So the strangest Kyle Rittenhouse-acquittal reponse I’ve yet seen comes courtesy of the right-wing site PJ Media, from a fellow called Chris Queen, who thinks the most important thing for everyone is to remember that Rittenhouse is just a teenager.
“There’s been so much wrapped up in this case,” Queen writes.
that we can almost lose sight of the fact that Kyle isn’t a political football to be tossed around by both sides. …
He’s just a kid.
A “kid” who showed up at a protest in another state with an AR-15-style rifle, which he used to shoot two protesters dead.
There are probably plenty of people who want Kyle to become a spokesman for the cause of gun rights and self-defense.
It’s a bit late to complain about those on the pro-gun right portraying this “kid” as a gun-toting, gun-shooting protector of the Second Amendment. They were glorifying him even before the bodies were even cold.
But parents, would you want your 18-year-old trotted out on the news every day for a fortnight, especially after being the focus of a year-plus-long news cycle?
Oh, the horror of the news cycle.
Now that the nightmare of his trial is over, we need to let Kyle get back to being Kyle. He’s lost nearly a year and a half of his life to this unimaginable nightmare. … If anybody deserves to get back to a normal life, it’s this kid.
The “normal life” of a gun-obssesed 18-year-old killer of two
Kyle Rittenhouse, defendant needs to become Kyle Rittenhouse, normal teen.
Huh. Back when I was a “normal teen” I don’t remember going to protests and shooting people. Is that considered a normal teen thing to do these days, like TikTok?
So everyone needs to leave him alone and let him have the opportunity to enjoy the life of freedom that being an American affords all of us.
Let’s let Kyle go back to being Kyle.
Let’s not. Let’s treat him as the wrongly freed killer of two, a symbol of encroaching fascism and racist double standards. Now that he’s been acquitted of double murder he’s going to inspire copycats who figure that if they choose the right victims they’ll be able to get away with murder by calling it “self-defense.” If this is what Kyle Rittenhouse can manage to do while still a teenager I’m really not looking forward to seeing what he can accomplish as an adult.
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This dude is gonna become a serial killer
Kyle likely doesn’t want to go back to being pre-murder spree Kyle. He’ll want to soak up the right wing fame and do the tour of RWNJ news and scumbag podcasts. He’ll think of a way to raise more funds off it and the right will use him until he commits another crime they can’t celebrate.
@Elaine
Or a politician, alt right radio figure, Fox News mainstay, judge, whatever. If I’ve learned anything in my relatively short life, it’s that people like him can only fail upwards. His wealthy shithead supporters will make sure he gets whatever life he wants.
Queen is a shithead from Georgia. Love the use of “fortnight”. Must have reached for his Dictionary of Pretentiousness for that one.
There’s nothing normal about Bile Twittenhouse.
@Ninja Socialist:
Kyle likely doesn’t want to go back to being pre-murder spree Kyle. He’ll want to soak up the right wing fame and do the tour of RWNJ news and scumbag podcasts. He’ll think of a way to raise more funds off it and the right will use him until he commits another crime they can’t celebrate.
Oh, the implications are worse still: they want the definition of “normal teen” to encompass “state-sanctioned political predator.”
“He’s lost nearly a year and a half of his life to this unimaginable nightmare”.
Gee, nobody in these parts can understand what it’s like to lose a year and a half of their life to an unimaginable nightmare…
Anyway, that aside, the kid wanted to feel like a big man by waving around a gun, went looking for trouble, found it and killed some people. That’s my opinion on the matter and I don’t agree with the verdict, whether it is legal or not.
I took a concealed carry class one time. A couple points still stick in my mind: Defense of life, not property. Yeah, you could argue he had the fire extinguisher to protect the buildings and the rifle to protect himself, but see point two: Knowing you have ready means of lethal force, you operate by “With great power comes great responsibility”, and under no circumstances escalate a situation, least you be backed into having to use that force through your own actions.
(What scares me is that for my class two campus cops were teaching and had a fair grasp of the laws involved, knew what standards of accuracy were required by the state, basic gun safety, etc, etc. Another guy I knew described his class, and it sounded like it was taught by a couple of rednecks who mostly talked about shooting black people, didn’t even bother grading any of the targets, going over gun safety or discussing any laws. Real “The best diploma $20 can buy online” kind of stuff.)
@Full Metal Ox
Indeed. Jihad is only bad because it comes from the wrong religion, otherwise using impressionable young men as religious/political foot soldiers is A OK.
