THIS REALLY DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE: Kyle Rittenhouse: ‘I support the BLM movement.’

Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who was acquitted of murder last week after shooting and killing two people in Kenosha, Wis., during civil unrest there last year, said he supports the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

“I’m not a racist person. I support the BLM movement,” Rittenhouse said during an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a portion of which is slated to air on Carlson’s program on Monday evening.

“I support peacefully demonstrating,” the teen told Carlson, according to a transcript of the interview. “I believe there needs to be change. I believe there’s a lot of prosecutorial misconduct, not just in my case but in other cases. It’s just amazing to see how much a prosecutor can take advantage of someone.”

Earlier: Kyle Rittenhouse and Ahmaud Arbery: a tale of two trials.

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More here: Waukesha, Wisconsin parade evacuated after shots fired at crowd.

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WELCOME TO THE CLUB, KYLE: Rittenhouse Joins Pantheon of Young Men the Left Tried to Destroy.

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THE SKY IS GREEN THEORY:

The wacko leftist on the street corner you used to mock as you drove by, he now brings you the news. He runs your FBI. He plays in the NBA. He pastors your church.

And because all the pillars believe the same thing, you no longer have a check and balance cultural system. If the government lies, the media should be there to expose it. A huge Hollywood star should expose it. The pillars check each other in a healthy society.

But we don’t have that. And because we don’t have that, they don’t feel the need to shade the truth or manipulate a story. They now can simply invent something out of thin air and they know no other pillar will check them on it.

Twitter thread by Jesse Kelly.

JAMES LILEKS: We’re Moving to a Faster Pace.

There will be mobs who attack Jews. No no not those guys, they’re angry about colonialism or acting out whiteness doctrines of otherizing, please keep up.

There will be throngs of white men in positions of authority demanding that Asians be suppressed in academic admissions –

What? No, no, that’s different. Please, you’re not conversant in the prismatic subtleties of the intersectional matrix, so maybe sit this one out? Once you’ve done the work, then perhaps you will be alert to the neo-Fascist elements who will restructure society to otherize those who do not have pure blood –

What? No, no, that’s different. That’s a matter of public health. Of course, you should have to show your papers. Point is, America is a lost cause. Soon, very soon, a group of people will try to burn down a city because they saw some tweets about a thing, and there will be a horrifying moment when the authorities prevent it. The nascent subterranean Fascist instinct ignites in the citizens, and they will join the police to prevent the people from smashing the store windows and burning down the legislature building.

Read the whole thing.

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Related: Revealed: California prosecutor with highly ‘progressive’ agenda backed by George Soros.

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ROGER KIMBALL: The Right Outcome for Rittenhouse, But…:

In the aftermath of the verdict, the meme was supercharged by all the usual suspects. Rep. Jerry “the Waddler” Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was among the first to suggest the U.S. Justice Department bring federal charges against Rittenhouse since the state charges didn’t stick. I’m sure the ghoulish Merrick “the Moderate” Garland is considering it if only he can peel off enough agents from harassing parents attending school board meetings for the task.

For his part, Biden, though acknowledging his disappointment that the 18-year old wasn’t going to be thrown in prison for the rest of his life, did at first say that the trial vindicated the judicial process and that “the jury system works.” Aides soon began walking that back, however, perhaps in preparation for the Nadler gambit of trying the boy twice.

Neither response, I think, is right. The second response is simply surreal, if offered earnestly, and contemptibly cynical if offered as a Machiavellian ploy in the game of power politics. Overwhelming evidence, including abundant video and first-hand testimony, shows that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. Had he not shot the three men who were attacking him, first Rosenbaum, a seriously deranged chap, and then Huber and Grosskreutz, he would almost certainly have been killed.

But the first response, the “hallelujah chorus,” is not quite right either. Yes, it’s a good thing that the jury found as it did because any other verdict would have been a horrible miscarriage of justice. The trouble is, by the time that Rittenhouse was put on trial, a horrible miscarriage of justice had already been perpetrated.

Rittenhouse had already been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. One swamp entity, GoFundMe, canceled a campaign to raise funds to pay for Rittenhouse’s bail and legal fees because, according to CEO Tim Cadogan, the company doesn’t support people charged with violent crimes. What about the presumption of innocence? GoFundMe said nothing about that.

Speaking of which: GoFundMe Denied Rittenhouse Fundraising While Crowdsourcing Funds For BLM Rioters.

JACK DUNPHY: Lessons from Kenosha.

