Kyle Rittenhouse Is Not a Nazi
He’s just a dumb kid with a gun
I have sat a long time on this piece, thinking whether or not I should make my opinion public. Two people were killed, another one almost lost an arm, and the shooter, a 17-year old kid, walked free. Some have gone as far as calling him a Nazi. I’m sorry, but I have to disagree.
Kyle Rittenhouse is not a Nazi. He’s just a dumb kid with a gun.
You could argue that these old, black and white photos with huge swastika flags, Roman-like eagle banners and endless rows upon rows of soldiers are full of dumb people, many of them too young, with guns. You would be right.
But this brings us to the next question: were all these young people really Nazis, did they just succumb to peer pressure and the inherent need to belong or was it something else? Put that thought aside for a moment.
Let’s suppose that after the November 1932 elections, which were the last free elections in Germany and in which the Nazi party actually lost 4% and slid back to 33.1%, two thirds of German voters magically turned into Nazis. This is what would have to happen for us to be able to claim, with some measure of certainty, that every head under those Stahlhelms was thoroughly filled with Nazi propaganda. That every soldier, every factory worker and every other cog that directly or indirectly helped power the war machine which brought terror to Europe and the world in WW2, was a bona fide Nazi.
This is not what happened in Germany in the 1930s. Germany fell prey to a demagogue, who was empowered by his country’s humiliating defeat in the previous war, by the reparations which it had to pay for that and by the consequences of the Great Depression on an already greatly ailing economy. It took all of that for Hitler to convince even one third of German voters to follow him.
He had to claw the rest of his way to the top by discrediting, terrorizing and persecuting the communists and social democrats which opposed him. But enough with the history lesson. Suffice to say that it would be absurd and unfair to claim that every German in the 1930s was a Nazi.
And even many of those who actually fell prey to Hitler’s rhetoric, even those dumb kids, did so because they needed to believe that someone would help pull them out of the mire they found themselves in. Out of a bleak, dead-end future to a life of purpose and glory. This is how demagogues operate. This is how Trump won the election.
Kyle likes Trump. The reason he gave was that Trump “supports the police”. Kyle also supports the police, but it’s not just because of the guns. He also seems to like firefighters, lifeguards and paramedics. He’s taken part in youth programmes for most of these jobs.
I’m no psychologist, but I see a pattern here. Kyle wants to help people. He wants people to look up to him. Whether working as a lifeguard or training in first aid or putting on a blue uniform for a youth cadet programme, it’s clear that Kyle wanted to be a hero.
The Rittenhouses are a poor family, with a troubled history. His father has alcohol issues, which might have led to domestic abuse. The fact is that Kyle and his siblings were being raised by a single, struggling mother. I think it’s reasonable, all things considered, that Kyle dreamt of being someone unlike his father. Someone people can respect and depend on.
Unfortunately, because of the insanity that is the American legal system when it comes to firearm possession and use (sorry, that’s what the rest of the world thinks, dear American friends), Kyle has ended up killing two people and seriously injuring another one.
Let’s make one thing clear. What the victims did was stupid. You don’t rush anyone, even a kid, armed with an AR-15 or any kind of firearm for that matter, to take their gun away, even if all you want is to stop them from hurting anyone. You don’t try to hit them with a skateboard. Unless you’re truly desperate, trying to stop an active shooter and knowing that you’re very likely to end up dead, you just don’t do those things. And Kyle was not actually an active shooter. Although, as it seems, he might have been mistaken as one.
And here lies the problem: when protests turn violent and troubled people, such as Joseph Rosenbaum, use them as an excuse to cause mayhem, seeing civilians with guns is not going to help calm anyone. This is not just my opinion, it’s that of the police. I have been to protests myself. They can become tense, violent and scary, even if you have absolutely no intention of doing anything other than exercising your democratic right in peace. Introducing guns in such a setting is a recipe for disaster.
