(Dobbs) Self-Defense: A Self-Fulfilling Prophesy
The Kyle Rittenhouse verdict makes us more vulnerable, not safer.
When Kyle Rittenhouse killed two men with his semi-automatic AR-15 last year during protests over a police shooting in Kenosha, it was a tragedy.
When Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges yesterday in Kenosha, it was a travesty.
Critics have called out the trial judge for unorthodoxy and the prosecutor for incompetence, but none of that changes a plain and simple fact: Rittenhouse took his military-style gun to the turbulent streets of Kenosha as a self-appointed vigilante.
At the trial, Rittenhouse claimed self-defense. That’s the travesty. Protestors saw this 17-year-old kid with an AR-15 and tried to wrest it away from him and he claims self-defense. One of them, named Joseph Rosenbaum, lunged at Rittenhouse and the virtuous vigilante pumped four bullets into him. Another, named Anthony Huber, swung a skateboard at this lethally armed keeper of the peace and got a bullet in the chest.
Neither victim had a deadly weapon. It was Rittenhouse who did. Neither fired a gun at the vigilante. It was Rittenhouse who fired at them.
In court, when asked whether his first victim, Rosenbaum, had a weapon of any kind, Rittenhouse’s answer was, “Other than him grabbing my gun, no.” The gun, by the way, wasn’t just loose in his hands, easy for the taking. It was strapped to his body.
Yet he claimed self-defense.
As New York Times opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote afterwards, “This is self-defense as circular reasoning.”
It also is self-defense as enabling. Anthony Huber’s family rightly said after the verdict, "It sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street.”
But to adherents of armed groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, it is a message they embrace. On the right-wing app Telegram, users called the family of Jacob Blake, the black man whose shooting spurred last year’s Kenosha protests, “parasites,” and reveled in the Kenosha verdict, saying, “Your comrades are dead and your mortal enemies are celebrating.” What people like these are celebrating is a verdict that frees a young man who took the law into his own hands. No surprise, really. That’s what these groups and others did at the United States Capitol on January 6th. A tweet yesterday from one neo-Nazi website said, “Kyle Rittenhouse is the hero we’ve been waiting for.”
And it gets worse, because this ghoulish lionization of a killer runs through the establishment of right-wing politics and right-wing media.
Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson— he who called the January insurrectionists “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement”— tweeted after yesterday’s verdict in his state, “Justice has been served.” North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn told supporters in a video, “Be armed, be dangerous, and be moral.” Georgia’s Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene celebrated Rittenhouse as one of “the good guys.” Florida Rep Matt Gaetz said he might offer Kyle Rittenhouse an internship in Congress. Not to be outdone, Paul Gosar of Arizona— the contemptible congressman who was just censured this week in the House for tweeting out an animated video of him killing a Democratic colleague, after which he tweeted out the video again— said he would “arm wrestle Gaetz to get dibs for Kyle as an intern.”
And of course, Donald Trump threw his oversized hat into the ring. The trial was “nothing more than a WITCH HUNT from the Radical Left,” who he said in a fund-raising email “want to PUNISH law-abiding citizens, including a CHILD, like Kyle Rittenhouse, for doing nothing more than following the LAW.”
Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber never got to chime in.
And Fox News? It turns out that during the trial, its leading personality, Tucker Carlson, had a camera crew shadowing the shooter for a documentary that will air next month, following Carlson’s live interview with him this coming Monday night. Don’t expect anyone to censure Kyle Rittenhouse.
“When you turn a foolish young man into a hero,” the former commentator for The National Review, David French, wrote in The Atlantic, “you’ll see more foolish young men try to emulate his example.”
More foolish young men, and more foolish older men too. They feel enabled by the verdict, and encouraged by its right-wing endorsements. They now have a pretense to call it legal when, as Farhad Manjoo put it, guns “transform situations that might have ended in black eyes and broken bones into ones that ended with corpses in the street.”
It could be a street near you.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
Greg, I am beyond angry at the jury’s decision. Thanks for so clearly expressing your view
Thank you Greg for a sobering assessment of this travesty. That this obviously disturbed young man, who has learned how to cry at will during his trial thereby influencing the jury, can become a poster child for the "Right" extremists, is at best disheartening and underlines the grave situation in our divided country. God help us. - Dave Dillingham