Rittenhouse not guilty as right-wing superstardom awaits. America will be worse for this.
Found not guilty on all counts in his murder trial, 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse may now ascend to a new role in life: right-wing superstar.
Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, days before Friday’s verdicts came in at the Kenosha County Courthouse, said Rittenhouse would be a good candidate for a congressional internship. After the verdict, Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn posted a video celebrating Rittenhouse’s acquittal and telling his supporters: “Be armed, be dangerous, and be moral!” I imagine before I’m done writing this sentence, producers for Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show will have reached out to book the new face of court-approved American vigilantism.
Rittenhouse has already been meme’d a million times over by militia enthusiasts on social media, hailing him as a hero and referring to his victims — and yes, I’m calling them victims — as “human garbage.” Not that the then-17-year-old could’ve known anything about his victims in the moment he gunned them down. But c’mon, facts like that don’t matter when you’re trying to lionize a white teen with an AR-15-style rifle taking it upon himself to hold the line against devilish liberals.
A jury decided that in taking the lives of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and injuring Gaige Grosskreutz on a summer night of protests and rioting in Kenosha last year, Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense. That’s what they made of the evidence and the cases presented to them.
People like me who can’t swallow the idea of a heavily armed teen not being held somehow accountable for such violent actions can’t do a thing about the decision. People like me who don’t believe for a minute that a Black 17-year-old who did exactly what Rittenhouse did would ever have made it past the Kenosha police alive much less be found not guilty by an almost entirely white jury? Well, we’re just stuck with that belief.
Complaining isn’t going to fix anything, and nobody other than jury members can know how these verdicts were reached. I can’t put myself in their shoes and I’m not going to try.
But the thing we can address is the inherent wrongness of heroizing Rittenhouse. The jury says he acted in self-defense. Fine. But should he have been there? Should any American teenager be slinging a rifle across his chest and taking to the street?
Should we accept as normal that heavily armed wannabe-soldiers will now be a presence at any fiery social justice protest under the guise of “protecting the community”?
No. Absolutely not. Protests, for causes liberal or conservative, should never devolve into criminal activity. It shouldn’t have happened in Kenosha. It shouldn’t have happened on Jan. 6 when the U.S. Capitol was violently overrun.
We should all be able to agree on that fact.
But we should also be able to agree that when things do turn chaotic, the last thing anyone needs is a cavalry of Rittenhouses swooping in with big guns and bigger chips on their shoulders, brimming with confidence that the courts and the right-wing media will be on their side if they have to take down a liberal or two.
You can accept the jury’s decision and believe wholeheartedly that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense that night in Kenosha. But you can’t treat him as heroic. And that’s going to be hard to resist, because Republican politicians who love to talk tough and right-wing pundits who overcompensate for their own insecurities with increasingly violent rhetoric are about to fete Rittenhouse like he’s royalty.
We’re in a dark moment in our country. The year started with a violent insurrection at the nation’s Capitol and there have been unrelenting assaults on our democratic system ever since. Before this column even posted online, I received two ominous emails saying liberals should be living in fear. The level of violent rhetoric, the threats against public servants, the increasing boldness of anti-government groups and militias, should concern any reasonable person.
Rittenhouse’s acquittal on all charges will only serve to embolden some of the worst elements of our society. Even if you agree he deserved to be acquitted, it’s crucial we find a way to come together to keep what happened that tumultuous August night in Kenosha from being seen as a good thing, or as some righteous stand.
It was a deadly night. It ended two lives and forever changed the lives of Rittenhouse and Grosskreutz, the man he shot who survived. That night was America at its worst.
It should be remembered as such. And Rittenhouse should be remembered as an irresponsible 17-year-old who brought a gun he never should have had to a place he never should have been.
He is free — absolved, at least by a jury. We can’t change that. But anyone treating him like a hero is guilty of making America a more dangerous place.