The Media’s Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse
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I'm Barry Weiss and this is Honestly. On January 18th, 2019, there was a video of Catholic high schoolers that went viral. It showed them on the steps of the Capitol, sort of facing off against an older Native American man. And he was singing and banging a drum in the face of one particular teenage boy who maybe or maybe not was smirking.

And this quickly became evidence of open hatred in Trump's America. It's no exaggeration to say that every media organization in the country did a story about how shameful this was. Vox called it the nation's biggest story. There were calls for violence against the boys, including from a host at CNN. Covington High School, that was their school, had to be shut down because of safety concerns. Then it was revealed that down to almost every single detail,

The story was completely untrue. CNN said yesterday it settled a lawsuit with Covington High School student Nicholas Sandman. The settlement comes after Sandman brought a suit against CNN, The Washington Post and the Associated Press to the tune of $275 million. And these news organizations played a key role in demonizing... Newspapers made corrections. Defamation suits were filed. Huge settlements were made with TV networks. It was a mess.

And then, just two weeks later, there was the story of Jussie Smollett. That was when an actor claimed that he had been assaulted by two men in Chicago in the dead of winter, in the middle of the night, who shouted anti-gay and racist slurs at him. Then he claimed that they poured bleach all over his head and tried to tie a noose around his neck, all while shouting, this is MAGA country.

Again, we were told this is Trump's America. There were calls for domestic terrorism charges. There were debates about whether wearing a MAGA hat is a hate symbol, about whether America could ever heal from this horrific crime. How can you doubt that? Like, how do you not believe that? It's the truth. And then it became a thing of like, oh, it's not necessarily that you don't believe that this is the truth. You don't even want to see the truth.

And then it was revealed that it also was completely untrue. Jussie Smollett had spent some of his many millions of dollars to hire two Nigerian men — they had been extras on his show — to attack him. And he staged the entire hoax, perhaps as a ploy to get the media to do exactly what it was that it did.

But in that case, the response from the press was far less apologetic. It almost feels like this pendulum to swing, like, oh, we're so sorry MAGA supporters that, you know, we falsely identify these people. And, you know, there are a lot of evidence of violent incidents that happen at these MAGA rallies. And I just don't want to get, you know, have Jesse Smollett distract from that.

Instead, we were told largely that we shouldn't worry so much about the details, to not let them distract us from the larger poetic truth that this story was really about. I don't think this is the time for everybody to say, oh my gosh, so sorry, you guys. Who would ever think that of the MAGA crowd? Like, there's reason. Where there's smoke, there's fire. There's a reason why people were willing to believe it. I could keep going here. From Russiagate to the recent inflation is just right-wing scaremongering.

We were told that this problem would subside when Trump was out of office. But it seems like it's just getting worse.

One reporter who's been patiently and often thanklessly trying to correct the record on all of these stories is my guest today, Jesse Singel. I feel like five years ago, if I clicked on an NBC News article, even an opinion article, I could at least trust them to get the facts right. I think that situation is deteriorating really quickly, and I just don't know where it leaves us. Because as a country, we're already so fractured and so distrustful.

When you get to a point where you, like, can't really trust any of the big major outlets, I think that'll lead us to a very dark place and that we're most of the way there, unfortunately. Jesse is an independent journalist. He's an author. And he's the co-host of the podcast Blocked and Reported. And he's here today to talk about this trend through the lens of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. If I would have let Mr. Rosenbaum get my gun, he would have killed me. But you had already pointed your gun at him.

Yes, because he was chasing me. Why'd you point it at him if you didn't have any intention of shooting? He was chasing me. I was alone. He threatened to kill me. I didn't want to have to shoot him. As Jesse points out, this may be the best or the worst example we've had yet of just how willing the media is to ignore the facts of a situation in service of promoting a narrative. Today, the media's trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. Stay with us. We'll be right back.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

So, Jesse, I have been obsessing over the Kyle Rittenhouse trial over the past week. And a lot of people over the past few days have had these incredibly smart takes. Andrew Sullivan's, I would really recommend to everyone. But you were...

Yeah.

that was more powerful maybe even than the Covington Catholic case or the Jesse Smollett case or the Lably case or I could go on, you saw that it symbolized sort of the brokenness of our press and the way that we are increasingly living in two realities depending on what we read, what we listen to, and what we watch. So,

Can we just start at the beginning? Can we go back to what you view as the beginning of this story? Yeah, well, I think we need to go back to before the beginning to understand the beginning of it. In Minneapolis tonight, tensions are high as four police officers have been fired after a man was pinned to the ground and died. The incident was caught on camera, and we must warn you, the images are disturbing. So, end of May 2020, George Floyd is murdered. I can't breathe, I'm not alive.

And this sets off, you know, what we could call the present reckoning. It began with a lot of protests around the country. Hundreds of thousands of Americans protested this week in a movement to make our democracy better.

And I think it is accurate to say they were mostly peaceful, but there was also a fair amount of looting and rioting and destruction. So almost exactly three months to the day after George Floyd is killed on August 23rd, 2020, we get this horrible police video and it shows a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooting a black man in the back.

