New Article: The Tikvah Fund’s Crusade Against the Law: Bari Weiss and Alana Newhouse Embrace White Racist PILPUL Antinomianism
David Shasha
The Tikvah Fund’s Crusade Against the Law: Bari Weiss and Alana Newhouse Embrace White Racist PILPUL Antinomianism
It is critical to understand that a central tenet of Ashkenazi Anti-Maimonideanism is the idea of PILPUL as articulated in the Franco-German Tosafist tradition. PILPUL is a means to break the autonomy of the Law and set out an authoritarian rabbinical system.
The late Jose Faur vehemently criticized this antinomian tradition in his article “The Legal Thinking of the Tosafot”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E7OdK3DLGsQ957hp0noPafRFDylkq0sXtI4uoZDjVg0/edit
As he said there:
The impasse from which the Tosafot took its departure was: How to maintain the Talmudic tradition in a different social and historical context, The Tosafot analyzed the Talmud in a manner, that it would reflect the mores, ideology, economics and social situation of the Jewish communities in France and Teutonic lands. Seen from this perspective, the Tosafot school appears deeply concerned, on the other hand, with the preservation and maintenance of rabbinic authority, and well aware, on the other, of the historical, changes that had taken place in Judaism since the compilation of the Talmud.
The pilpul methodology of the Tosafot presupposes that there is no objective Halakha. In the final analysis, law is grounded on the discretionary judgment of the rabbi, and it is formulated through pilpul. The rabbi molds the law to fit the specifics of any situation. The pilpul reflects the specifics of the situation as seen by the rabbi, and projects to the community the pronouncement of the law made in a hallowed text -- as interpreted and recast by the rabbi.
A critical aspect of the PILPUL methodology is the Davqa/Lav Davqa analysis:
The Tosafot, occasionally, prefaced their analysis of the Talmud by declaring that the sense of the text is lav davqa (not exact). The lav davqa methodology revolutionized the study of the Talmud and changed the content of Jewish law. This methodology is grounded on the assumption that the rabbinic texts may be interpreted not in accordance to their usual sense. The methodology, as well as the philosophy of language that it projected, was brilliantly formulated by Abelard. Abelard, in his attempt to reconcile the conflicting views found in the writings of the Church Fathers, formulated the semantic principles that the same word may be differently used by different writers.
We will see later in the article how Bari Weiss applies the Lav Davqa method to the Kyle Rittenhouse case.
In my Huffington Post article on PILPUL I discuss the way in which the Ashkenazi tradition rejected Maimonides’ legal code:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-is-pilpul-and-why-on_b_507522
As I said there:
The Talmudic formalism of Maimonides in his encyclopedic legal compendium, the Mishneh Torah, was strongly contested by the Ashkenazi rabbis of France and Germany. In the Mishneh Torah Maimonides famously eliminated the rhetorical discussions of the Talmud and simply presented the final ruling -- a process that replicated the methodology of Rabbi Isaac Alfasi, Maimonides' precursor in Lucena.
In the spirit of Faur, here is how I summed up the Lav Davqa matter:
As if this was not enough, the Tosafists instituted one more pilpul principle into Talmudic discourse. This was called the Lav Davqa method. In English we might call it the "Not Quite" way of reading a text. When a text appeared to be saying one thing, the Tosafot -- in order to conform to the already-existing custom -- would re-interpret it by saying that what it seemed to mean is not what it really meant!
I have also written articles on the New Talmudism and on the Anti-Maimonideans that delve deeper into this Ashkenazi/Sephardi binary:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPbxxP_kkV536tPTvMpsUE9feBgoBSa7QEP8iXXDHIk/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qihywNGjZbuPEY4-cbQ1g02-nOoaCL2Ug0G2qZ12t64/edit
Yale legal scholar Robert Cover’s oft-cited article “Nomos and Narrative” is built around the idea that Jewish Law is fitted into a conceptual structure that is not juridically fixed, as in the classical Sephardic tradition, but which has an elasticity that is based upon human feelings and concerns reflected through narratives:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jFLXRokGfnxBpVHk-PUEa8baDXHngHwm/view?ths=true
The late Cover, who was ostensibly a Liberal thinker, sets out – contra Timothy Snyder’s abiding concern with the Law being a bulwark against Authoritarianism – to allow people to adjust the Law to suit their convenience, whether that is to promote reactionary values, or to promote less rigid ones.
Indeed, we have seen how Rabbi Shai Cherry has firmly rejected the Maimonidean tradition in favor of the Ashkenazi, which ultimately sets out to change the Law as it suits him:
I refer to Cherry in my article on the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the ongoing erasure of Sephardic Humanism:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T95UtKqVQrTZWObnxgTYMxrBYvc-6SzTpQM668sKoj4/edit
The great Sephardi scholar Daniel J. Elazar presented this substantive difference between Ashkenazim and Sephardim in his classic article which identifies the former as “Romantics” and the latter as “Classicists”:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OI6TFkFDxgeW4deIJxLzErg_Fe8BU898/view?ths=true
It is the Romantic view, whether in its Liberal or Conservative iterations, that has served to undermine the basic integrity of Jewish Law, as it creates an extra-legal system which is devoted to upholding personal opinion rather than objective fact.
One would think that the Ashkenazi system would end up being more tolerant and accommodating of human values, but indeed, it is only in the rapidly-vanishing Sephardic tradition where respect for the integrity of the Law translates into a more easy-going approach to both practice and application, as we will soon see in regards to Abortion.
A key figure in the ongoing Ashkenazi antinomianism is the German Jewish scholar Leo Strauss:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
In his seminal essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Strauss accused Maimonides and other Religious Humanists of prevaricating and presenting an “orthodox” front, when in reality they were atheists and antinomians:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_and_the_Art_of_Writing
Strauss has, of course, long been identified as the father of American Neo-Conservatism as espoused by prevaricators like Newt Gingrich and his band of anti-democratic militants:
http://hnn.us/articles/1494.html
Which has landed us right smack into Trumpism:
https://time.com/5863457/how-newt-gingrich-laid-the-groundwork-for-trumps-republican-party/
It has become the New Normal:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/opinion/trump-newt-gingrich.html
Lying is a central tenet for the Straussians, as their primary political value is a Platonic elite system, run by a Philosopher-King who must ultimately control the rabble beneath them:
https://brooklynrail.org/2005/09/express/you-may-never-have-heard-of-leo-strauss-
The Straussians are indeed quite similar to the Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews who follow a system of authoritarian Da’as Torah, as Faur has correctly explained, where the rabbi heads a hierarchical system based on his own view of what the Law should be, and not what the Law actually is.
And that leads us into the current mess over White Supremacy in the Trump era.
Central to the contentiousness over that American White Supremacy is the bold and courageous articulation of a New Racial Consciousness, which has turned into a battle over something called Critical Race Theory:
I have presented the spurious anti-CRT polemic of Tikvah White Supremacist Bari Weiss many times, especially in her connection with The Rufo Institute and the Black Neo-Con Glenn Loury:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/wl0lG1tSMh8/m/OiJVsGdAAQAJ
I think that it is important to understand how Weiss and her Tikvah allies set out to attack the New Racial Consciousness by remaining silent on certain issues, as much as by speaking out on others.
We will soon get to her shrill racist advocacy for Alt-Right hero Kyle Rittenhouse, but first it is critical to look at a number of current cases that she and her ally Alana Newhouse, both women acting as Whores of Trump, are resolutely ignoring.
First, we have the case of Ahmaud Arbery and the lynching that killed him:
https://www.vox.com/21263899/ahmaud-arbery-lynched-video-mcmichael-glynn-county-georgia
Arbery’s case is similar to so many in the old Confederacy where White racist Klansmen took the Law into their own hands:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
We should mention here the blessed name of the immortal Ida B. Wells, who actively fought this scourge, as she too was persecuted by the racists of her day:
https://www.history.com/news/ida-b-wells-lynching-memphis-chicago
Central to this deplorable heritage is the extra-judicial vigilantism used by the racist Whites to take the Law into their own hands:
https://theconversation.com/vigilantism-again-in-the-news-is-an-american-tradition-141849
We have seen the murderers of Arbery, an unarmed Black man killed while jogging on “suspicion” of criminality, turned into the aggressor because he tried to protect himself:
We will soon see how this too plays into the Rittenhouse case as parsed by Weiss.
