Kyle Rittenhouse did it, there’s no question about that. The Illinois native traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year, when he was 17, during protests over police brutality, to act as a medic but instead behaved as a killer, fatally shooting two men and wounding a third. Yet on Friday, a jury decided in his favor, having concluded that prosecutors had not adequately met the burden of proving he committed murder. Instead, jurors believed Rittenhouse, who claimed, weeping from the witness stand, that he had feared for his life and acted in self-defense when he decided to kill. Rittenhouse will go home.
Liberals will want someone to blame. Candidates include the prosecutors, who undercut themselves repeatedly, such as when one of their witnesses admitted he pointed a gun at Rittenhouse before he was shot. Then on Monday, Judge Bruce Schroeder dismissed a gun charge against Rittenhouse — widely thought to have the likeliest chance of conviction — because prosecutors had failed to note a potential loophole in the law: While it’s illegal in Wisconsin for people under 18 to possess firearms, there’s an exception for long guns, such as the AR-15 he toted, used for hunting. Then there’s Schroeder himself, whose refusal to allow prosecutors to refer to the dead men as “victims” and bizarre behavior during the trial invited accusations of bias. Finally there are the jurors, who cleared Rittenhouse of all charges.
There was never any catharsis to be had here. Whatever happened to Rittenhouse, his victims would still be dead and he would still be a hero to the right. Jails do not rehabilitate; they devour and ruin. Yet without even the merest slap from the jurors, there is no acknowledgement of wrongdoing, no sense that justice has been done. It is obvious — it has been obvious — that the forces that produced Rittenhouse and his forgiving jury and his lenient judge are all the same. They are endemic to American society. There will be other Kyle Rittenhouses.
The mechanisms are already in motion. By the time a jury cleared Rittenhouse, he had already become a laudatory figure, perhaps even a role model, to the right. Donald Trump defended him. Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance told Tucker Carlson that the trial was “child abuse,” and added, “It’s an indictment of our disgusting president who called him a white supremacist even though he only shot other white people.” (The media, Vance said, “slandered and bullied a 17-year-old boy.”) A Christian fundraising site, GiveSendGo, raised money for his legal case; Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted a link to another fundraiser for him. Ed Martin, the president of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, called Rittenhouse a “hero.” Rittenhouse cried on the stand, but earlier appeared almost triumphant: In January, when he was out on bail awaiting trial, he posed with Proud Boy supporters in a bar wearing a shirt that read “Free as Fuck.”
Rittenhouse is not the only vigilante the right embraces. As protesters filled American streets, demanding justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain and so many others, they faced physical threats from the police and from the public, too. People began striking them with cars. “From May 27 to July 7, I cataloged 72 incidents of cars driving into protesters across 52 different cities, including both civilian and law enforcement vehicles,” wrote Ari Weil, the deputy research director at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, in July of last year. Conservatives often sided with the drivers. “Anti-riot” legislation signed into law by Florida governor Ron DeSantis would have granted civil immunity to drivers who strike protesters, but a judge later blocked the bill from taking effect. Lawmakers in Iowa and Oklahoma drafted similar bills after last summer’s protests, expanding the definition of “rioter” to include nearly all protesters. The Oklahoma version protected drivers who said they were “under a reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary to protect the motor vehicle operator from serious injury or death.” A judge has also halted part of the Oklahoma law, too.
The logic behind these laws resembles that which motivates Rittenhouse’s supporters, and his lawyers gave voice to it again on Monday during closing arguments. “They were rioters. They weren’t demonstrators,” claimed defense attorney Mike Richards. “There were people doing legitimate demonstration. These people were rioting.” Later he added, “When he came down here, are we to believe that he’s working to clean up graffiti, not getting paid because he’s here to look for trouble?” Richards then answered his own question. “That’s ridiculous. He came down here, trying to help to see the damage. That’s what he did.”
And that is what the jury believed. We should be honest about the implications. To some on the right, it’s evident the left is dangerous and must be put down, “like a dog,” as Trump might say. Violence is so easily justified, and the consequences are so inconsistent. By absolving Rittenhouse of wrongdoing, the jury exposed the great lie of the courts. The system pretends fairness while it delivers different tiers of justice, one for boys who look like Rittenhouse and another for boys who don’t. Self-defense, as the courts define it, is a luxury. See the case of Marissa Alexander, who spent years in prison and home confinement because she fired a warning shot at her violent husband. Jurors left this unfair system intact, preserving the very social structure that pushed demonstrators into the streets. Today’s verdict will not, by itself, produce another Kyle Rittenhouse. Vigilantes would have followed him into the street no matter what the jury decided, because that is where we are. This is the United States: Property matters more than human life, and protesters are considered combatants in a street war, and one side gets impunity. The future looks like a white boy with a gun.
