Posted on November 19, 2021

Kyle Rittenhouse Trial Was Designed to Protect White Conservatives Who Kill

Ja'han Jones, MSNBC, November 19, 2021

Kyle Rittenhouse, who fatally shot two protesters and wounded a third during anti-police brutality demonstrations in Wisconsin last year, has been found not guilty of homicide — an outrageous yet unsurprising verdict in a trial marred by controversy.

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Conservatives are encouraging white vigilantes like Rittenhouse to police progressive spaces by all means.

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The case had the makings of an acquittal before the trial even began. The outcome seemed clear even before an almost exclusively white jury pool was selected, even before Judge Bruce Schroeder created an uproar by ruling that the slain protesters could be referred to as “rioters” and “looters” but not “victims,” even before Schroeder refused to punish Rittenhouse for what prosecutors said amounted to a violation of his bond conditions. Rittenhouse is a white teen who abides by white rules, and white people empathetic to those rules seemed poised to insulate him from repercussions.

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With these endorsements, white conservatives felt all the more comfortable swaddling Rittenhouse in the protection they often give to police and vigilantes serving white conservative interests — from George Zimmerman to Mark and Patricia McCloskey. Rittenhouse is just their latest darling, pitifully seeing heroism in an armed teen who set out to patrol pro-Black protests as though he were police.

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