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Rittenhouse Verdict: A License for White Vigilantes

As an attorney, I can appreciate the niceties of the "burden of proof" and the fact that from the outset the prosecution had the burden of proving Kyle Rittenhouse was guilty whereas the defense counsel only need to plant some doubt in the minds of jurors.  That said, the not guilty on all counts verdict will likely lead to a flood of similar self-appointed vigilante activities by far right elements.  The lessonof the verdict is very clear: one can create a deadly situation, take the law into one's own hands as judge and jury, literally kill numerous people and then put up a disingenuous self defense claim that need only plant a seed of doubt in the minds of jurors.  Of couse, I suspect had Rittenhouse been black or non-white we would have seen a very different outcome.  It's little wonder that white supremacists and other vicious elements on the far right are celebrating the Rittenhouse verdict.   Minorities of all stripes - and those the calls liberals - are less safe this morning than just yesterday morning before this verdict.  A piece in The Atlantic and the Washington Post look at the dangerous message this verdict has sent loud and clearly to white domestic terrorists.  First this from The Atlantic: 

From the start, the events that led to Rittenhouse fatally shooting Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and injuring Gaige Grosskreutz, are incomprehensible without considering the role of race in how things unfolded. The shootings occurred during protests after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, on August 23, 2020. The United States was already in the midst of huge protests following the May murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer. But the case could never serve as a plain assessment of race in America, in part because the three men Rittenhouse shot were all white.

The most striking element of Rittenhouse’s experience, and one of the reasons it became such a focal point for national attention, was the way he was treated by police. Rittenhouse was 17 when he self-deployed to the streets of Kenosha, not far from his home in Illinois, carrying an AR-style rifle. Just a few minutes before he shot the three men, footage showed police greeting Rittenhouse and giving him a bottle of water. After the shooting, he then went home, where his mother persuaded him to turn himself in. At the police station, detectives cut off his interview when he plainly did not understand Miranda rights.

[A] young Black man in the same situation would almost certainly not have been afforded all—or perhaps any—of these indulgences. The Second Amendment may be written in a race-neutral way, but in practice Black Americans do not have the same rights that their white compatriots do. A Black boy might never have had the audacity to go to protests with a rifle on his back. If he had, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to waltz past friendly police, turn himself in on his own timeline, and have his rights so carefully protected. But this injustice was outside the scope of the trial.

A group of conservatives, largely of the MAGA variety, have chosen to make Rittenhouse into a hero. That’s disgraceful, and not merely because much of the effort has been shameless profiteering. Rittenhouse’s choices during the summer of 2020 aren’t something that anyone should emulate. Even if you are more sympathetic—if, for example, you found yourself moved by Rittenhouse’s apparent breakdown on the witness stand during his trial—you should object to the commodification of the worst moment in a teenager’s life.

In fact, 17-year-olds shouldn’t even possess rifles. That’s not a normative statement; it’s a description of federal law (albeit with a few exceptions). Rittenhouse initially faced a charge of unlawfully possessing a dangerous weapon, but the judge tossed that charge in an arcane dispute over the length of the gun. The larger and more socially important matter of whether 17-year-olds—or anyone else—should be acting as a vigilante defense force is not strictly a legal question, but a political one. No judge or jury can resolve that.

[S]elf-defense laws are being stretched to their limits by the number of people carrying guns in the United States today. Going to a protest armed may be a stupid and provocative thing to do, but it is not (necessarily) an illegal one, and the legal parsing of self-defense does not take prior wisdom into account, but begins at the moment of conflict. A reasonable jury might have reached a different conclusion on these charges, but its ambit was always going to be narrow.

Over time, the repeated failures to convict white defendants erode trust and legitimacy. A functional justice system will produce both convictions and acquittals, but the disproportionate burden borne by Black Americans is a sign that our justice system is not a functional one.

 A similar theme is found in the Washington Post column that express fear over future vigilante actions.  Here are excerpts:

The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse was no bolt-from-the-blue surprise, but I worry about what it portends — and potentially encourages. I fear that other self-appointed, heavily armed vigilantes will take this verdict as a green light to act out their bloody fantasies.

The jury accepted the defense’s claim that Rittenhouse . . . . was acting in self-defense. Perhaps his tearful histrionics on the witness stand were convincing. Perhaps Judge Bruce Schroeder’s long-standing reputation as a jurist who tilts the scales toward criminal defendants was a factor. Perhaps prosecutors should have put on a more coherent, less disjointed presentation from the beginning . . .

Rittenhouse ended up killing protesters Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and wounding a third person, Gaige Grosskreutz, 26. One of the men tried to take Rittenhouse’s rifle, the defense argued; another tried to attack him with a skateboard; another pointed a gun at him. In each instance, defense lawyers claimed, Rittenhouse had reason to fear for his life — and therefore had the right to fire in self-defense.

