The Toxicity of Kyle Rittenhouse Discourse Can’t Be Emphasized Enough
Facts, civil liberties, and more have gone missing in the mainstream reactions to this case. And the power to divide is the whole point of the coverage.
The coverage of Kyle Rittenhouse’s actions and murder trial over the last year-plus has always been meant to do something simple: to provoke screaming matches between you and your friends and family. It’s been meant to put fire below a bubbling cauldron of political and cultural grievance — one that will soon spill over into Thanksgiving dinners and family reunions. And all of this is not even to mention the virtual brawls that keep breaking out online.
Things now are so combustible that a near plurality of voters wish that half the nation would just secede from the country already. The skill of the media in stoking the kind of rage that conjures these feelings, that keeps folks tuning into political coverage, should not be underestimated.
But there’s another trick up the media’s sleeve that escapes the notice of many of us — an act of submerging the very sorts of facts that keep hyperpartisan and incendiary narratives from forming in the first place. We need to understand that Rittenhouse’s case wasn’t nearly as simple as the media and many influential figures want you to think. The coverage here has in fact been so bad as to serve as a case study of psychological manipulation through narrative tricks. We should explore the techniques used now — if nothing else, to save you some stress this holiday season.
Part One: Flaws in the Narrative on the Left
I have to ask readers to trust me. I will get to the many flaws in right-wing narratives about Rittenhouse. There, the pathologies are so deep that several conservative congresspeople have lined up to offer Rittenhouse an internship slot in their offices — effectively, for killing other human beings.
I start with the left because that’s the way my readership leans. Starting with right-wing mistakes seems counterintuitive to the project of this piece, which is to outline the hidden complexity of a dramatic but over-simplified court verdict. I promise I will have criticism for the right wingers who want to elevate Rittenhouse to hero or god status. But I have to start with the narrative my readers are most familiar with. (Feel free to comment if you disagree.)
Most leftists believe that Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a gun to counterprotest Black Lives Matter. But this isn’t true.
Arguably the most viral bit of misinformation about Rittenhouse’s case has to do with his motivations. For the left, a narrative started to emerge right after news surfaced of Rittenhouse’s alleged crimes — his killing two individuals and wounding a third — and it was focused on the fact that Rittenhouse crossed state lines to reach the protests where the shootings occurred.
Rittenhouse, then, must have acted with a premeditated motive and lust for violence, because he brought both himself and an AR-15 rifle to a community in which he didn’t live and for which he shouldn’t have had the least concern.
This crossing of state lines became, for many, incontrovertible proof that it was hatred which brought Rittenhouse to the scene of protest on the night on which he shot three people — either hatred for the ideology of Black Lives Matter or hatred for black lives themselves — and this meant that Rittenhouse’s rifle must not have been an instrument for protection but rather something he planned to use all along.
It’s important to point out the falsehood of this narrative because it grew into a central part of the left conception of the Rittenhouse case. So central was this specific idea that declaring Rittenhouse not guilty for reasons of self-defense got ruled out in advance as a corrupt or invalid verdict, and this notion persisted even after the trial concluded.
Local news outlet Block Club Chicago reported comments from activists who protested the Rittenhouse trial’s not-guilty verdict. For activist Catlyn Savado, interpreting the case was easy: “When a white person crosses state lines, and kills people, how are you not guilty?”
New York Mayor Bill Deblasio opined that the only reason why Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum lost their lives was because “a violent, dangerous man chose to take a gun across state lines and start shooting people.” And NBC’s Amber Ruffin was moved to tears as she announced on air, “It’s not okay for a man to grab a rifle, travel across state lines, and shoot three people, and then walk free.”
The only problem is that this story didn’t happen. All of these actors believed in a false narrative up to, during, and after a well-covered and televised trial. I believe this happened because of an extremely ubiquitous media technique: selective amplification and attenuation of facts.
