by Clarice Feldman
The Rittenhouse trial exposes, once again, the mendacity, malevolence, and stupidity of the media and the Left as a whole.
In medieval days, before there were secular dramas, there were roving
bands of semi-professional actors performing morality plays. The plays
were often short and sometimes even farcical. Plots were designed to
encourage moral choices or illustrate Biblical stories. The audience was
a mostly illiterate populace who paid for the entertainment with small
change.
Today, we have criminal trials as
national entertainment. They usually take days and too often devolve
into farce, as did the Kenosha trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, fumbled by the
prosecutors (looking so much like Laurel and Hardy) trying the
17-year-old hero for shooting two felons to death and wounding a third
man during a days’ long riot, arson and looting. The rioting predictably
followed the mayor’s ordering a standdown of police and rescue teams
and the governor’s failure to order in the state National Guard. It’s
impossible to choose the worst of the bumbling questions Kyle was asked,
but perhaps my favorite was this, respecting the shooting in the arm of
a Craig Grosskreutz who held a gun to his head: “All he had was a
handgun. why did you think that was a threat?” I take it the prosecutor
John Binder never had a gun held to his head. Had I, I certainly would
have considered it life-threatening.
I think Rittenhouse has a made out a strong self-defense case. The governor may think so, too, because he has deployed the National Guard on to Kenosha in anticipation of a verdict.
Do
you suppose Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers believes that those who think
Rittenhouse should be acquitted will riot if he is not? Obviously not.
Given the history of the riots, it’s a small group of
BLM/Antifa/Communist thugs who in the absence of order ripped the city
apart to protest the district attorney’s refusal to charge with murder a
cop who shot a knife-welding Jacob Blake. (This followed on the
nationwide riots which followed the death in custody of George Floyd in
Minneapolis).
The old-time morality plays rather spoke
for themselves. Now, we have a Greek chorus media, which beforehand,
during, and even after the trial distorted facts in a way so obvious to
those who pay attention enough to watch the video-streamed trials that
it’s fair to conclude that they relish lawlessness and chaos and even
race wars.
Jurors have been spied upon and, in this case as well, Judge Bruce
Schroeder is receiving threats to his safety and that of his children if
the defendant is acquitted. He’s being accused of racism, which I
suppose means having a different, fairer view of the issues because the
defendant and all three of the men he shot at are White. (Perhaps these
people believed some media accounts which led them to think that the men
he shot at were Black. Who knows what lurks in these mostly empty
heads?)
Online I’m seeing tweets from people who, having believed
the media fairy tale that the “victims” (with substantial criminal
records) were randomly attacked by an armed 17-year-old (actually a
lifeguard with family and friends in Kenosha who scrubbed graffiti off
walls, put out fires, and rendered aid to the wounded when the elected
officials shirked their sworn duty to uphold the law), are angry that
they had been so misled. Why has it taken so long for the lights to go
on in these attics? They are routinely misled.
Did they believe the Washington Post articles on Russian Collusion with Donald Trump? This week the Post
has admitted errors and amended them, very tardily acknowledging their
sloppy work for which the authors, Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger
received Pulitzer Prizes. (MSNBC, CNN, and the Atlantic have not done
so, and their lies still stand unedited. Pulitzer Prizes seem to be
handed out to those who best pen leftist narratives, from Walter Duranty
the New York Times’ man in Russia on.) Did they believe the
media reports that January 6 was an “insurrection”? Did they not bother
to note that, contrary to the media, not a single defendant was charged
with that and the FBI concluded
there was no evidence of that. Did they believe the Duke Lacrosse team
engaged in gang rape? The team recovered damages for that slander and
the prosecutor Mike Nifong was disbarred and jailed. Did they believe
the Covington kids harassed an “innocent Indian advocate?” The kids
recovered monetary settlements for that slander.
But the incessant
media lies are what sticks in too many heads, not the eventual outcome
-- the unmasking of the factual distortion. It’s no wonder that public
faith in the news industry is at an all-time low. It’s a self-inflicted
wound.
Glenn Greenwald is absolutely right when he tweets:
There's an avalanche of punditry, think pieces and cable segments
about the Rittenhouse case and only a tiny portion of it relates to the
evidence in court about what happened.