And then there are two important cases of Systemic Racism in American courts, the focus of CRT, where innocent Black men were framed and railroaded into Death Row.
There is the ongoing case of Kevin Strickland:
Strickland has been totally exonerated by the evidence and by the government prosecutors, and yet has still not been pardoned by the Missouri Trumpist governor:
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article248324690.html
And then there is the case of Julius Jones, whose trial reflected the bias and racism of White America:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Darius_Jones
Jones has just been removed from Death Row by the Oklahoma governor, after much pressure from activist groups:
Another important revelation in this regard was the FBI corruption that put two innocent Black men in prison for the killing of Malcolm X:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/us/malcolm-x-killing-men-exonerated/index.html
The exoneration will not do much for them, as one has passed and the other is now 83 years old:
All of these cases put the lie to Bari Weiss and The Rufo Institute when it comes to the validity of CRT and the need to apply it to what remains a racist judicial system which favors Whites over Blacks.
An excellent piece by Charles Blow puts all this racism into context:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/opinion/rittenhouse-trial-bannon.html
The complete article follows this note.
Indeed, I was struck by the following story of a convicted White teen rapist who was sentenced to probation rather than prison:
Would the judge have been as lenient with a Black rapist?
Brett Kavanaugh would be proud!
https://www.businessinsider.com/brett-kavanaugh-sexual-assault-misconduct-allegations-2018-9
And so would the Zombie Orange Pig!
https://www.businessinsider.com/women-accused-trump-sexual-misconduct-list-2017-12
It’s great to be a White criminal.
We have also been experiencing the trauma of the Charlottesville Alt-Right Nazi Klan trial in Virginia:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christopherm51/charlottesville-trial-closing-arguments
I am sure that the Trumpscum Jews would like Charlottesville to just go away, but unfortunately, they are now fully tied to it.
All these examples of White Racism and oppression of Blacks cannot be found in the work of Bari Weiss, Alana Newhouse, and their many Tikvah cohorts.
But you know who can?
The QAnon SHAMAN!
https://mailchi.mp/75d60148bef0/what-happened-today-june-16-809969?e=4b6f9b46a8
Tikvah Tablet The Scroll was positively apoplectic about the “persecution” of this misunderstood “political prisoner,” as they repeat the standard 1/6 Trumpropaganda Fake News:
As I was finishing up today’s Scroll, the news came in
that Jacob Chansley, better known as the QAnon Shaman, was sentenced to 41
months in federal prison for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. That’s a
travesty. Chansley, a Navy veteran who committed no violence, has already served
10 months in solitary confinement for crimes that amount to trespassing and
vandalism. Is that really a crime that someone should spend years in prison for?
The breach of the Capitol building was a disgraceful event, but for largely
symbolic reasons. What was in reality a ritual desecration has been transformed
by a concerted propaganda campaign, supported by the highest levels of government,
into a terrorist act on par with Sept. 11, 2001. If you think that’s an
exaggeration, go back and reread The New York Times op-ed written by a former CIA station chief
calling for a counterinsurgency campaign against Trump supporters. That was a
call for civil war, which is not far off from what we already have.
So it bears repeating that the only person who died violently on Jan. 6 was a
Trump supporter, shot as she tried to breach the Capitol building. For months,
government officials such as Nancy Pelosi, echoed by leading media organs,
asserted that a Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick, had been beaten to
death with a fire extinguisher by Trump supporters even as the testimony from
his family and medical examiner made clear that no such thing had happened.
It is no defense of what took place at the Capitol to point out that the facts bear
no resemblance to the hysteria about organized insurrectionists. Do I even need
to mention that the majority of people who participated in last summer’s
demonstrations, which turned into the most destructive riots in the United
States in 50 years, had their charges dropped?
A wild-eyed, pagan, QAnon-spouting Capitol rioter will hardly be a sympathetic
figure to most Scroll readers. But do we really want a class of political
prisoners in this country? People sentenced for their beliefs
rather than the crimes they committed? The unsympathetic deserve
justice as much as everybody else, and they may need it more.
The key PILPUL term here is “crimes that amount to trespassing and vandalism”; which is a complete misstatement of the facts.
For those who still might not recognize Mr. SHAMAN, he was the Insurrectionist with the warpaint and horns, carrying a six-foot spear:
“Trespassing and vandalism” sounds like some harmless kids’ prank; what the SHAMAN did with his murderous Trumpist Alt-Right buddies was violate the proper functioning of the American government by trying to prevent the orderly transition of power after a duly authorized election:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/the-capitol-attack-treason
It is what must properly be called “Treason.”
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title18/part1/chapter115&edition=prelim
As clause 2383 sates:
Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
And while everyone has their basic presumption of innocence and Civil Rights protections – often denied to African-Americans – the 1/6 Insurrectionists upped the criminal ante by trying, as the SHAMAN did, to formally threaten the lives of our elected representatives:
Then there is the Proud Boys hero Kyle Rittenhouse.
The Tikvah Tablet antinomian spirit also permeates Common Sense with Bari Weiss, as she and her partner Nellie Bowles vigorously defended the now-freed Alt-Right teen vigilante.
It began with Bowles:
Here is her complete “analysis”:
Rittenhouse trial: Kyle Rittenhouse is on trial this week for killing two and wounding one during the Kenosha riots of August 2020. The Common Sense team has been glued to the courtroom livestream, which shows a trial going very badly for the prosecution.
Perhaps you saw this clip, in which the prosecution’s star witness, Gaige Grosskreutz, admitted that Kyle Rittenhouse did not fire at him until he pointed his own weapon at Rittenhouse:
Or this one, in which the judge dressed down the prosecutor:
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1458488157796765698/pu/vid/960x540/CfuUWqAtWOs3o8B9.mp4?tag=12
Or this one:
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1458491841184247822/vid/1280x720/43KqCRIX1K8Zw8WG.mp4?tag=14
The jury is expected to begin deliberations as soon as tomorrow, and lots of folks who know more about the law than I do are expecting an acquittal.
I keep coming back to two themes.
The first is just the yawning chasm between the press narrative about what happened that night in Wisconsin—what the conventional, proper-thinking wisdom was—and what actually seems to have happened. The smart set insisted that Kyle Rittenhouse was a MAGA-loving vigilante who went to Kenosha to kill BLM supporters. Remember that the President of the United States seemed to imply Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist” in a campaign video.
The divide between the coverage and the reality—Rittenhouse appears to have a solid self-defense case—is stark. For more on that, the writer Jesse Singal articulates it best. (Though I also appreciated hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s Twitter thread, which was so off-message that a journalist apparently called him to see if he had been hacked.)
The second thing I keep thinking about is that the events of that night show the abolish-police vision in action. When the defund advocates talk about what replaces policing, they talk about community-led safety. They talk about neighbors and friends stopping crimes, relying on themselves. But what does abolishing the police look like in practice? What happens when the police really do stand down and let fires burn as they did last summer?
It looks a lot like Kyle Rittenhouse. It looks like a teenager seeing chaos and getting pretty convinced that stopping it falls on his shoulders. It looks like heavily armed, untrained local dads defending shops and homes because no one else will. AOC told us the police-free life looked like “a suburb.” The implication is that street violence is somehow imposed by cops. Take away the police and, like magic, no more problems. Kenosha suggests that is very much not the case.
But that was not nearly enough Alt-Right Trumpist love for Rittenhouse, as Weiss herself entered the fray with her own PILPUL:
The complete article follows this note.
She begins the article with the usual Tikvah Tablet hubris, in the Bret Stephens Jewish Genius intimidating manner:
Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.
