90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #87

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #86

A Tale of Two Cities: Kenosha vs. Waukesha

The media’s blatant lies amount to racial arson.

Both Wisconsin towns, Kenosha, and Waukesha, about 50 miles apart by car, were the recent sites of multiple deaths. The violence in both made national news. Yet in contradictory ways both reflected the common themes of America’s current legal, media, and societal corruption.

The relevant public prosecutors in both were in the news for alleged ideological bias. Specifically, they habitually calibrated the charging, indicting, and trying (or not) of defendants through ideological lenses and community pressure rather than on the basis of the facts and the law.

Kyle Rittenhouse was a 17-year-old armed youth who volunteered to protect business properties at the height of the August 2020 arson, riots, and looting in Kenosha. He was pursued and attacked by three members from a larger group who chased the armed youth, presumably either to disarm, injure, or kill him—or perhaps all three.

Rittenhouse variously was assaulted, kicked, and had a firearm pointed at him. In reaction, he fatally shot two of his pursuing attackers and wounded a third. Kenosha prosecutors reviewed videos of the altercations. They saw clearly that Rittenhouse was running away from his assailants. He was variously rushed by one assailant, kicked by another, and struck with a skateboard by still another. Again, a final pursuer pointed a gun at him at close range.

No matter. The Kenosha district attorney’s office charged Rittenhouse with several felonies including two first-degree homicide charges. All four whom Rittenhouse fired at—whether he missed, wounded, or fatally shot—had lengthy arrest records. Three were convicted felons; the fourth had a long arrest record.

Given the lengthy and quite horrific rap sheet of Rittenhouse’s first attacker Joseph Rosenbaum (including multiple counts of pedophiliac rape), it is difficult to understand why the latter was not in jail (he had been released earlier that day from a mental facility to which he had been committed after a failed suicide attempt). The common denominator to the various prior convictions of his other three assailants was that they should have led to consequences far worse, given that many of their arrest charges were dropped, or bail was sometimes waived, or plea bargaining turned serious charges into merely bothersome ones. The release of violent offenders on little or no bail seems now thematic in Wisconsin.

Shortly after the August 2020 shootings, the media, Joe Biden, and most of the left-wing commentariat had claimed Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist,” even though there was no evidence of such a libel, then or now. Remember, the Kenosha shootings took place just nine weeks before the November presidential elections, at a time when the Left was framing the incumbent Trump as a “white supremacist” and Joe Biden a “healer.”

The Racist Construct

The shootings were immediately declared to be “racial.” Yet both the shooter Rittenhouse and all of his attackers who were wounded or killed were white (a fourth assailant, an African-American who kicked Rittenhouse while he was on the ground escaped without injury).

What followed in the media was the most egregious example of concocted fictions since the Russian collusion hoax. Rittenhouse was falsely accused of crossing “state lines” (plural), while unlawfully armed with an “illegal automatic weapon.”

In truth, he did not buy the Smith & Wesson semi-automatic rifle, much less bring it into nearby Kenosha, Wisconsin from nearby Antioch, Illinois. It was legal for Rittenhouse to possess and use the firearm. The gun itself was not unlawful. He did not purchase it but had been given it by a friend. And Kenosha was his alternate home in that it was where his father and other relatives lived. Rittenhouse, then, was constructed as the proverbial white supremacist of the sort warned about by the likes of Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley.

At various times during the trial, the prosecuting attorneys called Rittenhouse a coward. They claimed he should have faced the pursuing mob of at least a dozen and willingly taking a beating from them face-to-face, in at least one case at gunpoint. The jury inter alia was told that the ongoing arson and other violent acts were not serious crimes, and that the three who attacked Rittenhouse were near-heroic victims.

Protestors outside the courthouse tried to intimidate the defense and jurors. A journalist sought to follow the jury bus, ostensibly to divulge their identities or to...

A Simpsons episode titled “Goo Goo Gai Pan” featured the Simpson family traveling to Beijing, where they walk past a plaque in Tiananmen Square, the site of the 1989 massacre, that read: “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”

We have seen various countries carry out censorship functions for various governments, including social media countries. Now the Simpsons have been “disappeared” in an episode that acknowledged the Tiananmen Square massacre. China blocks any mention of the massacre so Disney willingly became an extension of its massive censorship bureaucracy.

I recently discussed the decision of the W.H.O. to skip the letter “xi” in naming its new COVID-19 variant, which it dubbed the “omicron” variant. While the organization insisted that it was only avoiding “causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups,” it was an effort to avoid embarrassment to Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Xi has been accused of covering up the outbreak in Wuhan and also ordering the cover-up of evidence related to the emergence of the virus (including the possible release from a government lab). W.H.O. took the action after global criticism for its fawning treatment of China in the investigation of the virus.

The decision by Disney made a mockery of the words of its founder, Walt Disney: “Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.”

The missing episode in the 16th season was noticed by people in China. The season jumps from episode 11 to 13. Episode 12? It was a 2005 episode where Homer takes his family to China, where they visit Tiananmen Square and come across a placard that reads: