This isn't Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of the helpless George Floyd or James Alex Fields running down Heather Heyer for waving an anti-racist sign. Rittenhouse's victims are easy for fascists to paint as "antifa," i.e. What the fascist movement needed was a situation where there's some wiggle room to say the violence was defensible, and in Rittenhouse, it appears they have a live one.
RITTENHOUSE NOT GUILTY MEMES FREE
RELATED: Don't be shocked if Kyle Rittenhouse goes free - that's the system working as designed Even efforts to recast the January 6 insurrectionists as martyrs and "political prisoners" have largely fallen flat, due in no small part to the participants getting convicted on a conveyor belt. As I note in Friday's Standing Room Only newsletter, authoritarian propaganda always relies on a narrative that casts the right as acting in "self-defense" or out of "chivalrous" intent, whether it's Nazis portraying the Holocaust as a corrective to a supposed Jewish conspiracy or the KKK defending lynching as necessary to protect white womanhood. The problem for fascists is that their recruitment and publicity strategy depends on being able to successfully portray themselves not as the aggressors, but as reactors. Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only. The "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia the summer of 2017 dramatically backfired after a white nationalist rioter killed a peaceful counterprotester and injured many others by running them over with his car. Nothing has really taken.Įarly in the Donald Trump years, groups like the Proud Boys tried to turn a few of their members into heroes for beating up leftists, but they were too fringe and ineffectual to really make much of an impression outside of the ranks of the already recruited. RELATED: The NRA gave us Kyle Rittenhouseįor years now, the so-called "alt-right" - or what one would traditionally call the fascist right - has been casting around desperately for some hero to rally around, a figurehead to tempt more people to transition from just being generic right-wing trolls to people who are ready for open violence. Unfortunately, by successfully pleading self-defense in the killings of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, Rittenhouse has opened the door to an entirely new form of anti-social behavior for other crappy young men to emulate: political violence.
has an ongoing school shooter problem, as self-pitying and entitled young men compete with each other to rack up body counts. Unfortunately, as Rittenhouse's killing of two men and the maiming of another in the summer of 2020 proves, losers can still do a whole lot of damage, especially in a country with so much easy access to deadly weapons. His AR-15, meanwhile, made him look all the more pathetic, just by virtue of how badly he hoped it makes him look tough. No matter how many wannabe edgelord memes were made to celebrate Rittenhouse, there was no changing that he's just a doughy loser with a creepy and overbearing mom.
The only good thing that can be said about Friday's "not guilty" verdict in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha shooter, is that the Trumpists are getting the icon they deserve.įorget that ever-present right-wing fantasy of a muscular Aryan übermensch in a MAGA hat punching skinny black-clad leftist protesters, Rittenhouse is a more accurate avatar for the dweebs and dirtbags that make up the Trumpian right.
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