The word “Independent” is apparently a relative term in the corrupt Zalman Bernstein echo-chamber, where deviation from the master Neo-Con Straussian narrative is prohibited:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y8UrV67wrZUghBRZimf_5PeQTkQbzXsufntJtD6Y1EM/edit
Weiss lays out the basic fixed point that is the mark of every PILPUL: only I know the truth, and any evidence presented must be seen as “proving” that fixed point!
We must, for the purposes of legal coherence, first cite the text of our Second Amendment which applies to all vigilante killers:
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-2/
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
While the NRA kook wingnuts have sought to parse these words to their partisan advantage, the text states clearly that we must limit the bearing of arms to the State and its “well regulated militias.”
And not to vigilantes who choose to take the Law into their own hands, as is the case with Rittenhouse and the killers of Ahmaud Arbery. If those vigilantes stayed home, their victims would still be alive.
I would like to enumerate Weiss’ Common Sense points one by one in order to show the TOSFOS method she uses in her pro-racist advocacy:
First, the idea that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist.
Many White Supremacists do not advertise this fact, but there is ample evidence that Rittenhouse, a fervid Trump supporter, is a racist.
He has posed with the Proud Boys flashing White Supremacist signs:
His bail was paid for in part by Trump White Supremacist My Pillow Lindell:
He is a hero to White Supremacists like the vile Pat Buchanan:
https://buchanan.org/blog/kyle-rittenhouse-both-right-and-righteous-158750
Politico has published two articles on the connection between the Alt-Right and Rittenhouse, which shows how the Fascists are in love with him – and that is no coincidence:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/01/trump-rittenhouse-kenosha-support-407106
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/19/the-lionization-of-kyle-rittenhouse-by-the-right-523054
Both articles follow this note.
The following article presents the chummy connection between the teen vigilante and the Kenosha PD, who treated the teen killer with kid gloves!
https://www.revolt.tv/2020/9/10/21431040/kyle-rittenhouse-law-enforcement-white-nationalism
It was a veritable White Supremacy fest:
“We’ve got to save a couple, but we’ll give you a couple,” one of the officers can be heard saying on the recording before expressing to Rittenhouse, “we appreciate you guys, we really do.” He shoots three protesters, killing two, just 15 minutes later.
Kenosha itself is White Supremacy, as Jacob Blake already knows:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/06/racial-tensions-kenosha-police-shot-jacob-blake
That is just Common Sense.
But not for Weiss:
There was zero evidence that Rittenhouse was connected to white supremacist groups at the time of the shooting. He was a Trump supporter, yes, though he wasn’t old enough to vote. He was an admirer of police and firefighters, also true. He was a lifeguard. He’d been part of a “police explorer” program, and was also a firefighter/EMT cadet with the fire department in Antioch, Illinois, where he lived with his mom and two sisters.
Notice how at the very start of her full-throated defense of Rittenhouse, the fixed point of the PILPUL from which everything else follows, Weiss used the term “at the time of the shooting.”
It is a Lav Davqa move, what most people would call shyster lawyer tricks, that qualifies Rittenhouse as not being a racist – precisely, Davqa, at the very time of the shooting.
How can you explain the picture with the Proud Boys, and why the judge would not allow it into evidence?
Here is that picture that the mostly all-White jury did not get to see:
Why would someone who is not a White Supremacist take a picture with White Supremacists, as he flashes the White Power sign?
And as for all those staged crocodile tears, the following report on a video showing Rittenhouse pummeling a young woman shows us what a thug he really is:
https://nypost.com/2020/09/01/video-shows-kenosha-shooter-kyle-rittenhouse-punching-a-girl-report/
Violence is apparently part of the lifestyle choice he has made.
It is clear that the cagey Rittenhouse denies being a White Supremacist, and it is technically impossible to get into his mind on the night he shot and killed those men at the Black Lives Matter rally. But Common Sense tells us something else entirely.
The following article discusses this vigilante intervention and its relation to that racism in a very Common Sense way:
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a33853022/racism-white-supremacy-doesnt-age-out/
As we read:
We also have to recognize that this is a prime example of why reverse racism can’t and doesn’t exist. Racism is about power; not simply prejudice. Had Rittenhouse hated those protesting yet stayed home, that hate would be his problem. But when multiple people are shot, his heroes and future colleagues congratulate him, and when he is reassured and tucked into his bed that night… it became our problem. Intentional anti-racist parenting needs to be normalized through diverse books or toys and honest conversations about the reality of race in this country. Acknowledging the ways that toxic masculinity consistently manifests into deadly violence is another part of disrupting this power. We need to have conversations with boys and men about combating entitlement before it’s too late.
Indeed, pace CRT, we have seen how Trumpist Judge Bruce Schroeder fatefully put his thumb on the scales of justice to favor Rittenhouse and help bring the Not Guilty verdict:
https://newsone.com/4239432/kyle-rittenhouse-murder-trial-judge/
Racism is often hard to prove, but it is only Common Sense to state that if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck – then it is in the end a duck!
Indeed, in the wake of the acquittal, even the ADL understood the link with the Alt-Right and its dangerous consequences:
https://www.adl.org/blog/right-wing-extremists-cheer-rittenhouse-verdict-in-predictable-fashion
Though The Tikvah Fund is not the ADL!
That Rittenhouse had no connection to Kenosha.
This is the first attempt by Weiss to put the press on trial in a Lav Davqa way, rather than to actually deal with the legal case at hand.
It is not relevant to the legal case whether Rittenhouse had a connection to Kenosha.
It is not relevant if a journalist, or journalists, made a mistake in this regard.
In point of fact, Rittenhouse’s Kenosha connection actually adds an aggrieved motivating factor that would provide further evidence of a personal animus to the victims of his murderous actions that night.
Her next three points deal with the Gun, and this is where the Lav Davqa PILPUL spins wildly out of control:
- That Rittenhouse drove across state lines with a gun that night to oppose the protests.
- So what about the gun?
- But it was illegal for him to even have the gun given that he wasn’t yet 18 years old, right?
After Weiss posted her unhinged Tikvah Trumpist rant, her former home The New York Times published an important article by Farhad Manjoo, “The Truth About Kyle Rittenhouse’s Gun”:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/opinion/kyle-rittenhouse-guns.html
The complete article follows this note.
Manjoo is clearly not in the Lav Davqa PILPUL business, not being a White Jewish Supremacist, but has a number of relevant things to say regarding the Gun that Weiss conveniently ignores, as it does not fit her PILPUL narrative:
But on Monday, the lead prosecutor, Thomas Binger, offered a meticulously documented closing argument that deftly summarized all the ways Rittenhouse acted unlawfully. We’ll see if the jury buys it, but to me, Binger’s argument had a power beyond this case.
That’s because it cleverly unraveled some of the foundational tenets of gun advocacy: That guns are effective and necessary weapons of self-defense. That without them, lawlessness and tyranny would prevail. And that in the right hands — in the hands of the “good guys” — guns promote public safety rather than destroy it.
In the Rittenhouse case, none of that was true. At every turn that night, Rittenhouse’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle made things worse, ratcheting up danger rather than quelling it. The gun transformed situations that might have ended in black eyes and broken bones into ones that ended with corpses in the street. And Rittenhouse’s gun was not just a danger to rival protesters. According to his own defense, the gun posed a grave threat to Rittenhouse himself — he said he feared being overpowered and then shot with his own weapon.
This is self-defense as circular reasoning: Rittenhouse says he carried a rifle in order to guarantee his safety during a violent protest. He was forced to shoot at four people when his life and the lives of other people were threatened, he says. What was he protecting everyone from? The gun strapped to his own body, the one he’d brought to keep everyone safe.
Unlike Weiss, Manjoo adheres to a discussion of the case itself as it applies to the Law and the way Rittenhouse sought to subvert it through his NRA vigilantism.