Seven times, I believe it was. And it's just this shocking video that really sparks a tinderbox in Kenosha. Protesters quickly gather and they begin to march and chant. And that first night after Blake's shooting, there's some looting and some chaos. Then the next day rolls around and during the day you have...

peaceful protesters and marching and chanting and nothing really threatening. But then night falls on the second day and things get really out of control.

to the point where you have blocks up in flames, you have a corrections building that burns down. More than three dozen fires reported, some nearly leveling an entire block and causing scenes of destruction like you see right there. Local authorities feel they've completely lost control of the situation.

And the sense from people both in and around Kenosha watching what's going on is that the authorities can't really protect them. They can't protect businesses. They can't protect people. The market, along with many other businesses, went up in flames. The mom and pop shop, B&L Furniture, reduced to a pile of debris. And the family who owns it, devastated.

Devastated after nearly four decades in business. It's got to be a better way. And this leads to some really scary chaos. On the third night of unrest, again, you've got angry rioters who are lighting homes and businesses and cars on fire. Just total chaos, a total absence of law and order. But now you've also got all these new people out on the street. And they've shown up to protect people.

local homes and businesses. And Wisconsin is an open carry state, so many of them are heavily armed. So there are all these live streams online and there are photos popping up in real time on Twitter of mass, basically paramilitaries wandering around saying they're there to keep the order, but no one knows exactly who they are. And there are protesters walking near them. Well, fuck you and your couch, bitch! And there are confrontations and it's just incredibly tense. Black, not blue!

And then, as though things can't get bad enough, we suddenly hear that multiple people have been shot. Anyone see the person who got shot? I did. What happened? Where did he get shot? I don't know. They ran in. Dude was getting attacked by a bunch of people, and then he fell over. They went to tussle over, and the gun went off. So he was there as well? I don't know. If he shot him, or somebody over here fucking shot the guy attacking him. This is why people get out here. They're sitting out here with guns.

Very quickly, we find out that the person's name is Kyle Rittenhouse. Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old vigilante. Kyle Rittenhouse, the vigilante. Kyle Rittenhouse, the armed teenage vigilante. The 17-year-old vigilante. And that he's a white guy. And this sort of launches everyone into their corners in the way you would expect. Arguably, a domestic terrorist picked up a rifle, drove to a different state to shoot people. Kyle Rittenhouse.

Without any details about it, everyone immediately starts speculating about his motives. And pretty quickly, I encountered the meme that he was basically like either a white supremacist or white supremacist adjacent vigilante.

White, Trump-supporting, 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. That's completely what I heard. I mean, I remember hearing that he was a radicalized MAGA fan who had crossed state lines with his semi-automatic rifle. Drove across state lines armed with a rifle, a

to go and shoot people. With the intention to kill peaceful protesters. Kyle Rittenhouse, who has killed unarmed protesters. Running around, gunning down protesters. Kyle Rittenhouse is the enemy. That he had no connection to the town of Kenosha, that he saw what was happening on Facebook. And by the way, he was 17 years old and couldn't even legally have a gun.

Rittenhouse is basically what you would have had in a school shooter. In the meantime, outside of the blue bubbles online, what was happening on the right was, well, what do you expect? Kenosha has devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it. Like you guys on the left want to defund or abolish the police. Well, here's what happens. People in charge from the governor of Wisconsin on down refused to enforce the law. They stood back and they watched Kenosha burned.

So we're really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder. How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would? And then the videos of that night became public. Hey, dude right here just shot them! Dude right here just shot all of them down there!

Yeah, so because everyone was filming this and live streaming it quickly, videos begin leaking out and a few things immediately become apparent. People are getting injured and our job is to protect this business and part of my job is to help people. If there's somebody hurt, I'm running into harm's way. One is that for most of the day... Like, you get hurt, I'm grabbing you. He seems to see himself as some sort of protector. Medical! EMS right here. I'm an EMT. You guys need a medic?

He's calling out to people to see if they need medical help. He comes across as a little bit of a fish out of water just because he's so visibly... He looks like a kid. But then we find out more about what happened right before the shootings. And most notably...

The first person he killed was a man named Joseph Rosenbaum. And we have video of Rosenbaum chasing him some distance. And then in the foreground of the video, you hear a shot go off because someone fires a handgun into the air. It's right after that that Rosenbaum is closing in on Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse shoots Rosenbaum right as Rosenbaum is lunging for him or for his gun.

So right after he shoots Rosenbaum, he calls a friend. He says she shot someone. And then the crowd seems to notice. And they begin chasing him. So cut to this other video we have. They catch up to him. He falls over. He gets hit in the head with a skateboard. He turns back toward his pursuers. He shoots one of them in the chest and he crumples over and dies.

