The Rittenhouse Case

 I have not followed the Rittenhouse case until it became impossible not to follow it at least a little if I watched the news. I know only what I have seen in the news, and a lot of it is strange. He is not a child and was not one when he did the shooting, but he was a minor living with his mother. One has to wonder if she or his father went along with him going on his own to a violent riot in another state, or if either tried to stop him. One really has to wonder how someone thought giving a firearm to someone his age to carry unsupervised in a riot was a good idea. I know there are seventeen and eighteen year-olds in the armed forces, but  they  have gone through at least basic training and are under the direction of responsible older officers and noncoms.

If the news it accurate, it seems he was acting in self-defense in the shootings, and that it would be very difficult to show he was not beyond any reasonable doubt.  The betting is that he will be acquitted, and that seems likely to me. (Officials in the region seem to think so too. They are preparing for rioting by leftists.)

Some conservatives in the media are touting Rittenhouse as a “Second Amendment hero”.  That makes little sense to me. The case has nothing to do with the right to keep and bear arms. It is about whether in one incident a firearm was used legally or criminally.  Nor do I find his actions as reported heroic. They are at best only justified. A calmer and more experienced man might have handled the situations without killing anyone.  The riot in Kenosha was a mess, but he was not someone who should have tried to do something about it, irrespective of how his intervention turned out. He was neither immediately affected nor mature enough.  He had no business being where he was.

Changes after the Riots?

 

One can read a lot of guesses about what things which were common last year will be gone or far less frequent when things return to normal  after the epidemic, because of the epidemic. It is an interesting topic, and so is a similar one about what might change because of the Black Lives Matter craze, the Black Lives Matter and antifa riots, and the responses by governments and organizations to them.

I have made a few minor changes on that account. My wife and I had shopped at Eddie Bauer for years. After the CEO of Eddie Bauer sent an email to customers asserting that we non-BIPOCs were a bunch of racists, and that he was going to have the company discriminate against us in hiring, we decided we did not care to give money to someone who was spitting on us. We haven’t bought anything since and won’t until he and his policies are gone.

I have not followed the NBA since the days of the first dream team, but I occasionally would look in on a game or two in the finals, particularly if San Antonio was playing.  Now I am done. I do not care  to be lectured by Chairman Xi’s special friends about how evil a person I am and how horrible this country is. I feel about the same way about the NFL. Listening to a bunch of rich spoiled brats who have been pampered since high school whining about how oppressed they are, slandering their country, and siding with an anti-American communist agitprop gang against the fans who made their wealth possible is a little hard to take. Besides there are lots of nice things one can do on a pleasant Sunday afternoon in the fall.

Those things are minor and insignificant except perhaps to Eddie Bauer, the NBA, and the NFL if enough other people make the same decisions I have. There are others that are more important.   According to statistics gathered  from dealers, among the several million Americans purchasing guns this year, there were  around five million new gun owners, people who had not owned a firearm before. While  some may have decided it was time to try their hands at hunting or target shooting, it seems likely that most of them were arming themselves for self defense. That would be a good thing both for them as individuals and for the country politically. People should  accept the responsibility and be prepared to defend themselves, and the more armed citizens there are, the harder it will be for the leftists to disarm the population.  The decision to take responsibility for one’s safety and  no longer completely trust or rely on governments to provide protection is one that can influence changes in attitude on other things.

There have been stories in the news about people moving away from big cities to suburbs or rural areas in response to the riots. I have not seen statistics on how much this is happening or from where, but there is evidence some people are leaving. There does seem to be some change in people’s mood. For years in media, entertainment, and even advertising big city life has been depicted as hip, exciting, and even glamorous while suburbs and rural areas often have been ignored or disparaged as dull and boring Cleaver-ville or backward domiciles of hicks and rednecks. We may never see people in the media and advertising singing Green Acres is the place to be, but general attitudes toward urban living may change some as people consider costs, benefits, and incentives.  If so, it likely will be mainly the more productive, self supporting people who leave the cities, making the political and other situations worse for those who stay behind.  If leftist city governments respond to losing taxpayers by  raising taxes on the ones remaining, incentives for leaving would only increase. 

Sending in the Feds?

In recent weeks in Portland and other cities there have been violent riots with assaults, vandalism, arson, and a few murders.   State and local officials have shirked their responsibility to stop the rioting and restore order.  A few have sided with the rioters. (People in the traditional media have ignored or played down the story, often with quite irrelevant claims that most demonstrators in most places have behaved peacefully. Most airliners flown on September 11, 2001 landed harmlessly, but that did not change  the newsworthiness of the story of the four which did not.)   The behavior of even those officials who did not has often been disgraceful.  People in those cities have a right to expect that their municipal and state governments will protect their lives and property, and that has not and is not happening. Several mayors and governors should be voted out of office at a minimum and, if possible, sued or prosecuted for gross and often willful negligence. 

