David French in The Atlantic. “And although the state should not permit rioters to run rampant in America’s streets, random groups of armed Americans are utterly incapable of imposing order themselves, and any effort to do so can lead to greater death and carnage.”

But those voices have been in the minority. More common has been a refrain that Rittenhouse has been a victim of media hysteria like others before him. Kirk pointed to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Nick Sandmann, the Kentucky teen falsely accused of trying to intimidate a Native American drummer at the Lincoln Memorial, as similar cases of media “smear jobs.”

Sandmann’s case, in particular, looks instructive for Rittenhouse. He sued CNN and The Washington Post for defamation and became a cause célèbre on the right for it. The lawsuits were settled and Sandmann was eventually invited to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention, where he warned about “cancel culture.” In the days before the Rittenhouse verdict, he penned a Daily Mail op-ed in which he encouraged the 18-year-old to sue for defamation. “Give it a shot and hold the media accountable,” Sandmann wrote.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/unsurprising-outcome-rittenhouse-trial/620742/

Of Course Kyle Rittenhouse Was Acquitted

It is one thing to argue that the jury reached a reasonable verdict based on the law, and another entirely to celebrate Rittenhouse’s actions.

By Adam Serwer

The United States is a nation awash in firearms, and gun owners are a powerful and politically active constituency. In state after state, they have helped elect politicians who, in turn, have created a permissive legal regime for the carry and use of firearms, rules that go far beyond how courts originally understood the concept of self-defense.

These laws have made it difficult to convict any gun owner who knowingly puts themselves in circumstances where they are likely to use their weapon—that is, anyone who goes looking for a fight. It should come as no surprise then, that Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges after shooting three men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020, killing two of them. Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber were killed; Gaige Grosskreutz was injured but survived to testify against Rittenhouse at his trial.

According to Wisconsin law, Rittenhouse need not have proved that he acted in self-defense—rather, the state had to prove that he did not. Even if Rittenhouse traveled to Kenosha with a firearm because he wanted to put himself in the position to use it, as David French writes, “the narrow nature of the self-defense inquiry is one reason people can escape responsibility for killings that are deeply wrongful in every moral sense.” Under some circumstances, Wisconsin law allows an individual to provoke an attack and still claim self-defense.

It is one thing to argue that the jury reached a reasonable verdict based on this law, and another entirely to celebrate Rittenhouse’s actions. Much of the conservative media and the Republican Party, however, don’t see the killings as “wrongful” in any sense, instead elevating Rittenhouse as the manifestation of retributive violence against their political enemies.

The shootings took place across the backdrop of protests and riots in Kenosha that followed a police officer’s 2020 shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year old Black man, in the back and side, and the nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd. Rittenhouse’s critics contend that his intentions were racist, because he showed up armed in anticipation of protests on behalf of Black rights, while his advocates maintain that he was defending the city from rioters and point out that his victims were white.

David French: Kyle Rittenhouse is no hero

The ideological battle lines recall the 2013 George Zimmerman trial. In Zimmerman’s case, prosecutors said he assaulted 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman’s defense claimed the then-29-year-old had been attacked by Martin, whom Zimmerman had been following. Even though Martin would have had reason to be concerned about a grown man following him, the law was designed to accommodate people like Zimmerman, who was armed, and his defense attorneys were able to create enough reasonable doubt among the jurors to secure his acquittal.

Conservatives saw Zimmerman as a martyr who acted in self-defense, unfairly vilified by a liberal press. Martin’s supporters saw him as yet another Black teenager perceived to be menacing both by authorities and by those who consider themselves adjacent to the authorities, as one of many Black children never extended the benefit of the doubt to which others are accustomed. But Zimmerman wasn’t simply acquitted; some on the right embraced his actions as the fulfillment of a violent fantasy.

Few people ever use a firearm in self-defense—doing so is rare even for police officers—so the extreme elements of right-wing gun culture have to conjure the specter of impending catastrophe in order to maintain their political salience. Sometimes this manifests in deranged reveries of armed revolution, sometimes in overt fantasies of murdering urban minorities, and sometimes in the make-believe of resisting a supposedly tyrannical government. Right-wing gun culture is not unlike the wellness industry, in that it requires the cultivation of a sustained insecurity in its audience in order to facilitate the endless purchase of its products. You can never be too skinny, and you can never have too many guns to stop the impending communist takeover.

Not content to maintain that Zimmerman was innocent of murder, some of his supporters lived vicariously through his gunning down of a Black teenager. People bought Trayvon Martin shooting targets. Right-wing pundits marked his birthday with jokes, and spread falsehoods about his background in an attempt to retroactively justify Zimmerman’s killing of him. Some people turned Zimmerman into a hero, because he killed the kind of person they liked to imagine themselves killing. The fact that then-President Barack Obama empathized with the fear of many Black parents, that their children will be seen not as children but as dangerous threats, by saying that if he had a son “he’d look like Trayvon,” only added to the fantasy’s appeal.

