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Kyle
Rittenhouse
is a white domestic terrorist who should spend a lifetime in prison.
However, white nationalists, Donald
Trump
and the Republican Party view him as a hero who should be celebrated,
loved and honored, lavished with corporate sponsorships and sent to
Congress.
And
like so many white terrorists before him, Rittenhouse is being held
to a different standard. As innocent Black lives are criminalized,
Kyle Rittenhouse is propped up by a society of enablers who want to
see more young, toxic white men murdering the defenders of racial
justice.
Rittenhouse,
17, of Antioch, Illinois was released on a $2 million bond thanks to
the generous financial support of those who admire his deeds - using
federal stimulus money to purchase an AR-15 assault rifle,
and commit mass murder at a Black
Lives Matter
protest last August.
He
shot three and killed two following the police shooting of Jacob
Blake
in Kenosha,
Wisconsin.
Blake, who was shot by cops in the back eight times in front of his
children, remains paralyzed.
That
White America will raise $2 million for a terrorist to post bail - in
the middle of a plague - points to a long history of complicity.
Rittenhouse continues a long tradition - since the slave patrols on
the plantation - of self-deputized white men who believe their job is
to police and terrorize Black people, and kill them with impunity.
A
Blue
Lives Matter
supporter, Rittenhouse was one of those armed white extremists
hanging around Black Lives Matter protests and looking to cause
trouble - all with the support of the police with whom they share a
common hatred of blackness and membership
lists.
Echoing
the preferential police treatment of Dylann
Roof
-
the white supremacist who was reportedly treated to Burger King after
he murdered nine Black parishioners inside Charleston’s Emanuel
AME Church
in 2015. Similarly, Rittenhouse was treated to bottled
water and a thank you from the police
before he used his weapon to murder protesters. And after the
bloodbath, which he claims was an act of “self-defense,”
he walked by the cops and escaped across state lines.
Because
white privilege, that’s why.
A
normal country would react to its own Kyle Rittenhouses with
condemnation. But in the land of the free - where a domestic
terrorist is a freedom fighter when he fights for white supremacy and
a country that continues to oppress and murder Black people - such
young thugs are afforded a hero’s welcome.
Meanwhile,
as the white-collar Klan weaponizes their words and laws to terrorize
Black lives while keeping their hands clean, they empower foot
soldiers such as Kyle Rittenhouse, Dylann Roof and the Michigan
anti-mask militias
to do the dirty work for the advancement of white power.
Early
on, the Republican Party chose to embrace this white boy and
everything he represents, painting him as someone who came to Kenosha
armed to defend
small business owners,
and a minuteman
patriot
exercising his right to bear arms in a war zone.
Viewing
Rittenhouse as a solider in the rightwing extremist culture
wars,
his lawyers also represent the stepmother of the cop who killed
Rayshard
Brooks
outside an Atlanta Wendy’s, and Patricia
and Mark McCloskey.
The McCloskeys are the white St. Louis couple who pointed weapons at
Black Lives Matter protesters outside their mansion and later spoke
at the Republican National Convention, along with a Hitler
youth from North Carolina
who became the youngest member elected to Congress.
A
white nationalist leader who condemns and criminalizes racial justice
protesters and praises violent white men such as the Proud Boys,
Boogaloo Boys and neo-Nazis, Trump defended the terrorist acts of
Kyle Rittenhouse, saying: “You saw the same tape as I saw, and
he was trying to get away from them.” Republican U.S. Rep.
Anthony
Sabatini
tweeted:
“KYLE RITTENHOUSE FOR CONGRESS.”
Rittenhouse
has enjoyed support from washed-up, D-list sitcom stars like Ricky
Schroder and
Scott
Baio,
an apparent
coffee brand sponsorship,
and financial support from Mike
Lindell,
the MyPillow guy who helped raise the $2 million to bail the young
American hero out of jail.
This,
as Black
mamas of children murdered by police
can’t raise enough money for their baby’s funeral, and
Sandra
Bland
and Kalief
Browder
wind up in jail for doing nothing wrong and end up in the grave
because they couldn’t pay their bail. Breonna
Taylor cannot
get justice, and the police murdered her in her home for sleeping
while Black. Now one of her killers is suing
her boyfriend
for “severe trauma, mental anguish, and emotional distress”
for shooting him in the thigh during the home invasion.
The
hypocrisy is palpable. Kyle Rittenhouse enjoys support because
America is filled with monuments to white men just like him -
colonizers, genocidal maniacs, slave masters, Confederate generals,
Klansmen
and other terrorists - which tells us not only that white domestic
terrorists have been normalized and immortalized, but that they
always were.
Meanwhile,
the purveyors of violence always told Black folks to be peaceful, as
the terrorists and police who conspired in our deaths were never
charged, or were rewarded with not-guilty verdicts from an all-white
jury. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
was not their hero. He was nonviolent and they vilified him, called
him as a communist and murdered him.
FBI
chief
J.
Edgar Hoover
said “the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the
greatest threat to internal security of the country,” not
because of their armed self-defense, but because of their free
children’s breakfast program.
Colin
Kaepernick
took a knee for justice against police brutality, and the white
public called him un-American and ungrateful. And Black Lives Matter
is branded as terrorists for believing we are all human beings, and
for fighting in the streets and trying to make America a habitable
place for Black life.
Spend
enough time in America, and you realize they never took issue with
our tactics, but they always opposed our Blackness.
Malcolm
X
said
it best, so I’ll end it right here: “If you’re not
careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being
oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
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