John Kass on Kyle Rittenhouse

See, "If only Kyle Rittenhouse could ask Biden and media: “Have you no sense of decency?”":

A jury has loudly issued “not guilty” verdicts in the malignant political prosecution of Illinois teenager Kyle Rittenhouse.

And now, what next?

What happens to corporate media—and its phony social justice warrior pundits–who savaged Rittenhouse and used race, when race had nothing to do with the case? They egged on the mob that screamed for the young man’s head on a pike, and now they’re still at it even after the verdict. They got their clicks out of him, and now they expect what, exactly? That we’ll forget how they howled even before the first witness testified?

And what of the politicians, from President Joe Biden on down, who falsely and maliciously defamed the teenager as a “white supremacist” before trial, though no such evidence was ever presented. Biden and company fed him to the mob, stepping on justice for votes.

Can you sue a president for libel, even a witless meat puppet like The Big Guy?

The thing is tragic. Two men are dead. I don’t consider him a hero. He’ll carry the stain of this forever. The kid should never have been there that night with his gun in the chaos of the riots in Kenosha. But he was there, as the governor and mayor pulled law enforcement back, leaving Kenosha’s streets to the violent.

And in America, for now at least, you can still defend your life when a mob tries to take it from you.

At least the jury got it right. They heard the evidence. They considered the testimony and acquitted Rittenhouse. He shot three men in self defense, one who tried to bash his head in with a skateboard, one who tried to take his gun, and the third who pointed a gun at him. Two of them died. And again, the mayor and the governor had withdrawn law enforcement, turning the streets over to the rioters who burned buildings that some fools in media called a “mostly peaceful” protest.

The prosecution revealed itself to be purely political, rushing to charge Rittenhouse before all the facts were in. And they failed.

If they’d succeeded, the kid who cried on the witness stand could have been sentenced to life in prison. How would he survive inside, a kid like that? He wouldn’t. A kid like that wouldn’t survive five minutes. The media that twisted and shaped the facts to suit a political narrative, and politicians who benefitted from narrative support would have moved on with their lives. And as they heaped glory on themselves, Rittenhouse, if put in a state prison, would be dead or wish he were dead every minute of his life.

So he’s free. I wonder if Biden and his Democrat and media allies ever read “The Ox-Bow Incident” that was made into a great classic movie in the early 1940s. It is about a posse that becomes righteous and lynches three innocent men. I suspect a few politicians and media read it, at least those who read more than their own Twitter feeds. And I’ve got to believe Biden read it, and watched the movie. He certainly was lucid enough back then to have handled it. Now, I don’t think so.

For years “The Ox-Bow Incident” was a favorite of liberal teachers and professors, who had lived through the McCarthy era and the “Red Scare,” when it was the political right making accusations and stoking anger through media. Sen. McCarthy’s political reign of terror ended as he hunted for Communists in the U.S. Army. Joseph N. Welch, the lawyer for the Army, confronted McCarthy at a public hearing with this withering question:

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Things change and parallels are conveniently forgotten or ignored. Because now it is the left that goes out hunting for witches in the Armed Forces. Democrats shut their mouths and don’t dare ask the inquisitors if they’ve lost their sense of decency. Careerist generals, their fingers in the wind, have eagerly gone woke reading “White Fragility.”

Now that the jury has cleared Rittenhouse, mealy mouths pipe up and ask us to move past it all. I don’t want us to move past it. And I make a simple request: Don’t forget what politicians, prosecutors and media have done.

If you do want to forget what happened, to make things easier for yourself, at least be honest about the cost of forgetting. Forget, move past it, and you’re inviting the next mob to grab blind Lady Justice by the hair, strip off her blindfold, and bend her to their political will. And if their politics aren’t your politics, you will pay for it. That’s where America is now, lusting for tribal justice, not blind justice.

Imagine your son or daughter in the middle of it all, or yourself or your friends, your neighbors professing innocence and being drowned out by the political barking dogs. In this case, the Kenosha jury stood up, and refused to cave to pressure. They were deliberate. They were careful. They saw that prosecutorial overreach had little in common to the reality they’d lived through in Kenosha. But the next time? Who can say? Is that what you want for America?

If you don’t want to forget, all you have to do is Google your favorite social justice warrior pundit and search out what they said and wrote in August of 2020, when the streets of Kenosha were on fire.

I’d recommend that you also read Miranda Devine of The New York Post. She recently compiled a list of ten debunked lies that were told about Rittenhouse. Or read Bari Weis on Substack, “The Media’s Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse: Why so many got this story so wrong.”

The media got it wrong the way they’ve gotten other stories wrong, and for the same reasons, from media attacks on innocent Covington, Ky. teenager Nicholas Sandman, or media stubbornly pushing the false “Russia Collusion” narrative that is now completely falling apart. Will the Washington Post and the New York Times return their Pulitzer Prizes that were based on the Russia Hoax lie? They should, immediately. But they won’t...

Still more.