Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
A sobbing Kyle Rittenhouse collapsed after a jury acquitted him on all counts related to his shooting and killing two men, and wounding a third, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the Jacob Blake riots last year. But he wasn’t the only American relieved, or perhaps even surprised, given that the jury deliberated almost four full days. And though the jury’s message was clear — communist mobs will not be permitted to destroy cities and brutalize people who stand against them — it didn’t just spare Rittenhouse from life in prison.
It stopped a prosecutor’s attempt, at the unspoken behest of the Democratic Party, the leftist mainstream media, and their Antifa-Black Lives Matter storm troopers, to railroad an innocent kid who defended himself against four hardened criminals. Though video clearly showed Rittenhouse acting in self-defense, prosecutors forged ahead. They would make an example of Rittenhouse. Like Derek Chauvin and George Zimmerman, Rittenhouse was the victim of a racially and politically motivated prosecution, a morality play in which the Great White Defendant is exposed as a villain created in the casting department of Mississippi Burning.
The trial showed that the criminal-justice system can still render a fair verdict with an impartial and courageous judge and jury. But then again, it also showed that no one is safe from ideologically motivated prosecutors.
The Lies
Within hours of the shootings on August 25, 2020, the leftist mainstream media and its army of Twitter Orcs set the narrative with outright lies about Rittenhouse and what he did — and didn’t do. That mendacious narrative is clearly what drove prosecutors to charge him, again, despite video that clearly depicted four separate attacks on Rittenhouse in a matter of minutes.
This is what video clearly and unequivocally proved:
• Joseph Rosenbaum, a deranged sociopath and child rapist, ran hither and yon, spitting threats of murder and violence. “Shoot me, n***a, shoot me n***a,” he shouted. Rosenbaum, a witness testified, also said he would “kill [the] “motherf***ing n***ers” who were defending their businesses and “cut [their] hearts out.” Another witness testified that he pushed a flaming dumpster toward occupied police cars. He chased and cornered Rittenhouse, then tried to grab his AR-15, which the then-17-year-old carried for protection. Rittenhouse killed the man affectionately known among leftists as JoJo.
• As Rittenhouse went to find police, the communist mob attacked. An unidentified street thug hit him in the head with a rock. When the mob finally had Rittenhouse where it wanted him — on the ground — an unidentified career criminal known only as Jump Kick Man kicked Rittenhouse in the face. Rittenhouse fired and missed. Jump Kick Man wisely retreated.
• Then another felon entered the melee. Convicted strangler and domestic abuser Anthony Huber hit Rittenhouse over the head with a skateboard. Rittenhouse shot and killed him.
• Then the fourth criminal, Gaige Grosskreutz, attacked. Grosskreutz pointed an illegally carried .40-caliber Glock semi-automatic pistol at Rittenhouse, who fired again. That bullet blew apart Grosskreutz’s right biceps.
Rittenhouse did nothing to provoke Rosenbaum. Rittenhouse threatened no one with his rifle as he tried to run to turn himself in to police. But the raging mob of rioting goons chased him down. They wanted to “cranium” Rittenhouse, as one thug shouted.
The video was unimpeachable. Even the criminal complaint’s description of the shootings showed that Rittenhouse shot the men in self-defense. But that wasn’t enough for leftists, particularly elected officials who should have known better. U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley, a leftist from Massachusetts, immediately tweeted what became representative of the leftist media’s narrative.
“A 17 year old white supremacist domestic terrorist drove across state lines, armed with an AR 15,” she tweeted. “He shot and killed 2 people who had assembled to affirm the value, dignity, and worth of Black lives.”
That claim — that he took the rifle across state lines — is utterly false, but that was just one falsehood. In any case, leftists behaved like a torch-bearing mob chasing the monster in an old Frankenstein movie. As Grabien Media founder Tom Elliott asked in a tweet that contained a mash-up of material from MSNBC and The Young Turks, “why do reporting when we already know Rittenhouse is a terrorist?” Elliott’s collection made it clear that they knew absolutely nothing about Rittenhouse or what happened that night.
“Rittenhouse [is] the 17-year-old that went with a weapon into the middle of a protest, and then provoked people, and then shot and killed them.”
“Kyle Rittenhouse is the enemy.”
“[Rittenhouse is] a 17-year-old boy, who drove across state lines with an AR-15, and started shooting people up, including a guy with a skateboard.”
“A boy from out of state, drives up to the state with an AR-15 around his neck, shoots and kills a couple of people, shooting wildly, running around acting like a rent-a-cop.”