As the left has pointed out at least since the writing of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in the 1980s, information presented in straight corporate news coverage is rarely directly contrafactual. Rather, specific narrative lines are constructed through careful choice of what facts are foregrounded and emphasized, in contradistinction to other facts which are effectively buried. This dynamic paid out dividends in the Rittenhouse case. It allowed folks on both left and right to set mental priors about the case which, effectively, could never be updated or disturbed.
In reality, Rittenhouse not only had ties to the Kenosha community; he had also spent the night in Kenosha with a friend of his, Dominick Black, the night before he and Black traveled to downtown Kenosha in the midst of the city’s unrest. Black’s house was also the site where Rittenhouse long ago had stored the AR-15 rifle he used in the shootings. The two grabbed arms and went together to downtown Kenosha, from Kenosha, on Aug. 25. An Associated Press fact check reports:
According to testimony in Rittenhouse’s murder trial, he drove to Kenosha the day before the shootings and spent the night at a friend’s house, where the gun used in the shooting was kept. It wasn’t until the next day that he took the gun from the house and went to the Kenosha protests, where the shootings occurred. The testimony was not challenged.
Both Rittenhouse and Black testified to the following circumstances:
… [Rittenhouse] drove to Kenosha on Aug. 24, 2020, the day before the shooting, to work at his job at the RecPlex in nearby Pleasant Prairie [Wisconsin], according to footage of the proceedings reviewed by The Associated Press. After work, he drove his car to his friend Dominick Black’s house in Kenosha where he spent the night.
According to this unchallenged account, Rittenhouse ended up in Kenosha because it was convenient for working at his job nearby. Rittenhouse’s friend, and even his father, lived in Kenosha, and those were the ties that most likely placed him in the area before Aug. 25, even though Rittenhouse usually lives with his mother about 20 minutes’ drive from Kenosha (in Antioch, Illinois).
Indeed, sentences like “Rittenhouse was staying with his friend Dominick Black, who was dating the defendant [Rittenhouse]’s sister” can be found in the body of articles from CNN and elsewhere, but this fact had no bearing on most people’s perceptions of the case.
Most leftists have not seen video showing Rittenhouse fleeing from the people he eventually shot — and injured or killed. And most leftists do not know the first victim was not a protester.
The left narrative of premeditated wrongdoing hits another major snag. If Rittenhouse went to the protest purposefully to shoot protesters, then why did he try to run from his victims, who chased him, before shooting them? And if the animus that drove Rittenhouse was mainly toward Black Lives Matter protesters, then why was it that his first shots killed an apolitical interloper?
A straight news account in The Washington Post, which is hardly a conservative publication, outlines these aspects of the case in detail. It describes the scene in which Rittenhouse killed Joseph Rosenbaum, the first person shot by Rittenhouse that night, as “more accidental than political … a tragic, chance encounter between a mentally ill man and a heavily armed teenager.”
In fact, “Rosenbaum had never attended a protest, and seemed caught up in this one almost by accident.” That day, he had just been discharged from a hospital for a suicide attempt. “He carried a clear plastic bag containing a deodorant stick, underwear and socks that the hospital had given him upon discharge … In the seconds before he was shot, Rosenbaum threw the plastic bag at Rittenhouse and chased him behind some parked cars.”
Prior to chasing down Rittenhouse, Rosenbaum appeared to try goading another armed individual into killing him. “Shoot me, nigger!” were words that Rosenbaum yelled at a white militia member on the scene that day. According to The Washington Post, “Rosenbaum tried to grab Rittenhouse’s rifle” after chasing him across a car lot.
Rosenbaum’s own fiancée, even, had no clue why Rosenbaum showed up to the protest where he eventually lost his life. “Why was he there?” she said in an interview. “I have no answer. I ask myself that question every day.”
Rittenhouse also testified that Rosenbaum had yelled out a wish to kill him multiple times that day. Other witnesses concurred that Rosenbaum was “hyperaggressive,” “acting belligerently,” and “threatened to kill Rittenhouse at one point.”
