Kyle Rittenhouse's Crime Was Standing up to the Woke Mob | Opinion

Justice prevailed in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, but only after a soul-crushing process that itself served as unjust punishment. And the injustice to which the teenager has been subjected persists in political persecution and perhaps still further legal prosecution.

Our nation's most prominent politicians and news outlets have not only shown no contrition for slandering Rittenhouse, but have doubled down on their character assassination while urging the inaptly named Biden Department of Justice to intervene.

Why does the mass assault against Rittenhouse continue after the facts of the case exonerated him? Because Rittenhouse will be forever guilty of the worst crime of all: defending himself and a community under siege by the left-wing mob.

You're not supposed to dare do that. The Left brooks no dissent and demands total submission. It does the resisting—not its victims.

As the prosecution put it: "Everybody takes a beating sometimes..."

At least, the Left thinks its political opposition should accept the beating.

To the Left, you cannot defend yourself. You cannot be left in control of your life, even on matters of existential self-preservation. You live at the mercy of your rulers.

Kyle Rittenhouse was supposed to submit, as all of us are supposed to submit, to leftism. He faced it in its crudest form, in its street expression—mob violence. And he said, "Enough."

That makes him an intolerable exception; remember, millions did, in fact, submit. During the summer of 2020, when Kenosha exploded, it was the Left that locked Americans in their homes while unleashing rioters, looters and pillagers on our streets. It cheered them on or at best remained silent; condoned anti-law-and-order rhetoric and policy; and sometimes even effectively underwrote the ensuing violence by rewarding criminals with bail funds.

It did so, of course, while ignoring basic facts that undercut the narrative of a systemically racist police system and a systemically racist America—calumnies that, even if true, would still never have justified chaos on the streets and the anarchy that sidelining police guarantees.

These acts were never about justice—they were about vengeance for the lawless, and for their Ruling Class manipulators, sowing division in service of power.

Now we are dealing with the consequences: A massive surge in violent crime and the related anti-cultural BLM revolution that has rampaged through every one of our most vital institutions—to disastrous effect.

Speaking up, and challenging say, critical race theory, will get you branded a racist, if not get the Federal Bureau of Investigations sicced on you—if you're a concerned parent at a school board meeting.

But the far worse crime in the eyes of the Ruling Class is doing what Kyle Rittenhouse did—standing up and defending your community when under assault by a leftist mob fomented by the Ruling Class, and which made innocent Americans sitting ducks.

Contrary to the "vigilante justice" canard, Rittenhouse sought to protect Kenosha from leftist vigilante injustice that the Ruling Class endorsed.

That's why our Ruling Class smeared him.

That's why he was called a white supremacist even though the people he shot, who were threatening his life, were white—and there wasn't a scintilla of evidence of racial animus indicating anything to the contrary.

That's why the media distorted the basic facts about his gun, his relations to Kenosha and a million other pertinent details.

That's why Big Tech censored those defending him.

That's why platforms like GoFundMe barred users from setting up legal defense funds for him.

That's why a cop was fired for contributing to a defense fund when Rittenhouse finally had one.

That's why a mob had to threaten the jurors and their community with still further violence—including attempting to doxx them—in order to try and intimidate them into making the politically correct decision over the just and sound one.

Remember, that Kyle Rittenhouse ever set foot in Kenosha in the first instance was purely a function of media and Ruling Class lies, as well as an utter dereliction of duty to maintain law and order.

Jacob Blake was not shot and killed by cops, nor was he defenseless.

Cops arrived at the scene because of Blake's actions, which spurred a domestic disturbance call; Blake had a warrant for his arrest from a prior incident in which he was charged with domestic violence offenses and a sexual assault; Blake scuffled with cops; he had a knife; he was ultimately shot during the struggle, but he was not killed.

What did the media and political class do? It spun a fake narrative of bloodthirsty bigoted cops, helping fuel a mob that Wisconsin's political leaders did nothing to put down while innocents suffered physical harm and tens of millions of dollars in property damage as the city burnt.

In sum, our Ruling Class and its woke shock troops sought to smear, silence and bankrupt Kyle Rittenhouse so he couldn't defend himself against an assault for which it bore responsibility. And then, the Ruling Class and its media abettors threatened to sic the mob on the jury to seal Rittenhouse's fate.

Kudos to the jury for refusing to cave to the mob. But that it ever came to that point is an indictment of a society that increasingly accepts mob rule over the rule of law. Consider as other recent examples the boarded-up windows in the run-up to the 2020 election, as well as the atmosphere in which the Derek Chauvin trial took place.

Kyle Rittenhouse is a living indictment of our Ruling Class because he was compelled to act in response to its myriad failings. Our Ruling Class is one that tells big lie after big lie, incites and underwrites societal destruction, and tells cops not to pursue criminal—while deputizing those criminals, on the other hand, to make life living hell for dissenters from Ruling Class orthodoxy.

For that, Rittenhouse will never stop paying. Nor will the country, as the Left pivots from the Rittenhouse loss to an attempted win by seeking to make the story about guns (which it is not about).

The Left wishes to leverage a case about our natural right to self-defense to further infringe upon the Second Amendment. After all, the Left has to disarm people, after leaving them undefended by police, in order to get them to submit to its totalitarian rule.

This is the Left's entire modus operandi, in a nutshell: Inflict pain upon the political opposition and, if the opposition remains unbowed, exploit that response to justify still further power grabs.

The only proper moral response is to refuse to be silenced and cowed: To confidently, courageously and boldly stand for the American way of life, and all it entails, and to never submit.

Ben Weingarten is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, fellow at the Claremont Institute and senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party (Bombardier, 2020). Ben is the founder and CEO of ChangeUp Media LLC, a media consulting and production company. Subscribe to his newsletter at bit.ly/bhwnews, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.