Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein dissect the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, analyzing his emotional testimony where he admitted killing two men while facing murder charges. They criticize prosecutors for "weasel moves" like reintroducing excluded evidence and using drone footage to claim provocation without proof, arguing these tactics prioritize convictions over justice. The hosts challenge media narratives that shifted from labeling Rittenhouse a terrorist to questioning mob violence, noting hypocrisy in condemning white vigilante acts while excusing others. Ultimately, they contend the trial exposes systemic flaws where legal bias and polarized media framing threaten to fuel further societal division regardless of the verdict. [Automatically generated summary]
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Aggressive Prosecution and Mass Incarceration00:14:26
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He's Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
We are figuring this shit out as we go.
How are you, sir?
I like this like dictator angle that I got going on.
I think it makes me look sexy.
Everything about this just screams that we need to figure something better out.
But we're feeling like I'm like the colonel of the Dave Smith Army or some shit.
You're weirdly holding a microphone with two cords sticking out of them.
I don't know.
I'm not happy about anything that's happening.
But you know what?
We'll make it work.
We're going to get through an episode.
The microphone cross of COVID Jesus.
Oh.
Well, you know what?
Now when you put it that way, all right, that is pretty goddamn cool.
All right.
How are you, brother?
I'm doing good.
I like this new angle.
I feel like it's a whole new me.
All of that seemed phony and fake.
Yeah, I'm doing good.
This is totally a really fun way to podcast.
Way better than just, all right, we're having some technical issues, but we've think we've figured out a way to fucking make shit work.
So anyway, all right.
So for today's episode, I think we might, oh, we'll see.
Maybe there's a few things we'll talk about, but I think this might be a Kyle Rittenhouse trial part two episode.
And this one might focus on the media's response to the trial and their response to the, you know, the incident when it first happened.
But so there's a few things that I wanted to get into.
I guess let's start with this.
Some more has happened in the trial since we talked about it the other day.
The main thing is that Kyle Rittenhouse testified.
Did you see that, Rob?
Oh my God, what a performance, dude.
That guy brought the tears.
It was a tear jerker.
I welled up a little bit.
They had to take a break.
It was great.
Did you?
You welled up?
Were you getting into it?
Yeah.
There you go.
You're man enough to admit it.
Yeah, it was, well, it was something to see.
I'll say this, and I am, let me disclaim by saying I am not a lawyer, and neither is Rob.
As Jewy as we are, we are not lawyers.
But I thought it was crazy that he testified.
Now, I'm not claiming to have some, you know, any type of expertise in the field of being a defense attorney or how, you know, anything like that.
But I thought from my understanding, that is a very like, it's a move that you usually would not recommend.
Like, there's no reason for him to get on the stand and testify.
And in a case where the conventional wisdom seems to be that the defense is doing very well, you would think that he would not testify.
Now, it is possible, by the way, I'm not just blaming his lawyers.
It is possible that he insisted that he's going to testify.
You know, you can do that.
And so maybe that's what happened.
I don't know.
But my first thought when I heard he was going to testify the day after we recorded our last episode, I was like, what are they doing?
How would someone not convince him not to?
I mean, when everything's going, you know, the way it's going, all that can happen is kind of something bad.
And anyway, I was really surprised that he testified, but he did.
And he had this emotional scene that everybody's talking about that you were just alluding to.
That was, oof, it was, it was something.
I know a lot of people making jokes and sharing memes and stuff like that.
There's been some real funny ones too.
I'm not shitting on anybody for making jokes about anything fucked up.
That was there.
I saw some real funny shit about it, but it was something.
I thought it was a real moment.
And in many ways, I looked at that and I thought it was kind of like a wake-up call to America, you know, to see that it's like, yeah, this isn't, this isn't a joke.
And did you see there were people who accused him of acting?
No, that wasn't acting.
Yeah, it just wasn't acting.
I thought that was so insane that people would even say that.
We're like, so what do you think?
What do you think is more likely here that this 17-year-old kid, you know, put on like a fucking Academy Award performance?
Or do you think that a 17-year-old kid or 18-year-old kid now, you know, killed two people and shot another one and feared for his life and was in this crazy situation?
And that this is like, you know, traumatic and overwhelming.
And that you are watching some real shit.
And people are making fun of kind of how it was like, you know, what they're making fun of is how it's, it doesn't feel like the way an actor acts out trauma because it's not.
It's just real and uncomfortable.
And, you know, I think there's a lot of people.
I've been saying this for a long time, but I think both on the left and the right and the libertarian and, you know, all types of different political persuasions, there are people who kind of glorify the drama of what's happening in the country right now.
And it's kind of like, oh, yeah, you want to bring a civil war to us, then we'll bring a civil war back to you and we'll fucking do all this shit.
And you have, you know, Antifa and the Proud Boys and all of these different groups.
And it's like, look, man, none of you guys want this.
Or maybe not none of you, 99.9% of you, you don't want this.
Especially if you're successfully a badass and then you got to go to court over it.
That's fucking lame.
Well, yeah.
But look, dude, even this, even if he never had to fucking go to court or anything like that, the truth is that for the vast, vast, vast majority of people, you're not just going to go kill someone and then just get back to life.
That's going to fuck with you for a long time.
And that is, it's a situation you don't ever want to be in.
And that's, uh, it, it's just a horrible thing.
It's a really, really horrible thing.
And whatever, like, and that's like my thing, like, my, my like pitch, which I think more important than anything else, is that the goal here should be whatever can de-escalate the violence.
None of us want to see more violence.
And I don't even care if you think you can win.
You know, if you think, oh, if it really comes to violence, we could like win this shit.
That's that's not winning.
The best way to win is to avoid any of this stuff at all.
So that's that was kind of my takeaway from the whole thing.
It was really sad to hear him say this.
And like, maybe, maybe I'm a little bit like, you know, I have my own biases or my own perspective and all that.
You know, I just had a boy.
I got, I, you know, I have a son now.
And seeing an 18-year-old kid, like, you know, in this position, like, oof, you just, you want to stay out of that.
Like, don't get me wrong.
I think I'm not at all saying I think he, from everything I've seen, I think the guy clearly was, you know, acting in self-defense.
And I think the fact that this has even been, he's even been charged or it's gone to trial is a, is like an outrageous miscarriage of justice.
Um, and and I, I expect, hopefully, um, and and and I hope that he'll be acquitted of all charges.
But man, what just what a horrible situation.
The whole thing is just awful.
And um, to see, like, yeah, he's he, you know, you never get off.
That's a, it's some fucking some shit about karma or maybe more accurately, God.
But uh, you always pay your price in this world.
And he's, I think he's gone through it.
That's that, that to me is the honest truth.
Like what I saw there, I know there's people who like can claim they're like, well, I think he's just acting or he's just this or he was smiling in that picture in the bar, but now he's crying here.
And you're like, yeah, well, okay, odds are like, yeah, he was at a bar and was smiling.
