One of the tropes of American films, from 12 Angry Men to the various John Grisham and Tom Cruise movies, is the celebration of the good liberal man who upholds the law against reactionary impulses, political corruption, mass media distortions and the evils of big business. In the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, all of these liberal ideals have been smashed to pieces.

In August 2020, 17-year-old Rittenhouse was on the streets of Kenosha Wisconsin attempting to protect businesses from being attacked during a riot in which properties were set on fire and looted resulting in an estimated $50 million dollars’ worth of damage.

Rittenhouse was attacked by three men, convicted paedophile Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, who had a conviction for strangulation, and Gaige Grosskreutz, another ex-con who pointed a gun at Kyle’s head. Rittenhouse shot all three men, killing Rosenbaum and Huber, and injuring Grosskreutz.

Kyle Rittenhouse was put on trial for murder, and unsurprisingly, based on the facts of the case, many of which were captured by CCTV footage, was found not guilty.

However, the facts of the case appear to matter little to the liberal reactionaries who did everything they could to convict this teenager based on lies, gross political bias and a total disregard for basic journalistic standards and principles of justice.

The riot that led to the shootings had been presented as a BLM protest and so the “correct” narrative, rather than any search for the truth, kicked in.

Before being elected, Joe Biden used the case to suggest, without any evidence, that Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist”. Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Presley called Rittenhouse a “domestic terrorist” who “shot and killed two people who had assembled to affirm the value, dignity and worth of black lives”: This was retweeted almost 100,000 times.

Based on these incorrect presumptions, Facebook announced that “We’ve designated the shooting in Kenosha a mass murder and are removing posts in support of the shooter”. This mass censorship and smear campaign was facilitated further by Twitter, which suspended people who dared to say Rittenhouse was innocent — including his attorney. The fundraising platform GoFundMe then refused to allow Rittenhouse fans to raise money for his legal defence.

The New York Times, keen to undermine the idea that businesses had suffered from the riot, due to them being heavily insured, sent Nellie Bowles to get this story. She found that in fact this was “not true” and that, “The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots”. The writer says the Times refused to print the story until after the presidential election.

Even after Kyle's acquittal, the illiberal reaction continued. President Biden put out a statement saying he was "angry and concerned" by the verdict. Other senior democrats talked about being “heartbroken” and described the innocent Rittenhouse as a “violent, dangerous man” and a “murderer” whose “white tears” prevented justice. Democratic congresswoman Cori Bush called the verdict “white supremacy in action”.

The online British newspaper, The Independent, had clearly swallowed the American liberals' race-terrorist spin on the case and following the verdict fronted with the story that “Teenager who shot three black men with rifle found not guilty on all charges”. The problem, of course, is that all these men were in fact white!

Some have argued that the “liberal” narrative that had, and continues to, justify rioting, helped to create the chaos in Wisconsin. Whatever the truth of this, the American liberal establishment - the politicians, the press, the mass economic and social-media power of Facebook and Twitter – have been shown up as the new reactionaries of the USA.

Serious concerns are now being raised about how Donald Trump will make hay out of this verdict. But it is not Trump's patter that is the issue here, it is the corrupt and degraded narrative that “progressives” have peddled that has been put on trial and found guilty as charged.

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