![]() “By suggesting he is a hero,” Mason tells me, “the implication is that what he did was not a tragedy at all. Yet it is one thing for conservatives to say the jury reached the legally correct verdict and another thing entirely to describe Rittenhouse as a moral exemplar: a gun-toting American standing guard against the country’s internal enemies. Rittenhouse’s acquittal is in a certain sense unsurprising: America’s self-defense laws are incredibly permissive, making it difficult to convict someone in a violent situation who claims to fear for their life. Far from cooling the passions of the fringes, mainstream Republican politicians and allied media are canonizing Rittenhouse, elevating him into a model for ordinary conservatives to follow. Looking at the reaction to the verdict from mainstream conservatives makes the current predicament even scarier. The ultimate risk may be what Mason terms “an endless cycle” of partisan killing, like Italy’s Years of Lead or pre-Civil War Bleeding Kansas. The more it does, the more likely it is to lead to retaliatory violence from the other side. Mason and Kalmoe’s research documents rising support for political violence in the US, prompting worries that eventually, the killing in Kenosha will repeat itself elsewhere. “The January 6 folks coming by, Kyle Rittenhouse-style,” as she put it. At future protests on charged issues like racial justice and voting rights, armed right-wing counterprotesters may continue to descend on America’s cities, in increasingly large numbers. Johns Hopkins political scientist Lilliana Mason - the co-author (with Nathan Kalmoe) of the forthcoming Radical American Partisanship - worries that this trend will escalate. The data also shows that these demonstrations are more than five times more likely to involve violent or destructive behavior as compared to unarmed ones. Based on how it’s been cheered in some quarters, the verdict is potentially setting the stage for future violence.ĭata from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project shows that, between January 2020 and June 2021, there were 560 protest events where either demonstrators or counter-demonstrators showed up with guns - about 2 percent of all protests in the United States during the studied time period. The Kenosha acquittal is a shout,” writes Kathleen Belew, a historian of white power movements at the University of Chicago. ![]() “It has never taken more than a whisper of approval to fan the flames of militant right action. There is every reason to take such rhetoric seriously. On Telegram, a secure messaging app popular with extremists, the leader of a neo-Nazi group wrote that the verdict gives “good Americans legal precedent and license to kill violent commies without worrying about doing life in prison if we defend ourselves in a riot.” Immediately after Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal on Friday, the fringe right’s online forums lit up with celebration - and among some, a belief that they too can kill without legal consequence. White Americans are justified - maybe even obligated - to take up arms to protect their people and their culture. The right’s radical extremists believe that mainstream American institutions have been rotted from within, undermined by the nefarious influence of Blacks, Jews, and liberals. In the apocalyptic imagination of the American far-right, violence plays a central role.
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