And now he's, you know, recounting the story of killing two people and shooting another while he's facing being convicted of murder and is and it's hitting him and he's having a serious moment.
And I, I thought that like that was to me, that was that was tough to see.
It's like, yeah, dude, this is this is hard, real shit that you don't ever want to be in.
You do not want to be in this situation.
And I said to everybody who listens to this show, everybody, you don't want to see a civil war, man.
You don't want to see any more of this violence.
No matter how much you think you're ready for this shit, I think you're really not ready for it.
So kids got some skills, though, between that epic performance of managing to only shoot the people that were attacking him and in pretty incredible fashion after falling over, the details by which he was able to recount it.
And oddly enough, one of the things the prosecutor pointed out is how much of this is your memory and how much of this is that you just watch the footage.
Well, that's a procedural issue then.
If you're showing the footage, like that's not on him.
He just had to sit there and watch all of it.
Can we talk about some of the weasel moves that prosecution team pulled on, you know, when they cross-examined him?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Now, what did we talk about last time that the judge got furious?
Last podcast, we talked about how the judge got furious at the or did we not know?
We haven't gotten into that yet.
That was on the prosecution.
So that's right.
So that was on, so they started grilling him about lawyering up and being quiet.
That was, yes, that was the first.
He dismissed the jury And was like, what the fuck?
You can't do that, which even I know you can't do.
No, that was the first weasel move that they pulled.
Is they started, then the next weasel move that they pulled was: I thought the fact that they were asking about playing video games, every kid in the world fucking plays video games.
We don't go commit violence.
That's like, what are you doing?
And also, Kyle was right when he was like, Yeah, there's more than just this gun in video games, which is true.
I've played Call of Duty.
There's a lot of guns in Call of Duty.
Like the wild claim that he was trying to, and then he pulled up his social media profile, which obviously is not the, but like when he said just trying to be famous, that's just as likely irony of him making fun of everybody and the purpose of why they're being on social media than it is him actually making a statement that he's looking to be famous.
And then the giant leap that that would be to say, hey, look at this idiot kid.
And so he's clearly an idiot.
He clearly likes playing video games and he was just here to like, those are such wild and inappropriate leaps.
Like, so that was weasel move number one.
Weasel move number two was they had already declared that some evidence couldn't be brought into the trial.
And then he tried pulling this just confidence salesy move where he reintroduced it and the judge had to kick out the jury and go, what are you doing?
We already said you can't use that.
And he goes, no, but it's relevant now because it's come up.
And so because it's come up, I can.
And the judge is like, that's not the way it works.
Fucking weasel those prosecutors.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and that's another thing.
I tweeted about this.
Scott Horton tweeted about this, and then I made my own comment about it.
But I do think there's something, you know, when these trials are so high profile, and particularly one like this, where the right wing, you know, generally speaking, is kind of rooting for the defendant.
I do think it's useful to point out that you're like, yeah, dude, this is not like, this is not a situation where it's like, wow, you never see this in our system.
It's like, no, this is the system.
These like mediocre, scummy prosecutors who are there to collect wins.
You know, they don't care if the fucking evidence comes out overwhelmingly that it's like, yeah, that you do not have a guilty guy here.
You have the wrong guy.
They suppress evidence all the time that would get somebody off because they want to get convictions and brag about it.
It's the grossest sales job in the world.
Yes, exactly.
It's like a sales job where you're ruining people's lives.
And that's one thing if you think you've got someone who's guilty, but they'll do it all the same.
And this is aggressive prosecution.
It's the main driver of mass incarceration.
And so I would, you know, I would just say that is something to right-wingers to say, hey, you know, historically, when people, libertarians and such, have complained about mass incarceration.
Maybe, yeah, there are a lot of prosecutors, prosecutors like this who will really, you know, be that sleazy and that unethical in pushing their fucking thing.
But yeah, the idea that he's, oh, he played video games or whatever he posted on social media was like, does this have any relevance whatsoever to this case?
Picking Deal Makers Over Breakers00:02:20
No.
The answer is no, it doesn't.
Yeah, I thought Kyle Rittenhouse did a good job.
How do you stay calm?
Like, can you imagine sitting there in a prosecutor?
You know, the game that you're playing.
This guy's just trying to send you to jail for life to advance his career and to sit there and be calm and not just be like, dude, what are you doing?
You're lying.
I would start going after the prosecutor.
I couldn't just sit there and take it and answer questions.
That'd be a tough situation to be like, dude, you're trying to ruin my life to get like a notch so your boss will go at a boy.
Like, that's what you're doing right now.
Yeah, that'd be real tough, real tough to deal with.
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Self-Defense Claims and Hidden Contexts00:15:52
So, yeah, that was that was something.
That was something to watch.
The judge, you know, going at that guy was really interesting.
And I don't know, you know, I guess we'll see.
We'll see how this whole thing ends up.
I'm still, I'm still not completely convinced.
I'm never completely convinced, like I said on the last episode, with these trials that are somewhat political.
It just, you never know.
I think, and this is also where it becomes a sales job.
The negotiation tactic is called anchoring, where they put life in jail on the table.
By the time tomorrow, there's going to be lesser charges.
And then the jury gets to feel like, all right, well, we didn't do that one, but we are going to give him this lesser charge.
So everyone gets to go home feeling like they won, which is not a win.
You're still putting some charge on a kid for absolutely no reason, but it's this mental psyche thing where it's like, well, we didn't give him the most severe charge.
So who knows what bullshit charges they're going to like walk it down to tomorrow when they actually bring it to prosecution.
But my guess is there's going to be some sort of bullshit misdemeanor offense that, and to take it a step back, we have a weird law here.
Cause like imagine if tomorrow there was like some Nazi rally and I had John Wick skills, which I don't, and I showed up with, you know, you know, like nine guns on me and provoked them to start a fight with me so I could take them all out.
I mean, the law shouldn't allow for that, but the current, and I'm not saying that Kyle did that.
Kyle clearly did not go there, in my opinion, looking for a fight.
I think he you grow out of trying to help people because you realize you just get in trouble.
I actually think that's a kid who was like, hey, I can go help out my town and probably needed some better parents to be like, nope, like that's not safe.
You should be staying home.
You're going to get yourself in trouble.
But like, I'm just saying the way the law is, like, he was in a tough situation and he probably shouldn't have been there.
And it was stupid to have been there.
But once it went down, it's fucking self-defense.
Like, this is not on him.
You got to change.
Look, what I'm seeing from this case, and this is my gut feeling.
You never know.
I mean, getting inside people's heads is something that you can't do for sure.
But You got a kid, and I'm seeing that you know, that uh, um, him crying while testifying.
And my feeling is not, oh, this kid's putting on a performance or something like that.
I just, I don't know, you know, it's funny.
