Kyle Rittenhouse gets a rock star reception at the Turning Point USA event in AZ.
The teen was found not guilty of criminal charges after admitting to shooting & killing two people in WI. He says it was self defense.
He’s now seen as a hero by some activists on the right.
(Twitter: Elex Michaelson)
I don’t really understand what’s happening. And I don’t mean that in the sense that I’m surprised or that I didn’t see it coming. We all said that Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal would become a cause célèbre for the Right. He had sponsorship offers before the trial and congressional internship offers during. He’s been celebrated by Conservatives from the moment he was arrested because he’s a symbol of White America’s fight against change, a visual representation of what can happen if you are brave enough to stand up to the forces conspiring to take Amerikkka from you.
I fully understand that, so this is not a surprise at all.
I guess what I don’t fully grasp is how am I supposed to respect these people in any way? Listen y’all, I was already at the end of my rope. Trump’s election in 2016 taught me that some people are irredeemable. Before that, I generally operated on the premise that most people, even people you do not agree with politically, are not inherently evil and that you can find common ground somewhere because we’re all people. 2016 taught me that, no, some people cannot be helped, saved, or taught.
You cannot force someone to have empathy for other people. I cannot teach someone they need to care about what happens to people outside of their perceived tribe. If you think poor people deserve to die because you feel like they didn’t work hard enough, I cannot fix that. If you think drug addicts deserve to die because you feel like they made a choice to become addicted, I cannot fix that. If you think undocumented immigrants deserve to die in their own countries (that the US made unstable) because we have our own problems at home (that you refuse to address), I cannot fix that.
Still, there was a little space left in my psyche for ignorance, misinformation, and the insular nature of social circles with a feedback loop of confirmation bias. I spent a lot of the summer in the rural Deep South while my dad and stepmom recovered from a car accident. I heard the conversations and watched the local news. Part of me feels like it’s not 100% your fault if you believe poor people are amoral and lazy. That’s what you’ve heard from your politicians, your family, your friends, your neighbors, your church, and the news. I’ll be honest: a lot of my belief system has been reinforced, if not outright formed, by the variety people around me. Ten years ago, I was making transphobic jokes. Five years ago, I was called out for fatphobia on Twitter. These are issues I didn’t know I harbored negative sentiments about, things that I quickly evolved my thinking around because the people around me called me out on it and forced me to reexamine how I felt and why I felt that way, intentionally or not. All that is to say, I get it. I understand being a product of your environment.
I don’t understand celebrating murderers. George Zimmerman signs bags of Skittles for his fans. Kyle Rittenhouse is introduced at events with a production worthy of a Wrestlemania top draw. Killing someone should be traumatic. If I had to kill someone in self defense, I would have to go to therapy for a long time to work through that trauma. I wouldn’t be able to be celebrated. I wouldn’t know how to book jovial interviews to laugh about what kinds of women I like. I wouldn’t know how to sit on stage and give life advice as a teenager who has never accomplished anything other than murder.
I don’t know how to respect people who celebrate death. And that’s not to say that I find life all that sacred, because I’ve gone on record many times saying I don’t. Not really. There are 7 billion of us. Seven billion of anything means a singular one of it isn’t that special, to me. But dead people have families and friends and loved ones who are hurting, and I don’t know how to respect people who revel in the pain of others. I understand not necessarily caring. I can understand dismissiveness. Outright celebration though is so beyond anything I can relate to. What kind of person are you that you would cheer for someone whose only claim to fame is looking for a fight and getting one? What am I supposed to say to these people? I’m so disgusted by their existence I can barely put my feelings into words.
There’s no part of me that could ever be in the same room with a Republican. This is who they are as a group of people. They are a political party whose guiding principle is “sticking it to the Libs” by any means necessary. If it makes the opposition upset, that makes them happy.
Wearing a mask is not hard. Getting a vaccine is not controversial. But Republican politicians, who are vaccinated and wear masks when no one is looking, just want to upset the opposition.
Singular They is not hard. We have been using they/them/theirs as a pronoun to describe the notion of an unspecific person forever. But Republican politicians have decided it’s the downfall of society to apply it to a specific person who asks for that pronoun.
Celebrating murder is wrong. Even murder in self-defense is seen as a tragedy. But Republicans want to use Kyle Rittenhouse to gloat. They’re turning a teenaged murderer into a rockstar to stick it to the Libs. That space I had left in my psyche to allow for ignorance and misinformation is gone. This isn’t about being ill-informed. They’re just bad people. And I can’t teach someone how not to be a bad person.
If you enjoy celebrating a murderer, that’s just who you are as a human being. And I don’t respect you.
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