New York Times story editor Charles Homans unloaded 10,000-words of ideologically charged pot-stirring in the form of an upcoming Sunday Magazine piece “Kyle Rittenhouse and the New Era of Political Violence — What brought the teenager and so many others to the streets of Kenosha, Wis., equipped for war?”
Rittenhouse (17 years old) was the one who killed two people in a riot in Kenosha. It took place in Wisconsin during the left-wing rioting following the August 2020 shooting of Jacob Blake. The Homans lament didn’t avoid the violence on the streets, but was more concerned about armed men defending property than the Black Lives Matter-affiliated rioters destroying it.
….Over the following nights, Kenoshans found themselves inside a compressed version of the national experience since the killing of George Floyd three months earlier. A demonstration at the site of the shooting grew larger and angrier and gave way to smashed police cruisers; an officer was knocked unconscious with a brick….Several streets’ worth of businesses and a parole office went up in flames….
Yet somehow it was the right-wing media’s fault for showing this truth.
Fox News and Newsmax ran the footage in fiery loops. The footage fueled conspiracy theories and raged talk radio hosts, as well as conversations inside the White House. These discussions also spilled over onto Fox News. People were persuaded that they could not have it on the Internet, and the rumours spread around online platforms. Do something — who, when reaching for an explanation of what they had done after the fact, would often reach for a video….
….
Kyle Rittenhouse was 17, a teenager who came from Illinois just across the border. He arrived in Kenosha that night. Harris confronted him the next morning. Rittenhouse joined other young men for the defense of Harris’s dealership. Less than two hours later, he would shoot three men, killing two and wounding the third, and transforming himself, in an instant, into a Rorschach test.
Homans seemed to realize he didn’t have much of a hit piece on Rittenhouse, so widened his angle to smear all armed citizen groups, even those defending life and property, as dangerous “paramilitaries.”
The video of Rittenhouse’s movements on the street that night clearly shows Joseph Rosenbaum, whom Rittenhouse encountered earlier that evening, pursuing him across the lot and eventually throwing a plastic bag at him….A minute later, a crowd chased Rittenhouse up the street, and after Rittenhouse fell, several people lunged for him. Rittenhouse captured one, Anthony Huber who was riding a skateboard and Gaige Grosskreutz who seemed to be reaching for his handgun.
Rosenbaum and Huber died within minutes; Grosskreutz, who was shot in the arm, survived….
Homans didn’t emphasize that the shootings appear justified as self-defense against men with violent criminal records. Check out Joseph Rosenbaum’s less-than-stellar record in prison, in which he served a full 10-year sentence.
Homans had a lot of momentum for his paranoid conclusion, which brought the conversation back to Donald Trump’s January 6th.
….In the months after Kenosha, similar armed coalitions showed up at “Stop the Steal” rallies protesting imagined threats to the election at several state Capitols….
All of these episodes looked, in retrospect, like steppingstones on the way to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, where a coalition of standard-issue Trump voters, QAnon true believers and militiamen united in an attempt to blow up American democracy in order to save the country from their perceived enemies. It was a new time in history where there would be enemies and people who were willing to help them. By then it was obvious that Kenosha’s events were much more than just the destruction of buildings. It didn’t matter whether one building was burning, or dozens. It did not really matter if buildings were burning at all.
Of course, buildings were burning, in Kenosha and across the country in the summer of 2020, fires set by left-wing “protestors.” But Homans can’t stop obsessing about the right, guns, and January 6.
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