It's like there, for all the um, you know, there's all this talk of it's really, but sorry, but it's it's like kind of hard to even wrap your head around, but so there'll be all these things where, like, you know, we have trick the trigger warning movement on college campuses where they'll be like, you know, we can't read Catcher in the Rye without a trigger warning on it first, because this could trigger someone, and they could,
so we need a safe space, and we need all this, and all this talk about how, you know, whatever misgendering someone is violence, and that could be traumatic to people.
And you know, this stuff on the kind of woke, crazy, woke left, where it's like everything they think is like trauma.
And some of those same people will look at this kid and be like, oh, he's acting it up.
And you're like, look, even if I mean, whoever you think he is, this is a guy who killed two people at age 17 and shot another guy after being chased through this alley at night and falling on his back and skateboards, hitting him and like, shoot, you know, no matter what that is, even if he was like a bad dude, which I don't see any evidence that he is but even if he was,
you think that just wouldn't with you at all.
Like you, you don't think it's possible that that's traumatic.
But you're think, but being misgendered is traumatic, like whatever I it's just a very weird, freaking culture that we live in.
But okay, but what i'm seeing here is a kid who I do think, you know, probably was somewhat naive and had no idea what he was really getting himself into.
Now, that doesn't, that's not a shot at him.
That's just to me the the you know 17 situation.
Yeah right, like we all are at 17 and I would, you know it, like I would do everything I could to make sure my son did not put himself in that situation.
Right, like that's how I would feel about it.
Um, but I think he went there like look, i'm gonna, you know, i'm gonna go clean up some graffiti and i'm gonna help people out if they're injured and i'll take my gun so that everything's.
You know fine, in case there's any issues and had no real idea like oh, you'd be in this type of situation, and he found himself in that type of situation and he, he did a good you know a good job to protect his life when it really came to it.
Um anyway, that's, that's what it seems like to me and uh, it's just, I don't know.
I guess the thing that I think is being lost on everyone is that this is sad, this is a sad story And it's something that you would think if we were if like, the country was smarter and better, that a lot of people would look at and go, ah, shit, we don't want to do this.
Like, what are we doing?
People are fucking getting killed over, you know what I mean?
Like these, these little like cultural flare-ups.
There's nothing positive about this.
It's awful.
Anyway.
Well, on that note, the cops are ultimately responsible to me.
If you want to say about there being a dangerous environment or people like who weren't doing what they're supposed to be doing, why is there a town where it's okay that people are just flipping over cars and breaking the car windows and things are being lit on fire?
I'm like, how do you end up in that environment?
Like I'm fine with blaming the cops, but I also want to spend a fair amount of time on today's episode blaming the media, as we like to do, who I think are every bit as culpable as the cops in this situation.
Can I mention one more weasel move that the prosecutors were pulling?
Of course.
Did you see today when they were showing the drone footage and they were basically asking the judge if they could bring it to, all right?
So they're showing the drone footage and they're trying to create a story that Kyle pointed the gun at Rosenbaum.
I believe it was the Rosenbaum guy.
And that Kyle earlier in the day, there was other evidence of him pointing the gun at people kind of jokingly when they were breaking property, even though he didn't initiate violence.
And so it could be that he provoked Rosenbaum to attack him.
And so it wasn't really self-defense.
That kind of is like the story that they're trying to put together.
Now, what's crazy is you can't see anything in the footage, right?
They make a claim that he could have ran away when there's obvious footage that there was a whole crowd of people there.
Then they also say that he wasn't pointing it at another individual, that there's footage that has a gun.
And then the language that they keep using is, well, we don't believe that or we believe this.
Wait a second.
So as a prosecutor, you can just say you believe thing based off of what like there can be zero evidence to present what you're trying to do to ruin a person's life, but you can just say that you believe that to be the narrative without solid proof of it to present to a jury.
That to me is a flawed system.
No, I agree.
And the thing that's crazy about the trial in general, which is perhaps I think the kind of greater, the most important thing about the trial, not that this one kid's life isn't important, but is that it's almost like there's been points of the trial where it seems like the prosecution is actually putting the right to self-defense on trial.
Like there's been all of these times within the trial where the prosecutor is like, and no one shot you, but you shot someone else.
So who's the only person who shot someone that day?
And you would shoot someone when no one else has shot you and you'd kill other people when no one had killed you?
You know, like this kind of thing where you're like, yeah, that's what self-defense is.
That once someone's threatening you, you can defend yourself.
Once someone has a gun pointed at you, you can be the first one to shoot because otherwise you'd have to wait and find out.
And then you might be the one who gets shot.
Like what?
It's very, you know, it's very bizarre.
And I just don't, I don't know what, like in what world we're supposed to feel like, yeah, you know, a mob of violent people, some of whom convicted criminals and arsonists and, you know, rioters and all this shit.
No, they have a right to just fucking chase someone down, curse at them, threaten them and beat them up without getting killed.
Really?
Do they have a right to that?
Do you have a right to do that?
I don't know.
I go, but I'm on the side of what the legal standard is, which is that no, like if someone like reasonably fears for their life, they have a right to defend themselves.
I think you and I are smart enough to understand that we need a legal system and that sometimes you might have cases where there's a flaw.
And so then you have to go about it and change the laws.
But the more important thing is to go, here's the law in the books.
And so we're going to enforce the law as it is on the books because otherwise, what do you have?
Right.
The problem with these juries is that, yes, I guess a prosecutor can get up there and make the claim, well, this is crazy that you, well, that's the fucking law, dude.
And like the jury is supposed to be like making a ruling on the way that, like, if he's breaking that law.
So, like you're saying, they're kind of pulling another weasel stunt where they're not really arguing the law.
They're trying to almost appeal to the jury to go, isn't this situation crazy?
You guys feel comfortable with this?
Yeah.
Well, if you think that's bad, what the media is doing is way worse.
And there's been, we have some clips.
So the first thing I wanted to go to was this, this was something that Tom Elliott, I'll give him a shout out on Twitter.
I don't know, Tom.
Maybe I do.
I don't know.
But it's at Tom, at Tom's Elliott, Tom Elliott on Twitter.
He puts together these fucking supercuts all the time of the media, which are great.
And I'm grateful to him for doing it because it just like puts things in perspective that you almost forget about.
But I want to go first to, and this is something that's been interesting to me: how the media narrative has been changing from initially when this incident happened a year ago to now.
And so here's a little supercut of a year ago, how people were in the media were responding to this incident.
Kenosha shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, he murdered two people, by the way.
Rittenhouse is basically what you would have had in a school shooter.
He's a 17-year-old kid.
He shouldn't have had a gun.
He crossed state lines to supposedly protect property.
No, he was going out to shoot people.
Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old vigilante.
Kyle Rittenhouse, a vigilante.
Kyle Rittenhouse, the armed teenage vigilante.
A 17-year-old vigilante, arguably a domestic terrorist, picked up a rifle, drove to a different state to shoot people.
Kyle Rittenhouse, a guy who's deeply racist, went with weapons to a Black Lives Matter protest, looking to get in trouble.
He did.