In one of the most crucial moments, Gage Grosskreutz points his own pistol at Rittenhouse, and Rittenhouse shoots him and basically vaporizes his arm. So how does the public feel

and journalists react to these videos. There's a subset of people who I think took the new evidence and maybe backpedaled from their initial claims that Rittenhouse had been the aggressor here. But what I found so disturbing and what led me to write about this in the first place is that

The existence of these videos, which did not dispositively prove anything, but did give us a great amount of detail about what happened exactly immediately prior to these shootings, they didn't really affect the take machine. I mean, a sitting member of Congress called him a white supremacist terrorist, Ayanna Pressley. And people immediately sort of poured over his social media history trying to find some evidence he was a white supremacist or a Proud Boy or something like that. You saw outlets like Slate and Vice saying,

continue to treat Rittenhouse as the aggressor in a way that I thought was not really backed up by the video evidence. So walk me through the trial. Let's start with what is Kyle Rittenhouse being charged with? He's being charged with a first degree intentional homicide, attempted first degree intentional homicide, first degree reckless homicide, reckless endangering, and illegal possession of a weapon by a person under age 18. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

The evidence in this case will show that on the night of August 25th, 2020, the defendant Kyle Rittenhouse, who was 17 years old at the time, had armed himself with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle loaded with 30 rounds in the magazine. And using that rifle, he shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum, an unarmed man.

What is the state's case against Kyle Rittenhouse? So in Wisconsin, as in most places, the threshold to make a self-defense case is basically I felt at risk of sort of grievous bodily harm or death.

And that defense doesn't work if you sort of instigated a conflict. You can't basically start a fight and then call self-defense when they fight back. So the prosecution's job is to basically portray him as someone who was there to start a fight or did not have an actual fair sense that he was about to be grievously injured or killed. This occurred after the defendant chased down Mr. Rosenbaum and confronted him.

while wielding that AR-15. So it's on the state to prove that Kyle Rittenhouse was the aggressor that night, that he shouldn't have been there, or to use your words, Jesse, that, you know, he came to pick these fights.

And the defense has to make the case that he didn't, that in fact, he had really good reason to think that there was a threat to his life that night. Yeah, what's interesting about this case is there's been a tremendous amount of attention paid to this idea that he came in from out of town or he had sort of a guilty mindset as he entered Kenosha or even that he had the weapon illegally.

At the end of the day, under Wisconsin self-defense law, really all that matters is whether he reasonably felt threatened by other people, that they would cause him severe injury or death. If that's the case, you're off the hook for murder and for many of the most serious charges. And it's my understanding that the prosecution's case gets off to a really rocky start. The state calls Gage gross courts.

And that's especially when they call up as a witness one of the men that Kyle Rittenhouse shot that night in the arm. Could you please state your name and spell your first and last name for the record? Gage, G-A-I-G-E, Grosskreutz, G-R-O-S-S-K-R-E-U-T-Z.

Yeah, so Gage Grosskreutz is the one person who was shot by Kyle Rittenhouse who survived, and he's basically the prosecution's star witness. So your hands are up, and at that point, he has not fired at you, correct? No, he has not.

You can see their sort of dream version of how this goes down is he offers compelling testimony that Kyle Rittenhouse was the aggressor, that he was out there looking for a fight, that he menaced people. At this point, you're holding a loaded chambered Glock 27 in your right hand. Yes, that is correct. Yes.

Instead, what happens is that on cross-examination, Grosskreutz acknowledges that when he was shot by Rittenhouse, Correct. Correct.

He was pointing his own handgun at Rittenhouse. It's a textbook self-defense case. And this is basically a major mic drop moment for the defense because the prosecution's star witness gave the defense exactly what they needed to make this self-defense claim. Then there's another moment where this guy, Ryan Balch, another prosecution witness. He seemed a little under-equipped.

and under experienced as well, which is one of the reasons we

Also undermines the idea that Kyle Rittenhouse was there to start a fight. And what does he say? So he testifies that he overheard Joseph Rosenbaum, who's the first person Rittenhouse shot, one of the people who was killed. Rosenbaum was right there in front of my face, yelling and screaming. He overheard Rosenbaum say that he was going to harm Rittenhouse. He goes, you know, if I catch any of you guys alone tonight, I'm going to kill you.

And it turns out Rosenbaum was this very troubled guy with a really tragic backstory who was just sort of wandering around, basically fresh out of a mental institution. And he can't even really be accurately called a protester, I don't think. He's seen in video throughout the chaos, really, in some cases, just trying to start stuff. So that further takes the winds out of the sails that Rittenhouse wasn't acting in self-defense because now we have video both of Rosenbaum chasing him

And we hear that before he chased him, he was talking about how he was going to hurt him. So it's like you couldn't do a better job hurting your own case than to raise these issues. Could you please state your name, spelling your last name for the record? Kyle Rittenhouse, R-I-T-T-E-N-H-O.

Then you have this really surprising moment in the trial where Rittenhouse actually takes the stand. And, you know, any attorney would tell you that this is just extraordinarily risky because you do not know how a defendant will behave in that situation. What did you make of that moment? On August 25th of 2020, did you come to downtown Kenosha to look for trouble? No. No.

Yeah, so the defense does this really risky move where they bring Kyle Rittenhouse up on the stand and they have him sort of walk through what he remembers from the events that night. I once I take that step back, I look over my shoulder and Mr. Rosenbaum, Mr. Rosenbaum was now running from my right side.

