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.
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.
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.
There's a moment in Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic where the newly freed drug boss says to the drug lawyer who had been working behind his back "do you know the difference between a reason and an excuse? Because I don't."
At this point the lawyer knows he is in deep shit. 🧵
(By the way this thread is part of a longer essay, but if I lead off the thread with a link to an outside source, it usually gets crushed by this site's dork owner and his algorithm shenanigans, so here you go.)
Anyway the lawyer knows he's in deep shit because "do you know the difference between a reason and an excuse" means "I'm not buying your bullshit," and if newly-freed-drug-lords-behind-whose-back-you've-been-working aren't buying your bullshit, then it is murder goon o'clock.
One thing I’ve noticed is, the meanest tables are often popular ones. Sometimes they are the most popular. My observation here would be that bullies know that cultivating friendly relationships is useful and necessary for effective bullying.
Any abuser knows they need accomplices. If dad is getting drunk and beating mom up he’s going to need everyone to keep nice and quiet about it, and if anybody squawks then it’s got to be quickly framed as something bad being done to him rather than the other way around.
If it looks as if the truth of the story is about to get around he’s going to need people to stand up for him in that moment and say things like this: “Nooooo! Not him. I know him. He would never. He has never been anything but nice to me.”
When people decide to leave the place they are and move to a different place, there’s an observable order to it. The order is very important.
So, in movement, there is the moment of arrival at the destination.
But before that moment, there is the actual journey. We began here. We moved until we got there. We put one foot in front of the other. We set sail and kept going until we arrived. The aircraft cut its way across the sky. This is the journey.
There's so much scandal all the time, it can be hard to remember where we are, much less how we got here. But they say it's important remember the lessons of the past, or else we're fated to do...something, I forget what, I forget, I forget.
It's really hard to know where to begin when it comes to where we are. There's only so much sheer volume of blatant corruption and noxious hate that a person can stay aware of even if they're trying. Eventually something pushes out.
It came out this week that NC Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson has in past years spent his time posting pro-slavery and pro-Nazi comments on porn sites, and other things of that nature, many of which are so bad CNN, who broke the story, declined to print them.
Conservatives keep telling us they're oppressed, and when they define what form the oppression takes, they explain that other kinds of people ... exist.
You know what? Let's do it. Let's actually do it. I think we ought to oppress conservatives.
Other people *should* exist. 🧵
Let's oppress conservatives with a kind and open and generous world that they will hate and fear specifically because it will care for everyone, even them, while it refuses any longer to accommodate the revenge fantasies that they call "self-defense."
At the bottom of it all, it strikes me that conservatives are driven by fear. They're big fraidy-cats, scared specifically of the ongoing danger of good and necessary things, of openness and diversity and peace and plenty.
Last Tuesday Donald Trump shat his pants on national TV. Ever since, he's been scooting his butt around on the national carpet to dislodge the detritus of loserdom. It's standard wounded narcissist self-care behavior, and it would be nice if all of this could be *only* funny. 🧵
Unfortunately, it can't be only funny; Trump and his gang are engaged in some shockingly evil rhetoric even for them—promising that, for the crime of existing while undesirable to conservatives, as many people as possible will be hurt, as soon and as badly as possible.
Incidentally, this thread is part of an essay that you can read right here on my weekly newsletter, The Reframe.