He focuses, not on how the Gun was acquired or whether it was moved over state lines as Weiss does, but on the actual shooting and its legal – or illegal – meaning:
Rittenhouse pointed his gun at Rosenbaum, but the man kept coming. In order to claim self-defense as a justification for shooting Rosenbaum, Rittenhouse had to have believed that Rosenbaum posed an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to him. Binger asked Rittenhouse how he could have believed that — Rosenbaum “didn’t have any weapon of any kind, correct?”
“Other than him grabbing my gun, no,” he answered.
Manjoo then blows the Rittenhouse defense to shreds:
The guns failed any notion of proportionality or moderation. Prosecutors pointed out that Rittenhouse quickly fired four shots at Rosenbaum. Even if Rittenhouse felt genuinely threatened by Rosenbaum, why hadn’t Rittenhouse stopped shooting after the first shot, which could have immobilized Rosenbaum without killing him? (A defense “use of force” expert implied that the gun shot too quickly for him to pause and reassess the threat between shots.)
But Weiss, in true Rabbenu Tam Lav Davqa fashion, demands that we know about the Gun, its purchase and physical history, rather than looking at the bogus claim of self-defense:
Rittenhouse didn’t bring the gun to Kenosha. The gun was purchased for Rittenhouse months earlier by a friend and stored in Kenosha at the home of that friend’s stepfather, as then-17-year-old Rittenhouse was too young to purchase it.
This is the essence of PILPUL misdirection: who bought the Gun, who possessed the Gun, why was the Gun in someone else’s house?
Who knows?
Who cares?
It is indisputable that the Gun was used by an underage Rittenhouse, as he went on a White Supremacy shooting spree, falsely claiming self-defense in spite of his obvious aggression as a self-anointed patrolman:
https://time.com/6120607/kyle-rittenhouse-self-defense/
But the idea of the Weiss PILPUL is to blow smoke in our faces and Gaslight us so that we miss the main legal point of the shootings, their motivation, and the psychological aspect of the teen vigilante.
The Common Sense fact here would ask why all the cloak-and-dagger mystery enshrouding this Gun?
It seems that the Gun is itself a PILPUL!
The New York Times also published a piece detailing the Gun issue – a week prior to the Weiss post – that refutes her attacks on the media:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/us/rittenhouse-trial-semiautomatic-rifle.html
The fact is that the Gun was purchased illegally, it was brought from Illinois to Wisconsin, and was used in the shooting to kill without a care in the world.
Just like an Alt-Right videogame.
This point on the legality of the Gun is disputed by the NRA “logic” that Weiss and Schroeder have used:
As it stands, there is enough to deal with without addressing the sickness that is the NRA.
After all, we have just looked at the Second Amendment, which, as Justice Warren Burger properly noted, has nothing to do with private gun ownership:
That the Gun was used by a minor is the only thing that matters in a legal sense. The rest is PILPUL hot air.
He was out there looking for a fight, and he got one: He killed two people and severely wounded a third.
We have all seen the pictures of Rittenhouse acting the part of Rambo:
https://twitter.com/kwamerose/status/1298670963912052739
Again, the duck analogy applies when we use our Common Sense rather than PILPUL Tikvah Da’as Torah trickery.
The Second Amendment gives the right for the government to use lethal force to protect its citizens.
It does not allow its citizens to act as their own private militias or to deputize themselves.
Weiss ignores the many current examples of White Supremacist racism because it fits her Trumpist narrative; a narrative that has become ubiquitous in Tikvahworld.
I would think that such a deplorable stance helps raise money from the Trumpscum Jews that are the majority in Tikvahworld.
The Law applies to QAnon SHAMAN, as it applies to Trumpscum Paul Gosar and his taxpayer-funded lethal videos:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/18/politics/trump-gosar-endorsement/index.html
As it applies to Child Molester Matt Gaetz, who very generously offered Rittenhouse a job as a Congressional intern because of his love of Trump:
https://news.yahoo.com/matt-gaetz-says-open-hiring-125036096.html
Moving from Rittenhouse and the White Supremacy that is now endemic to The Tikvah Fund and to Weiss and her Rufo Institute allies, I would like to close with a discussion of Abortion and the ongoing Federalist Society attempt to turn back Roe.
The following articles from The Witherspoon Institute show us the official Tikvah position on the matter:
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2021/11/79084/
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2021/11/79124/
I recently posted an article from the journal Zeramim that presents the position of Sephardic Rabbi Yehuda ibn Ayyash that refutes the Tikvah position in no uncertain terms:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UdaevoTLfXjrkmOHfVfij1CCzBYhK2A_7vKh5aCodUU/edit
I point to the following bit of TOSFOS PILPUL from the Witherspoon article:
With significant changes to abortion jurisprudence probably on the horizon as the Supreme Court has agreed to consider overturning Roe this year, it is worth exploring why such fears are baseless. But even more important, it is imperative to explain why overturning Roe is an important and positive development for American Jews—regardless of their convictions regarding abortion. American Jews should feel reassured by an examination of the full and accurate picture of the broader consequences of overturning Roe, the benefits of which especially redound to the advantage of religious minorities.
As we have seen, PILPUL relies on the assertion of a fixed, immutable point which is then “proven” by the “evidence” that follows.
Here the idea is that Jews have nothing to worry about from a possible reversal on Roe; in fact, it is actually beneficial to us!
First, that is not at all a coherent legal point.
The idea is to avoid, in the antinomian manner, the actual mechanics of the Law and how it is that a SCOTUS ruling can be reversed by the new Christian Theocracy that controls the Court, and which has turned it into a partisan joke:
Next, the Tikvah authors of the article attack Jewish Law itself as being spurious or irrelevant:
Some Jewish groups have argued that Roe must be upheld because, in some instances, Jewish women might have a religious obligation to have an abortion. As one of us has previously written on this site, “there is widespread acceptance,” even among Jews who take a more restrictive view of the matter, “that abortions are allowed when necessary to save a mother’s life.” Some Jews regard this allowance as a requirement, which gives rise to a religious obligation to have an abortion in some rare circumstances. As is true in many instances, Judaism does not speak with one voice on this issue. The authors’ beliefs are summarized in the article linked above, but we do not seek here merely to address people who share those views. Instead, we address those who believe that Judaism requires abortion to save a mother’s life or to protect her health, and that such a requirement necessitates the near-unlimited right to abortion provided by Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The idea again is to blow smoke in our faces, in order to undermine the integrity of the Law as understood by rabbis such as Ibn Ayyash.
The article goes on to further negate legal principles by making what is in effect an Anti-Semitic argument:
States with large Jewish populations such as New York, New Jersey, and California are not likely to restrict abortion any more than they currently do. As long as majorities in those states support liberalized abortion policies, abortion will remain accessible. In fact, some of those states have already passed laws spelling out how they will protect access to abortion if Roe is reversed. Jewish women who live in those states or who could readily travel to those states would not find their access to abortion restricted merely because Roe was reversed.
All Jews live on the two coasts, so what happens in Texas is not relevant to them!
We already know that not all women can afford to travel to pro-Abortion states to receive their constitutional rights that will surely be taken away by Rapist Kavanaugh, Whore of Trump Coney Barrett, and Pornographer Thomas:
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/02/texas-abortion-out-of-state-people-of-color/
But, of course, all Jewish women are rich!
And let us not forget that old Confederate stand-by: States’ Rights:
While proponents of a right to abortion may dislike the fact that other communities choose to restrict abortion, the principles of federalism and subsidiarity may actually provide them opportunities to obtain a more secure and expansive right in their own communities. When such a right is democratically enacted, it is not subject to the whims of a nine-member Court whose appointees, empowered by Roe to set abortion policy, are as likely to curb abortion rights as they are to expand them.