And you've got to think that what they're trying to do is humanize him. It's in their interest to make him out to be a scared kid, not this sort of killer who came in from out of town to cause trouble. You know, he's been described as basically a school shooter or a white nationalist at this point. They need to counter that, show he's not like that. There were three people right there.

And there's this one point where he really breaks down. I mean, he's sobbing on the stand in this very emotional way. To the point where the judge basically says, OK, we're going to take a 10 minute break so he can calm down. We're going to just take a break anyway. You can just relax for a minute, sir. We're going to take a break.

And then when the prosecutor cross-examines Rittenhouse... Good morning, Mr. Rittenhouse. Good morning. It's a little bit discordant because right away he's saying things like... Everybody that you shot at that night, you intended to kill, correct? I didn't intend to kill them. I intended to stop the people who were attacking me. By killing them? I did what I had to do to stop the person who was attacking me. By killing them? Two of them passed away, but I stopped the threat from attacking me.

By using deadly force. I used deadly force. That you knew was going to kill. I didn't know if it was going to kill them, but I used deadly force to stop the threat that was attacking.

Well, you know, you wanted to kill people. You were there to kill people. And this sort of shows how thin a case the prosecution has, because all the video evidence more or less supports the self-defense claim. And it sort of feels like the prosecution is backed into a corner where all they can do is impute motives to Rittenhouse and say, you were there to kill people. You wanted to cause trouble, even though there just isn't video evidence of him causing any violence until he's threatened.

You intentionally used deadly force against Joseph Rosenbaum, correct? Yes. With regard to Joseph Rosenbaum, you fired four shots at him, correct? Yes. You intended to kill him, correct? I didn't intend to kill him. I intended to stop the person who was attacking me and trying to steal my gun.

And there's this sense in which it just really feels like the prosecution is flailing a little bit and falling flat a little bit. And that's especially true during this moment where Rittenhouse is asked why he was running toward a fire. But you, at some point as you get close to the 63rd Street car source, start running towards that lot, right? Towards the fire in the Duramax. And Mr. Rosenbaum is running ahead of you, isn't he?

I don't believe so. But you decided you needed to run because of the fire on the Duramax? Yes. Why? What was so urgent? It was a fire. There's fires all over the place, so? I was getting to the fire to put it out. We'll get back to that in a second. And what about the notion that Kyle Rittenhouse had no connection to Kenosha? Why did you feel that you should go around off the 59th Street?

car source property and put out fires. To make sure my community didn't get burnt down at home. When we say your community, you mean Kenosha? Yes. Again, you're from Antioch. You're not living in Kenosha at this time when this all happens, right? My dad lives in Kenosha.

Yeah, this was key to the idea of painting Rittenhouse as this just sort of militia, like an out-of-towner coming in to cause trouble. But as he testified, his dad lived there, his grandma lived there, his aunt and uncle and a cousin lived there, and he had a part-time job there. Moreover, when the protest broke out, Kyle Rittenhouse was already in Kenosha staying with a friend. That was the opposite of everything that I had heard. Right. And the prosecution ran into other issues too, right? Yeah.

Yeah, so the judge, who's this guy who's sort of quickly become a... It's funny to imagine these judges just doing their job for years and years, and then suddenly they become a national figure. All right, good morning, everyone. I hope everyone had a restful and entertaining weekend. His name is Bruce Schroeder. Bears play tonight, right? Okay. So you're smiling a lot. I assume that you're a Bear fan? How many Packer fans? He's this sort of older, folksy, cantankerous guy who sort of...

Keeps making news himself. He keeps there all these stories about his own sort of demeanor during the case and decisions he's made. But he really lashes out a couple of times at the prosecution over the way they're conducting the case. My understanding is you should have come and asked.

What's the nature of the issue that he has with the prosecution? One of the issues has to do with how the prosecution is cross-examining Rittenhouse. You've also had the opportunity to read articles people have written, interviews, things like that, about what happened that night, correct? I do my best to avoid what people write on the internet. A majority of it, it's not true. And after all of that now, you are telling us your side of the story, correct? Correct.

I'm going to ask you folks to go in the library for just a second. Please don't talk about the case. The judge basically says that they're coming too close to saying that there's something suspect that Rittenhouse hadn't previously given his side of the story and that this sort of creeps right up to the line of violating his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. This is a grave constitutional violation for you to talk about the defendants' silence and your right...

You're right on the borderline.

And you may be over, but it better stop. Understood. You know, what everyone thinks of that or what legal experts will think of that, that's what he says. And there's this other viral moment where the judge says, don't get brazen with me. So why? Pardon me? That was before the testimony. Don't get brazen with me. You know very well that an attorney can't go into these types of areas when the judge has already ruled without asking outside the presence of the jury to do so. So don't give me that.

That's in response to the prosecution attempting to bring into the case something that happened months after. That was this minor news story you might have seen where Kyle Rittenhouse, he's out on bail. He's spotted at a bar wearing a shirt that says free as fuck. And he's posing and smiling with these other people. And it turns out they're members of the Proud Boys.

