Weekly Roundup: He Was A Midwestern Boy On His Own Edition
Not guilty on all counts. Who saw that coming? Yes, Rittenhouse had a remarkably strong self-defense case, one further bolstered by every video, still photo, or personal detail that came out in the past year, but the media had laid on a full-court press since last August to demonize him as a "white supremacist" (who didn't shoot any Black people), a "fascist" (who had volunteered to guard a car dealership owned by minorities) or a "murderer" (who ran from his attackers until he was knocked down). Thankfully for Kyle, the prosecutor was a confirmed moron who committed pretty much every error in the book, from pointing a gun at the jury with his finger on the trigger to describing Joseph Rosenbaum, who admitted to anally penetrating five boys between the ages of 9 and 11, as a "hero".
If you want the official Riverside Green position on the case, here you go: I wish Kyle had stayed home with his mom that night. I don't celebrate anyone's death, even the death of pedophile rapists and serial abusers. That being said, a significant amount of recorded history centers around young men choosing to fight when they didn't have to, whether we are talking about the "Flying Tigers" or Charles XII of Sweden. It's a measure of the invisible distortions applied by society to our thinking that we are somehow less surprised by a young man volunteering to fight for Blackwater halfway around the world than we are by a young man who wants to clean up graffiti in his dad's home town.
Some of my readers and friends are of the opinion that Kyle should have been put under the jail, so out of respect for them I don't want to discuss the actual shootings any more. Rather, I want to concentrate on a remarkable perspective that circulated around Blue Tribe social media, allegedly from a "combat veteran", regarding... insurgents. Oh, and let's talk about the "mutual combat" rulings in Chicago while we're at it, shall we?
Last month, Chicago city prosecutors tried an unusual tack in reducing the city's case load for violent crime prosecutions: they simply let five people who drove a couple of Scat Packs up to a drive-by killing off the hook, stating that the gunfight, in which over 70 rounds were fired across a residential neighborhood, amounted to "mutual combat". There's something absolutely astounding about this; it harks back to the Code of Hammurabi or perhaps even earlier. You have two gangs shooting it out... so let their skill decide who wins!
This isn't the first time Chicago prosecutors have cited "mutual combat", and it won't be the last. Hard to see how this isn't a blank check to the city's gangs to solve their problems in the most high-caliber way possible. Were I involved in the Chicago criminal underground, I'd hire a bunch of Bob Denard types to clear out my competition, pronto. If the cops are going to let you settle it yourselves, and there's no prosecution forthcoming, you'd be a fool not to basically assemble a mercenary squad and take care of business.
You can almost feel America slipping away at this point. The state is no longer interested in prosecuting drive-by gang murders.
Ah, but the state of Wisconsin was quite interested in prosecuting Kyle Rittenhouse. Let's review the salient portion of the "combat veteran" quote here, since it was widely distributed on Instagram and Twitter by Blue Tribespeople who thought they were making a point:
If you arrive armed to a place where violence is happening, prepared for violence, and you engage in violence, there is no self defense, you are in fact a willing combatant.
Okay, great! That means Kyle, who brought an AR-15 to Kenosha, was a willing combatant. And it means that Joseph Rosenbaum, who was absolutely "prepared for violence" and who incited violence several times that evening, was also one. Anthony Huber, who was whacking Kyle with a skateboard? Also prepared for violence and willing to execute. Gaige Grosskreutz, a felon in possession of a Glock pistol who tried some kind of Wild West quick-draw on Kyle? I think you can see where I'm going with this. Mutual combat. No charges either way.
Hold on, though; our "combat veteran" has more to say.
If you do this without being sanctioned by a government outside of a combat zone, you are also, in fact, a terrorist. We had another for armed citizens operating outside the military as well: insurgent.
Oh, this is great, because it lets me once again use the Katt Williams insurgent routine, but it also amounts to saying the quiet part out loud, as my friends on the right like to say. Mr. Combat Veteran is stating that Kyle was there without government sanction and is therefore a terrorist. In fact, he is an insurgent, even. This is a dog whistle to the Bluest Tribe, because to be an "insurgent" is the worst thing you can possibly be and it entitles you to an immediate drone strike or no-knock FBI raid, depending on your place of residence.
So let's work through this. Kyle was in Kenosha to clean up graffiti and protect property against rioters. Don't buy into the hype that he was there to kill people. You don't dress in short sleeves and a baseball cap to kill people. Every single person at my local airsoft field shows up in Crye gear, a chest rig, and extensive personal-protection equipment, just to poke each other with plastic pellets. I'm not saying he was right to be there, and I'm not saying he was smart to be there, but I am saying he didn't go to Kenosha in the hopes of killing a pedophile.