And some people are actively looking for such a thing. Some join such events just to cause disruption and revel in the ensuing chaos. Some even have agendas, others are there just because they are drawn to the madness. Case in point: Rosenbaum did something really stupid. Suicidal, even.
Rosenbaum had literally just been released from hospital after a suicide attempt.
There’s another question that needs to be asked: Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people and almost shot a third person’s arm off. How many protesters were killed by the police that night?
Zero.
Well that was a poor performance wasn’t it? Unless of course you, like me, think that the role of the police is not to actually shoot people just for doing anything illegal (or seem likely to). There’s a reason the police uses tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets in such situations and not AR-15s. Obviously, if they see armed gang members or robbers in a crime scene clearly endangering other people’s lives they will use deadly force to stop them, as they should. Hopefully after they give them the chance to surrender (and to make sure they’re not kids playing with toy guns). But if they see someone smashing a store window? They won’t shoot, nor should they.
I don’t know if you grew up in some remote village in Afghanistan or a country enforcing Sharia law where thieves are punished by dismemberment, but in the (so-called) civilized world we don’t cut off people’s hands for theft or property damage. Nor do we shoot them.
“They had it coming”. “They had no business being there”. These arguments that are so casually thrown around whenever something like this happens, even when a handcuffed man is slowly suffocated to death, mean nothing. Wake up. This isn’t the 1800s. We’re not in the Wild West. There are laws. People walking around with guns during a protest are not going to help anyone. They are just going to get more people killed.
Especially when the one carrying the weapon is an untrained 17-year old with dreams of being a hero.
And that’s what he’s managed to become. Kyle is now a hero to those conservatives who have wet dreams of frontier justice. They dream of a society where every wrongdoer will “get what’s coming to them”, Dirty Harry style. That’s what things used to be like in the world before there was an organised system of justice outside the big cities.
That was 200 years ago.
In rural Greece at the time, newly independent from the Ottoman Empire, things weren’t much different. Livestock thefts were common, and they were dealt with summarily by the owners. Usually, this led to vendettas that could last for decades, and sometimes whole families were wiped out.
The problem is that in such a society, justice is decided only by the caliber of your gun and your skill with it, or by the size of your posse/gang, not by any objective measure of justice.
But I digress. Kyle said after the trial that he wants to be a lawyer or a paramedic. Good luck with that. He has to navigate through the treacherous waters of people who want to use him as a poster boy for their cause. A lot of money is already within reach: fundraisers, book deals, TV appearances, perhaps even a movie. He has denied being offered or accepting any money for his appearances so far, but for how long will he keep doing that, if it’s even true? Offers for congressional internships from hardline conservatives were very public after his acquittal. Again, Kyle claims that he doesn’t want to be in politics.
Will he insist, however, on slipping back to a tough, thankless, underpaid job like his mother after all this is over? Somehow, I doubt it.
During his appearance at the “You Are Here” podcast co-host Sydney Watson claimed that “of all the people that you shot at, you killed probably two of the worst on the planet.” Those two being the obviously troubled Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber who has been convicted of domestic abuse against his siblings. This and a dumpster fire are apparently now enough for people to deserve capital punishment. With that in mind, Kyle was congratulated for his actions. To his credit, he said:
“It’s nothing to be congratulated about. Like, if I could go back, I wish I would never have had to take somebody’s life.”
“Well, hindsight being 20/20, probably not the best idea to go down there.”
I don’t know if he was instructed by his lawyer to say those things, but he said them publicly and that’s what matters. Unfortunately, this will not stop gun-crazed conservatives from turning him into an icon.
The real question isn’t whether or not Kyle Rittenhouse is a Nazi. He isn’t and we keep on throwing that term around too lightly. The question is what the people who actually are fascists (and idolize a kid for a decision which even he himself admits was bad) will do given half a chance in the future. If you become a cog in a killing machine, willing or unwilling, whether you believe in it or not matters very little in the end.
I think Kyle has already become a hero. Just not the kind he wanted to be.