“What a dark dystopian scene where a 17-year-old boy is carrying around a rifle, running around and gunning down protesters.”
“A white, Trump-supporting, MAGA-loving, Blue Lives Matter social media partisan, 17-years-old, picks up a gun, drives from one state to another with the intent to shoot people.”
MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid and Lawrence O’Donnell, Antifa-BLM activists and apologists who pass as journalists, repeatedly called him a “vigilante.”
The ex-officio leader of the lynch mob, by the way, was none other than President Joe Biden, who falsely called Rittenhouse a “white supremacist.”
Coverage just before and during the trial was no better. And that was long after leftists had the chance to see the video. The Atlantic labeled him an “American Vigilante,” and while that offering from the snooty elites at least got the story a little right, it never mentioned the records of the hardened criminals who attacked, which were available shortly after the shooting.
Also ignoring those criminal records, The Intercept offered this headline over a story full of falsehoods and misleading claims: “Rittenhouse Jury Has to Decide If the Men Who Tried to Stop Him Were Heroes or Villains.”
That formulation suggested, as prosecutors did in closing arguments, that Rittenhouse was an “active shooter” whom Huber, Grosskreutz, and Jump Kick Man were “trying to disarm.” “When you think about the defendant’s behavior in this case,” prosecutor Thomas Binger had claimed, “contrast it with Anthony Huber, a man who was there because he knew Jacob Blake, who carried his skateboard everywhere, and who rushed towards danger to save other people’s lives.”
Rosenbaum, The Intercept’s Robert MacKay wrote, “chased the heavily armed teen for reasons that remain unclear,” and Huber was “one of three protesters who tried to disarm the gunman as he fled the scene.”
In fact, Rosenbaum’s reasons were crystal clear: He chased Rittenhouse to kill him, as he had warned. Why Huber thought he could “disarm” a “heavily-armed” “gunman,” we cannot know, but we do know he tried to kill Rittenhouse with a skateboard. And as prosecution witness Grosskreutz admitted at trial, Rittenhouse did not shoot him until he, Grosskreutz, aimed his illegally carried Glock at Rittenhouse. Amusingly, Grosskreutz confessed that his $10 million lawsuit against the city doesn’t mention his firearm.
Hoping to guarantee a conviction, hate-Rittenhouse MSNBC sent a producer to track the jury bus. The network would then identify jurors and intimidate them. Judge Bruce Schroeder kicked MSNBC out of the courtroom for the remainder of the trial. Violent hate-Rittenhouse “protesters” showed up outside the courthouse, just feet away from where jurors deliberated.
On Twitter, hateful leftists threatened violence and mayhem if jurors acquitted Rittenhouse. “If we don’t burn the judge of the Rittenhouse trial at the stake after this farce is over I will riot,” one said. “I want it on pay per view, I want it at the MGM and Vegas, I want there to be beer and wings deals at every bar when it happens. F**k this place.” Another threatened to “burn the Rittenhouse judge at the stake.”
All that, plus the nearly four full days of deliberations, suggested the jury might convict. Remarkably, they stood up to the mob.
Post-verdict Lies
After the trial, the counterfactual hate-Rittenhouse propaganda campaign continued. The Intercept falsely claimed that Rittenhouse went to Kenosha to “hunt down anti-racist protesters with an assault rifle.”
“Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum are victims,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted:
They should be alive today.
The only reason they’re not is because a violent, dangerous man chose to take a gun across state lines and start shooting people.
To call this a miscarriage of justice is an understatement.
Again, false. Rittenhouse was not “a violent, dangerous man” who “chose to take a gun across state lines and start shooting people.”
Representative Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) peddled a nearly identical falsehood:
This heartbreaking verdict is a miscarriage of justice and sets a dangerous precedent which justifies federal review by DOJ. Justice cannot tolerate armed persons crossing state lines looking for trouble while people engage in First Amendment-protected protest.”
Rittenhouse wasn’t “looking for trouble,” and what occurred in Kenosha wasn’t a protest. It was a full-blown riot that left businesses in flames and property destroyed. State and local officials did nothing to stop it. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers encouraged it.
But Rittenhouse “left a trail of bodies on the ground, and two of the people he shot were acting on the belief that Rittenhouse himself was an active shooter,” phony conservative David French wrote for The Atlantic. “He had, after all, just killed a man.”
