Politics
The Violence of the Mob
Kyle Rittenhouse is a symptom of an American illness
We are living in strange and frightening times in the United States of America, as our bitterly divided society tries to grapple with the lethal results of a massive proliferation of guns, accompanied by a feverish rise in political animosity and seething cultural hatred.
There is a new willingness to embrace vigilante violence to resolve the issues our poisoned politics seemingly cannot, and we are quickly ceding our ability to find common ground with one another, instead ending up in deadly confrontations at the end of the barrels of our countless guns.
Violence is seeping into every aspect of public life in America, a foul social contagion gaining a life all its own. The dread is palpable.
Our last presidential election ended in a vicious assault on the U.S. Capitol. Local school boards are erupting in mayhem because of disagreements over student curricula and social justice protests are ending in death and destruction. It seems Americans are walking away from efforts to resolve our mutual differences peacefully through negotiation and compromise.
Four out of ten Republicans agreed that political violence might be necessary in an infamous but unsurprising recent poll.
These are dark omens for an uncertain future, as a quickening drumbeat of violence replaces democratic governance as the primary mechanism with which to solve our direst problems.
The air in America is heavy with electricity, and the dark mood is only exacerbated by an indulgent and heavily-politicized regime of lax and ever-loosening gun laws that practically guarantees the influx of military-grade assault rifles and hidden handguns alike into every conceivable part of American life. There are more guns per capita in America than anywhere else in the world by far, as people from both sides of the political spectrum feel increasingly unsafe and under siege, and rush off to arm themselves in turn.
This is a deeply troubling and self-perpetuating cycle of mutual suspicion and mobilization, and the alienation and isolation of the pandemic has only reinforced these dark trends downward. America feels as though it is riding the precipice of something truly terrible, awash in guns and fraught with fury.
Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal Friday was the predictable symptom of this much larger American disease, and one that Kenosha’s local judicial authorities are hardly equipped to resolve. That is the fact that American civilians are armed to the teeth en masse, and increasingly and bitterly divided over everything from race to partisan politics to public health measures.
The bloody results are as macabre as they are unsurprising.
The Rittenhouse case seems to epitomize America’s enduring addiction to firearms, and the price we continue to pay in blood. As our public life descends into ever worse acrimony at ever hotter cultural flash points, there will be more young men wielding more guns and killing more people. That much is assured. How much worse things might get is a matter that’s entirely up for debate.
As the Irish poet William Yeats wrote: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” America was perhaps always destined to fall apart as a hostage, held at gunpoint at the end of the barrel of its own AR-15, a national suicide.
A teenaged killer as Republican mascot
The fact that Kyle Rittenhouse is being idolized as a hero in conservative politics says almost as much as his acquittal does about the broken state of our country. After his acquittal, the teenaged killer was publicly offered congressional internships from not one but three Republican congressmen, right-wing provocateurs Madison Cawthorn, Matt Gaetz, and Paul Gosar (who was himself censured days earlier by the House after tweeting an animated video that showed him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Biden).
It is a noxious statement from America’s seething right-wing confirming their open embrace of political violence that they would elevate this boy-killer into someone to be worshipped and celebrated by their voters.
Indeed, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson snagged the first interview with Kyle Rittenhouse to be aired Monday, in what is sure to be captivating television drama (and political red meat) for the embittered masses of right-wing voters that make up Carlson’s audience.
His viewers will presumably feel freer themselves to bring their own AR-15’s to menace and shoot up their next local street protest against police brutality and racism. Broadcasting their support for Kyle Rittenhouse is a convenient way for Republican politicians to broadcast their antipathy for Black Lives Matter and efforts at racial justice, and to display their abiding love for unfettered weaponry.
The Republican Party finds in Kyle Rittenhouse a tidy way to project their barely-veiled racism alongside their political infatuation with guns, guns, guns at the exact same time. This is why there were Fox News cameras filming behind the scenes during his trial, a fact that recently emerged from the proceedings: violent white vigilantism is good politics in the GOP.
Donald Trump likewise recognizes that this teenaged killer is an obvious political winner. He went on Fox’s Ingraham Angle to praise his acquittal, claiming the case was the result of prosecutorial misconduct, and declaring that Kyle Rittenhouse is the “poster boy” for innocence based on self-defense.
Kyle Rittenhouse’s case sits right in the GOP’s political sweet spot of barely-concealed racism, white vigilante violence, and fetishistic gun-worship that Donald Trump and his ilk have nurtured so effectively for so long. I doubt if the boy himself even realizes how politically useful he is to Republicans, who have reportedly raised millions of dollars using his name.
Conveniently, though, his skilled legal team was all paid for, leaving cash on the table for the circling political jackals to fight over.
Indeed, his case has become such a farcical money grab for craven right-wing politicians and Republican operatives that his own trial attorney, Mark Richards, came out to publicly admonish them, calling efforts to cash in on his client’s celebrity “disgusting.” Indeed.
“I had to kill them.”
Kyle Rittenhouse’s argument for self-defense was essentially, “I had to kill them because I had a gun and they would have taken it from me and killed me if I hadn’t killed them first.” It was remarkably hard to argue with, if you ignore everything else about that night, which the jury apparently did.
The fact that he came to this tense street protest illicitly armed at 17 and looking for trouble seemed not to factor into the juries decision to acquit him of all charges, and thus he walked.
Indeed, America’s lax gun laws encourage exactly this kind of deadly vigilantism, and Rittenhouse’s attorneys made beautiful use of them. The obviously sympathetic judge even dropped the single pending gun charge against him, right before the jury began deliberating. Hint, hint.
The GOP/NRA’s longtime argument that more guns make us safer in America notwithstanding, this is precisely the kind of human tragedy that happens when you flood American streets with easily-accessible firearms and do almost nothing to restrict their ownership or use.
Guns do not make us safer. There is an abundance of high-quality academic studies and research that show unequivocally that more guns equal more death, especially in high-income countries.
People with guns make other people with guns more nervous, and lead to violent and preventable death via both homicide and suicide. Only in America do we seem unwilling to comprehend this deeply intuitive truth, thanks to a corrupt Republican Party enamored with the political utility of firearms and aided by an entrenched and highly effective gun lobby.
More people with more guns means a lot of very nervous people.
The circular logic of heavily-armed America and Kyle Rittenhouse’s lawyers, however, is being realized. In a society fraying from political dysfunction and cultural angst, a fearful America finds itself armed to the teeth and looking for trouble.
Unfortunately, it will take more than one Wisconsin jury to acquit America of its sins, as we trundle on toward national apocalypse with our pistols tucked tightly into our belts.
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