Coop Scoop: Not Guilty Does Not Mean Innocent (resend)

Rittenhouse is many things but hardly a hero

November 23-24, 2021

By Marc Cooper

Remember that “not guilty” does not necessarily mean “innocent.” Those are often two separate things.

And just as Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal might be justified by limiting the examination of events to the 30 seconds before he fired his first shots, immediately elevating him into a folk hero and offering him jobs in the United Senate comes off as rather repugnant. As center-right pundit David French put it in The Atlantic, “A political movement that turns a deadly and ineffective vigilante into a role model is a movement that is courting more violence and encouraging more young men to recklessly brandish weapons in dangerous places, and that will spill more blood in America’s streets.”

Yet, we have reached a point in our political discourse that when we describe a teenager wandering into what is already a full-throated riot packing an AR-15, it might be unfair to call him a vigilante. Maybe he wasn’t.  OK. So, what should we call this young man? Certainly not an EMT, even though at one point he claimed to be one.  Not a sworn or trained law enforcement officer even though he carried a weapon that a federal agent might tote.  Maybe a half-assed militia member?  While he told America’s leading fascist commentator, Tucker Carlson, that he now supports BLM marches, we also have pics of Rittenhouse hanging out with some local Proud Boys while flashing the camera a White Power sign.

Hey, I certainly have no idea what was in the head of this boy.  I guess I will settle for David French’s charitable label of “fool.” Very charitable.

There will be no consensus on this. The trial and its aftermath have come in handy as a national Rorschach test for a nation currently suffering from a bad case of split personality. The way you see him depends on where you stand (which of course is an awful way of assessing reality). Nevertheless, we will be seeing this kid’s mug on all kinds of new T-shirts and bags, as well as hearing from him in one venue or another as the right to self-defense and iron defense of the second amendment are bandied about.  The whole choir over at Fox News has been singing his praises, nobody more enthusiastic than the usually half-gassed screaming meemie, Jeanine Pirro in turn, egged on by the double-impeached Great Orange One.

It was a constellation of alt-right groups that raised the $2 million for Rittenhouse’s bail and now we are treated to the grubby spectacle of different lawyers fighting to get a hold of that dough now that it will be returned.  They better be careful not to piss of former client Rittenhouse, who also has a claim on the money, and if he gets snubbed -- who knows—he might have to send them all to the cornfield! Stirring up this sleazy aspect of the affair is none other than QAnon disciple and on-again-off-again Trump lawyer, Lin Wood. 

While the Trump Right continues to froth over Rittenhouse’s acquittal, the other side (Democrats, liberals, progressives) are best described as foaming over the trial.  They are swept up in a sort of catastrophizing that, in the end, does nothing but discourage people  and demobilize them.  As soon as the verdict was read, shouts rang out from the liberal punditocracy that the trial was “rigged” that the verdict was predictable given the White Supremacist domination of a racist justice system. All the pre-canned socio-political “truths” revealed in the course of the Great Racial Reckoning were fired off in a deafening barrage with little regard for their accuracy: Blacks can’t get a fair trial in America (though the defendant and the victims were all white); the US justice system is irretrievably stuck in Jim Crow and so and so on.

How the trial was rigged, of course, cannot be explained, because it wasn’t.  Yes, the judge definitely tilted toward the defense…tilting judges are a dime a dozen.  The cold facts are: 1) The prosecution absolutely did not make its case, not even close. And 2) it’s the jurors, not the judge, not “the system” who decide the verdict.  If anything was predictable about the case, it would have been that this venue, this local jury pool, was probably hopelessly contaminated. 

The Kenosha demonstrations of last summer were violent.  It was not just police clamping down on protesters.  It was also very much protesters sacking and burning as many as a hundred local businesses and causing tens of millions in property damage. At the time, and even now more than a year later, those sympathetic to or supportive of the demonstrations, prefer to simply avoid the issue of violence.  They usually try to ascribe it to outsiders or “provocateurs” and those who do acknowledge the violence, minimize it by calling it merely property damage that must take second place to greater moral imperatives.

That very well might be true.  Plumbing that issue takes more than a graph or two in a newsletter and requires a deep political and philosophical exploration about individual rights, the legitimacy of the state etc.  What we do know, however, is that generally speaking, people do not like violent rioting (unless they are one of the rioters).  You cannot leave the levels of violence generated by last summer’s myriad protests as a dead issue unless you are prepared for an eventual snapback… you know, the one we are living through now with so much pro-police sentiment and with a Kenosha jury acting pretty much as one could have predicted.

Hey, no problem here for some of our loudest pundits.  Nikole Hannah-Jones whose 1619 Project preposterously argues that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery was quick on the trigger blasting out this tweet: “In this country, you can even kill white people and get away with it if those white people are fighting for Black lives. This is the legacy of 1619.”

It boggles the mind as to how much misinformation can be crammed into one short sentence.  I will refrain from unpacking all the foolishness herein but cannot help noting one very big factual error here: the first guy Rittenhouse shot was not fighting for black lives.  He was literally a mental patient who had been released that same day and had wandered into the protest still clutch his toiletries bag.  There’s no evidence he was “fighting” for anybody, though he did confront Rittenhouse.

I think the worst reaction on the center-left side of the great divide came from Joy Reid, the very doctrinaire DNC lackey who holds down the 7pm slot on MSNBC.  Apart from being a die hard Hillary-loyalist, Reid is also a dogmatic race reductionist.  I don’t care what the topic at hand is; could be George Floyd, the floods in Canada or the Dodgers loss in the playoffs, Joy is always ready to jump right in and, rather excitedly and with a great sense of self-satisfaction, proclaim this is one more example of White Supremacy.

She patiently explained last week that both Rittenhouse and Justice Brett Kavanaugh are “Karens”  because they both cried in public in a quest for sympathy.  These were, ruled Reid, “male, white tears.”  See this video.

So that is where we are now? Liberals like Reid feel empowered to engage in the sort of broad-brushing of race and gender much like the Dixiecrats used to do? It is way too stupid to be offensive.  But it is aggravating to think of the thousands of heads of the liberal audience slowly nodding in agreement with Reid because this is now just one more Received Truth that requires no thoughts or scrutiny.

I am not a defender of Rittenhouse by any means, I am simply partial to truth-telling.  Liberals are just as guilty in portraying this confused kid for a national bogeyman just as the right holds him in awe. And many of the basic facts of this case were never absorbed by Rittenhouse’s critics who simply chose to present him in the worst possible light in order to “prove” pre-determined narratives and assumptions.

Our country is in too dire a state to obsess over side-shows like that of Rittenhouse. A year after January 6, we are closer not farther from a repeat of such events.  Trumpies and anti-vax militants continue to organize at the local level and are quietly moving in to control school boards.  State Republican parties are moving ahead with replacing local non-partisan election officials with partisan toadies who will be in charge of counting the votes. The Republican Party has hardened its positions and now requires support of the January 6 uprising as a litmus test for party support.

This all rolls forward while the Democrats remain paralyzed on the absolutely central issue of defending voting rights.  Time is about out on that matter and that is what we need to be agitated about.  We might be less than one year away from our last free election – no kidding.  If you are not working locally with others in your community to thwart this illiberal wave as well as making provisions for when it hits, then you are pretty much a spectator in this crunch time for America. +

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