I have been traveling all day, and am only just now able to post something about the Rittenhouse verdict. I’m going to keep it short, because I’m really tired, and besides, you who have been online or watching TV have probably had as much of the commentary as you can stand. I do want to post this so you can discuss it in the comments.

Here is the video of the young man receiving the verdict:

I’m grateful that the jury returned this verdict, and that kid’s nightmare can begin to end. I’ve been catching up on the media reactions today, and though I am not surprised by the malicious insanity on the Left, I am nonetheless more convinced than ever that the media and Democratic Party people are going to end up stoking racial violence. Tucker Carlson is right:

It is hard to believe, but truth can still prevail in this country over the monstrous progressive lying machine. Despite the best efforts of the media, it turns out that you can’t always ruin a person because you hate the color of their skin and their politics.

My TAC colleague Declan Leary has a sulfuric column about all this. I really like this graf:

The great tragedy of Kenosha is that, in a matter of days, civilization collapsed so fully that the only people willing to stand against chaos were teenagers and twenty-somethings who barely knew how to shoot, much less how to fight, and not at all how to establish or maintain control. That is the reason people died, and the reason Kyle Rittenhouse will spend the rest of his life with the weight of having killed them: the wholesale dereliction of basic duty by an ineffectual government, and the inability of the whole society to form men as capable as they are willing to step into the breach. Once the regime finally crawled out of its bunker, with whole sections of the city turned to ash, the best it could manage was to send some effeminate mediocrity to prosecute the youngest of the LARPers for killing a pedophile and a wife-beater in ham-fisted self-defense.

UPDATE: Matt Taibbi:

Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all six charges today, already causing a great exploding of heads in the pundit-o-sphere. Unrest wouldn’t be surprising. How could it be otherwise? Colleagues in national media spent over a year telling the country the 18-year-old was not just guilty, but a moral monster whose acquittal would be an in-your-face affirmation of systemic white supremacy.

He talks about the unbelievable recklessness of an MSNBC employee tailing the juror bus. More:

We’ve seen Die Hard-level indifference to social consequence from the beginning of this case. The context of the Rittenhouse shootings involved a summer of protests that began after the police killing of George Floyd, and continued in Kenosha after the shooting of Jacob Blake. We saw demonstrations of all types last summer, ranging from solemn candlelight vigils and thousands of protesters laying peacefully on their backs across bridges, to the burning of storefronts and “hundreds” of car thieves stealing “nearly 80” cars from a dealership in San Leandro, California. When the population is on edge, and people are amped and ready to lash out, that puts an even greater onus on media figures to get things right.

In a tinderbox situation like this one, it was reckless beyond belief for analysts to tell audiences Rittenhouse was a murderer when many if not most of them had a good idea he would be acquitted. But that’s exactly what most outlets did.

Meanwhile, some folks looted Chicago stores overnight to protest white supremacy.

These people — people in the media, President Joe Biden (who earlier groundlessly called Rittenhouse a “white supremacist,” the Chicago looters, all of them — are ruining this country.