The issue had become whether, in the split-seconds before firing, Rittenhouse genuinely felt he was in mortal danger — rather than how Rittenhouse had created danger in the first place by needlessly inserting himself, and his loaded rifle, into an already tense situation.

My fear is that the verdict will encourage like-minded yahoos to take it upon themselves to act as guardians of law and order. In a nation where there are more firearms than people, no good can come of such vigilantism. For proof one need only look to Brunswick, Ga., where the killers of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed Black jogger, are on trial for murder — also claiming they were acting as guardians of their community, and also claiming they acted in self-defense.

[A]ll the principal actors in the Rittenhouse case — the defendant and his three victims — are White. But since the Kenosha protest was about racial justice and police violence against Black Americans, race was very much the subtext of the Rittenhouse trial, too. Rittenhouse became seen as an avatar of White grievance and anger.

He [Rittenhouse] is a “victim” only to the extent that he might have bought into some apocalyptic fantasy of “the real America” being under siege. The protesters in Kenosha that night in 2020 — Black, White, Hispanic, Asian — were real Americans, too. The streets belonged to them as much as to Rittenhouse and his fellow vigilantes.

There is a distinction between being “not guilty,” which the jury declared Rittenhouse, and being innocent in the moral sense. Friday’s verdict cannot be allowed to blur that line.

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Despite GOP Obstruction Joe Biden Is Succeeding

Joe Biden's poll numbers are in the toilet lately largely in my view due to two things: (i) the American public and most certainly the mainstream media have the attention span of a fruit fly, and (ii) the mainstream medai seeks sensation and controversy to generate page views on webpages and viewership on programs that give little indept coverage on anything, especially something as boring as economic theories or government programs that take time to show results.  The irony is that the Trump regime delivered almost nothing save fanning hate and bigotry - and a huge tax give away to the very wealthy - yet Republicans are whining and seeking to sabotage Biden administration policies and accomplishments.  Some Republicans are even so disingenuous that they are bragging about the benefits the newly passed infrastructure bill will bring to their districts even though they voted against the bill - a testimony to the dishonesty of today's GOP and the low intelligence of many voters who don't even know how their members of Congress actually voted or that GOP ads about increased taxes on the middle class are lies. A column in the New York Times by an anti-Trump Republican looks at Biden's accomplishments.  Here are highlights:

Joe Biden came to the White House at a pivotal moment in American history. We had become a country dividing into two nations, one highly educated and affluent and the other left behind. The economic gaps further inflamed cultural and social gaps, creating an atmosphere of intense polarization, cultural hostility, alienation, bitterness and resentment.

As president, Biden had mostly economic levers to try to bridge this cold civil war. He championed three gigantic pieces of legislation to create a more equal, more just and more united society: the Covid stimulus bill, the infrastructure bill and what became Build Back Better, to invest in human infrastructure.

All of these bills were written to funnel money to the parts of the country that were less educated, less affluent, left behind. Adam Hersh, a visiting economist at the Economic Policy Institute, projects that more than 80 percent of the new jobs created by the infrastructure plan will not require a college degree.

These gigantic proposals were bold endeavors. Some thought them too bold. Economist Larry Summers thought the stimulus package, for example, was too big. It could overstimulate the economy and lead to inflation.

For over a decade I have been covering a country that was economically, socially and morally coming apart. I figured one way to reverse that was to turbocharge the economy and create white-hot labor markets that would lift wages at the bottom. If inflation was a byproduct, so be it. The trade-off is worth it to prevent a national rupture.

The Biden $1.9 trillion stimulus package passed and has been tremendously successful. It heated the overall economy. The Conference Board projects that real G.D.P. growth will be about 5 percent this quarter. The unemployment rate is falling. Retail sales are surging. About two-thirds of Americans feel their household’s financial situation is good.

But the best part is that the benefits are flowing to those down the educational and income ladder. In just the first month of payments, the expanded Child Tax Credit piece of the stimulus bill kept three million American children out of poverty. Pay for hourly workers in the leisure and hospitality sector jumped 13 percent in August compared with the previous year. By June, there were more nonfarm job openings than there had been at any time in American history. Workers have tremendous power these days.

The infrastructure bill Biden just signed will boost American productivity for years to come. . . . Federal infrastructure spending will be almost as large a share of annual GDP as the average level during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Americans are exhausted by a pandemic that seems to never end. And they are taking it out on Democrats. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll revealed that voters now prefer Republican congressional candidates in their own districts by 51 percent to 41 percent.

