ABC News Calls Kyle Rittenhouse An ‘Alleged White Supremacist’ Without Evidence, Cites Joe Biden
The ABC report referred to Rittenhouse as an alleged racist without offering any evidence to support the assertion. Instead, the report later noted of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden featuring the teenager in a video ad about “white supremacists.” The video triggered a reaction from Rittenhouse lawyer L. Lin Wood, who threatened a lawsuit over the alleged libel.
“Rittenhouse, an alleged white supremacist accused of killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin,” ABC News said in the report (emphasis added), “in the wake of an officer-involved shooting, appeared via Zoom for an Illinois hearing where his attorney contested the teen’s extradition to Wisconsin to face homicide and other charges in connection with the August shootings.”
The news network then noted Biden’s notorious “white supremacist” ad featuring Rittenhouse, seemingly to justify ABC’s “alleged white supremacist” label of the teen:
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign has criticized President Donald Trump’s failure to condemn white supremacists. A campaign video featured Rittenhouse on the streets of Kenosha. Attorney Lin Wood, who is helping to raise funds for Rittenhouse’s defense, threatened to sue the Biden campaign for libel on behalf of Rittenhouse in response to the video.
However, the left-leaning ADL admitted earlier this month that Rittenhouse has no ties to extremism.
“Kyle Rittenhouse has not been linked to any formal extremist group,” said the ADL, in a piece highlighted alleged “extremists” defending the teen.
During an NPR conversation with Oren Segal, vice president of the ADF’s Center On Extremism, it was noted that Rittenhouse’s social media showed support for President Donald Trump and pro-police movement Blue Lives Matter, neither of which are “extremist.”
“There’s no other way to put it: the president of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night,” Biden captioned the ad featuring Rittenhouse.
“Formal demand for public retraction is being prepared for Biden/Harris Campaign on behalf of Kyle Rittenhouse,” Mr. Wood responded, adding, “I also hereby demand that [Joe Biden] immediately retract his false accusation that Kyle is a white supremacist & militia member responsible for violence in Kenosha.”
Rittenhouse’s legal defense previously released a video outlining the events leading to the fatal shooting of two rioters in Kenosha as well as the injury of a third.
“To prevent the total destruction of their communities, good Samaritans united to guard local businesses,” the video narrated.
“So people are getting injured,” Rittenhouse says the night of the shooting. “Our job is to protect this business. Part of my job is to help people. If there’s somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way.”
“I have a medic kit. If you are injured, come to me!” the teen also says before the incident.
Describing the events of the incident, a statement from law firm Pierce Bainbridge claimed that Rittenhouse was on his way to a mechanic’s shop when multiple rioters accosted him, recognizing him as one of the people trying to protect the shops in the area. The teen reportedly then tried to flee as the “mob” chased him, and “[u]pon the sound of a gunshot behind him, Kyle turned and was immediately faced with an attacker lunging towards him and reaching for his rifle. He reacted instantaneously and justifiably with his weapon to protect himself, firing and striking the attacker.”
“In fear for his life and concerned the crowd would either continue to shoot at him or even use his own weapon against him, Kyle had no choice but to fire multiple rounds towards his immediate attackers, striking two, including one armed attacker,” Pierce Bainbridge said.Here is something to chew on. If you had a time machine and traveled around periods in history, what would you find? Let’s say you’re a French knight in 732, and, after fighting at the Battle of Tours, you step into the device with all your chainmail, armor, shield, and sword. You pop out in 1415 to fight again at Agincourt. What you might notice is that in seven centuries weaponry really hasn’t changed very much. In fact, technology overall hasn’t advanced far, certainly not in any revolutionary way. One key reason for this lack of advancement is that, despite the reputation for constant warfare, the Medieval period was not a particularly violent time on a large nation-against-nation scale, albeit quite miserable, filthy, and plague-infested by our standards.
You, our brave knight, climb back into the time machine and step out in France again…this time approximately 300 years later in 1712 at Denain. Although a strange and noisy projectile-hurling device called a musket is now in use, it’s primitive, inaccurate, and cumbersome. The weapons of choice on this battlefield are still of the bladed variety…bayonet, sword, pike, halberd, spontoon. Horses are still the main shock force and they are defended against by hedges of spear points in the form of bayonets and pikes. So even after a thousand years have passed from Tours, you’re still in the game.
