No matter what the jury decides in the case of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, there is no excuse for protests to get rowdy and absolutely no reason to manufacture racial grievances out of the killing of two white men by a white man.
It is a sad commentary on our culture that authorities feel obliged to deploy 500 National Guard troops to protect against possible rioting over a jury verdict. The deployment is wise, however, considering how destructive and violent riots have become in recent years.
In any society that affords constitutional protections for basic rights while providing true insistence that the “consent of the governed” is the ruling credo and practice, no protest should ever turn rowdy, much less feature violence against property or people. No one should interfere with the rights of innocents. Where there is a right to protest and the chance to right wrongs through appropriate, transparent legal and legislative processes, there also is the concomitant moral and legal mandate that protesters act lawfully.
In such circumstances, lawful authorities have not only the right but the duty to put down violence with greater force. The more force is illegally used, the more serious the force that authorities are justified in using to respond.
Again, this rule applies only in nations where the rule of law is firmly established — where all of the above criteria are honored. No authoritarian government merits such deference. But in the blessed land we inhabit, we must show, in the poet Tennyson’s words, “some reverence for the laws ourselves have made.” We must do so even if both Kyle Rittenhouse and those he shot did not appear to show such reverence.
In the Rittenhouse instance, the case and the law are both complicated. The judge repeatedly has made that clear. With poorly worded criminal statutes, some of which seem to partially contradict others, and with the circumstances involved having been fluid and inherently dangerous, the jury has a tough job. No matter what its determination, there is no reason to believe jurors are acting in bad faith or that the trial has been unfair.
Anyone who wants to peacefully hold up signs or chant slogans in response is welcome to do so. But not a single thing in the trial suggests the slightest reason for mayhem.
Particularly galling are the reports of Black Lives Matter protesters gathering at the courthouse. This is not a trial where race plays any part. Young Rittenhouse did not go into Kenosha on the night in question in order to fight black people. He went there, no matter how illegitimately, to “protect” businesses from outside agitators who were mostly radical, white, antifa types. All three people Rittenhouse shot were white. Black lives were not at stake.
As is always insisted by the organization Black Lives Matter and its legions of media sympathizers and social media “cancel-culture” avatars, black lives and black lives only are at issue in their particular social justice activism. Then again, maybe BLM should reconsider whether, despite its earlier insistence, it may really be true that all lives matter.
Lives and property alike are worth saving, and they should not be put at risk in the first place. Anyone in the United States who, without lawful authority, does otherwise, forfeits his own protection from lawful force.