But my favorite part of the PILPUL has to do with the authors’ rejection that the Roe issue is related to Christian Theocracy:
Finally, the claim that anti-abortion legislation can only be rooted in a Christian understanding of human life is specious. Embryology textbooks consistently explain that a distinct living human organism comes into existence at conception. It is completely rational using purely secular logic, and within the realm of regular state powers, for a state to choose to protect that human life. Legislators and abortion opponents consistently explain their interest in restricting abortion in secular terms. Jewish pro-choice advocates are free to argue that their understanding of science or religion leads them to believe that abortion is justified, but they deserve little credence when they attempt to rewrite the arguments of their opposition.
The passage on “Embryology Textbooks” provides a link – not to actual books or science, but to an article by Robert George!
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20028162.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A77a1c5de8805063a28e3a96dcde8def4
In my article on Bari Weiss ally and proud supporter of CHABAD and Opus Dei Joshua Katz, I refer to George and his radical Catholic First Things propaganda:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yYo3tU1N7bAizRhL-h9bGqlAIkIfLTK2PWxc_F2r0kg/edit
I am not sure if he is an impartial observer:
ROE MUST GO!
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/07/roe-must-go
ROE WILL GO!
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/10/roe-will-go
Indeed, it is all circular reasoning.
It is not about science, nor is it about the Law.
It is in fact all about Christian Theocracy, because the legal status of an embryo is not a matter of what we feel but what our legal traditions teach us.
And, at least as Judaism is concerned, life begins at birth and not conception:
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-beginning-of-life-in-judaism/
None of this should be relevant for SCOTUS, which has an obligation to respect precedent; a precedent that was fought for by many activists who devoted their lives to protect the hard-won right:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/call-action-activists-who-fought-roe-v-wade-are-back-n1028631
Those activists, like those who continue to fight for Black Civil Rights in the wake of Reconstruction amendments and the much-needed 1964 reinstitution of those important laws, are now being forced to re-litigate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Amendments
https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/vote-suppression
As I have shown in quite exhaustive detail, The Tikvah Fund cabal has sought to use the Ashkenazi antinomian tradition of PILPUL in order to support what is in effect the Trump Alt-Right agenda, with its blatant racism and real threats of violence.
This disrespect for the Rule of Law is in stark contrast with the traditional stand of the Conservative Right, with its disdain for legal loopholes and lawyers’ tricks to get defendants off the hook.
Indeed, as we have so clearly seen from the 1/6 Insurrection and from the Rittenhouse trial, it is clear that the Rule of Law is irrelevant for Conservatives. It is all one big scam to Troll the Libs. We are indeed likely to see more of this type of racist vigilantism in the wake of the Rittenhouse acquittal.
In such a world Black Lives do indeed not Matter, as Whites are free to kill whoever they claim is threatening them, without concern for the Law.
Bari Weiss and Alana Newhouse have very expeditiously loaded up on PILPUL antinomianism in order to adhere to the strict Tikvah Neo-Con Straussian fundraising protocol, which has now sadly deteriorated into Trump Anarchy, promoting the kind of lawless Authoritarian Fascism that Timothy Snyder has so eloquently inveighed against.
As Sephardim have understood for so long, though many of them do not understand it any more, the Ashkenazi Tosafist tradition serves to undermine a civil society and its need to have laws applied equally and equitably in a way that protects all of us, rather than a smug elite that would relegate us to lives of oppression and misery under their Fascist Da’as Torah thumbs.
David Shasha
The Media's Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse
By: Bari Weiss
Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.
It turns out that account was mostly wrong.
Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.
This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.
Take this, for instance, from CNN:
So, too, this statement posted by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, which perfectly summarizes what was, until the vertigo-inducing trial, the mainstream position on the matter.
https://twitter.com/AyannaPressley/status/1298780540431224832
But just as in the cases of Covington Catholic’s Nick Sandmann or Jussie Smollet or the “Russia-collusion” narrative, almost none of the details holding up that politically convenient position (boys in MAGA hats are bigoted; racism is as much a blight as it has always been; Trump conspired with Putin) were true.
Take each in turn:
First, the idea that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist.
There was zero evidence that Rittenhouse was connected to white supremacist groups at the time of the shooting. He was a Trump supporter, yes, though he wasn’t old enough to vote. He was an admirer of police and firefighters, also true. He was a lifeguard. He’d been part of a “police explorer” program, and was also a firefighter/EMT cadet with the fire department in Antioch, Illinois, where he lived with his mom and two sisters.
That Rittenhouse had no connection to Kenosha.
In addition to having a job in Kenosha, Rittenhouse testified that much of his family lived there: his father, his grandma, his aunt and uncle, and his cousins. He also testified that on the morning of the shootings, he went downtown with his sister and friends to see the damage done by rioting the night before, and spent about two hours cleaning graffiti off of the local high school.
That Rittenhouse drove across state lines with a gun that night to oppose the protests.
This was a line that we heard constantly—never mind that Antioch, Illinois, is about 20 miles from Kenosha, Wisconsin. As the trial has shown, Kyle Rittenhouse did not travel to Kenosha to oppose protesters. He testified under oath that he had traveled to Kenosha for his job the night before the shootings, and was staying at a friend’s house.
So what about the gun?
Rittenhouse didn’t bring the gun to Kenosha. The gun was purchased for Rittenhouse months earlier by a friend and stored in Kenosha at the home of that friend’s stepfather, as then-17-year-old Rittenhouse was too young to purchase it.
But it was illegal for him to even have the gun given that he wasn’t yet 18 years old, right?
That is not true. Under Wisconsin law, 17-year-olds are prohibited from carrying rifles only if they are short-barreled. The weapon Rittenhouse was carrying was not short-barreled. Which is why, during closing arguments, the court threw out the charge.
He was out there looking for a fight, and he got one: He killed two people and severely wounded a third.
Unless there’s evidence we haven’t seen, there’s no clear indication that Rittenhouse sought to kill anyone. What we know is that he showed up with a first aid kit and an AR-15-style rifle. Video evidence, and Rittenhouse’s own testimony, indicates that he offered medical assistance to protestors and ran with a fire extinguisher to try to put out fires—and that later, after being pursued, he killed two people, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and severely wounded a third. Both video evidence and the only living person that Rittenhouse shot that night, Gaige Grosskreutz, undermined the idea that Rittenhouse was simply an aggressor looking for a fight. During cross examination Grosskreutz acknowledged that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz had pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse. Here’s how it went down:
Prosecutor: When you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right?
Grosskreutz: Correct.
Prosecutor: It wasn't until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun—now your hand’s down pointed at him—that he fired, right?
Grosskreutz: Correct.
Had the people Rittenhouse shot, as Pressley claims, “assembled to affirm the value, dignity, and worth of Black lives”?
Watch this video of Joseph Rosenbaum and ask yourself if that is how you would describe this person:
Rosenbaum, 36, had spent years of his life in prison because he was a convicted sex offender. The morning he was killed, Rosenbaum was released from a Milwaukee hospital where he had been admitted after a suicide attempt. Ryan Balch, another witness for the prosecution, testified that Rosenbaum threatened both Balch and Rittenhouse saying, “If I catch you guys alone tonight, I’m gonna fucking kill you.”
In the aftermath of the media frenzy around the Covington Catholic story at least there were some mea culpas from the mainstream press, some sense of shame, some desire to get the egg off their faces. But with rare exception it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting that here.
Here was Joe Scarborough of MSNBC on Friday, as the trial was wrapping up:
“Here we have a 17-year-old kid, underage, said he bought an AR-15 because he thought it was cool. He drove across state -- had his mother drive him across state lines—he appointed himself a militia member, he goes around and he ends up unloading, what, sixty rounds?”
Here is Bakari Sellers on CNN:
https://twitter.com/0rf/status/1460795152516194311
Here is Congresswoman Cori Bush on Monday:
https://twitter.com/CoriBush/status/1460335492415819786
Ferguson’s police chief, Frank McCall, says that he is not aware of any such thing happening. Indeed, the idea that white supremacists hid behind a hill and shot at Bush and her fellow protestors in Ferguson — and that this somehow went completely uncovered until now —sounds a bit like the false claim that the government intentionally blew up the levees in the Ninth Ward during Katrina. Or that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax. Only this is a statement from a sitting member of the United States Congress. It’s Qanon made respectable.
