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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the rare sighting of an accused murderer taking the stand at his own trial and how this fits into the larger context of our government and society. Plus, priests are "weighing in" on the "Satanic" nature of the tragedy at Astrofest.
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Welcome to the Patreon-exclusive Weekender episode of the Montclair Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates-Hexton here with Nick Halseman.
A quick bit of housecleaning before we get going.
Just to let our beloved audience know, I've got a little bit of a familial emergency that I have to go take care of, so we're taping this a little bit earlier than usual.
Hopefully, it will not interfere with what we've got going on in our taping schedule.
We'll keep everybody apprised.
But unfortunately, Nick, we have to go back into the world of right-wing radicalism and vent our frustration about everything from growing calls for violence, vigilantism, the American judicial system, which, by the way, I got a tour of in jury duty the other day that I want to talk about.
There's a lot going on.
Oh yeah, yeah.
And this is a really interesting case if we want to talk about Kyle Rittenhouse being tried for murder in Wisconsin because it's almost never will you see an accused murderer actually get on the stand and testify.
Almost never.
So this is a really interesting experience for everybody, including the lawyers in the courtroom.
Yeah, and to go ahead and put this on the table, I've talked to a few people who are following the case, a couple of legal experts.
I think there is a dawning understanding that he's not going to be convicted, that this is a situation where Our judicial system's real screwed up.
I don't know how else to put it.
We'll get more into that as we go along with this, but to go ahead and get everybody prepared for it, I mean, the chances are here, we get kicked in the teeth all the time by this stuff.
And undoubtedly, if he is acquitted, there's going to be hell to pay in that regard.
We'll talk about that as it happens.
But him going on the stand, I don't know, really disturbing.
For those who maybe haven't seen, he got on the stand, And basically turned into a child before everyone's eyes.
This person who, of course, went to Wisconsin out of state with a semi-automatic rifle in order to carry out vigilante justice.
And by the way, Nick, for the record, he has been posing with every right-wing personality he can find.
He's been celebrated for this.
But just remembering it on the stand somehow or another reduced him to tears.
It's a really strange turn of circumstances.
Well, okay, I mentioned this to you in the DM yesterday.
There's a lot of people out there, blue checks included on Twitter, who would want to mock him for his breakdown that he had on the stand.
Now, I have no idea if he's faking that or not.
It doesn't look like he's faking it.
And as a result, because we don't know and have no way of ascertaining that, I am in no position to sort of at least mock him for what clearly was, in my mind, going through a traumatic experience that he had went through, which is exactly why they put him on the stand.
So I think what kind of getting to what you're saying is that he probably had already done something like this when he was trying to recount it.
And they're like, ah, that's really, really cynical version.
This is great.
We got to put him on the stand now because he's going to have to do that.
The funny thing is, is that the funny thing?
The interesting thing is, to me, it kind of felt like at certain times, maybe he isn't his IQ might not be really high.
But then other times when I saw him reacting normally during the trial, he seems like a completely with it kid who knows exactly what he was doing and doesn't have any kind of deficit there.
So either way, it's a win for the defense by having that kind of reaction on the stand.
It will no doubt affect the jury in a positive way for him.
It's an incredibly effective strategy is what it is.
I mean, and in part of the reason and to drill down deeper into this thing, one of the reasons that such an effective strategy is because of the double standard within the United States of America.
Of course, you know, we, we've all seen this and, and you know, we roll our eyes at it.
It turns up on social media.
We point out the bullshit of it every time.
That a black teenager gets blown away by police every time that somebody gets killed.
Immediately, the media flocks to this person.
They go on their social media.
They go to their record.
They say, oh, he's no angel.
He's no kid.
Meanwhile, Rittenhouse again carries a semi-automatic to a riot zone or whatever we want to call it.
And then we get stuff like this.
This is a New York Times social media post that is about about the trial.
Kyle Rittenhouse, who has idolized law enforcement since he was young, arrived in Kenosha on August 25th, 2020 with at least one mission to play the role of police officer and medic.
The night would end with him fatally shooting two men and wounding another.
And a lot of what we talk about on here is about rhetorical understanding and sort of getting down into these narratives that sort of persuade our culture.
It's all right there.
The story is that he's a kid who got in over his head.
He had noble intentions and he got there and it turns out that he was still just a kid.
That narrative feeds in and and now of course and we're gonna have to talk about Heaven help us, we're going to have to talk about J.D.
Vance here in a minute.
But the entire purpose of this is to spin a narrative which is basically to say, oh, this poor child ended up in a situation, got in over his head, we need to go ahead and treat him well, which by the way has been used for white teenagers, everyone from Brock Turner now to Kyle Rittenhouse, but that is the double standard that takes place in our media and in our culture.
Well, you know, the people who would never listen to this podcast, for whatever reason, would simply say, well, those are facts that the New York Times is reporting.
