Kyle Rittenhouse scares me in part because I don’t understand him. He isn’t like the racist or incel mass shooters of recent memory. The media has painted those mass shooters as evil enigmas—motivated only by hate. That unknowability is bunk. If you read their manifestos you find out what they think they want. And if you listen to their voices—the awkward, theatrical “evil” laughs—the psychotic proclamations interspersed with silences, desperate to avoid self-reflection—you get a feeling for what they probably need. I completely sympathize with the hyper-alienation and despair of angry white dudes. I just categorically reject fascism, solipsism, or homicide as ways to get over. I used to hole up in a depressive fugue at the news of another mass shooting. I’d comb through their biographies, marveling at our similar life paths, and wondering what it all means. On the simplest level though, you can burrow down further into yourself. Or you can ask for help.
Rittenhouse is the enigma. I can’t go into one of my famous depressive fugues with him. There’s no “there” there. The media might uncover racist chat logs of his—but I doubt it. The kid is mainstream as fuck. He’s just overflowing with well-meaning, homicidal goodwill. His life path seems very simple. Ordinary Midwestern kid raised in the default gun culture. Maybe not the most popular kid. That gun culture, though, offered an alternative path to herodom. Really the only question is—where were his parents? Rittenhouse ended up in Kenosha through a weird mixture of conscious nurturing and unconscious neglect. At the trial, I hope the prosecutor calls to the stand every authority figure Kyle ever had. The parents, obviously—grandfatherly firearm instructors—boy scout leaders, I don’t know. There’s blood on Kyle’s hands, but there also needs to be a community reckoning. Kyle wasn’t acting from the margins—and we need to find out why it seemed upstanding for him to drive across town, gun in hand, to police a demonstration.
Midwesterners, especially middle-class ones, largely distrust Black Lives Matters. And they downright hate rioters. For many, owning a boat or a gun is their biggest claim to having a personality. So property damage, even half a state away, is a personal affront. The Kenosha protests were largely peaceful. Kyle, though, came looking for the fiery. And he found it. The three deaths at his hand occurred in two stages. After traipsing across town, he found himself a bona fide riot. People were burning down a car dealership. Kyle showed up looking to protect, and he shot his first victim.
Now, the car dealership scene was undoubtedly a riot. Pictures from the next day show every car in the parking completely scorched. But I don’t think that gives license for private citizens to start shooting. I bring this up because it’s going to get dragged in as part of his defense in court. I’ve never been in a riot. But I try to understand the mindset of the largely poor folks who would torch their own community. (This isn’t to defend Black Bloc theorybros with the time and means to follow the trouble. My goals align closer with theirs. But I don’t think accelerating a commie/fascist civil war is best way to create a better world, or that it would end particularly in our favor.) For locals, that car dealership might have certain associations. A parking lot full of unused vehicles while citizens can barely afford public transportation. Years of working overtime just to pay off predatory loans. Even the car salesmen—putting sad years into desperately try to meet quotas. I don’t know—I’m projecting here. (For what it’s worth, the owner of the dealership, however sincerely, said that—if it served the cause of justice—he would want his business burned down 10 times. He was promptly mocked by online white nationalists as a cuck.) The riot takes these anxieties and exerts its right to burn it all down. I don’t know how good of a strategy that is. But I don’t think it warrants private citizens gunning people down over property they have no stake in. Perhaps Kyle had some real-life fealty to car dealerships. If so, he probably envisaged something like a dad buying his teen daughter her first Mazda. More likely, though, his head was just oozing ideology. He completely embodied a certain brand of alt-American values. Your right to life stops where someone else’s property begins. As the fascists are saying, “Fuck around and found out.”
The second, fatal event in Kyle’s evening happened moments later. Fellow protestors acted as first responders for the first victim for a few moments. People’s senses returned, though, and they were pissed. Some dudes chased after Kyle. Others followed at a distance just to see what would happen. The guys who caught up with Kyle tried to wrestle the gun out of his hands. The first challenger was shot. The second guy tried to tackle him, pulling a handgun out of the same type. He was shot and killed. Some people are sharing stills or videos of just that second confrontation. Without the full context—just a mob chasing down a kid (even packing heat)—they claim it was self-defense. But they’re intentionally obfuscating. In the Sutherland Springs church shooting a while back, a couple cowboys chased after the shooter attempting to gun him down. They were hailed as heroes. I think the situation is similar here. In Kyle’s trial, the defense attorney will try to prove that the first shooting was justified. If the jury slides down that slope, the later shootings will by that logic have been self-defense. I’m scared that’s what’s going to happen. That would create a dangerous precedent and encouragement to organized right-wing militias. But hopefully everyone will remember that none of Kyle’s shots were necessary or ordained by law.
These shootings are undeniably political. But they’ve been further politicized in a toxic way by the extreme right and Trump’s GOP. Rittenhouse is acting out talking points you could hear at the Republican Convention, which gave those McCloskey lawyers a national soapbox. That St. Louis situation didn’t lead to deaths there but Rittenhouse is the upshot. (There’s “I am proud” memes going around of McCloskey and Rittenhouse locked in a father-son embrace.) Slightly edgy but mainstream conservative circles are hailing Rittenhouse as an “American hero.” And fascists are using that ideological proximity to advance their imagined boogaloo race war. One fascist meme of the moment runs as follows. A picture of Rittenhouse parading the street (“victorious”) is chopped-and-screwed in vaporwave-esque neon. The caption reads “THE TREE OF LIBERTY HAS BEEN WATERED.” I’m familiar with the Jefferson quotation: “The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots.” My fundamentalist Christian school held cartoon versions of the Founding Fathers in almost equal reverence as the Bible. This quote signified to us the occasional need for “freedom-fighting” wars in the Middle East, etc. The fascists misuse of this quote is disturbing. In their reversal, the state must occasionally devour demonstrators/innocents to keep the machine running smoothly. Violent, scapegoating blood sacrifice—that’s the future Kyle’s killings are being used to promote. But their misuse of the quote reveals perhaps a deeper truth. Rittenhouse deserves legal reprimand for the shootings—deciding what that should be for a seventeen-year old is above my pay grade. But his life is now also a sacrifice to the higher powers that encouraged him. Online trolls get their kicks off the death of “commies.” But the trigger-happy mainline culture Rittenhouse grew out of gets its priorities asserted while keeping its metaphorical hands clean.
I’d been dreading the water-cooler talk about these happenings. I’m no valiant persuader, and with topics like these I often learn more about my friends & associates than I wanted to know. If my hometown people applaud actions like these… eh, the thought is scary. We really would be close to dissolution of the Union. Talking to four people and making grand assumptions is a trap… but the few conservative folks I talk to have (thank God) said something along the lines of “What the hell was that 17 year kid doing out there? Where were the parents?” Someone like Kyle Rittenhouse is certainly more in their sympathies than protestors or rioters. But we haven’t yet (it seems) reached the point where normal folks condone armed militias. I understand the despair of white dudes. Even those I abhor—those so far gone they’d shoot up a school or nightclub. But barring radical, universalist change, that spectre is not so easily addressed. For punks like Kyle, though, I hope the consensus is clear. If you catch of whiff of your seventeen-year old kid wanting to play hero with a semi-automatic gun—smack the shit out of him. If might just save his life and—more importantly—others’ too.