The legal questions in the Rittenhouse trial—like those of the Zimmerman trial—have become entangled with the political ones. In the aftermath of the January 6 attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, some conservative media have escalated their justifications of political violence. In this context, Rittenhouse has become a folk hero for the same reason Zimmerman became one—not because they see him as a scared child who acted rationally in a frightening situation, but because they see him as a soldier in a war against the enemies of America as they want it to be. Like Zimmerman, Rittenhouse killed the kind of people some on the right like to fantasize about killing.Graeme Wood: Kyle Rittenhouse, Kenosha, and the sheepdog mentality

As the historian Caroline Light writes in Stand Your Ground, English common-law traditionally held that self-defense could be invoked only as long as one attempted to retreat, if possible. There were important exceptions such as defending one’s home, a concept known today as the “castle doctrine.” In the aftermath of Reconstruction, American courts began expanding the circumstances under which certain men could invoke the right of self-defense; an Ohio court determined in 1876 that “a true man, who is without fault, is not obliged to fly from an assailant, who by violence or surprise maliciously seeks to take his life, or to do him enormous bodily harm.” In the 21st century, state legislatures passed legislation such as “stand-your-ground laws” that extended the circumstances under which “self-defense” could be invoked further. But from the beginning, such laws were bound up in the perceived social morality of the invoker, and those whom the right was being invoked against. The “true man” could take his castle anywhere.

Consequently, which acts of violence are considered legitimate self-defense has always been highly political. For most of American history, white men alone had a right of self-defense that included both their persons and property. Although the concept of armed self-defense is not inherently racist in the abstract—many 1960s civil-rights figures bore arms when not protesting—in practice the American legal system has tended to see certain claims of self-defense as more legitimate than others. “Our embrace of lethal self-defense has always been selective and partial,” Light argues, “upholding a selective right to kill for some, while posing others as legitimate targets.”Zimmerman had a right to defend himself; his supporters could see Martin only as the sort of person the right of self-defense was meant to be invoked against. In Georgia, Travis McMichael, on trial for murder after he, his father, and a friend chased Ahmaud Arbery through their neighborhood, before pulling guns on him, has similarly sought to justify his actions as self-defense. “It was obvious that he was attacking me, that if he would’ve got the shotgun from me, then it was a life or death situation,” McMichael testified. “And I’m gonna have to stop him from doing this, so I shot.” Even the white nationalists facing a civil lawsuit over their 2017 riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, have sought to invoke their right to self-defense.

There is a paradox of fragility here, in which a moment of fear—perhaps one imbuing the deceased with supernatural strength—is invoked to justify homicide, and the dead who would be alive but for this moment of terror subsequently become a symbol of the frightened man’s valor. At a certain point the logic of this sort of “self-defense” becomes indistinguishable from a custom that simply allows certain people to get away with murder. This is the legal regime that a powerful minority of gun-rights advocates have built—one in which Americans are encouraged to settle their differences with lethal force, preferably leaving as few witnesses capable of testimony as possible.

The fact that Rittenhouse has become a folk hero among Republicans points to darker currents within the GOP, where justifications for political violence against the opposition are becoming more common. The party finds the apocalyptic fear of impending leftist tyranny useful not only for turning out its supporters, but also for rationalizing legislative attempts to disenfranchise, gerrymander, and otherwise nullify the votes of Democratic constituencies. Engineering the American political system so that Republicans’ political rivals are unable to contest their power is a less forceful solution than killing people, but the political goal is similar: to never have to share power with those they disagree with.

For this reason, the party defends those who engage in rhetoric threatening violence against their political enemies and silences those who denounce it. Whether it’s Donald Trump justifying his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Republican members of Congress threatening their colleagues, or Fox News hosts praising Rittenhouse for “doing what the government should have done,” the desire to kill your political opponents is a sentiment no longer confined to the dark corners of the internet. The principle that canonizes Rittenhouse as a saint for defending his city from rioters, and the mob that stormed the Capitol as martyrs, is the principle that the slaughter of the right’s enemies is no crime.

“At this point, we’re living under corporate and medical fascism. This is tyranny,” said an attendee at an event held by the conservative group Turning Point USA in October. “When do we get to use the guns?” The audience responded with applause. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Most of this is idle bluster from keyboard gangsters on social media. But the more it is encouraged by mainstream political leadership, the less likely it is to remain mere talk.

Rittenhouse’s trial was a matter of law, and the outcome should not have been dependent on the political questions raised by the events that led to his indictment. But his acquittal will be seen by some on the militant right as a validation of the sentiment that someday, perhaps soon, they will get to kill all “these people.” No one they would listen to will tell them otherwise.