National Review Have you noticed that a lot of psychos have access to the media lately? Psychotic stuff is shared across media constantly now. We’re perpetually being told that in the future we’re going to eat bugs and own nothing, and we’ll like it. A “neuro-divergent” child named Greta has been turned into a celebrity-environmentalist scold and made to scowl at world leaders. Last week, Bloomberg media shared a story about inflation and advertised it this way: “The inflated price of Thanksgiving this year will make you thankful you don’t have a bigger family.” Ah, yes! These days everyone is looking at the price of canned cranberry sauce and thinking, “Gee, I’m so glad that at least some of my family members died young. And I’m grateful for all the miscarriages too!” Everyone who is a complete lunatic, I mean.
But the pro-max-elite Operating Thetan–level psychos have apparently all been tasked with writing about Kyle Rittenhouse crying, and what that means. As you may know, Kyle Rittenhouse shot at three people during the riots in Kenosha last year, killing two of them. He was 17 years old.
And he is currently on trial for murder. He took the stand and at various times he burst into tears or what seemed like a full-on panic attack. (He is being treated for PTSD.) Rittenhouse’s panic attack has been met with disproportionate retaliatory nuclear “think pieces” at CNN, Vox, the Guardian, and USA Today. The explainer journalists are here to explain what crying while male and white really means.
You, a normal person, could probably guess why someone in Kyle Rittenhouse’s position might cry and have a panic attack on the stand. He’s literally recounting the moments and events that have changed his life and will mark him forever. He is retelling how it was that he took the lives of two men and nearly a third. He is in the middle of a judicial process that could end with a conviction and life imprisonment.
Note that you don’t need to believe that Rittenhouse is innocent of the most serious charges against him — first-degree intentional deliberate homicide and first-degree reckless homicide — to think like a normal person and come up with multiple normal reasons that Kyle Rittenhouse might have cried on the stand last week. In fact, your brain needs only two qualities. First, it must not be terminally poisoned by ideology. Second, it must have been exposed to any cultural material with greater moral significance than comic books, where the villains all enjoy their wicked acts and revel in their misdeeds.
Alas, the American elite is running out of such brains.
It used to be that stereotyping was seen as the mental crutch of the ignorant and bigoted. But much of the commentariat has now adopted a quasi-Marxist view that every individual always represents the political group of which he is a member. You’re not a real woman if you’re not a feminist. You’re not really black if you don’t share Nikole Hannah-Jones’s politics. Now much political commentary is written as if every event must fit into archetypes. If Kyle Rittenhouse is a white man and crying, he must be exactly like Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who is a white man who once came close to crying in public.
Referring to Kavanaugh and Rittenhouse, Moira Donegan wrote at the Guardian: “The common thread in these rightwing expressions of masculine emotion is that when conservative men express their feelings, they don’t do so as a gesture of humility or need. Instead, they wield their feelings as a threat.”
A threat to whom? A threat to do what? Who is threatened by tears? Clearly it is not the columnists. They are provoked, not threatened.
“The fact that Rittenhouse shot and killed two people and lived to see trial is a testament to the racial violence and inequality that people in Kenosha were protesting the day this emboldened vigilante decided to come and play with real people’s lives,” wrote Carli Pierson at USA Today, in a meditation on Rittenhouse’s crying (my emphasis).
Did you catch the implication of her sentence? If not for America’s bottomless racism, we would live under a regime of true equality according to which Kyle Rittenhouse would have been killed by police or in a reprisal attack before he could be tried in a court of law. The author of this is a lawyer herself.
“There is evidence that Rittenhouse conspicuously aligned himself with the ‘blue lives matter’ crowd, so it’s worth considering his sobbing within the context of the toxic and limited view of manhood that remains so popular in America, particularly among the modern political right,” wrote Jamil Smith at Vox. What is the substance of this consideration? Nothing more than an assertion that crying somehow works to the advantage of people who possess Rittenhouse’s “gender and privilege.”
Smith goes on to write:
Rittenhouse’s victims were all white men, making them somewhat of an exception in American jurisprudence. Typically, such prejudgment is saved for people of color, and is handed out by law enforcement. If people of color even survive encounters with law enforcement and live to see the inside of a courtroom for the chance to be wrongfully convicted or disproportionately sentenced, it feels like a small miracle.
How were the people Rittenhouse killed “an exception in American jurisprudence”? It’s not clear. As for the rest? Well, if you can’t see the hysteria in it, maybe yours is the type of mind grateful for all the people not showing up at Thanksgiving dinner.
What we have in all of the above is a strained attempt to turn Kyle Rittenhouse into a symbol of pathologized “whiteness.” Why weren’t the people he shot also symbols of whiteness? Gaige Grosskreutz, who testified on the stand that Rittenhouse shot at him only after he had aimed his own pistol at Rittenhouse, was an ACLU observer of the protest, and his concealed-carry license was expired. If we’re going to play this game, that set of facts seems pretty “white” to me. Why isn’t he on trial? Is that not a form of white privilege? Our experts on Kyle Rittenhouse’s “privilege” do not comment.
In a strange way, our psychotic commentariat is providing for Kyle Rittenhouse the inverse image of the “black rage” defense that was once employed in the trial of Colin Ferguson, who killed six and wounded 19 others on a train in New York in 1993. Yes, he had committed the killings, but he was driven temporarily insane by a racist society and so he was criminally non-liable, his lawyers argued.
Kyle Rittenhouse doesn’t have real emotions, apparently, because he’s “aligned with the ‘blue lives matter’ crowd.” He doesn’t have a right to self-defense or even the right to experience the emotion of fear when an ACLU “observer” points a pistol in his face — because of Brett Kavanaugh, or something. Being fearful when someone with an expired concealed-carry license points a gun in your face is actually threatening, the psychos explained.