The Proud Boys describe themselves as Western chauvinists. They're basically a right-wing or far-right-wing group, depending on who you ask. So some of them posed for photos with Rittenhouse, and they're all smiling. You can see why the prosecutor would want to bring something like that in. But the judge said, no, that happened after that night. It doesn't bear on the case of that night at all. So he deemed it inadmissible.

The prosecutor tried to bring it up anyway. My comments are of record and why I ruled as I did is of record. There's nothing that I heard in this trial to suggest anything's changed, even if you're correct.

In your assumption that you know more than I did at the time, you should have come to the court and say, I want to go into this. Which is a legal no-no. It's pretty clear to understand why. I mean, again, part of it is it happened after the shootings. And, you know, if you think about even if it had happened before the case, this is like saying, well, you say you acted in self-defense, but you had that heroin charge from months ago. It's just not clear exactly how it would be relevant to those exact moments. The

The other thing people harp on is this is and I feel bad even bringing this up because it's such a ridiculous bit of Internet nonsense. Kyle Rittenhouse is flashing an OK sign in some Internet circles. This is taken to be a white supremacist sign. It's used both by legitimate white supremacists and by trolls trying to rile people up.

The average person, unless they're extremely online, does not know this is a white supremacist sign. So I think it's very unlikely Kyle Rittenhouse is photographed making a white supremacist sign while he's facing these charges.

So just to be clear, like, is any part of the prosecution's case against Rittenhouse connected to white supremacy or involvement in white supremacist or racist groups? No, there doesn't appear to be anything there on that front. That really does seem like it was just a manufactured, truthy moment.

It's just for those people that have been purely following this story, according to the mainstream media, and then all of a sudden they're dropped into the facts of the case and the trial. It's like looking at two different realities. And the sort of chasm between those two things has been on full display. So what has the media been saying as the trial has unfolded?

It's been really disturbing to watch. He took his gun, crossed state lines, went to another state where he does not live to like guard a building that he is like no business guarding. And now he's claiming self-defense. I mean, there's this theme of white wannabe vigilantism. That's vigilantism. This is the ultimate entitlement.

Especially the opinion writing we've seen. There was one quote that absolutely blew me away. It's from The Intercept, which is a left-wing outlet that's done really important work and that I like. Natasha Leonard, the quote is that Kyle Rittenhouse, quote, chose to travel to Kenosha, Wisconsin and hunt down anti-racist protesters with an assault rifle.

The level of disconnect between that description and all the stuff we know that Natasha Leonard could know is astonishing, not least of which is one of the people who was killed, Joseph Rosenbaum, was in no sense an anti-racist protester. He was a disturbed man walking around. So a lot of the takes from her, she's far from the only offender here. You read these articles, and they're in major outlets like Vox and The Intercept.

you would not get a good sense of what actually happened that night or what issues are in dispute in the criminal case. And what were they saying about Rittenhouse's tears during his testimony?

Well, we had the white tears narrative, which is just this claim that like, I guess when white people cry, it's suspect. And then this whole thing of, you know, the whole breaking down and dry heaving in court, you know, making himself the victim and sort of making himself seem more innocent. When

Rittenhouse got emotional. Maybe it was crocodile tears designed to elicit sympathy. I mean, I've written a lot about psychological science for my career, and there's no real evidence you can tell based on whether or not someone's crying, anything about whether they're lying or anything like that. Furthermore, if he had just sat there and stoically talked about what he would have done, you could have just as easily accused him of not being emotional. He's talking about killing people. So it's this very...

lazy sort of punditry. Today, the jurors saw what must be the greatest performance of Kyle Rittenhouse's life. I mean, it's the easiest thing in the world to sit there and watch someone on the witness stand talk about an emotional event and critique them for not being emotional in the right way. And what really pisses me off about this is the lack of any sort of principle. Because if you look at the history of criminal justice in America, people come up with all sorts of ways to assume suspects are guilty, even if they don't have strong, like,

The thing that also struck me is that...

It's not just Rittenhouse anymore that they're talking about as a symbol of what's gone wrong. Now it's sort of expanding out to criticizing the justice system as a whole and specifically, you know, going after the judge. I mean, the judge seemed to make a joke about supply chains. Anything else? What time are you on the spectrum?

Let's hope for 1 o'clock. I don't know. Hope the Asian food isn't coming, isn't on one of those boats in Long Beach Harbor. But let's aim for 1 o'clock. That was then torqued.

and contorted. His comments were offensive and perceived as anti-Asian by some and as placing blame on Asian people for a catastrophic event happening in this country. In order to sort of make the case that no, the judge was actually making, you know, a bigoted Asian joke. John Yang, the president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, told CNN that the joke, and I quote here, "harms our community and puts us in the crosshairs of microaggressions as well as actual physical violence."

Yeah, it's just like a very noisy information environment. I said it yesterday and I'll be extremely blunt. It appears that this judge is auditioning for the cameras and looking for his next gig on Fox News or OWN or whatever, OAN or whatever it is. And in all this talk about the judge and all these accusations... This judge is going beyond the pale and trying to show off for the country his conservative credentials or whatever it may be. You don't really hear anyone mention that he was appointed by a Democrat. Right.