Just after he shot Rosenbaum, video evidence shows Rittenhouse trying to call a friend for help, according to the Post.
The next victim, Anthony Huber, chased after Rittenhouse in a crowd of people that also included Gaige Grosskreutz, the third victim and the only one who survived.
Rittenhouse stumbled to the ground, ahead of the group in pursuit, as he was running to fetch police after killing Rosenbaum. Another individual kicked Rittenhouse. Then, Huber struck Rittenhouse in the shoulder with a skateboard and tried to wrest Rittenhouse’s rifle away from him. Rittenhouse fired and killed Huber in the scuffle. The Post describes how Huber’s girlfriend, Hannah Gittings, found Huber’s near-successful attempt to take the rifle to be the hardest part of watching the scene on video.
“He almost got it away from him,” she explained.
Grosskreutz was the final victim. He testified that Rittenhouse only fired at him after he advanced toward Rittenhouse with a pistol drawn.
“It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him … that he fired, right?”
“Correct,” Grosskreutz replied.
Grosskreutz was one of many carrying a weapon that day. He testified that he carried a weapon because “I believe in the Second Amendment. I’m for people’s right to carry and bear arms.” Still, he says, he never wanted to kill Rittenhouse:
“I decided the best course of action would be to close the distance between the defendant and I, and from there, I don’t know ... wrestling the gun, detaining the defendant, I don’t know ... I do know that I was never trying to kill the defendant.”
Some leftists think that bias from Judge Bruce Schroeder swung the case. Many think the Rittenhouse case proves that there are separate legal rules for white people.
I’m going to be frank here and say I do think that Judge Schroeder, who oversaw the Rittenhouse proceedings, was biased against the prosecution and in favor of Rittenhouse. But I don’t think this had much impact on the case.
As far as legal scholars are concerned, the case for self-defense was Rittenhouse’s to lose. The New York Times reports that “Once Mr. Rittenhouse claimed that he had acted in self-defense when he shot three men … the onus was on the prosecution to prove otherwise.”
Self-defense laws typically do not require someone to have good judgment and tend to consider only the moments leading up to the violence, not whether the person willingly entered a turbulent situation or contributed to the chaos.
Given the details of the case, the video evidence of Rittenhouse attempting flight, and the fact that every victim was either shown on video trying to take Rittenhouse’s weapon or testified to doing so, there was almost no chance that self-defense statutes couldn’t be used to exonerate Rittenhouse.
Mainly, it was the responsibility of the prosecution to bring charges that would be harder to dispute by means of self-defense. Yet the only other charge brought against Rittenhouse was a gun offense for which he didn’t even qualify. No bias was necessary for Schroeder to dismiss the charge.
It’s clear to me that we need much tighter regulations around firearms and laws that will deter underage of use of same. Perhaps we can even limit firearms at protests specifically. But it’s simply not the case that self-defense laws merely exist to give white people a free pass to kill protesters, nor is it the case that cops will murder any black person with an AR-15 on sight, as many progressives seem to believe.
For those in doubt: consider another case from the George Floyd protests of summer 2020, that of Jaleel Stallings.
In a context remarkably similar to Rittenhouse’s, protests against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Minneapolis police arrested Jaleel Stallings, a black man who fired multiple shots at police officers. The officers had first hit Stallings with a nonlethal “marking” round — a plastic projectile typically used for police training. The cops involved said they had fired those rounds toward Stallings because they believed he was picking up a rock to strike them.
Whether or not you believe these officers — I personally don’t — the live rounds Stallings fired at police were enough for him to be charged with eight criminal counts, including second-degree attempted murder. The case turned in Stallings’ favor, however, when the jury found him not guilty on all counts by reason of self-defense.
Yes, self-defense can even protect black men from literal cops. It’s therefore ludicrous, in my opinion, to assume that a black Kyle Rittenhouse definitely would have been killed on sight as he walked, hands raised, toward police after he was involved in shootings that the police did not witness.
