Photo credit: Quinn Clark
A protester holds up signs remembering the deaths of Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, protesters who were shot by Kyle Rittenhouse.
Immediately after a Wisconsin jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse on all charges for shooting and killing two unarmed men and permanently disabling another man, jurors in two other states delivered more appropriate verdicts for death and serious injuries in their communities by punishing armed vigilantes for committing deadly violence on their streets.
Find hope anywhere you can these days. In the words of the rock philosopher Meat Loaf: “Two out of three ain’t bad.”
It also says a lot about racial bias in criminal justice that few expressed any surprise at the acquittal of a white, Midwestern teenager who opened fire with an AR-15 assault rifle on a crowded public street, but many welcomed the surprise of a nearly all-white, southern jury in Brunswick, Ga., convicting three white men of murder for chasing down an unarmed Black jogger with their pickup trucks and killing him with a shotgun. Clearly, stereotypes about racial bigotry in various regions of the country aren’t up to date.
The second important jury verdict against deadly American violence occurred in Charlottesville, Va. That was the scene of the violent Unite the Right rally in August 2017 that attracted American Nazis and other white supremacist hate groups from around the country to celebrate Donald Trump’s election and protest the removal of Confederate statues.
Despite Trump publicly claiming many of the participants were “very fine people,” jurors convicted every defendant and their hate groups of conspiracy to intimidate, harass and commit acts of violence and ordered them to pay $26 million in damages.
Wisconsin Was Progressive
There was a time when Wisconsin was considered one of the nation’s most progressive states and Southern states were the ones where ignorant, violent rednecks got away with taking the law into their own hands.
That was only about a decade ago before Tea Party Republicans like Sen. Ron Johnson started pushing their party to the extreme right. Trump took it all the way to Crazy Town, using the attack on Charlottesville as his model when he sent his violent supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol to end democracy by preventing Congress from certifying President Biden’s election.
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The Charlottesville trial conducted a seminar for the jury on language tips recommended on the Nazi website, the Daily Stormer, to avoid prosecution for publicly advocating violent attacks on racial and religious minorities. “Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred,” a Stormer writer advised. “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes, but that’s neither here nor there.”
An historic irony ever since Kyle Rittenhouse became a hero to the far right is “Did you see Kyle?” has long been a humorous code phrase to identify fellow Nazis who are in the closet. The in-joke is “see Kyle” sounds exactly like “Sieg Heil,” the words used when giving the Nazi salute.
Trump’s Vicious Attacks
Trump has never been a big reader, so he probably didn’t pick up his rhetorical technique from the Stormer, but his supporters have always insisted his vicious racial attacks and outrageous lies at public rallies are really just great big jokes to “own the libs.” Maybe it’s the Nazis who have learned at the feet of their master who has taken their lunatic fringe, anti-democracy political movement to new heights by welcoming them into a major American political party.
Trump is gone now. His angry, hateful presidency was soundly defeated by the American people, but elected Republican leaders still fear alienating his supporters. Fear is exactly the right word. House and Senate Republicans lived through the Jan. 6 insurrection hiding behind locked doors with furniture stacked against them to protect themselves from the violent mob that was just as eager to murder Mike Pence and congressional Republicans who refused to do Trump’s bidding as it was to kill Nancy Pelosi and AOC.
The Charlottesville jury knew Trump’s violent Nazi supporters were no joke, especially the one who intentionally drove his speeding car into a crowd of counter-protesters killing Heather Heyer and seriously injuring dozens of others. After that, organizers dropped all pretense they were just joking in their hateful online postings eagerly predicting bloodshed at the “Battle of Charlottesville.” Nazi Christopher Cantwell, already imprisoned for violence against University of Virginia students after their torchlight march through campus chanting “Jews will not replace us!” described Heyer as “bleeding commie filth we sent to the morgue.”
It’s a mistake to dismiss American Nazis as a few deranged, violent misfits within our society from another time. Trump’s hateful presidency made their violent tactics on his behalf a clear and present danger to our democracy. Most American judges and juries punish violent citizen vigilantes on our streets. Republicans need to start distancing their party from Trump’s violent supporters too.