He murdered a couple of people.
Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old kid, just running around shooting and killing protesters.
You see, the 17-year-old who was radicalized by Trumpism, took his AR-15 to Kenosha.
These people came to kill him.
A white, Trump-supporting, MAGA-loving, Blue Lives Matter social media partisan, 17 years old, picks up a gun, drives from one state to another with the intent to shoot people.
A 17-year-old boy who drove across state lines with an AR-50.
Pause for a second.
Sure.
I like how they say cross-state lines, like it's a hard thing to do.
Like that shows the intent.
Like I drive into New York every day.
Like you're going to go drove across state lines.
Imagine that would work.
What, like, even what information are you even adding?
But it just, it does, to their credit, I guess.
It's like this is, it's decent propaganda because it does sound like something.
It sounds like state lines.
Oh, well, if he crossed state lines, I mean, holy shit.
I mean, you know, it's one thing.
If you go to Brooklyn to lower Manhattan, then you don't really mean anything bad.
But if you went from like Jersey City to Manhattan, well, then you just, you know what I mean?
Like, anyone think about that?
Like, if anyone lives anywhere near a border of a state, like it doesn't mean anything.
You could travel way, like, for example, if you're in New York, let's say you're in downtown Brooklyn and you drive to Buffalo.
You know, you haven't crossed any state lines, but that's way more of a trek than like Jersey City into fucking Manhattan, right?
So, like, it's such a weird thing, but oh, like, as you said, it's hard to not feel like these people are the scum of the earth.
I mean, to be saying some of the things they say who went there to murder people, this deeply racist person, this person who was propagandized by Trump to hate black people, even though it's all white people, he shot whatever.
They never exactly said it's black people who he shot, but they went to go gun down protesters, all this shit.
I mean, and by the way, this is not like, it's not like I'm playing you some random Twitter people who said this.
These are all like, we've just seen a montage already of like a who's who in the corporate press.
Like, humongous people with millions of followers on social media and you know, shows that have you know millions to hundreds of thousands of views, just putting this out there.
This was a 17-year-old kid who quite likely is going to get off on the you know, acting in self-defense.
Now, how whatever happens in this trial, whatever the verdict is, I think we all know, you know, because it's not like a verdict in a trial is not, you know, it's an imperfect system, right?
Nothing human beings on this side of heaven ever do is perfect, but there is a reality, and the reality is that it's quite possible that this kid feared for his life and acted in self-defense, and that's what it looks like, and that's what me and you both said it looks like a year ago when this first happened.
And to be fair, I someone sent me a clip of us talking about this when it first happened, and I thought we were fair.
We both said we were like, Look, this really looks like self-defense.
Now, something could have happened before this video that we don't know about.
Of course, since then, the FBI miraculously showed the video of what happened before it, and it only helped his case.
Um, but it looks like, let's just say, this seems like it was self-defense.
And can you imagine there's a 17-year-old kid whose life hangs in the balance, you know, who's clearly been traumatized already, who's going through all of this.
Weapons, State Lines, and Skateboard Victims00:05:11
And do any of these people actually care about what happened?
No, they see a political opportunity, an opportunity to reinforce their worldview and help them out.
You know, it's not even like this will make the difference between whether Joe Scarborough or Jenk Huger can sell to his audience that Trump is a bad guy and Black Lives Matter is good and all of this.
It's just, I don't know, it's one more little notch.
So, fuck what happened.
We'll call this kid every name in the book.
Let's play the rest of it and started shooting people up, including a guy with a skateboard.
Kyle Rittenhouse, who had just paused, just a guy ultimately.
Yeah, he just, he was just, you know, just trying to skateboard.
He was, he was hopping an ollie or whatever.
He was grinding on fucking.
I don't know enough skateboard terms.
I got to get Scott Horton to school me on that.
But, well, it was a guy with a skateboard who swung the skateboard at his face, which was the video of it was available the day that this happened.
Mere minutes after this incident, the video of the guy swinging the skateboard at him.
But come on, man.
How dishonest can you be?
A guy with he just murdered a guy with a skateboard.
Like, oh, oh, yeah, it's a little bit different.
A little bit different than what happened.
Protesters, a 17-year-old that went with a weapon into the middle of protests and then provoked people and then shot and killed them.
Kyle Rittenhouse is the enemy.
A boy from out of state drives up to the state with an AR-15 around his neck and he shoots and kills a couple of people.
Stop right there.
That's what.
Oh, sorry.
No, but that was Mika's point.
Stop right there.
I mean, he had a weapon and he crossed a state line.
That's, I mean, what do you have to say?
There's a fucking, there's a line and a weapon.
Fry them, right?
I mean, why are we even still talking about this?
You know, that's, I mean, that's literally where they're coming from on this.
You're not allowed to disagree with them or live in other states that don't have the same laws as you or the same values and don't have a problem with you owning a rifle.
That already is a violation of their ethical code.
Such tremendous bias against gun rights and against anyone who would oppose Black Lives Matter.
You know, not that he was even out there.
It doesn't even seem like he was out there clearly to oppose Black Lives Matter, but opposing, I suppose, rioting and stuff like that.
But the idea is like, well, he had a gun.
Why would he come there with a gun?
Well, there's lots of reasons to come there with a gun.
And I guess what happened to Kyle Rittenhouse is one of the reasons.
Like, yeah, in case, oh, holy shit.
In case it goes in that situation, well, it's not you.
It's the people who tried to attack you.
Anyway, all right, let's keep playing.
Wildly running around, acting like Redicop drove across state lines armed with a rifle to go and shoot people.
What a dark dystopian scene where a 17-year-old boy is carrying around a rifle, running around and gunning down protesters.
Can you pause again for a sec?
No, that's such a when he says such a dark and dystopian scene.
Well, why?
Where's the law and order?
Or what's provoked a whole bunch of people to go out and burn buildings in their own community?
Let's let's address this dystopian scene.
It's unbelievable, too, if you can remember at the time.
This is when like the entire corporate press, I bet you could find clips of every single one of these people, because these are major players, you know, talking about how it's mostly peaceful protests.
And they keep saying, oh, he goes he's going around shooting protesters.
And they said so many times in there.
And I mean, look, I'm not a big believer in like, you know, slander and libel laws and shit.
But man, I hope if he gets off, he sues the shit out of every one of the people we just saw in that clip.
Can you do that?
Because, well, I think so, particularly the fact that he was a minor.
I mean, for them to be saying, it is just so outrageous and appalling.
And look, ideally in a society, I don't think there would be laws that even like were governing this.
I think ideally that these people would just be, you know, unable to show their face in public because they're such scumbags.
But the fact that how many times did we just hear in that that he went there to kill people?
That a kid with a rifle crossing state lines, which by the way, you know, they keep repeating because that's what makes it sound bad, but there's nothing bad about that at all.
Unlawful Conduct and Systemic Failure00:15:04
And, you know, whatever.
