One thing that the Rittenhouse trial throws into stark relief is a strongly held belief among a huge percentage of white conservatives that people protesting for Black lives should be killed, and that white conservatives should be allowed to personally do it.
They are protecting their right to self-defense as exclusive to white conservatives.
No white conservative with a gun can ever be deemed a threat worthy of self defense.
The immediate danger they clearly pose must always be deemed pre-facto AND post-facto self-defense.
They are protecting their right to pre-and-post justification of any threat they pose and any violent act they commit, their right to frame their violence and only their violence as self defense, their fear and only their fear of bodily threat as valid.
Your body. Their choice.
Why did he carry a gun? Self defense.
Why did he shoot? Self defense.
What about the people he shot? They attacked.
Could THEY have attacked in self defense? No.
But he held a deadly weapon. Yes, for self defense.
To white conservatives, self-defense is their exclusive property.
Again: To white conservatives self-defense is their exclusive property. Deadly force is their birthright.
They're protecting their right to kill who they see fit to kill, when they see fit to do so.
They'll do anything to protect that right.
They'll certainly kill to do so.
The right to walk somebody else's street with a massacre weapon and not be deemed a threat.
The right to decide who is a threat, and then use the massacre weapon without penalty.
The right of white conservatives to self-deputize themselves to kill.
Your body. Their choice.
Your body, their choice.
It was the police who rioted as a pretextual justification for increased violence, but nm.
What’s being said here is:
“if white conservatives perceive a riot, they should be allowed to travel there with massacre weapons and engage in civilian killings upon targets of choice.”
One person has a skateboard; another an AR15.
The one with the AR15 killed the one with the skateboard.
Yet they’re convinced the one with the skateboard was the dangerous aggressor, and the one who killed him with an assault rifle was his endangered victim.
This perfectly describes the actions of a person with only a skateboard defending themselves against a person armed with a gun.
By the white conservative standard, Huber was perfectly within his rights—except they believe that self-defense is their exclusive property.
Here's the problem:
The fact that he held a deadly weapon means he posed an active threat—underscored by the fact that he killed people. Which means that by the very logic of white conservative self-defense, attacks upon him are justified.
The only way that Rittenhouse's armed presence doesn't invite completely justified attacks in self-defense is if you assume that the use of self defense is the exclusive property of white conservatives—an assumption that informs every defense I've seen of Rittenhouse.
"Any threat a white conservative poses to the people around him can be justified by the fact that he feels threatened. Any violence he enacts is therefore self-defense, while no violence enacted by anybody against a white conservative can ever be self-defense."
Catch-AR22
To white conservatives it's impossible for a white conservative to be a threat.
So the person with no gun must be the threat, and the person with the gun must have been threatened. The person who he killed must be the aggressor. The killer must be the victim.
They'll tell you.
A man with a skateboard was shot to death by a man holding an AR15.
The skateboard is the murder weapon in that scenario to a white conservative, who believes only white conservatives can exercise self-defense.
"Of course Kyle shot him! He had a skateboard!"
Think of this: The very act of disarming a shooter is seen as pretext for the shooter to exercise self-defense, as long as the shooter is a white conservative.
"Of course Kyle shot him! He was trying to take Kyle's gun!"
How else would one defend oneself against a shooter?
What is happening is this: white conservatives are claiming for their civilian populations the qualified immunity that police officers currently enjoy in order to terrorize and murder within Black communities.
And that's really what's on trial here.
And here is the exact thing mentioned in the original post:
A strongly held belief among a huge percentage of white conservatives that people protesting for Black lives should be killed, and that white conservatives should be allowed to personally do it.
Beyond parody. Look how impossible it is for conservatives to see any violence by conservatives as aggression, or any act by non-conservatives as self-defense.
They believe self-defense is their exclusive property. They think they should be allowed to kill.
Let’s end the thread by QTing the original post, and noting if you go through the comments all the conservatives are essentially saying “here’s why people protesting for Black lives should be killed, and here’s why white conservatives should be allowed to personally do it.”
Quite seriously I think they mostly all say “you’re insane, we don’t think that” but then every single one of their arguments are “now here’s why we’re right to think that.”
I mean: “he did what the government should have done.”
You can wish that this isn’t what white conservatives were saying; the only problem is, they are saying it.
Being a white conservative means bringing an AR15 to a crowd, shooting 3, killing 2, and still demanding to be understood as not only innocent but heroic; not just justified but peaceful.
One thing that the Rittenhouse trial throws into stark relief is a strongly held belief among a huge % of white conservatives that people protesting for Black lives should be killed, and that white conservatives should be allowed to personally do it.
One thing that the Rittenhouse trial throws into stark relief is a strongly held belief among a huge % of white conservatives that people protesting for Black lives should be killed, and that white conservatives should be allowed to personally do it.
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