If there is a visit to purgatory awaiting people who stir up racial tensions unnecessarily, imagine how long that purgatorial interlude will last for lawyers who say race is more important than evidence in a murder trial.

Yet that’s what “criminal defense attorney” Page Pate, who is white, said on CNN as the jury deliberated in the case of Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooter Kyle Rittenhouse. He said this as a rebuttal to a correct and contrary statement from black former federal prosecutor Phillip Turner.