Kyle Rittenhouse and the American Identity Crisis
27th November 2021
There was no reason for the world ever to hear the name Kyle Rittenhouse. Except that in the summer of 2020 this country was staring over a precipice. The Covid lockdowns effectively ended after the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesotan policeman. Suddenly mass gatherings in the name of BLM were a public-health duty and, because it was an election year, neither Democrats nor Republicans seemed to know how to react to protests that soon degenerated into serious disorder.
For a country that is only one bad police interaction away from meltdown, it was inevitable that something would happen again. Sure enough in August a man called Jacob Blake was shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. There was a warrant out for Blake’s arrest and he was shot after fighting with police, wielding a knife and having already been tasered. Though Blake was not killed, BLM and other protest movements immediately had another martyr to hold up as evidence of systemic racism in America. And once again the peaceful movements turned very violent indeed. For two nights businesses were looted and burned to the ground. “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests” was how CNN captioned events as its correspondent reported from in front of the fires.