Sadly, the news media are no longer staffed by people who see their mission as informing the public of verifiable facts. Instead, today’s newspaper writers and electronic media reporters are proud purveyors of “narratives,” the details of which are crafted in the tonier enclaves of New York City and Los Angeles. The employees of these outlets are ideologically aligned and virtually interchangeable with one another, reflecting the tastes and inclinations of those predominating in those same tony enclaves on the east and west coasts.

The narrative applied to Kyle Rittenhouse was that he was a “white supremacist” and a “vigilante” with no connection to Kenosha and no conceivable motive to be there other than a malevolent desire to shoot “peaceful protesters.” None of this was true, yet these claims were repeated endlessly on CNN, MSNBC, and in countless print pieces. And, lest we forget, as committed as these news outlets are to advancing the narrative, that commitment is subordinate to their desire to expand their audience. Nothing short of international warfare achieves this purpose better than the type of widespread social upheaval and racial unrest seen after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha.

How else to explain the absence of evidence running counter to the narrative in the coverage of any of these incidents? How else to explain why both CNN and MSNBC aired the prosecution’s closing argument in the Rittenhouse trial but cut away from the defense’s argument? Put simply, they profit from riots, and in such selective, biased coverage they built up public expectations of a conviction even as they were losing confidence in its inevitability.

Read the whole thing.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Black Rifle Coffee — Who Disavowed Rittenhouse — Silent After Not Guilty Verdict.

Flashback: Is Black Rifle Coffee About to Throw Its Customer Base Under the Bus for Fun and Profit? “Just as Black Rifle Coffee is on the cusp of changing its financial structure, it is also arriving at a philosophical decision point. Will it stay conservative and cater to the people that made it successful? Will it go ‘woke?’ Will it complete the transition from a cause to a grift? Unfortunately, the signs aren’t all that great.”

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One hopes Musk doesn’t try very hard to rival Henry Ford, particularly in Germany.

(Via.)

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To be fair, California’s well-groomed governor has far more important priorities he’s focusing on:

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JUST ANOTHER FRIDAY NIGHT IN SAN FRANCISCO: Looters and vandals strike San Francisco’s Union Square.

San Francisco’s Louis Vuitton store in Union Square was “emptied out” by thieves Friday night, witnesses posted to social media.

* * * * * * * *

San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management sent out an alert shortly after 9 p.m. to avoid the area and to expect traffic delays because of the police activity.

It is unclear if this incident was connected to protest movements in light of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, which was announced hours earlier. When the police officer killing of George Floyd happened in 2020, Union Square was heavily looted.

Related: The ORC Invasion.

ROGER SIMON: Rittenhouse Free, but Where Can the ‘White Supremacist’ Go in Race-Obsessed America?

Normally, the case wouldn’t have been tried at all. It was obvious self-defense. We do, last I heard, have the right of self-defense and the right to bear arms, though much of the craziness around this trial seems aimed at taking those rights away.

But the biggest lie of all was and is about race. Rittenhouse has been called a “white supremacist” more times than Joe Biden has said “C’mon, man.” This even though all combatants in the trial incident were white. As clearly shown on videotape, a young white man was defending himself against extremely violent white attackers.

Yet it’s become another version of the old story—who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? Or, more ominously and, alas, more accurately, as Joseph Goebbels once put it, “A lie told once is just a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”

Unfortunately, we are well past a thousand when it comes to false accusations of racism in our country, maybe closer to a million.

If racism were a God, the Democrats would pray to it and the media would write its Bible.

Andrew Cuomo’s young “supremacist vigilante” might be well-advised to move to Europe. As COVID surges, everyone is about to be locked down in Austria. No one would know he is there.

Just kidding, of course. Many of us, myself included, wish Rittenhouse the best.

Good luck, Kyle and godspeed. We’re pulling for you. Some of us are even crying from happiness that you got cleared. But don’t tell Joy Reid.

Earlier: Once more with feeling! Media coverage of the Rittenhouse case was hot garbage.

It’s all about the (race-driven) narrative — and in CNN and MSNBC’s case, the ratings. As Glenn wrote in April, and re-posted today, “The thing is, it’s a lot easier to encourage violence when the consequences happen to someone else. Too much of upper-class America is cocooned from real risk. For the people in poor and working-class neighborhoods where riots and looting tend to happen, the consequences are much more apparent. That’s why the cavalier attitude of so many Democrats toward riots makes sense. Democrats are now the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs. The people who have to deal with consequences will have to go somewhere else politically. And they will.”