A couple other facts I just want to drop in there, and by the way, they're not lying, but you're right, you have to look at the context of how they would describe other people in this situation.
and how they've done that in the past as facts.
Now, here are a couple of facts for you.
He's going to be convicted of possessing a firearm underage.
Okay, that I don't think is going to be in dispute.
It's one of the counts, and that's up to nine months of prison and a fine or both.
So, you know, I know that some of the lawyers are like, he's going to get off, and that's probably true for the serious stuff.
But at the very least, I think what we could safely say is that he will get, you know, that will be a guilty sentence.
Now, there's another provision of the Wisconsin law that extends that maximum sentence for crimes committed while possessing a dangerous weapon.
That could be up to five years.
I don't think he's going to get five years.
That's the maximum, maximum.
But I bet you they'll tack on another three months, make it a year, make it maybe two years.
He's going to get some time in prison and a fine.
I have no doubt about that.
But the question here is, what are they going to deal with as far as the other charges?
Now, do you want to get into J.D.
Vance and the cultural stuff first?
Well, I want to go real fast.
My instinct is that that what you just said is likely That's my instinct is that that's likely that he might end up serving jail time But also there's this other part and I assume you have this too It's living in the United States of America and seeing this play out over and over and over again And there is a part of me that is ready for the day that either he doesn't get convicted for those things Or he does get convicted for those things and they're like time served You know what I mean?
Like I, I, I'm, I'm prepared for that.
And I have to tell you, so like the other day I got called to jury duty and I had a weird experience, man.
I had a really, really strange experience on jury duty.
So I get in and I'm like sitting there doing the thing.
And before they start like impaneling this jury, like a sheriff comes out and he's being all folksy and talking to people or whatever.
And then he starts talking about like, Oh, we're just so glad you're here.
You know, your job is part of my job and we're on the same team.
And And I gotta tell you, there's something weird about that.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's a, that's, that's not true.
That's not how this works.
That's not how any of this is supposed to work.
He starts talking about putting bad guys around.
So already we're putting together a jury thinking that whoever gets arrested is a quote-unquote bad guy, right?
So all of a sudden that starts happening.
All of a sudden the lawyers come out.
And guess who gets to address the jury pool?
The district attorney and her team.
And they start talking about how long they worked on this and how much they appreciate us.
The defendant doesn't say anything.
The defending attorney doesn't say anything.
Meanwhile, then the judge comes out.
And the judge, well, oh, I forgot the best part about this.
The sheriff, by the way, is like, you know, uh, I just want to take a second to say to everybody, uh, you know, if you could take a second, say a prayer to the big man upstairs for America right now.
Jesus Christ.
It needs it more than ever.
And everyone's like, amen.
Absolutely it does.
Judge comes out and says the three most important things a citizen can do is to vote, serve on a jury, and carry a rifle.
Then, as they're dividing up the jury pools, I end up in another room, and I have to tell you, Nick, this was actually pretty shocking for me.
And this is something, I think we talk about this, but we never say it explicitly, which is, in the past you would hear political conversations, you would hear people talk about conspiracy theories.
It's gotten worse.
You can't get away from it now.
It's constant.
In almost all conversations and interactions out in the world, you come across this shit.
And it was everybody spouting off, not just Fox News, but internet, Facebook, conspiracy theories.
We pulled out of Afghanistan because Hunter Biden was making money.
You name it.
The entire experience, and I don't know about you, and maybe this is a fault of my own, I don't think about the judicial system that often.
You know what I mean?
Like, unless it's a trial, unless there's something going on.
But to think about, like, how inundated it is with this shit.
Not only, like, the false information, but this idea, this mythology of it.
And then I got home and this happened.
This Rittenhouse thing.
With the judge basically defending Rittenhouse.
And this, everything back and forth.
It felt very ominous, is what I would say.
It felt very bad.
You know, it's funny.
I had an interesting experience as a foreman on a jury.
Wait, you were a foreman of a jury?
Yeah, I'll tell you that in a second, but they must have kicked you out of there during voir dire pretty fast, right?
You're just some liberal, you know, professor.
Most of the time they do.
This time they brought in like 300 people for one jury.
Oh jeez.
And basically I got put in another room for a while and they picked the jury.
Okay.
So I didn't get dismissed this time, but I usually get kicked out pretty quick.
Wait, so you're still part of the pool?
Apparently.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Yeah, they're gonna kick you out.
Don't worry about it.
They're not gonna want you and your kind in that jury.
But yeah, I was a foreman and part of the reason why I wanted to do it is because I was sensing like we're gonna need to have in this kind of a case it was like some weird criminal law about you can't hang out with if they identify you like in a gang and then they see you with another gang member in the future then you can just be arrested just for hanging out with them.