If you believe in the Second Amendment and you believe in the freedom to travel across state lines within the United States of America, then there's no, I don't know, there's no moral issue with any of that.
But then they just add, went there to kill protesters as if they're telling you what his motivation is, as if he left saying, I'm going to go shoot me some fucking people.
And so what was it when he's scrubbing that graffiti off for the school for two hours?
That's what?
Just an act?
Like he's just doing that and going, I'm going to get my defense up real good right now.
Look, I seem like such a good guy, but I'm about to go fucking kill some people like that.
Really?
And then he's just acting when he's crying on the stand.
Like, I don't know.
It just seems like much more far-fetched to imagine that that's really what's going on here.
But for all these people to just tell you, oh, this is what his fucking motivation is.
Anyway, so the story's changed.
And there's been, you know, a whole different tone in the media lately, but they're still, they have to cover for themselves because they know this is what they said originally.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, Brian, let's go now, you know, in the order I told you or whatever we could do here because I don't even remember what I sent you, but there's a whole bunch of other ones.
I got this all from Tom Elliott.
That's the guy from his Twitter feed because he just posts all these fucking media clips.
They're great.
But so let's go to this one.
Oh, it's Don Lemon.
All right.
There's this theme of white wannabe vigilanteism that I think encapsulates both of these trials.
And I wonder what you think about, look, laws aside, how is the defense doing aside?
What do you think about just this idea that this is something people do that in some way?
This is still okay.
Pause it.
Holy shit.
I love that.
You know, you know, there's just this thing about white vigilantes.
I mean, okay, laws aside and how you think the defense is doing aside.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's put those aside.
Laws.
How the actual case is going.
Put all of that aside.
But aren't white people just fucked up?
Like, literally, that's how she intros this.
But isn't the white guy with a gun still like just bad?
I prefer to be on the side of the black looters.
That's the side I prefer to be on.
No, it's like, okay, laws and the trial and the defense.
So, but by the way, this is what they're already doing.
This is all over the place in the media now.
Well, yeah, look, he might get off, but that's only because the white supremacist system, blah, blah, blah, all of this shit.
So, you know, I'm sorry, but if what they said a year ago was true, that a fucking kid crossed state lines with a gun with the intent to just go wild and shoot protesters, then that guy would be in jail.
So don't give me that fucking shit.
That guy would get convicted.
But now they're starting to go, okay, but laws aside and the defense aside, isn't the racism demonstrated here so bad?
Like, even though he shot three white people, somehow the, you know, okay, whatever.
Let's keep playing.
We'll see.
Don Lemon, take it away.
E-Dog.
Well, it's the same idea as I was saying about the judge.
This is okay because people are used to it.
This is the ultimate entitlement.
That again, you can insert yourself into a situation with a gun that you're not supposed to be carrying, kill two people, injure, and it is, you are made to be a hero by the public.
You see someone jogging down the street and you take it into your hands.
You think it's your responsibility to stop that person when you're not even sure if they are committing a crime because what?
It is your street.
It is your town.
It is your country.
It is the ultimate degree of entitlement.
Would people believe this is how this did Kyle kill some jogger I'm not aware of?
Oh, no, he's he's uh referencing that other case.
Uh, what's his name?
Arbrey with the jogger.
He's referencing a different fucking case.
But uh, you know, it's it's funny to say it's like this is the ultimate form of entitlement.
I mean, look, what we know about this kid is that he was going and like cleaning up graffiti and offering medical help to people.
I mean, I will say, I think probably he was a little bit, he was certainly idealistic, maybe even a little bit delusional that he thought, you know, he was going to go make a difference or be this thing.
And I bet there was a part of Kyle that thought going there with a gun around his, you know, shoulder was kind of cool.
And like, you know, he's a 17-year-old kid.
I'm sure all of that played a part.
But are we going to say that that's the height of entitlement?
And yet setting your neighborhood on fire is not being upset about the way something is going and just deciding that you're going to go fucking smash in fucking storefront windows and start fires.
That's not entitlement.
All right.
I mean, you know, in the context of these huge riots that were going on in the summer of 2020, to say that this kid is the entitled one?
I'm not seeing it.
All right.
Let's keep playing.
Supposed to be.
What the right is saying about Kyle Rittenhouse is that, well, the government didn't do its job.
So it took a 17-year-old kid to come in and do what was right.
That's vigilanteism.
That's not what people are not supposed to be vigilantes.
We're not supposed to take justice into our own hands.
Imagine if every single person in America did that.
Imagine if you call for black men or just black folks to be armed and go out on the streets and do what they think, justice, take it back.
Remember what they did to you and slavery, whatever.
Go and take things.
Imagine if people were condoning that.
All right.
Yeah.
No, but it's so great is also just Don Lemon so stupid.
It's just a really like below average intelligence person that he can't help that just projecting.
Like there's something, there's something Freudian about this whole thing that's so interesting.
I mean, can you just imagine like black people being told that because of what's been done to them in the past, they have a right to go out into the street and just like commit crimes and just like take things that aren't even theirs.
Could you imagine what that would look like?
No, we never saw anything like that.
Never saw anything like that, Don Lemon.
And like, no, that's a very different thing than saying, but look, black people be armed and protect themselves.
And if someone's threatening their lives, defend their life with whatever force is necessary to defend them.
Fuck yeah.
Absolutely.
Absolutely they should do that.
But if you're saying, oh, well, slavery happens.
So go take what you think is yours.
Like, okay, well, I don't know.
I mean, what are you saying?
They should just like smash a storefront window and run in and start looting everything.
Never seen anything like that happen.
All right.
Yeah, that would be, that's a situation where some other people might want to come and protect the property.
But okay, go ahead.
Just doing that.
Would there be a different perception in this country about who should and who shouldn't carry guns?
Would our gun laws be different?
I certainly think so.
So there is a double standard, but it is the ultimate degree of entitlement.
This is what I'm supposed to do because this belongs to me.
Meaning this street, this town, and this country.
And I think it's tough for people to hear that, but it is the absolute truth.
I don't walk down the street saying, this is my, I pay taxes here and therefore I know if something, if I see someone breaking the law, I call the cops.
That's what they're there for.
This is, it's supposed to be about law and order.
This isn't about law and order.
This is about unlawful conduct.
It's funny.
Pause again.
Yeah.
How lucky he is that he's actually not a minority or migrant that managed to get a business off the ground in one of these communities that cops aren't protecting.
So yeah, it's real easy for you to claim with the life that you live that, you know, you've never had to confront this, but there's some individuals out there and a lot of them are not white who got businesses off the ground and had them destroyed because the cops did not do their job and did not protect their businesses.
Yeah, it's funny.
It's funny when you go like, no, you can't just take this shit into your own hands.
You call the cops.
That's the only appropriate move.
You call them.
It's funny.
I'm old enough to remember when they were all saying we should defund the cops, but okay, fine.
Three weeks ago?
Yeah, right.
Like, you know, it's okay.
Fine.
No, but now the answer isn't defund the police.
The police are the enemy.
The police are not the last line of defense.
They're the only line of defense.
No one else is allowed to defend themselves or property except the great police who we never wanted to defund.
That was all just, you know, maybe you heard a rumor about that, but no one was serious about that being a movement.
Like, okay, well, Don Lemon, he might say, well, I don't walk down the street and feel like this is my street or this is my town or this is my country.
But, you know, I think a lot of people do feel that way.
And I don't think that's so bad.
And by the way, that's not just white people.
Like there's a lot of black people that if you went into black neighborhoods, they'd feel like, hey, this is my neighborhood.
Believe me, as someone who grew up in Brooklyn and knew a lot of black people, it's like I've heard a lot of them say like, oh, this is my neighborhood or this is my street.
This is my block.
This is my, like, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
And in fact, if you're talking about the idea of vigilante, being a vigilante, I mean, what exactly do you mean by that?
Like just like defending people?
Like, oh, if the cops aren't doing their job, that you'll sit there and defend someone.
I mean, like, I'm just saying, like, how far would you take this?
Like, if the cops just decided to completely pull back and someone was going to like, you know, hit an old lady over the head with a pipe and take her purse and I stopped them from doing that.
Would you say, like, whoa, what are you, a vigilante or something like that?
You're just supposed to call the cops.
Even if you were like, well, no cops are coming and they're not doing anything.
Like, yeah, no, you absolutely, the only question that matters is, are you the aggressor or are you acting in defense?
Are you defending people and property or are you defending yourself?
Or are you aggressing against other people?
That's all that matters.
It's not whether it's the cops or whether it's private people.
It's a disgusting way to look at the world to just say, well, like, no, you just have to rely on the government agency.
You know, it's just such a funny thing for the whole, for the group who's defending the Black Lives Matter crowd to now be saying, well, listen, you just have to always defer to the police rather than ever taking anything into your own hands.
Fuck that, dude.
I'm for anybody defending themselves, defending other people, defending property, defending whatever.
You know, if the police won't do it and if it's against the police, if the because quite often, and this is the whole point, I think, of Black Lives Matter, I mean, I just say the best of the point is that the police can be the aggressors too.
And in that case, people have a right to defend themselves against the police.
So anyway, let's keep playing.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, this is that video is done.
So this is the next video.
Here's Democracy Now.
This is the more left-wing version of shit where you, you know, the ones who back in the day you could have counted on to be the good lefties, but not anymore.
Is the white promoter still alive?
Oh, yeah.
No, yeah.
Tyson beat him up, but he didn't stop him.
Amy, I don't have a crystal ball.
All right.
What I know is the law and what I know is what white people are willing to do to defend white supremacy.
If you look at this judge, if you look at his pretrial motions, if you look at his pre-trial decisions in this case, Rittenhouse has been in and around the jail since he shot those people in Wisconsin last summer.
So if you look at all the decisions that Bruce Schrader has made, they have been heavily balanced and weighted towards Rittenhouse, towards his defense.
I see very few neutral decisions in his history.
What we have is a judge who, from my perspective, has prejudged the trial in favor of Rittenhouse and has decided, again, even at the pre-trial stage, to use every bit of his power to put his thumb on the scale towards Rittenhouse.
Think about how biased this interpretation of things is already.
That it's like, okay, so, you know, this judge seems to be siding with Rittenhouse at every turn.
Race Bias in Judicial Decisions00:09:27
So that is obviously evidence that this is all white supremacy.
That this judge is as guilty as Kyle Rittenhouse.
But you see where this is just circular logic, right?
Like this is just starting from the starting point of Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist murderer.
Then why would the judge be siding with him?
Well, it must be because he's a white supremacist murderer too, or at least sympathetic to white supremacist murderers, right?
But there's that's just circular logic.
There's an obvious alternative to that, which is that the reason why the judge has been siding with him is because he's clearly innocent.
Maybe that's why.
Maybe because this is something that never should have even been brought to trial.
And the idea of arguing with the evidence that they have that this kid is guilty of murder is insane.
So that's another aspect to it.
And where white supremacy even comes in, it's unbelievable.
Like this is the game that like the fucking like, you know, the progressives play is that racism really has nothing to do with race.
Like it's just whether you're a progressive or not.
That's all that matters.
Like if you're a black conservative, you're a racist.
When Larry Elder was running for governor in California, they called him the face of white supremacy.
You know, even though he's a black dude, it doesn't matter.
And even though this guy, Kyle Rittenhouse, killed two white dudes and shot another white dude, well, he's still a racist because I guess they were at a Black Lives Matter riot.
So it really has nothing to do with black or white or race or anything like that.
It's just like, well, this is our team and that's your team and your team's racist and this team is black.
I guess.
I don't know.
Anyway, let's keep playing.
And that was obvious before the trials started.
I think now that the trial is going on, it's a little even more obvious to people how hostile he is to the prosecution, how much he's taking Rittenhouse's side, and how he is slanting the whole case.
He's basically not allowing the prosecution to put on its case against Rittenhouse.
He almost, it's almost like he wants the prosecution to put on a different case against Rittenhouse and already has this terminal.
The man is that the boy is not guilty.
Yeah, a case about whether or not this is self-defense, which is what the law is, not whether or not you're allowed to engage in self-defense.
Well, the law is that you can have self-defense.
And so now he's trying to keep them on topic of, yes, the conversations about self-defense.
This guy is looking at it from, wait a second, we have a chance to do theater here and show how this guy killed people.
It's what you pointed out at the beginning of the episode, but that's exactly the propaganda that they're looking for.
Yes.
So the judge is not letting them put on the case they want to put on.
They're asking him to put on a different case.
I guess it's like, well, yeah, what the judge said was that what you can't.
So the two things that I saw the judge really step in on and flip out about were one that when they were grilling Kyle about lawyering up and keeping quiet at first.
And this is when they dismissed the whole jury.
And he was like, whoa, like, what the hell are you doing?
You can't start grilling someone about exercising their right to remain silent.
Like, that's his constitutional right.
You can't, because they tried to start grilling him where they were like, well, you didn't have this story together until you came to court.
You didn't have this story when the cops first arrested you and you exercised your right to remain silent.
And the judge kicked the jury out and just started screaming at the prosecutor.
I was like, this is like, I could declare a mistrial over this.
What are you doing?
So, like, yes, they didn't allow them to use that defense because it's a wildly unconstitutional defense.
You can't attack somebody for like, you can't imply to the jury that it's shady to get a lawyer and then talk about your defense before you come out and defend yourself.
And then they started grilling one of the journalists at one point who was testifying about how they have a lawyer on a retainer.
And he stopped him again and was like, Yeah, you can't attack someone for having a lawyer.
Don't you know that?
You're a lawyer.
Like, you can't, like, this is insane.
And so, yeah, that's right.
I guess that's one way to spin it in the media.
It's funny because you see this happen in court, you know, and you watch it.
And then you watch in the media where they have none of these rules.
And it's like, oh, yeah, I guess you could just put it that way.
You could just say, oh, well, they won't let them prosecute it the way they want to.
Well, yes, that's true.
They actually have to prosecute whether or not this was self-defense, as you said.
They actually have to deal in the case with whether or not Kyle Rittenhouse reasonably feared for his life in the moment that he shot those people.
Also, someone should tell this news anchor that he's doing hair wrong.
He's like built out the khabib hat.
I don't know what he's doing.
Yeah, it's having hair.
It's not great, buddy.
All right, let's keep flying.
So that's why I said, that's why I was able to say two weeks ago, the boy was beached from Mario Maria.
Nothing that's happened in the trial so far has changed my opinion on that.
And the issue of not being able to refer to the men who were killed and the other one who was repeatedly shot as victims, though they could be referred to as looters or arsonists if the defense proves that.
Here's the thing.
Any one of his decisions, you could defend, right?
Any one of his decisions, if you take it in isolation, makes sense.
But this is actually one of the things that racists.
It's one of the fights.
If every one of the decisions independently makes sense, then he's doing a good job.
And if they're collectively, they make sense.
No, this is so this is what he goes.
He goes, you know, every one of these decisions in its own could make sense.
But when you put them together, it creates this pattern.
He goes, well, no, if everyone makes sense, then the pattern is it making sense the whole way through.
See, this is what race hucksters do is they take decisions that make sense, put them together, and claim there's some pattern of racism.
By the way, racism, there's only white people involved in this.
The people shot were white.
The shooter is white.
Like, this is, it's unbelievable how much these people will force their own narrative into that.
It's like you have a thing, like you're given like, you know, a square peg and there's only a round hole.
And you're like, well, we're forcing it in there.
I don't care.
Well, what it's like, oh, hey, you know, we just found out there were all white people involved in this.
And you're like, well, my card says racism.
So I'm going with that.
All I got is white supremacy.
So I'm just hammering away with this.
Everything looks like a nail, you know, doesn't matter.
Like this is, we're going with white supremacy.
But yes, exactly.
Any one of these things taken on its own could seem completely reasonable.
But it's only when all of these reasonable decisions are put together, Rob, that it becomes white supremacy.
It's sickening to see this actually being discussed by adults on platforms that are supposed to be like somewhat professional.
Even something like Democracy Now that was like was really great on so many of the like, you know, like they were a really good show on like the fucking the Bush war crimes and stuff like that and like a whole lot of other stuff.
When Republicans fuck up, they've Amy has been like good on all that.
But to sit here and say white supremacy, like you would think, I mean, it's unbelievable how crazy these people have gone.
Like, okay, let's say that like he shot a black person, right?
And let's say, like, let's say there was like a case where it was debatable whether or not it was self-defense.
You know, like a black dude was attacking some white guy and he screamed out some racial fucked up, some epithets, some like real fucked up shit as the guy was attacking him.
You know, like he was like, get away from me, you fucking, you know, N-word.
You're fucking less than human.
Get the fuck away from me and shot him and killed him.
But they still went into court and were like, well, look, he just said that because he was angry and he feared for his life.
So here's the trial, you know?
Okay, I know he, I know this guy said this really horrible white supremacist shit and he did kill this black dude, but look, he didn't really mean it.
He was just afraid for his life.
And this guy was the aggressor.
And then they argue, no, I don't think he was the aggressor.
And this is like the argument, right?
And then you had someone come on the news and they were like, look, I think this kid's a white supremacist.
And I think that's what happened here.
You know, it's like, oh, okay, in theory, maybe this is none of that.
White Supremacist Rhetoric Ignored by Court00:02:31
None of that.
They have nothing about this kid ever talking about race.
They have not, no one black was killed.
No one that they have the kid being like, hey, I'm coming here to like clean up, you know, clean up spray paint and offer, you know, like medical help to anyone who needs it.
And like, blah, blah, blah.
And then he gets chased and kills some people.
Everyone involved is white.
And they're going to claim white supremacy.
Like, what the fuck are you talking about?
What are you talking about?
This is like madness that this is even, there's actual adults with degrees from, you know, like universities of higher learning that will go and put this forward to people.
This is madness.
It's something to watch.
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Glossing Over Horrific Racial Slurs00:12:23
All right, let's get back into the show.
Let's go to the next clip.
We'll do one more and then we'll fucking wrap this up.
The Rittenhouse trial part two.
What do we have in the next?
I'm done with this nonsense.
What's the next one?
I can't even remember.
Long history of collaboration between police forces, white supremacist organizations, and white militias.
We have a very recent history of this as well.
We've had situations where police kill someone, there is protesting, and then in addition to the police presence in the street, which is a problem, we have white militia groups showing up, white supremacist organizations showing up.
We saw that in Fargo.
We saw that in Minneapolis, and we saw that in Kenosha.
And I think one of the things that is being kind of glossed over here is exactly.
So, so here she goes, there are these incidents.
It's funny that she used the term glossed over.
So she goes, there are these incidents where somebody's killed by the cops, and then you have protesters.
And then there's these white supremacist groups and police groups and all these groups that come out and are just fucking awful.
And you're like, well, wait a minute.
What's really being glossed over there?
Oh, yeah, the fucking rioting.
That's what's being glossed over.
It's not, come on, man.
And this is, I remember having this experience last year.
And in the last episode, I talked a lot about like my experience over the last year and how people reacted, particularly how libertarians reacted to the takes that I had over the last year.
But I remember having this a lot.
I remember like, I debated that guy who I guess writes for Cato occasionally, who's the laughingstock of the libertarianism world, that Andy Craig guy.
And he said, well, I was on the lines of liberty debate with him, where, oh man, that was that guy of all the debates I've ever done, probably the most just a guy who just humiliated himself, just so embarrassing.
But he said at one point that I had illiberal attitudes toward protesters.
And it's almost as if they'll say that, like, like they almost try to create this image of like, if there's just someone out there with a sign, like, we believe in our rights, and someone just shot that person, that I'd be like, yeah, totally fine.
Like, what?
Like, of course, no, nobody's saying you can't protest.
This isn't about protesters.
This is you, like, it's funny.
She's talking about protesters, and then they cut to this video of people like running around, just fucking fight.
We're talking about people being beaten to death, being shot and killed, stores being destroyed, looting in every major city around the country.
This is not someone saying, like, oh, people just want to protest and then everyone starts freaking out.
And like, no, the police presence that you're talking about during these riots was basically to turn the other way and let them do it.
The NYPD let them take Macy's.
They let them have the whole fucking city, basically.
And like, so if you're, and then they go, and we're just going to gloss over this.
No, you're glossing over what the issue is.
And it's, you can't even have a conversation if you're not going to address that.
It's like, yeah, this, this is what was going on.
This is the backdrop.