Mr. Combat Veteran points out that Kyle's presence there was not sanctioned by the government. Yet he says nothing about Rosembaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz being there without government sanction, even though one of them brought a gun and the other two were clearly ready to do violence at a moment's notice. What's up with that? Oh, nothing... except for his tacit acknowledgement that the latter three were, in fact, sanctioned by the government. Not the government of Kenosha. Maybe not even the government of Wisconsin. But the federal government. By people like Joe Biden, who literally said that he is angry about Rittenhouse's acquittal. By the bureaucrats at the Justice Department who are no doubt contemplating bringing federal charges against Rittenhouse for violating the civil rights of Joseph Rosenbaum to... use the N-word on camera? Continue raping children? It's unclear to me.
Now, to be clear, the feds weren't 100 percent in support of last summer's rioting. Anyone who threatened the federal courthouse in Portland got the minivan snatch-and-grab courtesy of some private operators taking the King's shilling to do some ad hoc dirty work. In general, however, the United States, as an organization, was quite fond of the violence and unrest that swept the country last year. And why shouldn't it be? Take a deep breath and prepare to open your eyes: Every aspect of our "racial justice" protest/riot spree, from the Autonomous Zones to the mass looting of brick-and-mortar stores, has the end result of centralizing power and wealth in this country.
Don't believe me? Look at it yourself. What do all the critics of "racist police" want? They want increased Federal control of law enforcement. Every one of the media-selected "high-profile" cases involves local law enforcement. Are you aware of any large-scale protests against a federal cop? Of course not. Ever hear of Jamarion Robinson? Why, he was just a mentally handicapped and completely unarmed Black man who was shot fifty-nine times by the Feds. The protests were brief, largely ignored by the media, and dispersed quickly.
No, I'm afraid that all of these media-elevated cases involve the local cops, and the suggested solution is always to give the Feds more control. The George Floyd Act implements wide-ranging Federal oversight for local law enforcement. Most critically, it allows the DOJ to set the standards for licensure of local police. If the local cops can't measure up, the Feds will step in.
If you were involved with the "police actions" in Korea or Vietnam, you'll recognize the way this works.
At the same time, the wholesale looting and destruction of local business shifts the balance of economic power further to Amazon and its fellow-travelers in the remote-fulfillment space. The estimable Ronnie Schreiber asked me yesterday, "There's wholesale looting of retail all through California. What would happen if the Crips showed up at an Amazon distribution center with AK-47s and the intent of each taking their permitted $949 worth of goods under California state law?" Oh, I think at that point the Crips would feel the proverbial Harkonnen fist, the same way Occupy Wall Street got the hammer-down protocol when they tried blocking the ports that bring in Wal-Mart's Chinese-made inventory.
Left unchecked, this endless street violence will take us to a future where local policing does not exist and small businesses (and by small I mean "smaller than Amazon") are looted out of existence. If you worry about this, you're a conspiracy theorist nutjob. And a right-wing fascist to boot, even though the left-wing case against an unholy alliance of all-powerful Fed and single-source Amazon fulfilment seems obvious to my dumb ass. A lot of my leftie pals are very pleased about John Deere's last round of labor negotiations. Do they think they'd get the same results against a federally-backed single retailer? Hint: remember what Reagan did to the air traffic controllers, in the name of national security?
Insofar as Messrs. Rosembaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz were actively supporting this program of dismantling local law enforcement and burning small businesses, therefore, they were, in fact, completely government sanctioned. Rittenhouse, in attempting to deter them, was the terrorist. Not necessarily because he shot anyone, but because he was acting against the direct expressed will of the Federal Government. Some of you may recall Raz Simone, the self-styled warlord of Seattle's "CHAZ" in which two teenagers were shot. Raz was literally filmed handing guns out to people on the streets and urging them to take violent action. Want to know how many charges he faced, on the state or federal level? Oh, you already know: zero. Raz was on the right side of history. Kyle Rittenhouse, with his graffiti scrubber and his naive desire to keep a small business from burning down, was acting in direct opposition to the approved plan.
A lot of you are both extremely bright and determined to prove me wrong, so I'll eagerly await your rebuttals below --- but try evaluating current events with the above-described lens and see how well it works. Of each thing, ask yourself: Will this serve, in the long run, to centralize power or wealth? Ninety-nine percent of the time, the answer will be an obvious "yes".
In that context, Kyle and the people like him are obviously insurgents. Their actions are in direct opposition to that centralization of control and cash. It is difficult to imagine a future in which that mindset is not ruthlessly eliminated. Yet I can't help but notice a funny thing: the last time we sent this country's full military might against a bunch of "insurgents", we ended up leaving a hundred million dollars' worth of equipment on the ground as we ran away with our proverbial tail between our proverbial legs. It could happen here, as well. Ask a "combat veteran", if you know one in person, or on Facebook.
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This week, I wrote yet again about the joys of old sports racers.