I saw the news on a TV and the unmentionable stain started fake crying for sympathy that he got away with it, but couldn’t even maintain it for 10 seconds. He knew he was gonna, despicable murdering asshole. At least he’s doomed to always have asshole friends, the kind that would knowingly be friends with a cold-blooded murderer.
That’s how it always is. Dark-skinned kids have adult level responsibility for their actions from the point where they look 8 or so. Slap another kid? Sass authority? Severe and often life-ruining punishment coming their way!
Light-skinned kids are have child level responsibility up until their early 20s. Ha ha, did the kiddles commit a wee bit of murder? Oopsy, mistake! You don’t want to ruin their life over a little mistake, do ya?
Unless they’re poor whites, or a well-off white girl doing things to a white man or boy. Then it gets messy.
When people try to justify this, and at least try to avoid flat-out bigotry in doing so, the general idea is that some people have harder lives, forcing them to grow up faster, while others have easier lives, delaying their entry into “real” adulthood. This ignores the fact that sometimes the opposite happens – people with harsh lives sometimes retreat into immaturity to escape their harsh world, and people with easier lives have more opportunities to learn how to become a truly mature adult (whether they take them is another matter, they’re discouraged from doing so, so many don’t). It also tends to lump people into broad categories without taking individual situations into account.
And then there’s usually the additional consideration of projected future “value” (read: socioeconomic status). A white middle class boy might become somebody; a poor black girl almost certainly won’t. Unpacking that either reveals a bigot in denial or someone who really doesn’t get the idea of unintended perverse consequences (it puts more horrible garbage humans in the position of power and authority, by refusing to weed out most of the ones who happen to be white males, and not because white males are inherently bad people, in case someone who is reading this doesn’t get it).
And of course the US is full of judges and juries who subscribe to the above sort of thinking, so this is a sad but hardly unexpected outcome.
This seems like a particularly ghoulish comment to make considering that “this kid” is the reason why two people can never get back to their normal lives, or to any lives at all.
I’d be in favour of letting him slip back into teen obscurity as that seems the least worst option at THIS horrible point, but that would mean being left alone by the Tucker Carlsons, the proud boys, the Heritage Foundations, etc. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think his life is on a path of ruin and he’ll take a lot more people down with him.
@Elaine:
Or a cop, which is kinda the same thing, but with pay and a union.
Apparently he wants to become a nurse.
Words fail me.
Matt Gaetz wants to hire him as an intern.
@Victorious Parasol
Unfortunately, there do exist people who seek out nursing jobs or elder care jobs in order to steal drugs/money or abuse helpless victims. Let’s just hope that’s not why.
Fortunately, abuser nurses usually get kicked out because that’s among the few jobs where you can’t easily get away with occasional accident or incompetence as a feigned excuse and people will notice a pattern of it. It’s a serious legal liability. And unlike with police or clergy, that will get you blacklisted. So we have no idea how many wannabes get wiped out before becoming a real problem and how many are just incompetent. No comfort to those who were damaged by it, obviously.
Drug-stealing nurses and bad elder carers of all kinds are still a problem, though.
The idea that you can murder two people and maim another, then just get back to “normal life” like nothing ever happened is sociopathic.
Cops, for example, have to go on administrative leave and get counseling after they shoot someone. Veterans come home from combat with PTSD, unable to process what they’ve witnessed. Taking a life is traumatic under any circumstances. It’s hard to live with that knowledge. Some are never able to return to work after that.
This kid, however, seems fully capable of sweeping the fact that he’s a murderer under the rug. He’s remorseless.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the right wing’s framing of compassion as un-American. At school boards across the country, they’ve been fighting tooth and nail against teaching SEL (social emotional learning). I can’t shake the feeling that they’re deliberately raising their children to be unfeeling foot soldiers for the civil war/liberal cleansing they’ve been fantasizing about. Empathy would only get in the way of their goals.
Dark times ahead.
“He’s lost nearly a year and a half of his life to this unimaginable nightmare”.
As opposed to what his victims lost…
@Victorious Parasol; @Snowberry:
Unfortunately, there do exist people who seek out nursing jobs or elder care jobs in order to steal drugs/money or abuse helpless victims. Let’s just hope that’s not why.
