The facts in the Kyle Rittenhouse case were never the focus of the bulk of news reporting. What was? Constructing a rationale for progressive Democrats to ceaselessly wax eloquent on the strawman of their choice. Or worse.
Trapped in legend, the conclusion of the trial could only appear to them as something utterly alien and malign.
“The Rittenhouse Verdict is Only Shocking,” Matt Taibbi headlined his Substack media takedown, “if You Followed the Last Year of Terrible Reporting.”
The jury’s decision “was hardly a surprise to many of us who watched the trial rather than the media coverage,” wrote Jonathan Turley at USA Today.
“Two Americas are hearing two entirely different stories about this case,” GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson noted on Meet the Press, “and neither of them is the full view that that jury got over the days and weeks of that trial.”
We were repeatedly told that young Rittenhouse “crossed state lines” (still perfectly legal*) looking for trouble (any evidence of that?) and had “no business being there.”
The truth? Kyle Rittenhouse had a constitutional right to be in Kenosha.
Notice I did not say “showed good judgement,” however, neither did Rittenhouse fit the legacy-left-media’s or Joe Biden’s “white supremacist” vigilante stereotype.
Thank goodness, the Kenosha jury got it right. The media nearly universally got it wrong — largely on purpose — as well as missing the biggest issue of all, identified concisely by former Democratic Party presidential candidate and Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard: “This tragedy never would have happened if the government had simply carried out its responsibilities to protect the safety, lives and property of innocent people.”
Government failed to do its job, and a lynch mob press corps failed to report it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Sadly, even the ACLU joined the chorus harping on Rittenhouse having “traveled across state lines.” The group also rightfully ripped the Kenosha Police Department and the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office for “an outrageous failure to protect protesters.”
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4 replies on “Lynch Mob at Eleven”
“That jury never got to consider the gun possession charge — one that at one time had seemed a slam-dunk for the prosecution. Rittenhouse was 17 at the time, and there was no dispute that he was armed the night of the shootings with a Smith and Wesson AR-style semi-automatic rifle strapped to his chest.
Though the charge was only a misdemeanor — punishable by a maximum nine months in jail — it might have offered the jury a way to convict Rittenhouse of a lesser crime if they were persuaded by his self-defense claims but agreed with prosecutors that he made a poor decision to carry a rifle on the streets of Kenosha.”
His having the rifle was not illegal. Even the judge said that.
Pam, in-so-far as journalists and pundits made claims about the law based simply upon their hunches, if you care about the truth, rather than merely hoping to contribute to a chant from an echo chamber, then you want to point to an actual statute, rather than quoting, unnamed, one of those journalists or pundits. In this case, no statute supports your claim.
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