An annoying number of commentators on the political Right are insisting that Kyle Rittenhouse shouldn’t have been out in the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin on the night of August 25, 2020.
Take the perennially wrong Quin Hillyer over at the Washington Examiner, for example.
“Rittenhouse is at clear moral fault for the two deaths. He went into Kenosha that night expecting trouble, and he grievously exacerbated the trouble he found,” he lamented in a Wednesday opinion column called “Don’t cry for Kenosha Killer Kyle Rittenhouse.”
To be fair to Hillyer, publishing contrarian opinions for rage clicks is his brand. It’s what keeps him paid, and thus, contriving lame takes will forever be his lot in life.
But keep in mind that Hillyer and others like him are also card-carrying members of the “well-regulated militia” club. These are the “constitutional conservative” types (who have managed to conserve nothing, ever) that we’re talking about here.
It seems to me that Kenosha Kyle was simply exercising his Second Amendment rights without infringement, as strictly dictated by the Bill of Rights. One could argue that he was legally too young to carry a weapon at the time of the shootings, a Class A misdemeanor in Wisconsin, but I’m having trouble squaring the “constitutional conservatives’” fawning adoration of the phrase “shall not be infringed” with their messaging on Rittenhouse. It doesn’t make any sense.
By the way, Kenosha Kyle is not “at clear moral fault for the two deaths,” unless people like Hillyer are prepared to argue that the moral thing to do when faced with imminent death, as Kenosha Kyle clearly was, is to roll over and die. And let it be known for the record that one of the dead Communists was a pedophile. The other was a domestic abuser. While we’re arguing morality, those two details ought to be included in the discussion.
Never mind that, though. There’s a more basic point to be argued here.
Nobody, especially not anyone on the political Right, is required to cede the streets of their communities to violent Communists who intend to burn them to the ground. Kyle Rittenhouse and his friends had as much of a right to be out on those streets as the violent Communists, as the reporters, as the casual observers, and as anyone else did.
People who claim otherwise might as well thumbtack an invitation on their foreheads for Antifa to come riot in their neighborhoods. And don’t worry that the thumbtack might injure their frontal lobes causing brain damage, as they clearly have no use for that organ anyway.
If the authorities are unwilling to protect our livelihoods, our property, and our lives, it is our responsibility to step up and do it ourselves. Absent law enforcement to quell violent riots, the only outcome will be total leftist anarchy. If defending our communities ourselves or watching enraged, misfit delinquents take a torch to them are our only options, give me the 17-year-old with the AR-15. I’d choose him every single time.
If they so choose, the Washington think-tankers and opinion columnists can let their businesses burn down. Except they don’t have to worry about that. They’re busy pontificating on the internet from their Beltway cubicles, their hands uncalloused from an honest day’s work.
Perhaps after more than a year of relative peace in the streets, the pontificators have forgotten quite how violent the cities were in the summer of 2020. Nobody in Washington has ever been accused of having a long memory. Remember when the neoconservatives plunged us into the Iraq war? They sure don’t!
This isn’t the space to recap all of the violence, which is public record. But there was a lot of fighting, burning, smashing, breaking, looting, and even killing during the 2020 “Summer of Love.” There were “autonomous zones” where street thugs declared their city blocks sovereign from the United States. That ought to have elicited at least some kind of response from federal law enforcement, if no one else. It didn’t.
Make no mistake about it: when these rioters whip themselves into a frenzy over the next dead criminal—and they will—we will once again be on our own.
Do you think the Biden Administration is going to do anything to stop them? Or the FBI that has all but deputized these black-clad Marxists to be their soldiers in that agency’s war on the Right? Of course not. Joe Biden doesn’t know what planet he’s on, and the FBI hates you.
Local law enforcement, I’m sad to say, will likely be just as worthless. The people in charge of these contentious cities and suburbs are nearly always Democrats, ready to give a stand-down order to local police at a moment’s notice.
Whether Rittenhouse is acquitted—and he should be—does not matter.
Don’t turn your community over to the mob.