You're a leader of men.
You're a coach.
You're a leader of men.
get people galvanized and on the same page and figure out how to, you know, there was some nuance to have to decide how we're going to go.
You're a leader of men.
You're a coach.
You're a leader of men.
Yeah, and by the way, we had like the one juror who was like, there's out of the 12, one of them was like, I don't give a crap.
Whatever you guys say, just get me out of here.
I'll just vote with whatever it has to be.
You know, and that's probably like, whatever one 12th of the population would be is probably how that would go across the whole, you know, nation, right?
Anyway, but let's focus on this for a second because, you know, this judge is a kook.
Let's just say that.
He has been there for 50 years and he is erratic as all could be.
But I do want to say... Most judges are kooks.
Yeah, they really are.
Short tempered.
Yeah.
Right.
Like authoritarian personalities, weirdly, not just conservative, but conspiratorial like that is a large part of our judiciary, our kooks.
But I do want to say one thing is he got crap a few weeks ago by not allowing them to use the word victims for the for the people that were killed by Rittenhouse.
Turns out in I was reading The New York Times today.
I was today years old when I learned this, that that's a longstanding rule in a trial for self-defense that you can't refer to the victims as victims.
So apparently, that isn't such a crazy, wild, white man thing, protecting the defense.
The prosecution is not doing a great job.
Right.
They're losing the control of the courtroom.
They're not able to sort of control the narrative they want to do.
They're leading questions, which are supposed to be leading anyway.
But but it's it's obvious.
Right.
Sometimes you can have a deft hand with these things and then you can get the defendant almost like they maybe weren't prepared to, like, deal with this.
The defendant of all people on the stand.
But I do want to at least say that that like as far as what the judge is doing like even the thing when he blew up because they were trying to include the notion of a picture of him that he was wearing a t-shirt that said free as fuck as a way of establishing his mindset after the after he was arrested but he was out on bail.
You know obviously they said they couldn't use that picture.
Okay, fine.
You know, maybe it's not completely germane to the case and whatever happened on that night.
But, you know, the defense was trying, I mean, the prosecutors were trying to, like, sneak it in.
So the judge freaked out on them.
I don't necessarily blame the judge for being upset that they were trying to, like, you know, ask some questions dancing around this piece of evidence so they didn't have to, like, you know, submit it.
Which they weren't allowed to, but it would get heard in front of the jury, right?
So, you know, they're not doing a great job with this thing and I'm concerned that they're going to be able to, we'll go a little bit deeper into this in a second, but I'm concerned that for not necessarily the reasons that you want to say, he'll get off anyway because the prosecution, I don't think, is doing as well as they could.
Yeah, and I think, to go ahead and put this in perspective, this is about more than Kyle Rittenhouse.
Like, we can sit here and talk all day long about this teenager who did this thing, and, you know, we could turn it into a passion play, which is exactly what the media does.
They're very interested in this because it's gonna gain a lot of eyeballs, a lot of clicks, it's gonna lead to a lot of attention.
This is what we like.
It's a ready-made narrative, you know?
But there's more stuff happening here.
And what we're dealing with at this point, with the fact that he probably is not going to get convicted of this, not only does that set precedent, but we've already seen the Republican Party and America's right wing start to galvanize around this kid.
They've started to turn him into a symbol of something else, right?
Vigilante-ism, the idea that somebody has to take matters into their own hands.
And, you know, like in all things like this, J.D.
Vance, who... I've been telling people for years that J.D.
Vance is a giant piece of shit.
But J.D.
Vance has become completely determined to show everybody how big of a piece of shit that he can be.
And a reminder that JD Vance is not just some simple Appalachian boy made good who's suddenly running for the Senate.
He is a pawn of Peter Thiel.
And this libertarian, right-wing, big tech movement in the country.
He does a lot of really insidious stuff.
And J.D.
Vance, I think, kind of started out this new sort of conversation that we're going to have to deal with.
And this is a quick little tweet thread from J.D.
Vance.
I'm going to read this so we can talk about it and dissect it a little bit and what it means.
J.D.
Vance.
I took a brief break to watch this written house testimony, and it fills me with indescribable rage.
Hey, me too, JD.
I'm not a criminal lawyer.
I'm sure people are right that it's risky for him to testify, but our leaders abandoned this kid's community to lawless thug rioters, and he did something about it.
And now a lawless thug prosecutor is trying to destroy his life.
Now, before we move forward, the message there is pretty clear, right?
Somebody has to do Something.
And that says that we need vigilantism.
We need more people to take matters into their own hands.
Which at this point isn't even about Kyle Rittenhouse anymore.
It's not about a kid who got in quote-unquote over his head.
All of a sudden now it's a clarion call.
Somebody has to do something or otherwise it's going to mean the safety of you, yours, and your family.
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