Kyle rittenhouse

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.

Last week, a district court acquitted two men and deadlocked on two others who were accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. No word yet on which of her Covid restrictions Whitmer will now violate in order to cheer herself up. But the decision was a credit to the jury, which did the right thing in the face of immense pressure. The case against Whitmer's would-be abductors was a crock from the start, a classic instance of the FBI egging on poor saps so it could land an arrest and grab a headline. The spooky right-wing terrorists were nothing of the sort. Their supposed ringleader, a man named Barry Croft, was a heavy pot smoker nicknamed "Bonehead" who caused one FBI investigator to ask "Do these guys even know what's up?

Senate carpool dad Ben Sasse recently made headlines when he went on a rant against installing TV cameras inside the Supreme Court. "A huge part of why this institution doesn’t work well is because we have cameras everywhere," Sasse said of Congress. He warned that televising the Supreme Court might cause it to go the same way, that it might incentivize, as he delicately characterized Congress's conduct, "jackassery." There's an entire anthology waiting to be written on Sasse's use of creative swearing in the Senate (after the January 6 riot, he waxed poetic about "kicking Hitler's ass and going to the moon"). Yet the senator from Nebraska is absolutely right.

In the past three weeks, two small communities in two Dairy Belt states have seen tragedy — and, of course, two very different media reactions. In Oxford, Michigan, Ethan Crumbley, a fifteen-year-old student, opened fire with a handgun at his high school on Tuesday. He killed four students and wounded eight and was taken into custody. After a brief search, both of Crumbley’s parents were arrested on manslaughter charges, for purchasing the firearm and gifting it to him. Ethan Crumbley has been charged with twenty-four different felonies including terrorism. Shortly before the shooting, a teacher identified disturbing signals in classroom, including his drawings depicting suicide, mass death, blood and firearms.

Much of Tucker Carlson’s exclusive interview with Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager found not guilty in a high-profile homicide trial last week, went as Cockburn expected. Tucker largely let Rittenhouse tell his side of the story, running through the events of the bloody night last summer when Rittenhouse shot and killed two men and wounded a third. Tucker’s questions on the political dimensions of the case, something about which Rittenhouse has said very little until now, prompted the most interesting responses. “This case has nothing to do with race, it never had anything to do with race,” said Rittenhouse. “It had to do with the right to self-defense.” Rittenhouse also said: “I support the BLM movement. I support peacefully demonstrating.

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.