And what he's doing is a textbook progressive cause, which is defending the rights of defendants and making sure the prosecution doesn't overstep its boundaries. Thirty seconds ago, everyone would have said that the American court system is often biased against defendants. And he's shielding Kyle Rittenhouse, treating him as if he's a child. I think that the behavior of the judge in totality is the problem. And the problem with that, with this judge, is that he's attempting to hang his hat on anything to protect Kyle.

And I think because some people maybe want to talk about anything but the actual law on the books in Wisconsin and the actual videos we have and all the myriad details we have about exactly what happened before those shootings, they make it about anything else. They make it about white tears, about white supremacy. The racialization of this has been very weird. You'll see a lot of outlets mention that Kyle Rittenhouse is white without mentioning that all of his victims were white, our alleged victims.

There's so many levels of point missing here because people also talk about the justice system protecting white people. Rittenhouse is like a kid who is working to try to get his high school degree who came from like a fairly broken home and had a messed up life. He's not the sort of person who's protected by the justice system. Usually this is obviously a very weird case because he became a conservative celebrity and they raised money. But people are just trying to fit this into very...

oversimplified boxes. And the other sort of maybe more aesthetic point I want to make is, Barry, every one of these pieces is so boring to read. Like just as a reader, when I see the Vox headline about Kyle Rittenhouse's white tears. It's Mad Libs. Like, you know what it says. Exactly. After the break, more with Jesse Singel and the real world stakes of journalists not doing their job.

So, Jesse, draw out the implications of this a little bit for me, because it's something that you've just articulated so powerfully for us. What is so dangerous about this trajectory in which we're increasingly living into this

realities as Americans. Yeah. So, I mean, 2015, 2016, I was at New York Magazine and I was really fascinated by the rise of the alt-right, by conservative misinformation, by all these new sort of internet celebrities who would constantly distort things on the right, usually to advance a Trumpian agenda. And I don't think the left is anywhere near there. I have seen a steady trajectory where

I can't trust like a lot of mainstream outlets just to accurately report on what happened. I mean, I find this to be such a disturbing sense in which the left is starting to build up what is in effect a fake news ecosystem that in some ways mirrors the rights, even if I personally think the rights is further along. Well, just to push back, like, why do you think that it's

less bad on the left. I would argue that on the left, it's more subtle. It's more sophisticated. It's often, you know, coming to us from places that historically we've trusted, unlike a Breitbart, let's say, like it's less obvious.

but that it's in a way more insidious because we do have a historic trust in a place, let's say, like the New York Times. And so when it participates in, I don't know if it's intentional or not intentional, but let's say, you know, driving a particular narrative and overlooking the facts in this case, that it's in a way more dangerous because it's less obvious.

Sure. I think my counter to that would be like some of the best reporting on this came from The Times, The Post and The New Yorker, all of which are outlets that I think produce some really bad takes along the lines of what we're discussing. But the reason I, you know, I sometimes have people ask me because I'm seen as like now a quote unquote independent journalist, like,

They'll say, I've given up on mainstream news. I can't read it anymore. Who should I trust? And I think it's a little bit more complicated than that. I think those outlets are capable of doing really good reporting and have the resources to do so. And we should encourage that. Jesse, you've talked about this phrase, epistemic closure. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Yeah, I think it was coined by Julian Sanchez, who's a smart, I think, libertarian-ish writer. He coined it in around 2010 when there was some fairly nutso Tea Party stuff going on. And he basically said that a segment of the right and maybe a growing segment of

That was becoming a really intense echo chamber that was completely immune to contrary evidence when it came to stuff they believe politically. That's my fear is that we're headed a little bit in this direction where I will see people repeat, quote unquote, facts about this case that were debunked.

Yeah.

That's what I think what we mean by epistemic closure. Like what happens when you get evidence that runs contrary to what you think you believe? Do you listen to that evidence? Do you evaluate it? Or do you just keep repeating the stuff that was debunked a while ago? Well, there was one example that I feel like deserves a shout out of someone publicly changing their mind and saying,

a willingness to sort of admit wrongdoing was Anna Kasparian from Young Turks, who admitted that after watching the trial, you know, first of all, she learned that Rosenbaum was chasing Rittenhouse. She thought it was the other way around. And she had, you know, been one of the main voices sort of pushing this leftist narrative about what happened there. And she came out and said, I want to correct the record. I was wrong. But that was the exception, right? Yeah.

Yeah, that's the exception. I'm glad she did that. But why would it take you, anytime you have access to primary video or primary documents, why would it take you a year if you're a commentator to view the evidence you're lucky enough to have? That's what, again, just the number of takes from people saying stuff that is just contradicted by the video is bad. But it's good that Kasparian did that, of course. There was also this...

that I noticed by the investor Bill Ackman who weighed in on this and dropped in from nowhere and said him and his wife were watching the trial and just from watching the trial they believed that he acted in self-defense and that I think he used the phrase that Rittenhouse was a civic-minded patriot.

