Two columns related to the Rittenhouse case, both written before the verdict came in.
Rittenhouse is not worth a riot (Nov. 16)
No matter what the jury decides in the case of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, there is no excuse for protests to get rowdy and absolutely no reason to manufacture racial grievances out of the killing of two white men by a white man.
It is a sad commentary on our culture that authorities feel obliged to deploy 500 National Guard troops to protect against possible rioting over a jury verdict. The deployment is wise, however, considering how destructive and violent riots have become in recent years.
In any society that affords constitutional protections for basic rights while providing true insistence that the “consent of the governed” is the ruling credo and practice, no protest should ever turn rowdy, much less feature violence against property or people. No one should interfere with the rights of innocents. Where there is a right to protest and the chance to right wrongs through appropriate, transparent legal and legislative processes, there also is the concomitant moral and legal mandate that protesters act lawfully…. [The full column is here.]
The case isn’t racial, and neither should the jury be (Nov. 16)
If there is a visit to purgatory awaiting people who stir up racial tensions unnecessarily, imagine how long that purgatorial interlude will last for lawyers who say race is more important than evidence in a murder trial.
Yet that’s what “criminal defense attorney” Page Pate, who is white, said on CNN as the jury deliberated in the case of Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooter Kyle Rittenhouse. He said this as a rebuttal to a correct and contrary statement from black former federal prosecutor Phillip Turner.
Pate was arguing for jury nullification. This was a concise distillation of the sickening leftist obsession with race, along with sexuality, as a predominant determinant of human behavior. There is no other accurate way to describe this attitude than to say that the obsession is itself racist and deeply wrong….
[The full column is at this link.]