Rittenhouse has already assumed the prerogative of passing life-or-death judgment…
(Mind if, by contrast, I digress to offer a shoutout to a bonafide Good Guy? I fell critically ill this past spring, and among my caretakers was a boisterous and dramatic young man named Shayne; he encouraged me with humor, and patiently coaxed me out of bed and got me up and moving (after the jerkwad PT had left me yelping in pain) and inched me along on the way to the restroom, and made sure that I’d had a final full meal before I was transferred to another facility.
One reason I’m singling out a man (because I’m aware of the Glass Escalator effect): Shayne had grown up hearing all the obvious cowboy jokes and, in perhaps a counterintuitive way, decided to embrace them: he aspired to be the wandering hero helping people, and saw fit to interpret that ideal through nursing.
Just wanted to thank that masked man.)
I see that they are going ahead with the Horst-Wesselisation process despite their man suffering absolutely no consequences at all…?
@Snowberry
I mean, kicked out from where? Because I haven’t noticed that they get kicked out from the state-funded county hospitals serving critical need areas. No one nurse-educated wants to live where the poors are and serve them, so the staff that’s willing to go has to be killing-people level bad to get kicked. You’ll think I’m joking but witnessed specific rape threats, assaults, and injecting substances into people’s blood contrary to doctor’s orders on multiple occasions (documented malpractice) is not enough to get one single nurse fired after 2 years. A doctor that was euthanizing old and fat people was fired though. After 10 years. (To be fair that one was a couple decades ago he might have been caught sooner these days. Maybe. Not sure I’d want to bet on it.) He did go to jail for some pittance as well, I think.
I’m just waiting for the inevitable scandal of Matt gates hiring a teenager murderer and also waiting for possible sexual harassment suit.
@ Big Titty Demon
Can’t say I ever saw that level of abuse, but some nurses definitely use their position of power purposefully to… I assume feel better about themselves by shitting on someone who can’t fight back? It doesn’t have to be outright abuse to ruin a sick persons day or make them despair. If you’re helpless an in pain and the person who’s supposed to help you treats you roughly, ignores or even sneers at your pleas for help cause they “got no time” or “you’re over reacting” or whatever – that is absolutely terrifying. And from experience this is truer the weaker and more helpless a patient is.
I also think in many cases that behaviour isn’t intentionally. At least in Germany the profession seems to come with a sort of inferiority complex and I’ve seen all sorts of coping mechanisms regarding that.
I don’t think though Rittenhouse has anyting close to an inferiority complex… judging from his behaviour he’ll be a shitty but “charming” (same kind of charming as some dude trying to lure into his mlm scheme) nurse towards everyone he deems to be deserving – and a possibly deadly menace to anyone he deems worthless.
On a different note: In this case especially I’ve noticed that the right wing trolls are esp. active in pushing the “this is a legal judgement, that boy acted in self defense, have you seen the VIDEOS!!!” agenda even on this side of the pond. I’m not sure why. But when I mentioned that stand your ground doesn’t seem to apply when black women use it https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/no-stand-your-ground-for-black-women/ I got immediately bombarded with: THIS IS TOTALLY DIFFERENT! STAND YOUR GROUND IS NOT FOR DOMESTIC DISPUTES! IT WAS ON VIDEO! A RESTRAINING ORDER IS NO EVIDENCE! IMAGINE WOMEN JUST START SHOOTING THEIR HUSBANDS CAUSE THEY FEEL ATTACKED!!!
Probably I would hold back, but I would at least tell this callous asshole that I felt like slapping him silly and treat anyone who associated with him as invisible for the remainder of their lives.
This stupid-evil veiled racist can fuck off: his “America” is already dead and rotting, and good riddance.
@Snowberry:
Too true, and I think “early 20s” is even undercutting it a bit. Didn’t George W. Bush famously lump together as “youthful indiscretions” all the illegal and irresponsible crap he indulged in before giving up alcohol at the age of forty?
I am jawdropped at the notion that anybody is even trying to explicitly justify this flat-out bigoted attitude. Not that I disbelieve you, but the very idea of trying to pretend that there’s a “rational basis” for such double standards is disgusting.
The law was meant to clean out a few bad apples in a mostly lawful population. I’m struggling to find the language to describe this current subpopulation which hates fairness, etc… How do you describe someone who doesn’t just commit premeditated murder, but is self righteous about it?? The word “evil” keeps occuring to me as an answer, since I ran across this Medium post. This culture war will probably get worse, as such people get worse.