reasonandempathy:

Like, I’ve gone over this incident and the videos a number of times. And the videos do make the case for “he was acting in self-defense.” They do.



But I’ve never seen a single person who is arguing that be consistent with their own previous statements, their own stated beliefs, or wrestle with the fact that the kid and his mother broke numerous laws in their efforts to, at least theoretically, “support law and order”.

The Vigilante is a hero of “Law and Order”.

Fuckwits like Tucker Carlson warned not even two months ago that “kids with guns will run our streets” as a fear-mongering piece about the left-wing unrest. But now that there are actual bodies in the ground and a right-wing kid did it, he’s steel-manning. He’s praising the kid as a hero, that we shouldn’t be surprised that “17 year olds with rifles decided that they had to maintain order?”

“Are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder?” just ignoring who did the killing. Ignoring who came to the scene armed, ready to kill (”we don’t have nonlethal”), as part of a movement and group directly linked to and supporting police officers who salivate at the chance of abusing and harming citizens and protesters. That the group previously and publicly acknowledged that they’d been told multiple times by police to not show up, but they did so anyway.



The vigilante is a hero of “Law and Order”.

That he literally wasn’t legally allowed to be there. That he violated state and federal laws to show up. That he and the group he was with brandished their guns and showed up explicitly to agitate and fight the “thugs” in the streets. That you’re not actually allowed to kill people because you brought a gun and they didn’t.

That after the first man was killed, the second group of people did explicitly things that we would call them heroes for doing in any other context. They saw a man with a gun kill someone and they rushed him. They tried to take him down. That’s explicitly what every wannabe tough guy says if they’re in that situation. That’s what teachers should do with a mass shooter, right? How many dead teachers do we mourn because they did the Brave and Noble thing (which they did) and gave up their lives to stop someone who killed people?

How many cops are we supposed to mourn for dying in the line of duty?

And somehow we’re supposed to side with the gunman who, by all accounts, escalated the situation to lethality. Who broke numerous laws not in the past (I’ve seen people bringing up god-damned traffic tickets), but literally there. That night. With his parents’ blessing. Who already shot and killed one man when Huber and others tried to swarm him and get the gun away from him because he already killed a guy.

It’s just so fucking obviously twisted around. Literally last week the right-wing and people on here were blasting Jacob Blake and defending the cop who shot him because if you torture everything in impossible ways you can try to squeeze out some bare-bones and cowardly line of the cops being afraid, despite literally seeing his kids in the car. Despite actually having a hold of Blake when you shot him 7 times in the back. Despite and ignoring literally everything, the cop was afraid and the entire incident with Blake started with him being a good Samaritan, escalated with cops literally not knowing how or not bothering to properly apprehend someone, and ended with a paralyzed father, shot in front of his kids, handcuffed to his hospital bed. As if police all over the world can’t apprehend someone without paralyzing them.





To get back on topic.

Anthony Huber saw a man with a long gun who killed someone and decided to try and stop him with a god-damned skateboard. That a man with a pistol also tried to stop him, but didn’t actually use it. He actually was the one who tried to de-escalate the situation, while the Kenosha LARP Guard went there explicitly to escalate the situation and kill people. “We don’t have nonlethal.”

And we have video of them escalating a situation from nonlethal to lethal.

Literally every step along the way for weeks Rittenhouse, his family, and the people he was associated with showed their hand. That they were there for violence and to kill people. Against what the cops had previously told them to do. Because they wanted to.

The Vigilante is a hero of “Law and Order”. And so many people don’t realize how fucking blatantly biased and flatly stupid that is.