Tag: kyle rittenhouse

Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, and the Inability to Think in Terms of Principles

On Monday night, we produced an in-depth video report examining the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and Project Veritas and the dangers it presents (as we do for all of our Rumble videos, the transcript will soon be made available to subscribers here; for now, you can watch the video at the Rumble link or on the player below). One of the primary topics of our report was the authoritarian tactic that is typically used to justify governmental attacks on those who report news and disseminate information: namely, to decree that the target is not a real journalist and therefore has no entitlement to claim the First Amendment guarantee of a free press.

This not-a-real-journalist tactic was and remains the primary theory used by those who justify the ongoing attempt to imprison Julian Assange. In demanding Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions.” Yet the five-term Senator insisted: “but he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.”

This not-a-real-journalist slogan was also the one used by both the CIA and the corporate media against myself and my colleagues in both the Snowden reporting we did in 2013, as well as the failed attempt to criminally prosecute me in 2020 for the year-long Brazil exposés we did: punishing them is not an attack on press freedom because they are not journalists and what they did is not journalism.

What is most striking about this weapon is that — like the campaign to agitate for more censorship — it is led by journalists. It is the corporate media that most aggressively insists that those who are independent, those who are outsiders, those who do not submit to their institutional structures are not real journalists the way they are, and thus are not entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. In order to create a framework to deny Project Veritas’s status as journalists, The New York Times claimed last week that anyone who uses undercover investigations (as Veritas does) is automatically a non-journalist because that entails lying — even though, just two years earlier, the same paper heralded numerous news outlets such as Al Jazeera and Mother Jones for using undercover investigations to accomplish what they called “compelling” reporting.

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Liberal Prosecutor Says Kyle Rittenhouse Should ‘Lose The Right To Self-Defense’ Because He Brought A Gun

Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger made a bizarre claim during the prosecution’s closing statement in the Kyle Rittenhouse homicide trial on Monday, arguing that the teen lost his “right to self defense” because “you’re the one who brought the gun.” Binger’s argument is not supported by state or federal law, or hundreds of years of Constitutional precedent.

“You can’t claim self defense against an unarmed man like this,” Binger said. “You lose the right to self-defense when you’re the one who brought the gun, when you’re the one creating the danger, when you’re the one provoking other people. The defendants fired four shots at Joseph Rosenbaum and caused five wounds total.”

Binger’s case has repeatedly resorted to bizarre allegations, including the insinuation that Rittenhouse shot the men attacking him because he wanted to play the video game Call of Duty in real life.

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As America Braces For The Rittenhouse-Verdict Unrest, Profits Soar

The Mayhem Watch is on. Closing arguments in the trial of “Kenosha Shooter” Kyle Rittenhouse are expected Monday, and after weeks of hype, the country is primed to explode again. Wisconsin governor Tony Evers announced 500 National Guard troops will be on hand for potential post-verdict “unrest,” which seems almost guaranteed, no matter the result.

As with all major news stories lately, the Rittenhouse case saw idiosyncrasies wash away as coverage accumulated, with pundits pounding the trial into yet another generalized referendum on American culture war. Prestige media made Rittenhouse a stand-in for the Proud Boys, January 6th, school board protests, anti-mask protests, QAnon, Blue Lives Matter, Trump, “Domestic Terrorism,” fascism, school shooters, and every other naughty thing, with everyone from then-candidate Joe Biden to The Intercept blithely declaring him a white supremacist. The efforts to cast Rittenhouse as a symbol of racism and white rage have been awesome in quantity and transparently, intentionally provoking, with even leading papers like the New York Times standardizing a practice of underscoring Rittenhouse’s race (“white teenager”) while leaving the identities of those shot out of coverage. Glenn Greenwald pointed out that his old outlet, The Intercept, noted Rittenhouse’s race 20 times in one piece while keeping schtum about the color of those shot. This has gone on for so long, we’ve seen a foreign newspaper misreport that the two people killed in the case were black. In the public consciousness, they might as well have been.

Because Rittenhouse from the day of the shooting was made a symbol of Fox-watching, Trump-loving conservatives, he was also quickly adopted in red media as a hero, which “he surely wasn’t,” as Andrew Sullivan put it. This turbo-charged the freakout even more, as Rittenhouse’s defenders turned his case into a referendum on everything from media coverage of last summer’s protests of Black Lives Matter to the performance (or non-performance, as it were) of police during the George Floyd/Jacob Blake demonstrations, to a dozen other things that made public passions rise in the last year.

