Reactions to the Verdict

I think that Megan McArdle’s take in her Washington Post column on the verdict in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse is about right:

All 17-year-olds act like fools sometimes, and many of them have grandiose fantasies about themselves. But in Kyle Rittenhouse’s case, those fantasies seem to have involved carrying a gun. And quite unusually, Rittenhouse took his fantasy life, and his gun, into the middle of a riot, where he killed two men and maimed another.

Yet whether or not you think he presented a legitimate claim of self-defense in his now-concluded murder trial, Rittenhouse is not the caricature the left has made of him. When on Friday afternoon the jury returned a verdict of not guilty on all counts, it wasn’t yet another triumph of white supremacy, aided by a biased judge. It was the American justice system working as it should: giving the benefit of the doubt to a defendant who was dangerously unwise but didn’t clearly commit murder.

While Rittenhouse dove into the drama of running around with a gun, putting out fires and providing first aid during unrest following a police shooting in Kenosha, Wis., in August 2020, he didn’t act like a hunter, or even a belligerent kid trying to provoke a confrontation. When chased, he retreated, turning around only after something was thrown at him, and then again when one of his pursuers fired off his own gun.

Rittenhouse himself pulled the trigger only when Joseph Rosenbaum was almost upon him — after Rosenbaum, according to witness testimony, “said, ‘F— you’ and reached for [Rittenhouse’s] weapon.” After Rittenhouse killed Rosenbaum, the two shootings that followed were a complex tragedy in which three men tried to disarm what they believed to be an active shooter, while Kyle Rittenhouse sought to protect himself from a mob attacking him with feet, skateboard and handgun.

That’s not to say that Rittenhouse is guiltless — at best he made a fatally stupid decision to bring a gun into a volatile situation, and at worst he panicked in a situation he himself created. But too many on the left rushed to the harshest possible judgment from the moment they heard Rittenhouse’s name, and refused to make the return journey even as new evidence emerged.

How could people believe that a “guilty” verdict was a foregone conclusion? Matt Taibbi points his finger directly at the advocacy journalism in the media:

Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all six charges today, already causing a great exploding of heads in the pundit-o-sphere. Unrest wouldn’t be surprising. How could it be otherwise? Colleagues in national media spent over a year telling the country the 18-year-old was not just guilty, but a moral monster whose acquittal would be an in-your-face affirmation of systemic white supremacy.

[…]

We’ve seen Die Hard-level indifference to social consequence from the beginning of this case. The context of the Rittenhouse shootings involved a summer of protests that began after the police killing of George Floyd, and continued in Kenosha after the shooting of Jacob Blake. We saw demonstrations of all types last summer, ranging from solemn candlelight vigils and thousands of protesters laying peacefully on their backs across bridges, to the burning of storefronts and “hundreds” of car thieves stealing “nearly 80” cars from a dealership in San Leandro, California. When the population is on edge, and people are amped and ready to lash out, that puts an even greater onus on media figures to get things right.

In a tinderbox situation like this one, it was reckless beyond belief for analysts to tell audiences Rittenhouse was a murderer when many if not most of them had a good idea he would be acquitted. But that’s exactly what most outlets did.

After the verdict that same advocacy journalism has been doing its level best to stir up enthusiasm for civil cases against Kyle Rittenhouse now that the criminal charges are a lost cause. From what I’ve seen so far Kyle Rittenhouse has better cases for libel and defamation than either the families of his attackers do and there does not appear to be any reason to get the federal government involved.