Even before the jury delivers its verdict in Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial, it’s clear that the wildly overcharged case against the then-17-year-old boy from Illinois should have never been brought. Multiple videos and witnesses corroborated Rittenhouse’s claim that he acted in self-defense when he shot three fellow white men during a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A remarkably political and unprofessional prosecution has confirmed that it is Rittenhouse, not those shot by him, who is the real victim of this unsavory saga.
At the same time, Rittenhouse is no hero.
Some victims succeed in righting the injustices done to them and become heroes in the process. Take Rose McGowan, who turned the pain of her horrific rape into the power of a cultural reset beginning with the #MeToo movement. Then, there are those who are adjacent to injustice, like Janice Dean, who used the loss of her in-laws to Andrew Cuomo’s deadly nursing home policy to help oust the New York governor from Albany.
But victimhood does not automatically confer heroism. That explains much of the hyperpartisan polarization framing the interpretation of Rittenhouse. Many on the Right have noted that despite Rittenhouse’s likely innocence of the criminal charges, he (then a minor) should never have gone to an active riot zone in defiance of a curfew. Others have lionized him as a vigilante hero who rose to combat lawlessness when law enforcement was being demonized and defanged.
The cognitive dissonance is perhaps even more galling on the Left, where the notion that Rittenhouse was foolish and immature must be reconciled with the baseless claim that he’s also some kind of white supremacist bogeyman artificially shedding “white tears.” Never mind that all three people he shot were white.
But, sometimes, a victim is just a victim. That’s Rittenhouse.
He was a victim of a social media mob that painted him as a racist killer without waiting for evidence. He was a victim of politicians who defamed him as a white supremacist (even if he is found guilty, there would be no evidence for that) for electoral gain. Currently, he is the victim of a justice system that chose to try him for murder charges that the prosecution must have known would never be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. That same system refuses to prosecute Jacob Blake, whose shooting sparked the riots, with the sexual assault charge that would bring some measure of justice for the black woman he had allegedly abused.
Rittenhouse is not a hero. He does not have to be. That he was wrongly victimized for over a year by every echelon of power ought to be enough to attract our sympathies.
