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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FWIW – I’ll share a less depressing thought of how there might be a cost to condoning murderous racism. Do you remember the Ferguson riots during 2014? Related to race after police shot Michael Brown? St Louis, the metro around Ferguson, has been been suffering economically since then. At least, that’s what my right-wing mother said recently.
I avoid discussing politics with her. I just mentioned that I was surprised how dead the St Louis airport seemed when i visited, which started her on an unusual rant. She complained that many businesses moved out, and aren’t coming back because the liberal media made that thug Michael Brown into a saint, etc. Obviously not a fair assessment of what happened. I’m not surprised businesses lost confidence in city leadership when their response to possibly racist police killings causing riots was to say it was justified, and what’s the problem? That seems like a set-up for more destructive rioting, when the leadership seems clueless on what caused the problem and how to stop it. They weren’t fooling anyone but themselves.
I’m not talking about the riot damage in Ferguson itself, but an unusual malaise for the metro area around it. My mother has expertise to assess a business climate, decades of experience in commercial real estate. Also, Googling seemed to back the idea of St Louis’ weakening economic strength. St Louis has good infrastructure, cheap real estate, and a central location in US. So it should have less trouble attracting businesses.
Trayvon Martin was just a kid.
Tamir Rice was just a kid.
“Now that the nightmare of (their murders) are over, we need to let Trayvon/Tamir get back to being kids. They’ve lost
nearly a year and a half of his lifethe entire rest of their lives to this unimaginable nightmare” —So, the best we can do for them is to make sure that their murders are not considered crimes, and their killers get off scott-free?
Much as in the case of Donald Trump, this is a bad person, but we’ll always have bad people, and a lot of them will never pay, ever, for what they do. That’s part of human life, and beside that being why, at heart, I am a trans-humanist, what really galls me is the extent to which these inevitable bad actors now seem to be celebrated in a way they usually weren’t a few decades back.
Sure, I know that being a sociopath or otherwise conscienceless has often been a ticket to fame and not infamy if enough people approve of your killing only the right people, but I can’t shake the (basically conservative!) feeling that we had reached a point where we weren’t doing it so readily. Some god-awful synthesis of the most one-handed aspects of Ayn Rand Thought, as in her serial killer crush, and the law-n-order cult got us here.
(Yes, Nietzsche wrote of the ‘blond beast’, but he didn’t approve…at least in some moods.)
isn’t it funny how all these right wingers who bemoaned the potential loss of poor widdle Kyle’s childhood/teenhood, never seemed to care about childhood when it was Tamir Rice (12yo) who was shot dead by the cops for carrying a TOY gun?
edit: ninja’d by BigKitty. but still.
@BigKitty:
Your comment reminds me of this series of paintings
https://www.adrianbrandon.com/stolen
I, a white Dutch Irish American woman, was mistaking for the 4th time in my life as an Asian woman again an hour ago. And this time it wad by a Asian baby at target who grabbed me by the pant leg of my legging and called me mama. His Asian mother then found him right after this and man did we not look even a little bit alike.
@ElaineTheWitch:
I bet you looked just like her from the knees down. /calvin
@nequam
that and apparently I looked like this one other gal from behind at the gym. Cause her boyfriend fully grabbed my ass thinking I was her.
@Nequam; @Elaine the Witch:
I bet you looked just like her from the knees down. /calvin
I seem to recall (Gavin de Becker, I think?) pointing out that, for small children, the adult world is a forest of legs.
@full metal ox
That kid is never going to hear the end of this. he’s going to be in his 30s talking to his ma on the phone about a lady he’s seeing and she’s gonna go
“are you sure she’s Korean? You thought a white woman was your own mother at target when you were a little boy”
“mom please let it go”
He wants to become a cop, so he’ll fit right in with his fellow pigs.