Again, false. Rittenhouse did not leave a “trail of bodies on the ground” that would suggest that Rittenhouse did what Scarborough falsely accused him of doing: “shooting wildly” and “running around and gunning down protesters.” Rittenhouse was not an “active shooter,” and no one could have thought that. “Active shooters” don’t stop shooting until their ammo runs out, they commit suicide, or police stop them. Nor do they shout, as Rittenhouse did, that they’re trying to find police. They don’t try to turn themselves in, as Rittenhouse did.
In a Facebook post, Star Trek thespian Wil Wheaton recycled the lie that Rittenhouse killed two blacks and preposterously claimed that “hunting non-white humans is now a-ok.” And like so many others, he claimed that Judge Schroeder, a Democrat who made sure Rittenhouse received a fair trial, had a “racist little white nationalist heart.”
Maryland’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union called the verdict “dangerous, disgusting, unacceptable white supremacy.” MSNBC’s Reid compared Rittenhouse to a slave trader, and Tiffany Cross called Rittenhouse a “murderous little white supremacist.”
Besides all that, the media generally omitted a salient fact in its coverage: The “mostly peaceful protests” that ended in flaming, burned-out businesses were premised on another big leftist lie: that the shooting of Jacob Blake was yet another wanton act of “anti-black violence.” In fact, police arrived at the scene of a domestic disturbance in which Blake, wanted on a warrant for sex assault, was the aggressor. Blake resisted arrest, brandished a knife, and tried to get into an SUV before Officer Rusten Sheskey fired in self-defense. Kenosha’s district attorney ruled the shooting justified, citing, in part, a former police chief who had worked for the Obama administration. As well, the administration ruled out federal charges against the officers.
Not that any of that mattered to the Antifa-BLM communists looking for a reason to riot.
The Meaning of the Verdict
More than a little frightening is another fact. Top Democrats and media leftists had to know the truth. Granted, some lay leftists knew only what the media told them; thus, they nodded in bovine agreement with the fake news the media published and broadcast — that Rittenhouse was a racist aggressor who provoked the attacks — and truly were shocked that Rittenhouse was acquitted.
Not so for those who watched the trial or paid attention to details. Anyone who saw the video and listened to the testimony at trial knew Rittenhouse did not commit either intentional or reckless hom-icide. Nor was he recklessly shooting at people. Again, prosecutors knew, too, but charged forward to send a message on behalf of the Deep State, Democratic Party, and their street enforcers: Americans are not allowed to protect their property from rioting communist mobs, or even protect themselves from communist mobs trying to kill them. The authorities didn’t stop the riots. And no one else can, either.
But they also had a follow-up message in mind — the same one prosecutors sent in the trials of Chauvin and Zimmerman. Because whites are, as Critical Race Theory tells us, inherently racist and privileged, white cops who subdue black felons with force are acting with racial malice, and white civilians who defend themselves against either black assailants or their supporters are likewise motivated by the same animus, and even worse have a license to kill because of “white privilege” and self-defense laws.
Thus, the lies. The hate-Rittenhouse lynch mob had to say that he “crossed state lines to shoot people,” that he was in a community “where he did not belong,” that he was an “armed vigilante” and “heavily-armed gunman,” and worse, of course, that he was a “racist,” “domestic terrorist,” and “murderous little white supremacist.” The lynch mob had to ignore the criminal records of Rittenhouse’s assailants, and had to insist they were “BLM protesters.” Otherwise, prosecuting him wouldn’t have been justified. But if Rittenhouse is a “white supremacist,” if his “victims” were just “protesters” upset about the Blake shooting and trying to stop an “active shooter,” then he didn’t have the right to defend himself. The only right he had was the right to remain silent and let communist goons kill him. That was the prosecutors’ argument.
Yet even as the Democrats and the Deep State and their leftist media information ministry pounded home the message that Rittenhouse was a foaming-at-the-mouth white supremacist, just waiting for an excuse to murder blacks or their white BLM supporters, jurors were unmoved. They sent a message back: We will not permit communist mobs to burn down cities. We will not permit mobs to attack those trying to protect life, limb, and property. We will not permit “protesters” to attempt murder, then blame the victim.
The struggle against politicized justice isn’t over. The 12 who acquitted Rittenhouse are just one jury among many, and prosecutors in this case charged the boy despite clear evidence that he defended himself. They charged him because he was on the wrong side of a communist mob. Had Rittenhouse been an Antifa-BLM protester, if he had shot three “white supremacists” who stopped him from burning down a business, he might never have seen the inside of a courtroom