And literally he said that journalists called him to see if his account had been hacked. That's how unusual it is sort of like for people to be off message. Like Bill Ackman is not perceived as a conservative or a right winger. He watched the case and that's what he thought.

Even a year ago, I was so... You know, I wrote what I wrote, but they were paywalled pieces on my newsletter. And I just now, a few days ago, like unpaywalled them. And you guys, you can link to that. But that feeling that you're going against a tribe, especially when people were killed, something as heartbreaking and horrible as this, it exerts a really strong pull. You do not want to be seen as being on the wrong side. It's just...

I don't know. If you're going to call yourself a journalist, I think you sort of have the obligation to sometimes just say what you think is right, even if people are going to be pissed off about it. But we shouldn't pretend that there aren't social incentives like chaining journalists to false claims. And, you know, we do have this sub stack revolution or whatever you want to call it, where people like me are making a living on there, just in part by pointing out bad media coverage.

I think a lot of people are getting more skeptical of mainstream coverage of these issues. I do think there's also clearly an appetite for it or people wouldn't keep writing these pieces. I'm just worried about like a world where...

I feel like five years ago, if I clicked on an NBC News article, even an opinion article, I could at least trust them to get the facts right. I think that situation is deteriorating really quickly. And I just don't know where it leaves us because as a country, we're already so fractured and so distrustful. When you get to a point where you can't really trust any of the big major outlets, I think that'll lead us to a very dark place and that we're most of the way there, unfortunately. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's not just about increased distrust in the media, which is what we've been talking about, but in this case, you know, increased distrust in the judicial system. And we're sort of, it feels to me like we're moving closer and closer to a world where it's not just a minority of people, but an increasingly large number of people don't believe in the results of an election, don't believe in what they read in the newspaper, and maybe don't believe that people are getting a fair trial, right?

And, you know, don't believe in the pandemic or don't believe in the vaccines or don't believe that the CDC is telling them the truth. Like, how do we live in that world? Right.

We're fucked. No, it's really bad. It also makes it harder to like fix stuff that is broken because, you know, maybe for example, the law in Wisconsin on open carry should be tougher or the law on a minor having an AR style weapon should be tougher. You can't really talk about that stuff when the whole conversation is like trying to read Kyle Rittenhouse's tears like they're chicken bones.

or whether the judge is a bad guy. There might be policy issues here to discuss, and we can't discuss them because the conversation is so detached from reality, but it's incredibly worrisome.

So I want to turn for a second to another trial that's happening right now, because everyone seems to be talking about Kyle Rittenhouse, but there's also the trial of Ahmaud Arbery, who you'll remember is the 25-year-old black man who's fatally shot last year while he was jogging in a neighborhood in Southern Georgia. And the three white men that are charged in Arbery's killing, I don't think most Americans even know their name.

Why are we obsessed or why are Americans obsessed with the Rittenhouse trial, which seems to be at least a decent case of self-defense, while the Aubrey trial, which is happening at the same time with a lot of similarities, you know, in both cases, the defendants are pleading self-defense. Both are portrayed as white vigilantes. Both are obviously racially charged cases. Why is that not capturing our attention to the same degree?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think maybe part of it is that the Rittenhouse case like really could be seen as an extension almost of Charlottesville. I think people are terrified of like street fighting and political violence. And it had that element to it, which the Arbery case lacked. The other thing, and this is complete speculation.

in the case of the Arbery trial, it's like everyone in a rare moment of unity agreed that the Georgia citizens arrest law that could potentially given out to the people who killed Arbery had to go. And it was quickly, I think mostly repealed is probably the correct language there. Um,

Without much controversy among a broad swath of lawmakers in Georgia, including people pretty far to the left and pretty far to the right. So maybe that took some of the wind out of interest in that case that the actual policy issue at stake there was resolved for once. But it's a really interesting contrast.

But I think that if you wanted to make an example and shine a spotlight on racism, you would want to focus there because there you had a defendant testifying that he had Aubrey, and this is a quote, trapped like a rat before he was shot.

That trial had like just on its face, you know, we can't get inside the heads of anyone involved in any of these cases on its face. It had a much stronger racial component than the Rittenhouse trial, which had literally no racial component because everyone involved was white. I mean, not no, because obviously people will claim being pro cop is being a white supremacist or silliness like that. But the Rittenhouse case does not have a clear cut white supremacist or racist angle.

I think it's really hard to sort of hold two things in your head at the same time on the Rittenhouse case. On the one hand, if you look at the specific facts of the case and you try to sort of like put the narrative out of your mind, he definitely seems to have a solid self-defense case. On the other hand, how do we live in a country where it's normal that someone can walk around with a killing machine?

And I think for some people, you know, they're so horrified by the reality of that situation that they can't even look kind of carefully at the actual facts of the case, if that makes sense. That by looking at the facts of the case and admitting that perhaps he has a self-defense case, they're sort of implicitly defending the idea that it's acceptable to walk around with, you know, a semi-automatic rifle. Yeah. I mean, I think there's just, I mean...