There is a natural question of what should the federal government do in the streets of those cities.  While sympathizing with the decent people living there, I  think  the correct answer is not much yet. Things have not reached the point of an insurrection  against the United States.  The pathetic secessionist theatre in Seattle was a long way short of a Fort Sumter, and the riots are a long way from actual rebellion.  It is not time for martial law.

I think  it is fine for the federal government to send in forces sufficient to defend federal property in places where the local authorities refuse to do the job. I think it is appropriate for federal officials  to prosecute  rioters who violate federal civil rights and anti-terrorism laws. I think it is necessary for the feds to identify  and deal with the people and organizations funding and coordinating the rioting. However I do not think federal officers should be patrolling and pacifying the streets (unless their help is requested by state officials). In this country that is the job of state and local governments, and until things get far worse, it should be left  to them, feckless and remiss though they may be. 

The federal government has far too many cops, bureaucrats, snoops, and assorted enforcers as it is. We do not need a precedent for the feds taking over local police work. 

Spontaneous and About Bad Cops?

The consensus of people in the traditional media has  been that the  recent demonstrations and riots were  spontaneous outbursts triggered by the killing of George Floyd and a desire to make police behave better, and that the many attempts to damage, desecrate, or destroy statues and monuments  were the same.   Of course as others have pointed out, it is hard to see what statues of Columbus, Thomas Jefferson,  Abraham Lincoln, or Robert Gould Shaw have to do with brutal or bigoted cops, but that was the story being told.   It is also hard to see what looting or burning down stores, assaulting and sometimes murdering people, or creating a secessionist mini-Confederacy in Seattle did to aid the cause of requiring police to behave, but that also was the story being told.

It is hard to take the  sanitizing stories about the motives of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and their hangers on seriously.  Many individual demonstrators may have been sincerely focused on making the police behave better and more fairly. Many individual rioters may have been ordinary hoodlums  taking advantage of  the chaos  to steal something, smash something, or burn something down. However it is fairly clear that the organized hard leftists were interested less in George Floyd or reining in bad cops than in anti-American, pro-Marxist agitprop – with Floyd (who certainly deserved better) as their convenient, cynically selected Horst Wessel of the moment.  The stuff with the monuments illustrates this very well.  Or one can take the  trouble to go BLM’s web site. They make their objectives pretty clear.

There are reasons for  doubting  the other part of the conventional view – the  notion the events were spontaneous.  One does not have to be a conspiracy enthusiast to have noticed that there were a lot of very similar things, with very similar patterns of behavior happening very quickly in many different places when the trouble began. There was more than a whiff of planning  and organization in what happened. Some conservatives have suggested the whole thing was a putsch organized and paid for by George Soros. Of course these days you can find people blaming just about anything they don’t like on  Soros,  Koch, or sometimes both, often without evidence.  Still BLM and Antifa are not living off tithes from their members’ day jobs. Somebody is paying, and the somebody or somebodies are not friends of the United States or of a free and liberal society.  I have seen no evidence that foreign governments are involved, but if the Chinese foreign intelligence service is not helping BLM and  Antifa, Chairman Xi should fire its director. It is an interesting question and one that probably will be left untouched by people in the traditional media but perhaps looked into by someone else.

Local Trouble

A policeman in our town has gotten in trouble for something he posted on Facebook about the riots and demonstrations going on around the country.  He is of course guilty of  first degree foolishness.  No one whose career depends on the whims of politicians, bureaucrats, or corporate weasels should post anything on Facebook   that can be interpreted as being about a black person or some black people  (or Muslims  and usually homosexuals and sometimes Hispanics) other than “They are  the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human beings  I’ve ever known in my life”, or the equivalent.

However, if the version of his post printed on the local newspaper’s website is accurate,  that seems to be all he is guilty of. He wrote that demonstrations across the country begin peacefully and lawfully and then are over run by trash “trying to start crap.”  The wording may be crude, but  rioters, looters, and arsonists have moved in with the demonstrations in many cities, and “trash” is a mild enough term for such vandals.  He then wrote that something similar happened at a local demonstration – saying that after a while “east side rabble” showed up, displaced some of the peaceful demonstrators,  and began chanting  “fuck the police”.   Well, a mob of people shouting such things can properly be called a  rabble, and if they came from the east side of town,  one could see how he could call them  what he did without intending any disparagement based on race. In fact he never mentioned any race or ethnic group in the post.

He’ll probably be fired anyway. Then he can  sue and get to share a big payoff with his lawyer. The citizens will foot the bill, but our sensitive, inclusive civil masters will have been able to signal all sorts of virtue, which should make us all feel better.