Guest post by Jim Roberts-Miller
On Tuesday, August 25 Kyle Rittenhouse drove from his home in Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kenosha was roiled by protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake. That night, Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two.
He is becoming a folk hero on the racist right. And not just on Twitter (which, as is often correctly pointed out, isn’t real life). As of this writing, at least two right wing pundits, Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter, have come out decidedly in favor of the shooter, claiming he was acting in self-defense and setting his defense of private property as superior to the “lawlessness” of the protests.
The racist right is in desperate need of a hero after a summer of protest in which their usual tricks of attacking the victim, sympathizing with the tough job of police, and exaggerating the usually mild property damage that often comes with angry protests were, for various reasons, simply not working.
Despite their standard calls for “civility”, so-called support for “peaceful protests, not violence”, support for Black Lives Matter not only held steady, but actually went up. Corporations felt the need to make explicit their support of the BLM movement. Confederate monuments which survived recent protests were removed, in some case overnight. City governments began looking to lower police budgets, shifting that money elsewhere. In a least a few cases, city governments have actually done this. The right’s normal paladin, Donald Trump, seemed not only unable to move the rest of America with his typically harsh rhetoric, but watched as his popularity went down and the electoral lead of his opponent Joe Biden climb into the double digits, at least partially thanks to Trump’s ham-fisted efforts to violently put down what were seen an legitimate protests, walling off the White House and using tear gas to disperse protestors so he could hold a Bible upside down outside of a church.
A vast, if incomplete and imperfect, reckoning with the structures of white supremacy began to percolate through American society. The hysteria with which this was met on the right is extreme.
On the internet, you never more than two or three clicks away from a racist right wing alternate universe of (black and brown) wild-eyed leftists bent on burning down the suburbs and replacing the (white) social structures of peaceful law-abiding (white) Americans with their (black and brown) socialist agenda for robbing the productive so they can live off welfare. And in this universe, the fear, confusion, and anger over the failure of the rest of decent (white) society to get angry over the lawlessness and disrespect being shown to the normal (white) power structures was palpable.
But the racist right has only one play. And that is to keep pushing the narrative that the protestors are not only misguided and wrong, but that they are (black and brown) violent and greedy and actively coming for you (decent white person). They pushed that narrative with the Portland protests, but it wasn’t working out. Kenosha was another chance.
And then Rittenhouse, who broke several laws just by being present in Kenosha with an AR-15 (thus proving the Racist right’s problem isn’t really lawlessness, but who is breaking the law), shot three people. Unconsciously or not, the racist right realized that they could not allow Rittenhouse’s crimes to hijack the news the way the murder of Heather Heyer did in Charlottesville. To do so would once again wreck their narrative of leftist (black and brown) violence endangering good hard-working (white) folks. And so he couldn’t be written off as an aberration, or someone who made a mistake.
No. Rittenhouse had to be a hero. A young man who idolized the police, law and order, and who selflessly came to Kenosha to protect the property and society of ordinary (white) people from a ravening (black and brown) mob. That is their story. That is their desperate need. For them Rittenhouse is a hero, a martyr, a (white) man literally pursued by a mob who, in his extremity, was forced to kill to defend himself. And that is the story they will be pushing at all costs, because it all they have and they have to get enough (white) people to condone the violence needed to put the mob (black and brown people) back in their place and re-elect Donald Trump.
You must not let them do this. Rittenhouse deliberately chose to break several laws to go to Kenosha Wisconsin, gun in hand, expecting to shoot people. He got his wish. This is not heroism.