To admit that the press, in the main, got just about every key fact in the Rittenhouse case wrong — that he crossed state lines with a gun, that he had the gun illegally, that he had no connection to Kenosha, that he was connected to white supremacist groups — has nothing to do with whether Kyle Rittenhouse should have gone to Kenosha that day. It has nothing to do with where one stands on the question of open carry. (I am opposed). Or whether or not a teenager should be allowed to walk around with a semiautomatic rifle. (I find it baffling that this is legal.)
No teenager should have been walking around the chaos in Kenosha with a semiautomatic rifle that night. Still, doing so does not forfeit your right to self-defense.
Rittenhouse and his violent acts (justified or unjustified) are tragic. But it is a tragedy that could have been avoided. We saw the night of August 25 what can occur when the state fails or refuses to do what it is uniquely charged to do: maintain the rule of law.
It did not help that in many places last summer, cities and police forces indicated or explicitly said they wouldn’t defend people’s property from destruction or burglary during the unrest. And it didn’t help our understanding of what transpired on August 25 that we were told repeatedly by national media outlets that there weren’t riots, and there wasn’t violence in Kenosha that night until Kyle Rittenhouse discharged his weapon. We could all see the blocks of burning buildings with our own eyes.
To acknowledge the facts of what happened that night is not political. It is simply to acknowledge reality. It is to say that facts are still facts and that lies are lies. It is to insist that mob justice is not justice. It is to say that media consensus is not the equivalent of due process. And that pretending otherwise for the sake of political expediency is why the National Guard is now standing watch in Kenosha, bracing for violence once again in the anticipation of a verdict that for many, has already been decided.
Today on Honestly, a conversation with Jesse Singal, one of the independent journalists who got this story right, about why so many got it so wrong:
From Common Sense with Bari Weiss, November 17, 2021
The Truth About Kyle Rittenhouse’s Gun
By: Farhad Manjoo
I’ve spent the past couple of weeks riveted by the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the white teenager who shot and killed two people and injured a third during a night of Black Lives Matter protests and civil unrest in Kenosha, Wis., last year.
It was a turbulent case. For many days the prosecution was on the ropes — some of the state’s witnesses seemed to bolster the defense’s case that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, while the crotchety judge frequently sided with the defense and blew up at prosecutors. After Rittenhouse began sobbing on the stand last week, it looked as if he’d be certain to walk.
But on Monday, the lead prosecutor, Thomas Binger, offered a meticulously documented closing argument that deftly summarized all the ways Rittenhouse acted unlawfully. We’ll see if the jury buys it, but to me, Binger’s argument had a power beyond this case.
That’s because it cleverly unraveled some of the foundational tenets of gun advocacy: That guns are effective and necessary weapons of self-defense. That without them, lawlessness and tyranny would prevail. And that in the right hands — in the hands of the “good guys” — guns promote public safety rather than destroy it.
In the Rittenhouse case, none of that was true. At every turn that night, Rittenhouse’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle made things worse, ratcheting up danger rather than quelling it. The gun transformed situations that might have ended in black eyes and broken bones into ones that ended with corpses in the street. And Rittenhouse’s gun was not just a danger to rival protesters. According to his own defense, the gun posed a grave threat to Rittenhouse himself — he said he feared being overpowered and then shot with his own weapon.
This is self-defense as circular reasoning: Rittenhouse says he carried a rifle in order to guarantee his safety during a violent protest. He was forced to shoot at four people when his life and the lives of other people were threatened, he says. What was he protecting everyone from? The gun strapped to his own body, the one he’d brought to keep everyone safe.
The shootings took place more than a year ago, in the pre-election, post-George Floyd, Covid-soaked summer of 2020. Near the end of August, a Kenosha police officer shot a Black man named Jacob Blake, leaving him partly paralyzed. The small city erupted in large protests that quickly turned violent and riotous.
The scene on the night of Aug. 25, 2020, had the makings of a classic gun-rights fantasy. An unruly mob had descended on private businesses. One such business was Car Source, an auto dealership with three locations in Kenosha. Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time and a resident of Illinois (his father lived in Kenosha), said he had come with a friend to protect Car Source on the invitation of the owner. He said he’d chosen a military-style rifle over a pistol because he believed he could not legally possess a pistol and, he conceded, in part because the rifle “looked cool.”
By the time Rittenhouse arrived, more than a hundred vehicles on a sales lot owned by Car Source had been set on fire. There were burning trash cans on the streets. Gunfire rang out often. Officers in riot gear and armed with tear gas were in control of much of the city, but there were sections where the police pulled back. It was here that the people with rifles took a stand against what they saw as a mob.
But as many witnesses testified, the rifles weren’t very helpful at all. Rittenhouse and others in his group said they didn’t intend to kill people that night; the main reason they brought the big guns, they said, was to deter attacks. That backfired. The guns seemed to invite conflict. Drew Hernandez, a right-wing internet personality who was covering the demonstrations, testified that when “rioters” spotted the men with guns, “they immediately attempted to agitate them, to try and start some conflict with them.”
Later that night, Rittenhouse left the car dealership and his armed peers and found himself in a crowd of strangers he suspected might be hostile to him. The prosecution says the killing began when Rittenhouse pointed his gun at Joseph Rosenbaum, an unarmed, 36-year-old protester, prompting Rosenbaum to run after him in an effort to stop a potential shooting. Rittenhouse denies provoking the attack; he says that Rosenbaum and another man, Joshua Ziminski, who was armed with a handgun, “ambushed” him, and chased him when he tried to run away.
Rittenhouse pointed his gun at Rosenbaum, but the man kept coming. In order to claim self-defense as a justification for shooting Rosenbaum, Rittenhouse had to have believed that Rosenbaum posed an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to him. Binger asked Rittenhouse how he could have believed that — Rosenbaum “didn’t have any weapon of any kind, correct?”
“Other than him grabbing my gun, no,” he answered.
It’s a telling response — Rittenhouse’s main worry was his own firearm. As Rosenbaum closed in, Rittenhouse said it became clear to him that Rosenbaum wanted to take the rifle — and if he got it, Rittenhouse said, he would have “killed me with it and probably killed more people.” Rittenhouse fired four shots in quick succession, killing Rosenbaum, just as he said it seemed that Rosenbaum lunged for the weapon.
Chaos ensued. Rittenhouse ran, and people who had just seen him shoot Rosenbaum begin to go after him. At some point Rittenhouse stumbled, and while he lay on the road, an unidentified man jumped and kicked him in the head. Rittenhouse shot at “jump kick man” — as he was often called during the trial — but missed. A 26-year-old named Anthony Huber attempted to smash his skateboard on Rittenhouse’s head. Rittenhouse shot Huber in the chest. He died.
Finally, Rittenhouse was met by Gaige Grosskreutz, an E.M.T. who testified he firmly believed in the right to bear arms and prepared for that night like any other: “It’s keys, phone, wallet, gun.”
Grosskreutz said he had rushed to the scene to provide medical help; as he ran, he’d drawn his own gun, thinking that Rittenhouse was an “active shooter.” Rittenhouse and Grosskreutz squared up, face to face, each lethally armed. But Grosskreutz hesitated. After pointing his gun at Rittenhouse, he testified, he decided that he could not take another human’s life. Rittenhouse had no such qualms. He fired, hitting Grosskreutz in his right biceps.
After all this mayhem, all this death, what use were the guns that night?
The guns failed to deter attacks against their owners. According to the defense, Rittenhouse’s gun was a reason Rosenbaum pursued him. And Grosskreutz’s gun was the reason Rittenhouse shot him.
The guns failed any notion of proportionality or moderation. Prosecutors pointed out that Rittenhouse quickly fired four shots at Rosenbaum. Even if Rittenhouse felt genuinely threatened by Rosenbaum, why hadn’t Rittenhouse stopped shooting after the first shot, which could have immobilized Rosenbaum without killing him? (A defense “use of force” expert implied that the gun shot too quickly for him to pause and reassess the threat between shots.)