One officer at the scene, says The New York Times, testified “that so many armed people were roving the area that when Mr. Rittenhouse approached with his hands up, [the officer] made no connection to the shootings that had occurred.” One of Rittenhouse’s victims, Grosskreutz, also said himself that Kenosha resembled a “war zone” the night he was shot. Gunfire in the area that continued long after Rittenhouse stopped firing rounds led some officers to believe that the real active shooter was still at large when Rittenhouse approached them. At that point, they pepper sprayed Rittenhouse and continued to search for an imagined shooter.
Still, all of this violates the progressive model of how such a scene could have unfolded:
I think it’s fair to feel angry and heartbroken at the Rittenhouse verdict.
But what are we to make of the fact that Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend — Kenneth Walker — had attempted murder charges dropped for shooting a police officer because the act was deemed self-defense? Walker shows that sometimes, self-defense laws can help out black defendants even when they wound police officers with lethal weapons — even when the case happens in the state of Kentucky. Multiple cases in 2020 and 2021 show that the U.S. justice system is not always and everywhere unequal.
Part Two: Flaws in the Narrative on the Right
Mistakes in the right-wing narrative are just as ideological as those on the left, only there’s a bit less of an excuse because the right doesn’t tend to incorporate actual misinformation about Rittenhouse. The narrative is just pure wishful or vengeful thinking and ignorance of much genuine information. We’ll unpack it now, as promised.
Many on the right think the Rittenhouse case is a referendum on self-defense. There’s basically no sense in which that’s true.
Honestly, I’m not even sure where this one comes from. The logic seems to be that if Kyle Rittenhouse were found guilty in this one particular case, by this one particular jury, most everyone in the U.S. would lose their right to claim self-defense in all cases:
I can chalk this one up, for the most part, to deep ignorance of how the legal system works. But more than that, the notion seems to evince ignorance or outright denial of key facts in this case.
We should note first that if Rittenhouse were to lose the trial that just took place, he would almost certainly appeal the ruling until some court or another found him not guilty. And even if this never happened, there is an entire litany of self-defense laws and rulings on the books that operate in parallel to the rules governing Rittenhouse in Wisconsin. Many people have been denied self-defense claims without the right paying attention.
There’s the example of Maddesyn George, whose self-defense claim might get thrown out by federal prosecutors and a judge. George shot and killed her alleged rapist as he attempted to enter her vehicle. Chrystul Kizer, who killed her alleged trafficker, was originally barred from claiming self-defense in her case, though that ruling might be overturned. The legal system is vast and complex, and although we hear much about individual cases that change society, most legal cases do nothing of the sort.
The right, seemingly, also wants to ignore several mitigating factors in Rittenhouse’s self-defense case. The prosecution alleged to have a video in which Rittenhouse, watching an armed person in a group leaving a CVS store, said, “Bro I wish I had my (expletive) AR. I’d start shooting rounds at them.” Because this event happened two weeks before the Rittenhouse shootings, the video plausibly could have been used to claim that premeditation was on Rittenhouse’s mind when the shootings took place.
What’s more, Rittenhouse’s first victim was unarmed, and his second victim was armed with nothing but a skateboard. Theoretically, Rittenhouse could have tried to use nonlethal force on Rosenbaum, the first victim. If he felt compelled to use lethal force, he could have set aside his gun afterward and tried to surrender not just to the police, but to others at the scene. Rittenhouse’s decisions not to do so — his juvenile fears that kept him armed and trigger happy — were likely the reasons that one additional person was killed and another injured that night. All of these were mitigating factors that would certainly keep this case from imperiling American self-defense writ large.
Many on the right think the backgrounds of the Rittenhouse victims matter. They don’t. It also doesn’t matter if the protest was a “riot.”
