The United States of Random Violence
Plus: Drawing the line at Fox News
We wake this morning to more horrific news about what happened last night in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
WAUKESHA - A treasured rite of the holiday season turned into a scene of bloody, deadly mayhem late Sunday afternoon as a vehicle plowed into the Waukesha Christmas Parade, killing five people and injuring more than 40 others, authorities said.
As I write, we don’t know what we don’t know, and my friend James Wigderson offers some good advice:
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This tragedy occurs as southeast Wisconsin is still processing the fallout from last Friday’s acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who shot and killed two men and wounded another last year in Kenosha. As I wrote last week, the jury’s conclusion that he acted within the legal definition of self-defense was not unexpected. The real damage, however, comes from the right’s continued glorification of violence.
The danger is quite real, as Adam Serwer noted over the weekend:
“At this point, we’re living under corporate and medical fascism. This is tyranny,” said an attendee at an event held by the conservative group Turning Point USA in October. “When do we get to use the guns?” The audience responded with applause. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”
Most of this is idle bluster from keyboard gangsters on social media. But the more it is encouraged by mainstream political leadership, the less likely it is to remain mere talk.
Despite the obvious dangers of treating Rittenhouse as a hero, Fox News, predictably, indulged in an orgy of celebration, while the political class gave us stuff like this:
And then there was this from Hugh Hewitt’s radio fill-in:
As Christian Vanderbrouk noted, Schlichter’s take is revealing: “They don’t love him because he defended himself; they love him because he killed their political enemies.”