If presidencies were judged by short-term popularity, the Biden effort would look pretty bad. But that’s a terrible measure. First-term presidents almost always see their party get hammered in the midterm after their inauguration. That’s especially true if the president achieved big things. Michigan State political scientist Matt Grossmann looked at House popular vote trends since 1953. Often when presidents succeeded in passing major legislation — Republicans as well as Democrats — voters swung against the president’s party.

Presidents are judged by history, not the distraction and exhaustion of the moment. Did the person in the Oval Office address the core problem of the moment? The Biden administration passes that test. Sure, there have been failures — the shameful Afghanistan withdrawal, failing to renounce the excesses of the cultural left. But this administration will be judged by whether it reduced inequality, spread opportunity, created the material basis for greater national unity.

It is doing that.

My fear is not that Democrats lose the midterms — it will have totally been worth it. My fear is that Democrats in Congress will make fantastic policies like the expanded Child Tax Credit temporary to make budget numbers look good. If they do that the coming Republican majorities will simply let these policies expire.

If that happens then all this will have been in vain. The Democrats will have squandered what has truly been a set of historic accomplishments. Voters may judge Democrats harshly next November, but if they act with strength history will judge them well.

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Evangelicals Demean Christianity, Demonize the "Social Justice Gospel"

I have never had respect for those who wear their religion on their sleeves and then act in a manner utterly at odds with the supposed tenants of their faith.  Indeed, if one belives the Gospels, Christ roundly condemned the Pharisees who put outward display and feigned piety over behavior consistent with the faith they claimed.  Indeed, Christ referred to these falsely pious individuals as hypocrites or worse.  Today, the same condemnation is deserved by the vast majority of evangelicals who continue to swear fealty to Donald Trump and support Republican policies that are antithetical to the social justice gospel espoused by Christ.  Rather than love their neighbhors, they hate almost everyone and seek to government programs that support the poor, the homeless, and those in need. Add to this their open racism - which drives much of the desire to destroy the social safety net - and homophobia, and these evangelicals comprise a daily advertisement of why one would want to reject the "Christian" label.  A piece in Salon looks at this demeaning of Christianity and hypocrisy that defines so many evangelicals.  Here are highlights:

As an ordained minister trained at an evangelical seminary, I find that motivation to fight for the least of these within what is called the "social justice gospel." In recent years, however, that gospel has been twisted by the evangelical Republican machine, which now seeks to instill the belief that social justice is the gospel of godless socialism and communism.  

Over the last few years, the evangelical movement has gone to great lengths to vilify any message coming out of any church that connects with the social justice movement. In a brief statement widely circulated in the evangelical world, prominent Christian leaders and pastors have claimed that the social justice movement is a danger to Christians, "an onslaught of dangerous and false teachings that threaten the gospel, misrepresent Scripture, and lead people away from the grace of God in Jesus Christ."

The problem for evangelicals is that the Bible is quite clear around the issues connected to social justice. Ignoring these issues requires completely ignoring the teachings of Jesus. It is fascinating to me, in a grim way, that the very people who claim to be holding onto the true form of Christian faith are in fact committed to destroying it. 

Connecting the social justice agenda to socialism is an intentional lie . . . . The Christian faith pushes its followers to fight for equality of opportunity, and teaches a belief in the possibility for every individual to be better, if given the chance. Our faith calls for providing every human being a chance to succeed while offering the basic need of forgiveness, grace, mercy, and love.  

No one exemplified this calling more than a dear friend of mine who died a couple weeks ago. Her name was Gale Hull, and she created the finest example of a mission organization I have ever come across. Her organization, Partners in Development, started its work in Haiti and brought its mission to Guatemala, Peru and rural Mississippi. Her beautiful idea of "whole-person change" provided the opportunity for thousands to have a better life and inspired thousands more to be better people.  

Gale understood that people needed an opportunity. Through a mortgage program, micro-business loans, child sponsorship and free medical care, families thrived. People within the program pay for their own homes with money they earn from their own businesses while having their basic needs of education and health met. That is the type of social justice that lies at the foundation of the Christian faith. 

How is it that using the Christian faith to serve the poor, heal the sick and welcome the foreigner is destroying America — in the minds of far too many evangelicals — but manipulating the Christian faith to condemn women as murderers and condemn LGBTQ people to hell is somehow proper Biblical teaching?  

The truth is that the Christian faith should be used as a shield for the oppressed and a sword against the oppressors. The working poor have been completely ignored by the evangelical movement and it's time for people of good faith to find themselves some new leaders. Preferably among people who want to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, not the teachings of Donald Trump.  

 My dream is that people of faith and people of conscience, especially if they have voice, power and influence in our society, will begin to align with the idea of equality of opportunity. That would be doing God's work for real. 

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