There’s another aspect to Ted Cruz’s tweet that’s worth pointing out. Rittenhouse, says Cruz, was “attacked by three dangerous felons.” And it’s indeed true that Rosenbaum, the first victim, “spent most of his adult life in prison for sexual conduct with children when he was 18;” it’s even true that the second victim, Huber, had previously been sentenced to probation and multiple stints in prison; and it’s even true that Grosskreutz, the final victim, has an expunged felony and a misdemeanor weapons charge on his record.
None of that matters.
For one thing, there are punishments and deterrents — time served, money paid, court cases lost — that these people already incurred from the state for the crimes they were charged with. Falling victim to violence on the night of BLM protests has nothing to do with these past events. In no sense is such violence an appropriate punishment or deterrent.
If Rittenhouse had been thinking about his victims’ past crimes, which he obviously couldn’t have known about anyway, and if he had acted violently in accordance with those thoughts, then he’d have committed the illegal acts of a vigilante.
Charles M. Blow is wrong about Rittenhouse being a vigilante because Rittenhouse only attacked people who attacked him. But that situation also nullifies any relevance of the victims’ past crimes. Trying to dehumanize victims because of their prior bad acts is just disgusting.
Just the same, the fact that many protesters were armed, the fact that many were destroying property, the fact that cars were burning and the city looked like a TV-show battle scene — none of these gave Kyle Rittenhouse any right to commit violence. Self-defense is violence done under threat of bodily harm or death, and nothing more.
Many on the right think Rittenhouse is a righteous hero. He actually lied about being a medic, skirted gun laws, and acted with deep irresponsibility.
As the Daily Beast reports, several GOP lawmakers have publicly “dangled congressional internships for Kyle Rittenhouse,” trying to boost their own pathetic brands by exploiting the death and suffering that unfolded in Aug. 2020.
Possibly, I would be sympathetic to an argument that some of what the GOP is exploiting is media mishandling of the Rittenhouse case. But we’d be fooling ourselves to think that voters for these congresspeople pay more attention to CNN and Politico than Fox News, Ben Shapiro, and MAGA Twitter. Trying to onboard Rittenhouse is not an act that challenges media hegemony in any way. It’s an act that venerates a foolish kid in order to exploit a tragedy for clicks, votes, and all the corruption that GOP politics entails.
Kyle Rittenhouse is not a hero. He should not have been able to bring an AR-15 to a protest. He had an older friend buy him the weapon because he could not legally purchase it himself. The only reason he couldn’t be charged for possessing the rifle — a toothless misdemeanor in the state of Wisconsin anyway — is because of an archaic carve-out in the gun laws designed to let kids carry weapons used for hunting game.
Rittenhouse exploited such loopholes. He inexplicably told people on the scene that he was a trained EMT (Emergency Medical Technician), when he hadn’t been trained and knew only the CPR techniques of a pool lifeguard. As mentioned earlier, he completely lost his cool in situations of danger, suggesting he should not have been on the ground in the first place. Quite literally, the older friend who bought and kept Rittenhouse’s gun testified he “climbed atop the roof of the [car] dealership that night because he felt being on the ground was too dangerous.” Why didn’t Rittenhouse follow suit? Why didn’t both of them leave the situation entirely? Their poor judgment literally cost lives.
Rittenhouse could have offered to help protesters or business owners, if that was his wish, without being armed and dangerous. I suppose it counts for something that he turned himself in for his potential crimes — but avoiding the potential crimes in the first place would have been easy! If you are a teenager and afraid of going somewhere because many people are armed, it’s probably best just to avoid the place entirely.
I do believe Rittenhouse’s actions were reasonably construed as self-defense. But a real hero would have given a much greater effort to keep others living and unharmed than Kyle Rittenhouse did. I think the moral verdict of this case, for that reason, is clear. Rittenhouse is not a hero but a symbol of a need for better laws.
With all of the above in mind, perhaps we can find a way to approach this position with people in our circles. The media doesn’t want to help us get there, but we can.
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