On 25 August, 2020, the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, was ablaze.
Peaceable, law-abiding, liberal citizens were exercising their First Amendment rights. They were supporting BLM and protesting against the government, police and the whole white supremacist establishment, otherwise known as the USA.
The First Amendment prohibits abridging “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Since I strongly suspect you may be a white supremacist yourself, I’m sure you’ll insist that such actions as rioting, burning down houses, attacking people in the street, sacking shops, trashing churches and paralysing the whole city don’t fall in the category of peaceable assembly.
Well, bully to you. You are denying the authority of the Supreme Court of Public Opinion (SCPO), which august body has ruled that any action, no matter how seemingly violent, taken in support of any cause SCPO deems worthy is ipso facto peaceable.
Since no cause, other than perhaps trans rights, is as worthy as BLM, Kenosha rioting, arsons and beatings were peaceable and therefore legal. It follows logically that any attempt to impede those peaceable activities was belligerent, illegal and white supremacist.
Kyle Rittenhouse was one such white supremacist, in President Biden’s unimpeachable [sic] opinion. That infernal teenager took to the streets armed with a medical kit and an AR-15 rifle, the civilian knock-off of the M-16.
He and his friends managed first to commit the illegal act of stopping the peaceable sacking, and likely burning, of a church, that viper’s nest of white supremacism. They also saved a few shops, the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with capitalism, America and white supremacism. And they ministered to the wounded, rather than righteously letting them bleed out.
Several peaceable, liberal people then attacked Kyle, with one trying to hit him on the head with a skateboard (average weight 11 lbs). I don’t know how fast that weapon was travelling, so I can’t tell you exactly what the force of impact would have been.
That force, as you know, is mass times velocity squared, divided by two. However, even in the absence of exact data, had the skateboard landed, Kyle’s head would probably have looked like a watermelon dropped on a hard surface from a great height.
Yet that white supremacist perfidiously didn’t let the skateboard land. He fired at his attackers, killing two and wounding one. The racist nature of this double murder is in no way mitigated by the chromatic incidental of all three peaceable victims being white.
It certainly had no affect on Joe Biden who was campaigning for president at the time. Joe didn’t have to wait for the facts to come in. He instantly knew Kyle was a white supremacist and identified him as such publicly. Quite right too: facts oughtn’t to be allowed to silence the voice of liberal conscience.
Anyway, Kyle Rittenhouse was arrested, charged with homicide, tried by a jury of his peers and found guilty as charged. Now I admit that the last two phrases are somewhat disconnected.
The jury of his peers actually found Kyle innocent because, according to those white supremacists, he was acting in self-defence. As if killing BLM supporters, no matter what they do, can be qualified as such!
But he was convicted by SCPO, the higher moral authority if one lacking in legal force. Since we are all moral people and few of us are lawyers, I know you’ll join me in voicing unequivocal support for the guilty verdict unanimously passed.
Joe Biden is on our side. “The verdict in Kenosha will leave many Americans feeling angry and concerned, myself included,” said POTUS. However, he added with his unfailing – well, rarely failing – sense of reality, “we must acknowledge that the jury has spoken.”
Must we, Mr President? New York mayor Bill de Blasio, busily doing to the city what Kyle did to his attackers, feels no such obligation. He described Kyle as “a violent, dangerous man [who] chose to take a gun across state lines and start shooting people. To call this a miscarriage of justice is an understatement.”
When someone pointed out that Kyle hadn’t in fact taken the weapon across state lines, the mayor replied to the effect that he used the concept metaphysically rather than factually. The concept of crossing state lines doesn’t actually involve the physical act of crossing state lines, he explained, taking me well out of my depth.
Actress and singer Bette Midler described the verdict as: “A tragic, tragic day for decent, THINKING, feeling, ethical people everywhere.” The emphasis on THINKING conveys the self-evident fact that only liberal, peaceable BLM supporters are endowed with the power of thought.
One man so endowed is talk show host Andy Cohen, who is also blessed with enviable eloquence. “What in the actual fuck,” he tweeted, displaying a capacity for both deep thought and lucid speech.
Actress Rosanna Arquette informed her audience that her sense of disappointment transcended that travesty of justice in Kenosha: “I have no faith in the justice system in America today. I don’t want to live in a country that is ruled by violent ignorant racists.”
Miss Arquette stopped just short of stating an intention to move to North Korea, where her ideal of justice has been fully realised. But when it comes to expressing liberal indignation, words speak louder than actions.
Meanwhile, tradesmen all over America brace themselves for another round of peaceable assemblies by boarding up their shops and taking their baseball bats from under the counters.
The police know they are helpless to douse the fires of peaceable assemblies, but they hope they’ll be able to protect their stations from the fate explicitly desired by liberal protesters.
“Every city, every town, burn the precinct to the ground,” they chant, showing a gift for poetic expression. If that’s not a peaceable assembly, I don’t know what is.
Fortunately, most of these “protesters” hibernate during the cold months so that there will be less “protests.” As for Kyle, I wish him well and a Merry Christmas and i hope that he not be brought before the federal Star Chamber for…..crossing state lines.
Of the three he shot all were criminals including one paedophile – Where’s my little violin?
This Rosenbaum [the child molester] had just been released from the psyche ward the same day of the shooting! My guess is that he was suicidal and wanted to find a cop to shoot and kill him. But rather instead found Kyle.
I think Kyle would have been found guilty in the UK, Canada, Australia, and NZ, etc.
For possession of a rifle, if nothing else.
Notable how long this erosion of the right to self-defence goes back: in 1987 (under Mrs Thatch, no less) Eric Butler, a 56 year old BP executive, was assaulted by two thugs on the Tube, and defended himself with his swordstick—Butler was charged and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon. (Despite this being the only known use of a swordstick in a ‘crime’, and despite it being used by a respectable ‘citizen’ in defence of his life against an unprovoked attack by two young crims, the Conservatives outlawed swordsticks in the Criminal Justice Act 1988.)
Sherlock Holmes fighting style bartitsu features the sword cane or umbrella. No respectable Englishman goes outdoors without his umbrella. And please don’t anyone say Sherlock was a fictional character.
True. Though the possession of a rifle does seem in Kyle’s case inseparable from self-defense.
Wisconsin USA is a BIG hunting state. Teens there legally allowed to carry long arms.
Including semi-automatic rifles?
Modern man has left behind reason and logic for his new hyper-feelings. This, of course, is progress, as we’re told that we are in every way better than our ancestors. (I do remember your blog entry asking if Germans of the 1930s were better than Germans of the 1920s!) The problem with these feelings, as driven by the SCPO, is that they are changing – at such a rate that few can keep apace. The O in SCPO is variable (except for free enterprise and white men), with some sort of subjective hierarchy. That means one can have many of the correct opinions today, but be vilified tomorrow. As you have recently written with “terf” and Kathleen Stock, the correct Os must be held and held within the correct order. Unfortunately, that order is arbitrary and up to the whim of the persecutors. Be ever on your guard! I assume that eventually it all will collapse in on itself, as many of the Os are contradictory and do not stand up to even the most timid application of logic. Well, I can at least hope.