Like you I had not read much about the details of the Rittenhouse case. I knew that Kyle Rittenhouse had driven across state lines to Kenosha, Wisconsin, that he was trying to protect businesses from looters. And that he shot some rioters while retreating.
What I did not know it that the whole affair shines a spotlight on the collapse of the white working class.
I learned that Kyle's parents were divorced, with his mother living just across state lines from Kenosha. I learned that Kyle's father lived in Kenosha, had been a machinist but had got in trouble with drugs.
Kyle Rittenhouse is the terminus child of the hollowing-out of the American rust belt. A young white teenager from a broken home, raised by a struggling single mother. His father, according to reports, is a former machinist who was swept away into the Sackler-fed opioid crisis.
I learned that the rioters that interacted with Kyle were also white, and were not exactly exemplary young men. The three men that Rittenhouse shot were Gaige Grosskreutz, Joseph Roseenbaum, and Anthony Huber.
Says Andy Ngo:
Gaige Grosskreutz, the person armed w/a pistol who went after Rittenhouse & was shot in arm, says he’s a @ACLU legal observer. He has a long criminal history that includes a gun-related conviction.
Says Michelle Mark:
[Josesph] Rosenbaum spent roughly 15 years in prison in his early adulthood, according to Arizona prison records. Court documents showed that Rosenbaum was accused of sexually abusing five pre-teen boys in 2002, was indicted on 11 counts of child molestation, and eventually pleaded guilty to two amended counts of sexual conduct with a minor.
The jury heard only select details about Rosenbaum's mental state before the shootings. Rosenbaum had been released from the hospital just hours before the Kenosha shootings, where he had been under psychiatric care following a suicide attempt.
Also:
[Anthony] Huber pleaded guilty in 2013 to two felony counts of strangulation and suffocation, and false imprisonment, court records showed. According to a criminal complaint, Rittenhouse's defense attorneys cited without the jury present, Huber had pulled a knife on his brother and grandmother, and choked his brother amid an argument about housecleaning.
These are all white guys, in case you didn't know.
In connection with Kyle Rittenhouse's father, I was reading a piece about America's drug problem:
According to data published by the Centers for Disease Control published this week, more than 100,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in the 12 months between April 2020 an April 2021.
In a country with a population of 330 million that is 30 per 100,000. The homicide rate, by the way was 7.8 per 100,000 in 2020.
And the drug problem is getting worse, because fentanyl and P2P are much stronger and easier to produce than before.
Today’s battle is against two synthetic drugs: one that kills with terrifying ease, another that creates zombified and desperate addicts almost overnight.
Today, fentanyl is responsible for the majority of drug deaths in America. In tiny doses it gives users a high that resembles the blissed-out pain relief delivered by heroin or prescription pills. But it is far stronger and more deadly. In anything other than those microscopic quantities, it will kill you. The other drug central to the latest phase of the addiction crisis is methamphetamine, in particular a kind cooked up using a method known as P2P, which uses phenyl-2-propanone...
Our blindness to the potency of modern drugs also means we have ignored the spillover effects of addiction. The proliferation of homeless encampments in American communities of all sizes, [writer Sam] Quinones argues, is first and foremost a consequence of the new meth:
We lordly educated class, with our credentials, our corporate or government jobs, our healthy families, we have no idea about life for the Other Half.
Hey, there's a poll out today, reported by Steve Cortes.
On the Economy, Biden has a 1% surplus approval [50% to 49%] from white college grads, and a stunning -54% deficit [20% to 74%] among [white] working-class.
Well, yeah. Because the educated got through the COVID crisis working at home and Zooming meetings. The working class lost their jobs, the dumb deplorables, the bitter clingers.
As Gaetano Mosca writes in The Ruling Class, a competent ruling class makes sure to recruit from the lower classes. For various reasons, including a circulation of elites.
The thing to remember about government and politics is that the ruling class lives for its own power and conceit. The rest of the country is of interest only to the extent that it can be organized and bribed to support the ruling class or used as an enemy for the ruling class to fight.
UPDATE: Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty on all counts. Thank you, ordinary American jurors. We wouldn't be America without you.
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