He paid a friend to buy him that weapon in another state and then went there, and it's just a misdemeanor for him to have it. I'm sure there are people involved who know way more about gun policy than I do who disagree with that. I just—I don't think it's good. I think open carry is a dangerous thing, especially in these, like, situations involving protests and violence and looting and—

a 17 year old walking around with that weapon that he's going to be the guy defending us against chaos is such a sign of everything having broken so profoundly. And, and,

I wish a third of the focus that's been on the question of whether Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist, which is the proposition we have no evidence for, would be spent on understanding how Kenosha fell victim to such chaos. Because that chaos really, in addition to the people who are dead and their families, there were buildings destroyed. There were people's lives sent into turmoil. And sometimes it feels like no one really cares about that. And most of the people that own those businesses were themselves minorities. Yes.

I don't know, Jess, if you read this essay by Freddie de Boer. Yeah, the one about like this is the end result of the chaos. Yeah. And, you know, Freddie de Boer, very much someone on the left, but wrote this essay that I thought was just really true. I mean, he talks about how, you know, during the Kenosha riots, many people, liberals, progressives, endorsed riots to some degree or another.

He writes, I know quite a few people who are willing to say that the riots were just good on the merits. And there were also many saying in some terms or another that these particular riots could not be judged by progressive people due to what had inspired them. And obviously we saw that everywhere. And then he goes on and he says, well, look,

Chaos is chaotic. Bad shit happens when people riot. When you create environments where anything can happen, anything can happen. Some people are going to take advantage of that opportunity and do things you don't like. You can endorse spasms of directionless violence and then complain when some of it plays out in a way you hadn't intended. This seems totally obvious to me. And yet so many out there want to both condone riots and condemn their chaotic outcomes. It's like putting on music and getting mad when people dance.

Yeah, I mean, as usual, Freddie puts it better than I ever could. I mean, the way I look at that is I don't like the idea of people's identities determining what they think, but obviously our identities influence how we think. And in my view...

I benefited from growing up in a low crime community. I basically never really had to deal with crime other than some minor run-ins in DC, which is, can be a rough city. I don't, I would feel really uncomfortable condoning someone else's neighborhood burning when I know I'll always have the resources to live someplace safe. I'll never have to deal with my business burning down. This is a longstanding thing. There's a subset of people on the left who are just have this romantic view of, of riots as this cleansing righteous fire. Um,

But then they get to go home to their nice homes and apartments after they come take photos of the wreckage or whatever. So I guess, Jesse, what I'm left with is that if I go online right now, I see that major figures on the right are making Kyle Rittenhouse into kind of like the last American cowboy and a folk hero and whatever.

taking on the yoke of law and order when the people who are charged with actually doing that sort of failed. And on the left, we still have major figures, including sitting members of Congress, talking about how he was a white supremacist vigilante.

But if we separate the truth and the facts of the case from the noise and the narrative, it seems to me a much more tragic and human story, which is a 17-year-old with a semi-automatic weapon who killed two people and injured another and who, if the world was not turned upside down, would never have been in Kenosha that night.

Yeah, I think you can simultaneously say that in a legal sense, this was a just outcome, but also that this whole thing was a disaster. Two people are dead and we should try to understand why that happened. And the reason why it happened is much more complicated and tangled than Kyle Rittenhouse is a evil white supremacist. And usually progressives are good at understanding structures and not focusing on like individual structures.

And I'd like to see more of that here because I don't want anything like this to happen ever again. And I think I'm not alone in that sentiment.

Thanks so much to Jesse Singel. Check out Jesse's work at jessiesingle.substack.com and his podcast with Katie Herzog, which is called Blocked and Reported. Like the rest of the country, I'm waiting patiently to see what the outcome of the Kyle Rittenhouse case will be. But here's what I'm left thinking about.

To admit that the press got just about every key fact in the Rittenhouse case wrong means absolutely nothing about whether Kyle Rittenhouse should have been on the streets of Kenosha that night, about where one stands on the question of open carry, or about whether or not a teenager in America should be allowed to walk around with a semi-automatic rifle. I don't think Kyle Rittenhouse should have been walking around the chaos in Kenosha with a semi-automatic rifle that night.

But Brittenhouse's presence doesn't take away his right to self-defense, and his violent acts, justified or not, are tragic. We saw on the night of August 25th what can occur when the state fails or refuses to do what they are uniquely charged to do, which is to maintain law and order.

It certainly didn't help that in many places last summer, cities and police forces either indicated or explicitly said that they wouldn't defend people's property from destruction or burglary during the protests. And it didn't help our understanding of the truth of what transpired that night, that we were told by national media outlets that there weren't riots, that there wasn't violence in Kenosha, or at least there wasn't until Rittenhouse discharged his weapon.

We could all see the blocks of burning buildings with our own eyes. To acknowledge the facts of what happened that night is not political. It's just to acknowledge reality. It's to say that facts are still facts and lies are still lies, whatever people say about what the right narrative is.

And that pretending otherwise for the sake of political expediency is part of the reason that the National Guard is now standing watch in Kenosha, bracing for violence once again in anticipation of a verdict that for many has already been decided. ♪