Kyle Rittenhouse and the hysteria of the elites. By Tom Slater.
America’s liberal elites are broken. They are now totally deranged and detached from reality. That’s become brutally clear in the past 24 hours.
Years of living in a fantasy world of politician correctness constructed for political advantage has left them unprepared for reality:
While we all knew it was coming, the collective media and political meltdown over the acquittal of 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse has revealed a ruling class so warped, so unprincipled, so governed by partisan prejudice, that it essentially lives in a parallel universe. …
Like Pauline Kael at the New Yorker magazine, who famously remarked in 1972,
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they [Nixon’s other supporters] are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.
Back to 2021, by which time Kael’s world has grown to encompass half of America:
As the trial wore on, it became all the more clear that the narrative cast about Rittenhouse and that night last August was utterly false. …
Much of the great and good doubled down on their ridiculous takes even as the trial disproved them. ‘White supremacy maintains its cover’, thundered one MSNBC contributor in the wake of the acquittal. The fact that the three people Rittenhouse shot were white continues to escape the attention of many, including the UK’s Independent newspaper, which told its readers yesterday that Rittenhouse had killed two black men.
Guess who wants to change the justice system to align with her fantasy world?
Democratic leaders have also been incredibly irresponsible, albeit in a more euphemistic fashion. ‘I spent a majority of my career working to make the justice system more equitable, and clearly there is a lot more work to do’, said vice-president Kamala Harris yesterday. …
Class warfare, with good jobs for them and their mates:
For much of the American elite, the Rittenhouse trial was not about proving him guilty beyond reasonable doubt. It wasn’t about trying to uncover the truth of what happened that awful night. It was another showdown in some fantasy battle against white supremacy that exists entirely in their imaginations. The jurors were being called on not to weigh the evidence and testimony, but to deliver the ‘right’ verdict and so strike a blow against evil.
But this jury stared down the intimidators:
The weight of all this on the men and women of the jury must have been immense. According to the New York Times, jurors thanked sheriff’s deputies yesterday for putting up a folding screen that blocked them from public view. ‘It helps calm my nerves’, one said. The ‘media coverage is insane’, said another.
This point was echoed by the judge, Bruce Schroeder, who blasted the media as ‘grossly irresponsible’. He said he’d think twice about televising trials such as this again. On Thursday, he banned MSNBC from the courthouse for the remainder of the trial, after police caught one of its freelancers following the bus that was transporting the jurors. Police believe he was trying to photograph them. The jurors were supposed to be anonymous by order of the court, such was the pressure heaped on them and the potential for reprisals.
In the face of all of this, these 12 men and women did what corporate media and many politicians fundamentally failed to do throughout the Kyle Rittenhouse saga: focus on the facts rather than the narrative.