Rittenhouse in other words became a symbol of so many things to so many people that the specifics of his legal case have ceased to be relevant. There seems to be no such thing as an editorialist who has negative feelings about, say, Rittenhouse posing with Proud Boys, yet also believes that incident can’t be evidence since it happened after the shooting. Everyone picks a side and stays there. Pundits are telling us that any opinion on how the jury should rule can only be understood as a reflection of racial attitudes. “If you’re defending Kyle Rittenhouse, you might be a white supremacist. Just sayin,” is how Tweeter-with-beard and sometimes-journalist David Leavitt puts it.

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Instagram censors suggestions Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense

Musician and podcaster Jordan Sarmo has announced that Instagram deleted his post about Kyle Rittenhouse, a teen who is on trial for first degree murder of two men – that he says he committed in self-defense, as he was being chased and feared for his life.

But the case has become just the latest in a flurry of highly divisive issues plaguing US society, and mainstream social media seem to have chosen to err on the side of censorship and stifle any voices supporting Rittenhouse, even though the trial is still in progress and he is therefore presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Sarmo’s post that Instagram censored showed Rittenhouse break down in tears while he was testifying about the events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the rioting in the summer of 2020.

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Twitter disables retweet function on Rittenhouse mother’s tweet condemning Big Tech censorship of her son

Kyle Rittenhouse, who is currently facing trial for shooting three men, killing two of them, on the night of Aug. 25, 2020, was branded as a “white supremacist” from the beginning by left-wing politicians and personalities.

His trial has done much to back the claims of self-defense that his defense attorneys are arguing, yet Twitter has disabled the retweet function on a tweet by Rittenhouse’s mother stating that media had lied about her son and condeming Big Tech’s attempts to “crush & deplatform” the young defendant.

“The media & many who know better viciously lied about my son from he start. Tech companies tried to crush & deplatform @freekyleusa over 20x, often w/o explanation,” wrote Wendy Rittenhouse.

“We are facing tremendous expenses to help Kyle win this case & could use your help,” she continued, linking to a donation page.

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Facebook Aggressively Censoring Any Searches for Kyle Rittenhouse Amid Trial

Big Tech platform Facebook is aggressively censoring any searches for information about the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, an Illinois youth falsely accused of homicide by Wisconsin prosecutors following a self-defense incident at an ANTIFA riot.

Reports of Facebook turning off any and all search results amid the trial began last week, with Facebook users sharing evidence of totally disabled searches for Rittenhouse.

The block of information comes as Rittenhouse defense attorneys increasingly reveal a corrupt charade of a prosecution, with Kenosha County prosecutors implicated in coercing false testimony from witnesses and hardened ANTIFA militants openly admitting to chasing Rittenhouse armed with weapons during the shootings in August 2020.

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FBI Sat On Bombshell Footage From Kyle Rittenhouse Shooting

On Tuesday, opening statements in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, an18-year-old aspiring police officer accused of fatally shooting two men and wounding a third on the night of Aug. 25, 2020, as BLM riots raged in the streets of Kenosha in response to a white-on-black police shooting.

While prosecutors have slapped the teen with two counts of homicide and one count of attempted homicide, Rittenhouse has pleaded not guilty to all charges, claiming self-defense.

Now, new footage has emerged which bolsters his case.

Before the shooting began, Rittenhouse, 17 at the time, was had arrived in Kenosha in order to help keep order and protect businesses from looting and arson.

“People are getting inured, and our job is to protect this business, and part of my job is also to help people. If there’s somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle, because I need to protect myself obviously. But I also have my med kit,” Rittenhouse said in footage recorded before the incident.

During the course of the evening, protesters became increasingly violent against Rittenhouse and the group he was with – eventually chasing the teen down the street when protester Joseph Rosenbaum was shot dead in the parking lot of a used car dealership. Shortly thereafter, Rittenhouse could be seen defending himself on the ground from multiple attackers – when he fatally wounded another, and shot the bicep of protester Gaige Grosskreutz who had drawn a pistol and was in the process of aiming it at the teen.

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