It's all just processed through their dreary, pre-scripted narratives about race and ideology.
He’s also right when he says, “Democrats Are Profoundly Committed to Criminal Justice Reform -- For Everyone But Their Enemies.”
And
for Democrats, you can add what Glenn Reynolds calls "Democratic
operatives with bylines." The press narratives are designed to divide us
by demonizing Republicans and Whites (and particularly White males).
In a longer but no less worthwhile analysis John Hinderacker excoriates the deceptive, manipulative coverage in the press of the Rittenhouse trial.
The first is just the yawning chasm between the press narrative about
what happened that night in Wisconsin -- what the conventional,
proper-thinking wisdom was -- and what actually seems to have happened.
The smart set insisted that Kyle Rittenhouse was a MAGA-loving vigilante
who went to Kenosha to kill BLM supporters. Remember that the President
of the United States seemed to imply Rittenhouse was a “white
supremacist” in a campaign video.
The
divide between the coverage and the reality -- Rittenhouse appears to
have a solid self-defense case -- is stark. [snip]The second thing I
keep thinking about is that the events of that night show the
abolish-police vision in action. When the defund advocates talk about
what replaces policing, they talk about community-led safety. They talk
about neighbors and friends stopping crimes, relying on themselves. But
what does abolishing the police look like in practice? What happens when
the police really do stand down and let fires burn as they did last summer?
It looks a lot like Kyle Rittenhouse. It looks like a teenager seeing
chaos and getting pretty convinced that stopping it falls on his
shoulders. It looks like heavily armed, untrained local dads defending
shops and homes because no one else will. AOC told us the police-free
life looked like “a suburb.” The
implication is that street violence is somehow imposed by cops. Take
away the police and, like magic, no more problems. Kenosha suggests that
is very much not the case.
And despite the readily available videos of the trial, much of the press keeps lying.
One of the deceased, Joseph Rosenbaum, was a clearly violent person
who had threatened to kill Rittenhouse, chased him down and went to grab
Rittenhouse’s rifle when shot. The other dead man, Anthony Huber, was
beating Rittenhouse with a skateboard in a swinging manner when shot.
Gaige Grosskreutz, who was wounded, admitted under cross-examination
that he ran after Rittenhouse and closed the gap (but denied he was
“chasing” him) -- and that Rittenhouse only fired on him when
Grosskreutz lowered his loaded Glock pistol to point directly at
Rittenhouse from three feet away.
Most of this evidence came out of the prosecution case. When the
defense called him to testify, Rittenhouse stuck to the same story
witnesses told.
With trial evidence inconsistent with the news’ narrative, there could have been a major media mea culpa.
Instead, headlines and framing continue that pre-trial narrative, even
if inconvenient facts appear deep down in the articles. As the editors
who run these stories and draft the headlines know, many if not most
people don’t get far beyond the headlines and opening paragraphs.
Thus, NBC News breathlessly headlines a news report about
the prosecution’s forensic pathologist testifying that Rosenbaum was in
a “horizontal” position, “suggesting the victim wasn’t a threat when he
was gunned down.” It’s not until the bottom of the article that NBC
acknowledges that same expert testified the wound positioning was
consistent with Rosenbaum diving towards Rittenhouse. Left out of the
story was his testimony that gunpowder residue was consistent with Rosenbaum grabbing the muzzle of the gun when he was shot, just as Rittenhouse and witnesses said.
The headline highlight of Grosskreutz’s testimony according to a Daily Beast report was that he “tried to surrender” to Rittenhouse. Similar misleading narratives frame the case at the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and elsewhere.
Reading only these publications, it would be reasonable to believe the
original story of Rittenhouse as a shooter run amok, despite the trial
testimony to the contrary.
I still regard Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America,
as the brightest, shrewdest observer of the American scene, even as it
has changed over the years, and he has much to say about our legal
system. It’s his view that criminal cases like this one “are entirely
founded upon the evidence of facts which common sense can readily
appreciate.” I hope the jurors exercise that “common sense,” weigh the
evidence, ignore the press and the threats, and acquit a young man whom I
consider an exemplary citizen in a city and state where the elected
officials failed their constituents.
Clarice Feldman
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/all_he_had_was_a_handgun.html
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