Thread by @JuliusGoat

Whenever I write something that critiques systemic injustice, people who defend systemic injustice appear to rebut me ... by making the exact points I made.

But there's never been anything I've written that has demonstrated this effect as much as this.

getrevue.co/profile/julius…

American conservatives, mostly white, told me I was crazy to suggest that they think such things, they made a fascinating pivot.

They didn’t proceed to explain what they actually think instead. Rather, they explained *why they were right to think the things I said they think.*

All of it reduced, again, to “people who protest for Black lives should be killed, and we should be allowed to personally do it.”

Their reaction to the Rittenhouse trial was white conservative America screaming at the uppity concierge of jurisprudence: don’t you know who we are?

Their offense is for the very fact that poor little Kyle now has to face a murder trial based on absolutely no evidence, other than the corpses Kyle made at the place Kyle travelled to, using the massacre weapon Kyle brought along with him.

It’s not really even a question of establishing Kyle’s innocence for them, but an insistence on an innocence so totally and obviously pre-established that impugning it is something they experience as a moral calamity.

Theirs is an outrage that guilt should even be put on the table for what is a clearly righteous act that could never have possibly been unrighteous. It’s not “Kyle didn’t do it.” It’s “how dare you put Kyle through all this for doing that?”

For them, poor little Kyle can't just be not-guilty. He must be innocent. No, not even that: He must be innocence.

He can't be a killer. He has to be a hero. Not just any kind of hero, either. He has to be a *war hero*.

He's the first recipient of the MAGA Medal of Honor.

With white American conservatives it’s almost always “Kyle,” like he’s your best friend’s kid brother. It’s striking. When a shooter kills, they’re typically referenced by their last name. You don’t hear the Charleston church shooter as “Dylann” … at least not yet.

But the Kenosha shooter is white conservative America’s kind of shooter. He had a target they approve.

He’s not “Rittenhouse.” No, he’s Kyle.

The Kenosha Kid.

Now Kyle’s on trial, and white America’s riled.

They're defending him.

Their defense of him is, clearly, defense of themselves.

It's self-defense.

What justifies summary execution? Ask a white conservative, they’ll tell you: whatever's at hand. Literally anything that happened, any moment of noncompliance, any infraction by the deceased that occurred in the days, weeks, months and years prior to their summary execution.

Any detail about the deceased that might scare a white person, any instance of even the possibility of destruction of property.

All this is offered as evidence of the dead having earned their fate, of the clear moral rightness, even bravery, of the person who pulled the trigger.

It’s qualified immunity for killing so vast and broad that, in application, it’s simply immunity.

And now white conservatives don’t just want that immunity for their police officers. They want it for themselves. They think poor little Kyle should have it.

And them, too.

All of it reduces, again, to “people who protest for Black lives should be killed, and we should be allowed to personally do it.”

The right to kill with the qualified immunity of white self-defense, is the property that poor little Kyle’s militia travelled to Kenosha to defend.

But all this is not what interests me today. All this is just establishing the facts on the ground.

What really interests me is this: American systems agree with white conservative America’s viewpoint on the question of whether or not they are permitted to kill as they please.

The police enjoy a qualified immunity so vast as to effectively be immunity.

The police didn’t see Kyle and his militia as a threat to their mission, but as natural and obvious partners, and this perception didn’t end after the fatal shooting.

Our systems are designed to allow this. And yet we know that Black people aren’t allowed to stand their ground when John Crawford III or Philando Castile can be shot for posing no risk at all, other than what existed in their murderer’s minds.

The Castle Doctrine can’t be theirs when Breonna Taylor can be murdered in her home.

Few if any who worried about poor little armed Kyle spared much concern for poor little unarmed Trayvon and Tamir.

These advantages for private citizen killers are quite obviously meant to be the exclusive institutional property of white people, written by people who held that understanding, enforced by people who apply it accordingly.

According to American law, poor little Kyle is innocent.

I submit that this fact impugns the American justice and legislative systems far more than it exonerates Kyle Rittenhouse.

The real horror isn’t Kyle's guilt, but his innocence.

The real horror isn’t that he represents a system failing, but one doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The real horror is this: the system works, and it looks like Kyle Rittenhouse. getrevue.co/profile/julius…

Violent self-defense as exclusively white property is so baked into our systems that white conservatives (a term I use because they want to conserve this already-existing state) seem unable to even protest against a claim exposing it without immediately staking their claim to it.

Which brings me to the another flavor of disagreement I received, and it’s one I happen to agree with.

It’s this: more white people than just self-professed conservatives are responsible here.

We don’t want violence either, we white liberals and leftists. But most of us do want order.

It’s natural to want order. Order isn’t a bad thing.

But my question in response is this: Order for whom?

Right now it’s order just for us—and by “us” I mean me and my fellow white people—whether far right extremist or corporate conservative or corporate liberal or a radical lefty.

Not to say that there is no difference between our worldviews and intentions, or that those differences don’t matter—but whiteness benefits us all by systemic design, and our unwillingness to engage with this fact reveals our deeper and more important worldviews and intentions.

So final questions:

Fellow white liberals and white leftists: will we enter the personal discomfort and danger of truly foundational systemic transformation?

Fellow white liberals and white leftists, are we prepared to fight for justice, or *are we also conservatives* when it comes to maintaining comfortable order over allowing disruption and discomfort of transformative justice?

Are we more concerned with establishing our own innocence, or in prosecuting the clear guilt in our midst?

Here’s my question for myself, and I invite you to ask it of yourself, if you are a white liberal or a white leftist like me:

How will I align against this?

Who let poor little Kyle walk the streets of Kenosha with a massacre weapon?

Was it white conservatives? For sure. They’ll tell you as much.

But also I did.

And so did you.

And more Kyles are coming, just as innocent as the one who received the law's anointing yesterday.

I don’t have answers, but I start by asking myself and you:

How uncomfortable are we willing to get, in order to do something about that?

Who let poor little Kyle walk the streets of Kenosha with a massacre weapon?

Me.

getrevue.co/profile/julius…