Rittenhouse acquitted: let the conspiracies and tantrums begin

This is a sentence I’d never thought I would ever write: common sense and truth have prevailed in America.

This is a sentence I’d never thought I would ever write: common sense and truth have prevailed in America. On Friday, the teenager Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all murder charges after jurors came to a decisive decision he was acting in self-defence – the evidence, though, was gifted to them on a silver platter by video footage and the aggressor’s own admission that he had pulled the gun on Rittenhouse first.

The American Constitution served its purpose in preventing an innocent man from spending his life in prison, with the verdict renewing belief in the legal system for many members of the public. However, Rittenhouse was inevitably found guilty in the court of public opinion before he ever put one foot in the courtroom.

The partisan progressive media sunk to a new low in their coverage of the Rittenhouse trial, destroying any remaining semblance of media impartiality, and attempted to stick an innocent boy behind bars to suit its own political ends. A ‘journalist’ from MSNBC tried their luck at jury tampering by tailgating the jury bus, forcing the judge to ban them from reporting on the trial (it’s lucky they haven’t been charged with contempt of court).

There is a reason why Trump’s motto ‘the press is the enemy of the people’ rings as gospel to half of America. If you have the wrong politics, you may very well find yourself in the line of fire. Fuelled by billions of dollars, the most powerful and unaccountable institution in all the land will lock its jaws around their enemy’s neck and violently shake it until it is choking on blood.

Rittenhouse was painted as Dylan Roof 2.0, in that he pre-meditated a mass shooting of mostly peaceful protesters. With Soviet level editing, they wiped half the contents of the trial from the teleprompter; the press painted the judge as unfairly siding with the defendants (when really the prosecutor was overstepping the mark, asking about social media usernames and whatnot).

Then there’s rule number one: if it crawls, swims, flies, or blinks; roars, cowers, moans, and winks; stands, crouches, kneels, or even thinks – call it racist. The dominant media appealed to progressive America’s inherent racialised paranoia, and, like a toddler trying to hammer a triangle into a square on a shape sorter, vilified Rittenhouse as a white supremacist (best not to recognise that his slain attackers were all white).

Barely an hour after the verdict, ‘#whiteprivilege’ was trending on Twitter. The conspiracy emerged that Rittenhouse was acquitted because of his skin colour, not that he was innocent. The outcome has shown how politically, and dangerously balkanised America has become, with Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, supporting the verdict, and Democratic lawmakers able to deliver nothing but shrieks and excuses.

Democratic Congress Andy Levin tweeted that this was “a stunning example of white privilege”; the gun-control activist group March for Our Lives tweeted (why is everything done with tweets nowadays?) that “Rittenhouse embodies the very danger posed by a toxic mix of a white supremacist culture.”

Without a guilty verdict, progressive America took to the streets. Protests erupted across the United States, equipped with the same placards and slogans observed in the Black Lives Matter riots of last year. Stores in Kenosha, where Rittenhouse stood his grounds against those wishing to seriously harm him, boarded themselves up in preparation for ‘not-guilty-induced-violence’.

I, and countless others, advise Rittenhouse to sue the media into financial oblivion, and I hope it happens, largely because this is the only way the partisan media can be held accountable – and in the most American way possible: putting bullet holes in its big bag of money. If he’s feeling ambitious, he can take on the nation’s many lawmakers who continue to smear him as a white supremacist. We’ll have to wait and see if this chapter will be scribbled into the legal history of the United States.

Finally, let this be a lesson to the progressive media that it needs to stop the conspiracies, de-escalate the hysteria and rhetoric, and quit trying to bully its opponents into total submission. As the Rittenhouse case proves, force can only be met with force, not dialogue, and if someone’s life is threatened, someone else ends up shot dead in the street.