The backdrop of the Kyle Rittenhouse case is not some fucking, like some fucking Heil Hitler meeting going on somewhere or some fucking Ku Klux Klan organization.
The backdrop is chaotic mass rioting.
That is it.
Whether you like it or not, that's the reality of the situation.
All right.
Let's keep playing.
Kind of glossed over here is the fact that that is exactly the element that Kyle Rittenhouse belongs to.
I know that it can't be introduced as evidence in the court, but we all know that he was at a bar during this time that he was on release from jail with Proud Boys buying him drinks as an underaged person, right?
So that is the larger.
So hold on, pause it.
So pause it right there.
All right.
So first off, I don't know.
Fucking, I saw the one picture of him at a fucking bar, or it looked like at a bar.
I don't know if there were proud boys there or not.
You know, I don't know what does that even mean to be a proud boy?
Like, okay, were there official, you know, card carrying members of the proud boys there with him?
Whatever.
Let's just say for the argument, there was.
Isn't this a thing?
Or she goes, Now, look, I know this can't be, this isn't admissible in court, but he was at a bar with some bad people and he was underage drinking in that bar.
And this I found so funny because I, you know, when Don Lemon before is like, well, what if it was a black dude like in this situation and flips it around?
And I think, Rob, you know, me and you, if the exact same situation happened with the black dude, we'd feel the exact oh, my bad.
No, but you know what I mean.
We feel the exact same way.
We'd be saying the exact same fucking thing.
Well, it's like, I don't know.
Everything I'm seeing on this video is that this guy fucking defended himself.
And truthfully, I think if there was the same thing with some black dude, I think he'd be fucking like basically a national hero at this point.
Like that, that's honestly what I think.
But maybe I'm wrong, but we'd still be defending him.
I'd be defending anyone who was on that video in the same situation, you know?
But when things are flipped around, I, because I've talked about this all the time, when there'll be, you know, there'll be like some incident where like some black dude gets killed by the cops, and then they go, well, you know, he was arrested six years ago for this.
He smoked weed, he had drugs in his system or something like you're like, dude, that has nothing to do with anything.
Like, what are you talking about?
Oh, he was at a bar when he was underage with proud boys.
I mean, that has nothing to do with anything.
In this moment, did he reasonably fear for his life or not?
That's what matters.
That's all that matters.
That's why that's not admissible in court because it's nonsense.
And for you to even bring it onto a news broadcast as if this is adding anything, you know, like, what the fuck does that mean?
What does that mean?
Nothing.
I mean, imagine how quickly Black Lives Matter would dismiss someone if there was a case where some black dude was killed by the cops and then they brought it onto the news that they're like, yeah, but you know, nine months ago, he was at a bar and he was drinking with some people we don't like.
Okay.
There's nothing to do.
What happened in the incident?
Who was the aggressor and who was defending themselves?
That's all that matters.
That's that's all that matters.
All right, let's play the rest of this and we'll get out of here.
That is the larger reality.
The other thing that I think is important is that the history of judges who are sympathetic to white supremacists has a very long history as well.
One of the moments that really struck me yesterday was when the prosecutor was questioning Rittenhouse on his knowledge.
I feel like if you're on the news calling out a judge for being a racist who's pro-what did she say white sympathetic to white supremacists?
You got to have some evidence on that one.
Something.
That seems, yeah.
So this is my point: is that even if, so this, this is the thing I was getting at before that you go, if it was a situation where the guy had killed a black dude and was claiming that he killed the black dude in self-defense and had yelled horrific racial slurs at the black dude before he killed him.
And the judge started, you know, going like, well, I think this isn't admissible.
I think this is admissible.
I think, oh, I don't know about that.
You know, even then, it would seem a little bit crazy to claim that the judge is sympathetic to white supremacists.
But in this case, to just that, it's like, I got to say, it's like a brilliant sales move because it's just assuming the sale and going past it.
It's not even making the argument that Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist, just that the judge is sympathetic to this obvious white supremacist, you know?
But dude, this is a like, it's almost like all of them look past the basic reality of this shit.
And I'm not trying to be, like, like I said before, I'm not trying to be on any side of the fucking culture war.
I really, I'm really not.
You know, to me, what stood out about Kyle Rittenhouse breaking down and his fucking testimony was like, God damn, we don't want a civil war in this country.
No one wants to see that shit.
It's fucking, that's like some really ugly shit that you don't want to fucking ever come to.
But there's, there's a real human being whose life is on the line here.
Whether or not he goes to jail should have something to do with what actually happened.
And to just throw this at, just casually willy-nilly call, oh, well, he's a white supremacist.
I was like, what are you basing that on?
Shouldn't there have to be like maybe I'm just old school, but for you to be considered a white supremacist, shouldn't there have to be one moment where you said, like, you know, I think white people are better than the other races.
I think other races are less than human.
I think white people should dominate other races.
I only want to live around white people.
I don't like any of these other people.
White people are better.
Like something before you just throw at this term, this, this fucking like pejorative of you're a white supremacist.
And there's some woman will get up and go into a TV studio and start talking and just be like, well, this is just part of the history of judges being in favor of white supremacists.
Something to say.
Something to say.
All right.
So let's wrap this episode up, but I will say that the thing that's fucked up now, which ultimately the goal, and this is what libertarianism is all about, right?
Is that the goal is always peace.
That's what we always want.
That's what we're in the business of trying to promote.
And I got to say, I don't know.
I wonder after people being told all of this, if there will be some fucking, you know, some violence if Kyle Rittenhouse gets off.
And in a way, you know, it's like, I mean, I'm not excusing anyone who commits any act of violence, but you could see so many people have now been told this is a white supremacist murderer getting off if he does get off.
And if he doesn't get off, if he ends up getting convicted, I mean, at this point, I just think that like for all the people who see what's going on here, it's going to be like, I don't know, man, this will be like one more, like really devastating blow.
I mean, I don't think there'd be like violence in the streets, but I do think people will go like, oh, wow.
Even when someone was clearly acting in self-defense, they're still going to fucking convict you.
That's kind of like the message here.
That it's like the cops won't fucking help you.
The entire media will side with the fucking rioters.
And if one fucking kid is idealistic enough to go like, well, I'm going to go out there and help and scrub off graffiti and make sure everyone's okay.
They'll fucking fry him too.
So this case has a lot of weight on it.
And I don't know.
I guess we'll see how it goes.
Anything else, Rob?
Chicago next weekend.
I'm there.
There we go.
Early show sold out.
Late show just added.
Doing some stand-up and a live podcast with BK Chris.
So come hang out at the Lincoln Lodge.
Fuck yeah, my guys at the Lincoln Lodge.
Have fun out there, guys.
And everybody, part of the problem, people, make sure you go support our people and go see Rob and BK Chris.
And fucking Rob's a fucking hilarious stand-up.
If you haven't seen it, fucking seeing Rob live, make sure you go check him out.
And then me and you will be back on the road a whole bunch.