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Beware the "Leftists" defending Kyle Rittenhouse
(Kyle Rittenhouse on the stand during his homicide trial)
Many White media figures who’ve styled themselves as allies, and socialists, and anti-establishment, and a host of other virtuous things in recent years have even more recently during the trial of killer Kyle Rittenhouse shown themselves to have flimsy commitments to any type justice that doesn’t center Whiteness and White victimhood. The likes of popular internet figures Matt Orfalea (who produced a strange piece of misleading and bald propaganda in favor of Kyle Rittenhouse’s fraught claim that he was merely defending himself when he planned out shootings of shoplifters, looters, and civil rights protestors in advance, then executed it by driving across cities and state lines with an illegal assault rifle to join a White vigilante posse to do just that, and shot three and killed two) and Jimmy Dore who Monday evening agreed on a stream of his show that Rittenhouse was defending himself (video embedded in tweet, below).
As you can watch and listen to, above, Dore does everything from insult victims for their mental health struggles to mock protestors’ efforts to disarm Rittenhouse with their bare hands and a skateboard as “a weird way to try and de-arm someone” (I’m not sure what ways Dore believes would be acceptable for people to try and disarm a rifle-toting vigilante mob member) to say that “they [the protestors] caused this [Rittenhouse’s shootings and killings].”
This strikes me as really shallow, sensationalist thinking from Dore, the son of a police officer. A certain type of person - one well indoctrinated by propagandized cop perspectives, for example - will always start the clock on the Rittenhouse killings in a way that benefits the anti-civil rights protest vigilante mob member, who was enabled and encouraged by police officers on the scene.
Other types of people, those of us more keenly & personally attuned to the dangers of White males illegally taking up arms in vigilante mobs against civil rights protesters, will see that it was proper for the civil rights protesters to attack the armed vigilante member in self-defense.
An analog can be drawn from this issue to the way different people view those who fight back against U.S. military troops and private mercenaries who illegally occupy their countries and regions. If one believes that the civil rights protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin were defending themselves when they identified and attacked an armed member of a White vigilante posse, then one also likely holds a similarly sympathetic view of natives fighting back against troops who have invaded their Middle-East country, and might even consider them freedom-fighters.
If one, on the other hand, one believes that Rittenhouse planning out a trip across state lines to join a vigilante group and use assault weapons against civil rights protesters to protect private property, and then his using said firepower to kill those protesters when they objected to his armed presence, was an example of Rittenhouse merely defending himself, one probably also classifies Iraqis, Afghanis, and Syrians who fight against occupying forces as “insurgents.”
We’ve always had people defending mobs of armed, White men lynching civil rights protesters who’d gotten too dangerous for their tastes. That’s not new.
What is particularly sad in this moment is seeing lots of White people who still claim to be Leftists defend mobs of armed, White men lynching civil rights protesters who’d gotten too dangerous for their tastes. You can defend mobs of White men who arm and organize themselves to oppose civil rights protests in protection of private property and with the assistance of the carceral state, you just can’t do that while being a Leftist.
Unfortunately popular figures are attempting to straddle that line and in so doing shepherd a lot of unsuspecting scared, angry, White people, often young men, into Rightwing spaces and stances. These are the types of young White people who, due to the alienating forces of capitalism and the emergence of charismatic politicians like Bernie Sanders on the mainstream stage in the past half-decade, have found themselves interested in socialism and sympathetic to causes like civil rights but who also may have not ever been forced to reckon fully with history and so still process issues in largely de-historicized ways.
I suspect many of those people simply wanted what the likes of Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advertised; a Nordic style social democracy where some people get more public benefits paid for by colonialism and petroleum. It appears that a new type of faux-Leftists is emerging here in the U.S., as the term “socialism” grows more popular.
These Leftists will work hard to insist that they are for a host of connected liberatory battles, until and unless those battles get a little rough and messy. Then, the pretense of support for those fights will fade, while they yet insist on their Leftist bonafides because they want Elon Musk to pay more in taxes, or wish they didn’t have student debt or something.
There is, it seems, an emergent “White Power/Police State, but with dental care and tuition-free college” class of supposed Leftists. Perhaps such a situation would be an improvement on the status-quo, but only slightly, and certainly not in a way that will inspire people of color or actually dismantle underlying systems of oppression.