THERE IS UNREST IN THE FOREST, TROUBLE WITH THE TREES. FOR THE MAPLES WANT MORE SUNLIGHT, AND THE OAKS IGNORE THEIR PLEAS: Tree Planting So White? Bizarre Racism at Vice.

Hey, Whitey! Yeah, you, the one about to send cash to your favorite environmental grift! Cease and desist. White people should not try to combat climate change. Only black, brown and various “indigenous” people can do it right.

I know this because I read it on Vice. A delightful young person named Anya Zoledziowski has penned an article asserting that “Tree Planting Is a White Person’s Solution to Climate Change.”

What’s white about it? I’m still not sure, but Zoledziowski is an “award-winning staff reporter at VICE World News,” whose “reporting focuses on a wide-range of social justice issues, including Indigenous affairs, race, politics, sex worker rights, and the disproportionate harm experienced by racialized communities as the climate crisis worsens.” So I have to trust her.

Her article comes on the heels of a dopy social media episode where somebody claimed they’d plant a tree for every picture of a pet people responded with. Shockingly, they didn’t have enough trees. Dumb situation, but Zoledziowski is here to make you think deeper about it.

“The reality,” she says, is that tree-planting initiatives are not always done right, and are rarely subjected to meaningful oversight—have you ever checked if that trendy brand planted a seedling after you bought your plaid?”

What is it with the left and racist — checking notes — trees this year? Earlier: $3.5T spending package includes big money for ‘tree equity,’ bias training and more.

Among the most contentious provisions, the bill gives a substantial funding boost to the Internal Revenue Service, which stands to gain an additional $78.94 billion over the next 10 years. The money would help the IRS strengthen tax enforcement activities, expand audits and modernize its technology. An additional $410 million would go to IRS oversight.

Democrats also are putting equity at the center of the bill. The Agriculture Committee has earmarked $3 billion for a tree-planting program “with a priority for projects that increase tree equity.” The legislation dishes out another $4 billion for “neighborhood access and equity grants.” Meanwhile, its “electric vehicle charging equity program” comes with a $1 billion price tag.

The bill generally doesn’t elaborate on the meaning of equity in this context, though American Forests defines “tree equity,” for example, as a tree-planting program that “identifies the cities that can gain the most significant health, economic and climate benefits by increasing tree canopy in places of high need.”

The legislation would add billions of dollars in climate change funding, starting with the “Civilian Climate Corps,” which would get at least $7.5 billion across multiple committee budgets. The organization, which President Biden has placed at the top of his climate wishlist, would employ thousands of young people to carry out conservation and climate change-related projects on public lands.

But what on earth is “tree equity?” Here’s a word salad of an article from June that tries to explain it: Finally Quantified: Tree Equity Has an Impact on Poorer Neighborhoods.

The effects of the decades-long systematic denial of mortgages to people of color, called redlining, are undeniably visible across the country. One effect has been the persistence of poverty in predominantly Black communities across the United States. Another is a distinct lack of tree cover in these communities. For the first time, the inequality in neighborhood vegetation has been quantified through the Tree Equity Score, developed by the nonprofit conservation organization American Forests.

Assessing nearly 500 municipalities representing more than 70 percent of the U.S. population, staff at American Forests found that neighborhoods consisting mostly of people of color have an average of one-third less tree canopy than majority white communities.

What’s the issue with tree equity, or lack thereof?

The prevailing problem with having too few trees in an urban area is the heat. Some neighborhoods have so much exposed concrete absorbing sunshine that they become heat islands, which can be up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than nearby areas with natural cover. One study found that urban heat islands can experience warming up to twice as strong as that caused by global warming.

In the face of elevating heat, the Tree Equity Score opens new opportunities for effective planting. Its tally puts an exact number on the trees needed to achieve equity amongst neighborhoods, leading to better health and livability. American Forests has calculated a total of 522 million trees needed nationwide, but not planted just anywhere. The online, publicly-accessible map shows exactly where cities need to plant trees — the goal, after all, is community uplift through equity.

“We don’t just need more trees in America’s cities. We need tree equity,” Jad Daley, president and CEO of American Forests, told Fast Company.

Not surprisingly, Twitter users had loads of fun dunking on the phrase “tree equity” in late September: “Spending $3B on ‘tree equity’ is really the perfect encapsulation of Democrats in 2021.”

Question: Are trees more or less racist than roads and bridges in 2021’s intersectional bingo?

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Rittenhouse, Sandmann Agree To Share Joint Custody Of CNN.