If you believe Rittenhouse’s defense, the gun also failed at a more basic level, that of ordinary product safety. Rittenhouse had his rifle strapped to his body but was still worried that it could be taken from him. How useful is a gun that can be pulled away from you by a guy who is also hitting you with a skateboard?
And finally, the guns failed at their most vaunted purpose, helping the good guys fight the bad guys. If Rittenhouse was your good guy, what good did his gun do him? How did it help anyone in the community he was trying to protect? It got two people killed, one person injured, and Rittenhouse himself facing charges of homicide.
On the other hand, it looked cool.
From The New York Times, November 18, 2021
From Kyle Rittenhouse to Steve Bannon, the Brazenness of White Men
By: Charles M. Blow
There is quite the convergence at the moment of race and justice as cases featuring white male defendants accused of everything from murder to insurrection dominate news coverage.
There is a virtual pageant of privilege as the country waits to see if our system of justice will deal as severely and unsparingly with these men as it has with others who were not white men.
All the cases are different, of course. Some are being adjudicated in the state courts, others in federal. Some have proceeded to sentencing, while others remain at the charging or trial stage. But the optics are somewhat consistent.
In the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year old jogger who was chased and killed in a Georgia suburb, the jury is almost entirely white. As The New York Times has pointed out, “The jury, which is made up of residents from Glynn County, where more than a quarter of the population is Black, includes 11 white people and one Black person.”
The defense has even complained about the presence of Black pastors supporting Arbery’s family in the courtroom. This week, one defense lawyer tried to get the civil rights icon Jesse Jackson kicked out of the courtroom, saying:
Your honor, I would submit, with all respect to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, that this is no different than bringing in police officers or uniformed prison guards in a small town where a young Black man has been accused of assaulting a law enforcement officer or corrections officer.
The defense even called for a mistrial because of the presence of these preachers, but the judge dismissed the motion and called the defense’s comments about Black preachers “reprehensible.”
In the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three protesters in Kenosha, Wis., killing two and injuring the third, the judge has acted more like a protective guardian watching over the accused than a dispassionate magistrate.
When the jury was selected, for instance, the judge denied requests to send questionnaires to the jury pool. He then wrapped up jury selection in a single day, even though what appears to be only one person of color had been selected. And he decreed that the men killed could not be called “victims” in his courtroom, but could potentially be called “rioters” or “looters.”
In the case of Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection shirtless wearing paint on his face and a fur pelt and horned helmet, he was sentenced Wednesday to 41 months in prison. But that was after his lawyer in February persuaded a federal judge to order the jail where Chansley was being detained to provide him with “a strict diet of organic meals,” according to The Times.
Steve Bannon, a former aide to Donald Trump, refused to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the insurrection. He has been indicted by a federal grand jury for contempt of Congress.
Republicans in Congress were livid about the indictment and vowed revenge. As Politico reported: “Within hours of the indictment, Trump’s top GOP allies were strongly signaling that a future GOP-led House would use the threat of criminal prosecution to extract testimony from Biden’s aides.”
Then there’s the case of Representative Paul Gosar, who posted an animated video of himself cutting the neck of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and holding a sword to President Biden’s face. Gosar refused to apologize. The House did censure him, but the vote was largely along party lines: Only two Republicans joined the Democrats.
Race hangs heavy over all these cases. They involve white vigilantes who stalked and killed a Black man, and a young man who killed two people at a protest that was in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. They involve white men who sought to overturn a fair election in which people of color secured a victory for Biden over a white nationalist president, and a white man who defied Congress to protect those white nationalists. And finally, they involve a man who posted a violent video about killing a woman of color in Congress.
We already know the outcome of two cases. I don’t know how the others will end. But in any case, the damage was already done by the original offending action.
They were all grand demonstrations of brazenness, by men behaving as if they were above the law, as if the law didn’t truly apply to them.
Some are being held accountable, but it is only because they were born in a country that gives white men passes others don’t get, that they were able to scoff at the rules without thinking that they would face any repercussions.
As others have noted, Trayvon Martin was 17 when he was killed, the same age Rittenhouse was when he did the killing. Martin was thugified; Rittenhouse is being infantilized. That, in one example, demonstrates for and against whom American justice is weighted.
From The New York Times, November 18, 2021
With a Hand from Trump, the Right Makes Rittenhouse a Cause Célèbre
By: Natasha Korecki and Christopher Cadelago
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/01/trump-rittenhouse-kenosha-support-407106
KENOSHA, Wis. — Kyle Rittenhouse was charged with homicide after shooting three protesters last week, two of them fatally.
But on Tuesday, Trump supporters had their own way to describe the 17-year-old from Illinois.
They called him a patriot. They called him a hero. They thanked him for defending the city.
Alan Endries was among them. When asked what spurred him to make the 40-mile drive from Milwaukee for President Donald Trump’s visit to Kenosha on Tuesday, he said he felt empathy for Rittenhouse. “I just feel bad for that 17-year-old.”
“He’s a hero. He stuck up for the population, for property owners,” Endries said. “He didn’t come up here just to shoot people. He came up here to defend himself.”
The defense of Rittenhouse by Trump backers reflects the chasm that’s opened across the nation in the wake of deadly violence in Kenosha and Portland, Ore. Activists on the left rushed to defend Jacob Blake, a Black man shot seven times in the back by a white police officer, launching a series of demonstrations protesting what they call systemic racism by police.
But many people on the right see a different dominant narrative from Kenosha: A teen who was wrongly charged with homicide and should be lionized. Online crowdfunding petitions have sprouted, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of Rittenhouse. And he's gotten a hand from the president himself, who refused this week to denounce the teen’s actions.
The divisions were on full display Tuesday in Wisconsin, one of the most pivotal swing states in the country. During Trump’s visit, his supporters and Black Lives Matter activists clashed in the street along the main government complex near downtown, trading chants of “All Lives Matter” and “Black Lives Matter.”
BLM activists held signs and voiced support for Blake, whose shooting prompted both peaceful protests and destructive riots. Meantime, more than a dozen Trump supporters interviewed Tuesday questioned the case against Rittenhouse, accusing the media of clouding the facts in the case.
Rittenhouse, wielding a military-style weapon that he could not legally carry at his age, shot three protesters, killing two of them. His attorney has said Rittenhouse acted in self-defense.
Rittenhouse was charged as an adult with six criminal counts, including two counts of first-degree murder, for shootings that killed two men, Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and injured a third. In videos of the incidents, Rittenhouse was pursued before he fired his weapon. The criminal complaint filed against Rittenhouse states Rosenbaum threw a plastic bag at him. The footage also shows Huber trying to hit Rittenhouse before he was shot in the chest, perforating his heart, aorta, pulmonary artery and right lung, according to authorities.
“You shouldn’t put a gun in a child’s hand,” Shawn Lyons, a Trump supporter from nearby Burlington, said. “But it was self-defense, definitely. I think we could have avoided the whole thing if we had the National Guard protecting Kenosha at the time instead of children wondering how their family’s business is going to do it with all the mobs.”
“Free him. Free Kyle,” said another man who said he was a Kenosha resident but declined to provide his full name. “He was here to protect us.”
His friend agreed. “He’s a patriot, he was protecting people," said the man, who also declined to give his name. "The people out there are trying to make him look bad. He shot some people — that’s bad. He killed two people, that’s bad, I understand that. But that’s our right as American people, to protect ourselves, right?”
Rittenhouse’s interactions with police have drawn scrutiny, particularly when compared with the swift reactions of officers to Black suspects.
J.A. Moore, a Biden supporter and South Carolina lawmaker whose sister was one of nine Black congregants killed at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015, recalled how officers brought fast food to the shooter, Dylann Roof. Moore and others compared that with Kenosha police providing water to Rittenhouse and thanking his armed group just before the shooting last week.
