Y'all will love this, wolves to lamb - Rittenhouse is evil

Posted on: November 16, 2021 at 18:21:44 CT

Kyle Rittenhouse is evil. And the people that support him are evil.
I mean this in the full, biblical sense of evil. Kyle and the people that support him aren’t merely bad people. They aren’t just weak, self-absorbed and selfish people. They are evil in the theological sense. They represent something profoundly inhuman and destructive, an abyss of nothingness and disastrous hatred, a pit of despair and terror. They are satanic and committed to the destruction of everything valuable and honorable. They are profoundly and inexorably anti-human and anti-American.

That’s a lot for a baby-faced teenager who murdered two people, and his supporters would say the characterization is hyperbolic, if they knew what hyperbolic meant. But it is not and here’s why: Kyle Rittenhouse and his supporters are more upset about the idea that their motives and intentions are evil than they are about defending his deeds. It isn’t the fact that most of us think that Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer that bothers them. It’s that you would characterize these murders as a bad thing, as evil. That you would characterize Rittenhouse and his supporters as evil. In America, murder isn’t nearly as bad as thinking the apologists for murder are evil.
Kyle Rittenhouse and his supporters aren’t saying that murder is a good thing. It’s just understandable. And if you don’t share that understanding; if you simply fall back on some established, Judeo-Christian, traditional — conservative — notions of morality and view Kyle Rittenhouse and the friend that bought him his illegal long rifle, and his mother that let him drive across state lines to participate in some vigilantism… if you view the supporters that raised two million dollars to contest his reckoning before the bar as malicious and racist… if you view the people that go to his website — website! — to buy t-shirts and hoodies as vile… that is what upsets them. Not the act. The perception and judgment that they are somehow awful people, the worst among us, a dead weight and nihilistic drag on society. That’s the offense. And so I’m going to say it again, with emphasis: Kyle Rittenhouse and the people that support him are evil.

God exists in many concepts and forms, but one of the most accessible notions is that God reflects the hopes and aspirations of the congregants that believe in the idea of God. God is the collective expression of some social order that establishes rules for conduct and interaction that makes society cohesive and functional. And evil is the systemic undermining of that conduct and order. Satan, after all, abandoned God’s order and began the project of replacing compassion with avarice, empathy with egotism, and honor with gain. And that project, like a sulfuric pool at the edge of a garden, has been corroding civilization and destroying life since the Fall.
When Kyle Rittenhouse decides to act the vigilante in contravention of regular conduct, he undermines the law and the standards of behavior for reasonable people. That by itself is not evil. And it’s not even evil when Kyle Rittenhouse and his supporters attempt to justify those acts, no matter how much it strains credulity. What is evil is when he is acquitted of the murders and his supporters act as though he is morally vindicated, and assert that acts like this are always justifiable. And that Kyle Rittenhouse and his supporters are somehow doing a good thing by killing protestors, that his and their motives are pure. That’s evil.
The particularly American version of this evil has been with us since the Declaration of Independence and consists fundamentally in its denial. In this reckoning, Americans have done terrible things in their history, but they intended to do good, and so it is all right. It doesn’t matter how many millions of first peoples were annihilated in American history, or how many families were shattered by slavery or indentured servitude, or how much theft of labor was stripped of slaves and factory workers — the point is that Americans are good people and their motives are pure.
Except when they are not, which is often. And is particularly the case with Kyle Rittenhouse. The road to hell is paved with his intentions, because that thoroughfare is one way and crowded with the demonic traffic of his apologists. Kyle Rittenhouse and his supporters are leading the country to hell because they are evil people. Not just bad. Evil.
Again, this is what makes them angry. Not that most reasonable people would look at the Kyle Rittenhouse case and ask: why is a seventeen-year-old high school dropout carrying a semi-automatic weapon across state lines to a racial justice protest? But that most people would conclude — regardless of the trial — that he intended to harm someone, that his motives weren’t pure, that he was a terrible human, and even more, that his mother is an awful, awful person, because she enabled this horror, because she set this monster in motion. Rittenhouse’s mother could have convinced him to plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of the court and the morality of his actions and hers would have remained clear. Instead she took the assistance of people who don’t even know her son to contest the morality of his acts.
They know better, and hate you for pointing it out. But this is the entire right-wing mode in America today. You can commit unspeakable acts, but you can’t be made to feel bad about them. Almost all the outrage of the Right stems from their fury over the idea that liberals — or really anyone — are judging them. Because almost all their self-image consists of the idea that somehow, someway, they are pure and their motives are good and if the facts suggest overwise, screw the facts. They center their identity as victims around this trope: the worst thing possible is pointing out just how profoundly amoral, un-Christian and inhuman their actions are. They don’t hate you for pointing out that Trump separated children from their parents. They hate you for pointing out that there is something profoundly wrong with separating children from their parents, and that they are somehow bad people to support it. Tucker Carlson is irate that people are rude to him in restaurants because they cannot see into his heart and understand that his intentions are good; all his incitements to violence and appeals to tribal passions (in the service of lucrative advertising) are secondary to the purity of his motives.
We see this with Kyle Rittenhouse. He shouldn’t have been in Kenosha. Ninety-nine percent of teenagers in America wouldn’t drive across state lines with a military-style weapon to violate an emergency curfew in a riot zone. You don’t do it, because it is ****ing wrong.
But Kyle Rittenhouse’s defenders are finding ways to explain it away, and almost all those explanations are evil, because they consist fundamentally of dehumanizing the people at that protest, and rationalizing their extermination. The judge in the case has already done this by refusing to allow the prosecution to describe the victims of Kyle Rittenhouse’s murders as victims; they are instead to be referred to, per the Defense, as “rioters,” and “looters.” Well, okay. This makes their murder so much more understandable.
And now the judge, Bruce Schroeder, who has done what he can to constrain the prosecution and make the murders understandable, interrupts his own trial to complain about his representation in the media. Because the worst thing would be for people to perceive his actions as evil, and to assess that he is a bad man and a terrible judge. He’s doing his job; his motives are pure. So if a seventeen-year old vigilante is acquitted of murder by a jury of white people, it’s all in a day’s work; and if it inspires more acts of vigilantism on the part of copy-cats he is not responsible, because his motives are pure, and Kyle Rittenhouse was just a confused kid driving across state lines with a weapon capable of spitting out 600 rounds per minute. Judge Schroeder did his job.
But Judge Schroeder is still an evil man.
In the imperfect narrative of American history, what has actually redeemed the American people is their willingness to acknowledge the depths of their depravity and to correct their malicious acts. This, of course, is exactly what Christianity wants of its adherents. You don’t acknowledge your sins and keep sinning; you beg forgiveness and do better.
Evil prevents you from that acknowledgement. In Kyle Rittenhouse today is the moral choice to hold accountable a young man — regardless of his intentions — for murder. A society that will not do this is committing itself to evil, and, moreover, to more acts like this — evil perpetuates itself. And more: it hides behind the idea that what it does is not evil.
So you can reconcile the outcome of this acquittal with the idea that the murders are justifiable, or understandable. But it doesn’t make them right. And it does make you a participant, a functionary, and an apologist.
For pure, unadulterated, evil.
https://medium.com/@jonesvery_75001/kyle-rittenhouse-is-evil-e882f754f14