Kenosha

While Cockburn was flipping through the channels last night, he came across Tucker Carlson, whom the media decries as a racist, interviewing Kyle Rittenhouse, whom the media decries as a murderer. Rittenhouse’s lawyer had accompanied him to this interview, and the pair announced that they planned to pull a Sandmann. That is, they want to sue the mainstream media over its smearing of Rittenhouse and the suppression of the facts that would have clarified the circumstances surrounding his shooting of three men in downtown Kenosha during a riot. Other claims have floated that Rittenhouse was a racist. Joe Biden even posted a video implying that Rittenhouse was either a white supremacist or part of a militia group.

Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong in law, but this does not mean he did the right thing in going armed to Kenosha. Much of the right is celebrating him as a patriot for taking arms against a sea of troubles, and as a poster child for the Second Amendment. He is neither. He is a liability for both of those causes. The right to bear arms is just that: a legal right. Choosing to bear them publicly is another matter: an ethical choice. Rittenhouse’s defense was that he was legally innocent because he was ethically innocent. Despite growing up with guns, he seems to have been unaware of the adult commonplace about bearing them: if you produce a weapon, you should be prepared to use it.

The fundamental right to self-defense won today. A jury in Kenosha acquitted teenager Kyle Rittenhouse on all counts related to allegations that he murdered rioters who attacked him. The prosecution’s case rested on the insane lie that legally carrying a firearm is an incitement to violence. Rittenhouse, they argued, was akin to an active shooter and thus deserved Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz chasing him, trying to take his rifle, hitting him in the head with a skateboard and pointing a handgun at his head.

There are three basic rules of gun safety: always keep your firearm pointed in a safe direction, always keep it unloaded until you're ready to use, and never put your finger on the trigger until you're ready to shoot. Thomas Binger, the lead prosecutor in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, violated two of those three rules in the courtroom Monday. Binger, who has built most of his case on Rittenhouse's decision to carry a rifle to the Kenosha riots last summer, pointed a rifle at the crowded courtroom with his finger directly on the trigger. It was a stunning bookend to the prosecution's fantastical argument against Rittenhouse, and the latest reminder that those who wish to take away your right to defend yourself with firearms know next to nothing about them.

I’m not an election prognosticator. I have no magic insight telling me what will happen on November 3, 2020. Frankly, I have zero idea. But what I do have is a great memory and some polling data that suggests Joe Biden’s media-assisted campaign is headed for an eerily similar crash landing to the one that happened in 2016. The media has once again sealed itself in a suffocating bubble, within which the impossible Trump victory can’t happen. The Democrats find themselves strapped to a low-energy candidate who is a bystander as social upheaval scorches battleground states. It has the look and feel of fall 2016. Democrats, start panicking now. First, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are starting to tighten.