“If he was Black, he would be a ‘thug.’ But because he’s white, he’s a ‘young man,'” Moore said of how Rittenhouse has been portrayed. “He’s not a young man. He’s a murderer.”
Rittenhouse has become a cause célèbre on the right. Shortly after the shootings, someone tweeted they wanted Rittenhouse to be their bodyguard. Ann Coulter tweeted back that she wanted the teen to be “my president.” Aubrey Huff, a former baseball player for the San Francisco Giants, hailed him as a “national treasure.”
And Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, quickly dedicated time on his program to the Rittenhouse story. Carlson drew fierce backlash when he seemed to justify the shootings by questioning why anybody would be surprised that “17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”
Carlson was slammed by Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter died in the Parkland, Fla. school shooting in 2018, while others urged his Fox News advertisers to boycott the show.
The rush to defend Rittenhouse prompted a Chicago Sun-Times columnist to ask, "How does a teenage vigilante get to be the hero?"
But right-wing activists and Trump supporters began seizing on new information, including a detailed sequence of the period leading up to the shootings published by The New York Times, to argue that Rittenhouse had no choice but to defend himself. In his first remarks about Rittenhouse, Trump on Monday refused to condemn the shootings and seemed to indicate that they may have been warranted. He also "liked" a tweet offering support for Rittenhouse.
“He needs to be in jail,” said Jayden Brown, a Kenosha resident who is Black.
Bryan Lanza, who worked on the 2016 campaign and remains close to the White House, lauded Trump’s trip to Kenosha and said the celebration of Rittenhouse helps drive a narrative around the president that’s helpful to energizing supporters.
“The facts will play out,” Lanza said. “What plays in the ‘burbs is that you have the right to defend yourself and there’s no district attorney or attorney general that can take that away from you. If the facts bear out that he had a gun for safety reasons and used it to defend himself because he was attacked, that’s a pretty strong case to make.”
But other Republicans think Trump’s refusal to denounce Rittenhouse — including by liking a tweet that said, “Kyle Rittenhouse is a good example of why I decided to vote for Trump” — could backfire. GOP strategist Rob Stutzman said he thinks the rush to support Rittenhouse will repel key segments of voters the president needs.
“The image of a dopey delusional kid with an AR-15 isn’t comforting to the ‘burbs,” Stutzman said. “The type of weapon he had I think influences those perceptions.”
Rittenhouse’s attorneys have portrayed him as a “good kid” who works as a lifeguard, saw that Kenosha was burning, and spoke with a Kenosha business owner before traveling there to help stand guard.
The lawyers did not respond Tuesday to a request for comment. But in previous statements and cable interviews, they said Rittenhouse’s gun never crossed state lines and was legal in Wisconsin, an open-carry state.
Joe Biden has not spoken in-depth about Rittenhouse, though he said last week he was concerned about armed militias. In a statement Monday after Trump’s news conference, Biden criticized the president for refusing to repudiate the Kenosha shootings.
“He is too weak, too scared of the hatred he has stirred to put an end to it,” Biden said. He urged Trump to join him in saying “violence is wrong, period. No matter who does it, no matter what political affiliation they have. Period.”
From Politico, September 1, 2020
The Lionization of Kyle Rittenhouse by the Right
By: Meridith McGraw
A jury in Wisconsin found 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty on Friday for shooting and killing two men, and wounding a third, during the riots in Kenosha in the summer of 2020.
But well before he was acquitted on the five counts he faced, Rittenhouse had found absolution elsewhere. A wide swath of conservatives had turned his case into an example of a social justice system run amok and Rittenhouse himself into an avatar of Second Amendment virtuosity. They treated the trial outcome as vindication, perhaps divine.
“This case has veins that go to every major political issue and contemporary political issue that we are facing as a nation right now,” said a spokesperson for the Rittenhouse family outside the courthouse in Wisconsin. “We are not going anywhere.”
Since Rittenhouse’s arrest, legal defense funds have been formed in his name, right-wing commentators have blasted media coverage for allegedly mishandling facts of the case, memes depicting Rittenhouse as a hero — or even Captain America — have cropped up on Twitter, and T-shirts have been made with the silhouette of Rittenhouse shooting his gun with the words, “Don’t Tread on Me,” and “Free Kyle.” Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz offered Rittenhouse an internship in Congress if acquitted.
Republican strategist Gregg Keller said he could see a future in which Rittenhouse becomes a featured speaker at the conservative confabs where activists congregate. A CPAC invitation “would not surprise me. ... I think there will be every effort made to turn him into conservative hero,” Keller said. “I think given the situation he found himself in, what he did appears to be justified — but I would stop short of lionizing him as a hero, a 17-year-old kid who found himself in that situation.”
Neither CPAC nor Turning Point USA commented on any potential invitation to Rittenhouse.
The trial of Rittenhouse, who faced multiple felony charges for those fatal shootings in 2020, was the latest event to split a deeply divided country. According to a new Economist/YouGov poll, 76 percent of Democrats believed Rittenhouse should have been found guilty of homicide, while 65 percent Republicans did not. The left has painted the teen as reckless and even racist for going to Kenosha armed with an AR-15 as violence erupted in the wake of Jacob Blake’s shooting at the hands of the Kenosha police.
The right, in response, largely and boisterously rallied around Rittenhouse. They argued that the media had mischaracterized his motives and the specifics of the case, largely by dismissing his claims that he feared for his life, was acting in self-defense, and that the men killed were white. Fox News commentators like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have dedicated nightly monologues to blasting media coverage of the Rittenhouse trial and defending the teen.
"This is what happens when powerful people in the media, in Washington, in the swamp … rush to judgment,” Hannity said. “And sadly, it happens every single time over and over again [with] the same cast of characters. The media mob … get it wrong and innocent people … pay the price."
Those same commentators seized on a Joe Biden campaign tweet from over a year ago casting Rittenhouse as a white supremacist. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she wouldn't comment on an ongoing trial or the president’s previous words. She also did not comment immediately on the verdict.
The totality of developments led conservatives to not just rally to Rittenhouse’s defense but portray him as a victim of a political hit job.
“Kyle is clearly innocent,” conservative activist Charlie Kirk told POLITICO. “But this trial is about more than just Kyle. It’s about the rule of law, it’s about the Constitution, the 2nd Amendment, and the right to defend yourself when a violent mob is attacking you. It’s about whether an American citizen will be afforded an impartial jury of their peers that won’t cow to threats of riots if they acquit an innocent man.”
Kirk announced he would be interviewing Rittenhouse for his radio show and podcast in the coming days.
Rittenhouse’s lionization on the right has not been universal. Some conservatives recoiled at the idea that they were celebrating, what they saw as, vigilantism. They have argued it is “dangerous” to paint Rittenhouse as anything but a teen whose reckless behavior resulted in the deaths of two men, and they have cautioned that while Rittenhouse may have acted in self-defense, killings are still morally wrong.
“When you turn a foolish young man into a hero, you’ll see more foolish young men try to emulate his example,” wrote conservative commentator David French in The Atlantic. “And although the state should not permit rioters to run rampant in America’s streets, random groups of armed Americans are utterly incapable of imposing order themselves, and any effort to do so can lead to greater death and carnage.”
But those voices have been in the minority. More common has been a refrain that Rittenhouse has been a victim of media hysteria like others before him. Kirk pointed to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Nick Sandmann, the Kentucky teen falsely accused of trying to intimidate a Native American drummer at the Lincoln Memorial, as similar cases of media “smear jobs.”
Sandmann’s case, in particular, looks instructive for Rittenhouse. He sued CNN and The Washington Post for defamation and became a cause célèbre on the right for it. The lawsuits were settled and Sandmann was eventually invited to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention, where he warned about “cancel culture.” In the days before the Rittenhouse verdict, he penned a Daily Mail op-ed in which he encouraged the 18-year-old to sue for defamation. “Give it a shot and hold the media accountable,” Sandmann wrote.
From Politico, November 19, 2021