After helping your future countrymen defeat the Austrians and Dutch, you hop back into the time machine once again and move forward another two centuries to 1916, wherein you emerge onto the Somme battlefield of World War One. But now things have changed dramatically. In fact, to your bewilderment, you feel as if you’re on the surface of another planet. Now what do you see? A world utterly transformed. Your armor and weapons are not only completely useless, but a hindrance. You are in a world of warbling artillery shells, rattling machine guns, rifles, steel helmets, clouds of mustard gas, armed flying machines, rumbling tanks, etc.
Terrified, you race back into your machine and are propelled forward yet again…this time barely 30 years later to 1945 and into the cockpit of a massive B-29 bomber 30,000 feet over Japan. From here, after getting over the shock of flying, to your incomprehensible horror, you witness a single 128″x28″ apparatus vaporize an entire city right before your eyes. Should you be so bold as to travel forward just 75 years later into 2020 you will see a world awash in nuclear-tipped ICBMs, enormous submarines that can stay submerged and silent for months, supercarriers with flying machines screaming through the air 100 times faster than your trusty warhorse, radar, sonar, satellites, Kevlar, even more powerful tanks of all shapes, RPGs, night vision, drones, stealth aircraft, smart weapons, supercomputers, etc. You get the idea.
What’s the point? It is this: technology grows at an exponential rate (think Moore’s Law). It just needs a catalyst. As Oskar Schindler said, he was always missing one thing: “War.” The reason we went from the flimsy Wright Flyer in 1903 to the Mach 3 Lockheed SR-71 less than 60 years later, to satellites, space stations, and reusable rocketry today, indeed the ability to destroy our planet many times over (let alone bioweapons), is because, nothing drives technological innovation like war. And the 20th Century was by far the bloodiest and most violent in human history…so far. And the better at war you are (and perhaps more aggressive) the faster you develop new and improved stuff. Measure begets counter-measure begets counter-counter-measure spiraling onward and upward at a sinisterly accelerating rate.
So what would this say about an alien race, if they’ve in fact been dropping in on us, that is so technologically advanced that they have overcome the limitations of light speed itself, possibly taking advantage of curves, folds and intersections in space-time that they can traverse the unfathomable distance to come here? The distances of space are so vast they are difficult to comprehend. We can illustrate it this way. The nearest star to our Sun is Proxima Centauri; it’s 4.3 light years away. That’s around 25.25 trillion miles. Now, if we were to shrink the Sun all the way down to the size of a golf ball, Proxima Centauri would be roughly the diameter of a BB. To stay true to scale to match the space between them, if we stood in New York’s Central Park holding the golf ball, how far away would the person holding the Proxima Centauri BB have to stand to match the distance? Green Bay, Wisconsin, or a little over 760 miles.
Furthermore, what would the aliens’ arrival here of all places say about their abilities to even locate us at all given our obscurity within the infinite expanse of the cosmos. A common illustration goes thusly: If our entire Solar System out to Neptune’s orbit, 5.6 billion miles diameter, was shrunk to the size of a quarter, the Milky Way galaxy would be the size of the contiguous United States…just to give you an idea of how hidden we truly are. And yet, somehow they have found us. So how advanced must they be?
In fact, the technology they would have to possess to get here would be so much farther ahead of our own that it is almost unfathomable. Maybe the best way to drive the point home is to compare us to a group of cave dwellers with clubs and primitive spear points being studied by a foreign power just over the horizon that fields F-22s, satellites, nuclear submarines, and ICBMs in its arsenal.
Call me a pessimist, but I have to think that a society so advanced, which implies a lot of experience at waging war if our own story is any guide, is a pretty hostile bunch. And yet we have sent our probes into the void with not only a “Hey there, we exist” message, but “Oh and here’s exactly how to find us.” I guess the only consolation is that if they are so advanced, which implies civilizational longevity, and yet have survived without annihilating themselves, it’s a good sign. Maybe they got it out of their system already. After all, we’ve only had nukes for 75 years. We’re just at the very beginning of the post-global-total-destruction-capability phase. Should we last, it may be because we’ve improved as a species, with our morality catching up to our technology. Or, maybe, the aliens are merely the survivors (read: victors), in some planetary cage match. The Spartans of their system who, in the end, defeated their celestial Athenians and came out on top.
Either way, I’m thinking any serious close encounter with these guys would be more akin to Independence Day and War Of The Worlds than E.T. or Arrival. With that in mind, perhaps inviting them over for a play date, like beckoning a sadistic child wearing Timberlands and carrying a magnifying glass to visit our little anthill, wasn’t such a good idea.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader, columnist, and author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of Another Time And Place.
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