Kyle Rittenhouse: Hero, Villain, or Neither?

A lthough it is difficult to know what the jury will ultimately decide, there is a broad consensus that the Kyle Rittenhouse trial went surprisingly well for the defendant. The last week or so of proceedings saw a number of unforced errors by the prosecution, and a series of important revelations have bolstered Rittenhouse’s claim to have acted in self-defense when he shot and killed two men during an August 2020 riot in Kenosha, Wis. But these are legal questions. On a moral level, what are we to make of Rittenhouse’s actions? What are we to make of Rittenhouse himself?

David French, for one, thinks Rittenhouse is a “foolish young man.” In The Atlantic, French argues that “no one should be surprised if Rittenhouse is acquitted on the most serious charges against him,” but he skewers “the Trumpist right” for “wrongly creating a folk hero out of Rittenhouse,” making him “a positive symbol” of “a young man of action who stepped up when the police (allegedly) stepped aside.”

“It is one thing to argue that the law is on Rittenhouse’s side—and there is abundant evidence supporting his defense—but it is quite another to hail him as a model for civic resistance,” French writes. “A political movement that turns a deadly and ineffective vigilante into a role model is a movement that is courting more violence and encouraging more young men to recklessly brandish weapons in dangerous places, and that will spill more blood in America’s streets.”

It is true that in certain corners of the Right, Rittenhouse has come to be regarded as something of a tragic hero — a symbol of American self-reliance, bravely taking it upon himself to protect his community when no one else would. Within a month of the shooting, a grassroots crowdfunding website had raised more than half a million dollars for Rittenhouse. Wendy Rittenhouse, Kyle’s mother, received a standing ovation at a Wisconsin GOP event. And the young defendant has been treated sympathetically in much of conservative media. “Kyle Rittenhouse went to Kenosha to clean up the filth left by the rioting Biden voters,” Tucker Carlson argued in a recent segment, for example.

That has invited a predictable slew of hand-wringing coverage in the mainstream media, which have aired concerns that “conservatives’ violent hero worship” will make it “all the more likely that more deluded right-wingers will show up to protests armed and looking for trouble,” and that the Right’s efforts to make “Rittenhouse a cause célèbre” are “driven by powerful interest groups, extremists, politicians and others using it to push their own agendas.”

But the media have also turned Rittenhouse into a symbol of sorts. From the legacy press and the academic “expert” class to the Democratic Party itself, the Left’s institutional organs had made up their minds about Rittenhouse well before the trial began. “When we marched in Ferguson, white supremacists would hide behind a hill near where Michael Brown Jr. was murdered and shoot at us,” Representative Cori Bush tweeted, making three demonstrably false claims — that the 2015 hill shooter was a white supremacist (he was black), that he was shooting at protesters (he was shooting at police), and that Michael Brown was murdered (the officer who shot him was acquitted by the Obama Department of Justice) — in one sentence. “They never faced consequences. If Kyle Rittenhouse gets acquitted, it tells them that even 7 years later they still can get away with it.” Joe Biden himself called Rittenhouse a “white supremacist” last year — a claim that White House press secretary Jen Psaki refused to explain when pressed on it earlier this week.

In all of this, some important factors, and questions, often are ignored. Rittenhouse did not kill two men and wound another in a vacuum, but against the backdrop of a nationwide breakdown in law and order. A completely overwhelmed Kenosha police force had effectively ceded the city to rioters, with Wisconsin governor Tony Evers repeatedly refusing to answer their pleas for reinforcement. By the time that Rittenhouse entered the city, “the only visible law enforcement presence was around the Kenosha County Courthouse, where an 8-foot-high fence was erected around the building, with about 1,000 protesters gathered outside the barrier,” The Washington Post reported. Regardless of the prudence of Rittenhouse’s actions, the kind of vigilantism he engaged in is an inevitable consequence of the state’s relinquishing its monopoly over the legitimate use of force, neglecting its basic duty to protect life, liberty, and property. As National Review’s Dan McLaughlin writes:

When the proper authorities fail to keep order, private citizens will one way or another take the law in their own hands. . . . It will always happen when government fails at its first duty. If you don’t want more Kyle Rittenhouses taking it upon themselves to hold back the forces of anarchy and ruin, you have to have responsible law enforcement ready and willing to do it. The people most upset at Rittenhouse are the ones who would put more of him on the streets.

French acknowledges this in a roundabout way when he writes that “the state should not permit rioters to run rampant in America’s streets.” But while the “narrow nature of the self-defense inquiry” may be legitimate, he argues, Rittenhouse’s actions were an example of “killings that are deeply wrongful in every moral sense.”

There is a logical subsequent question to this line of reasoning, however. What should Americans do in the event that the state “permits rioters to run rampant in America’s streets”? At what point is it morally justifiable to take it upon oneself to defend one’s community?

That the left-leaning media have no response to these questions is unsurprising, given that their governing worldview sees the original underlying rationale for the Second Amendment as hopelessly outdated and parochial. French gestures at an answer when he writes that “there is a dramatic difference between the use of weapons as a last resort, when your life or the lives of others are in immediate danger, and the open carrying of weapons as an intimidation tactic or as an intentionally disconcerting display of political identity and defiance.” Perhaps Rittenhouse’s situation did not rise to the level of “last resort,” in French’s estimation. But then we should specify what situation would. What if the police had abandoned Kenosha for a month? For six months? For a year? What if there were people barricaded inside their shops, directly endangered by the mob outside? What is the point at which those who have the means to defend a community should take it upon themselves to do so?

One possible example is the so-called “Roof Koreans,” the Korean-American shop owners who took it upon themselves to defend their businesses when the Los Angeles Police Department abandoned large parts of the city at the height of the 1992 Rodney King riots. For the five days of anarchy and violence in South Central L.A. — which killed nearly 60 people and injured thousands more — men in Koreatown kept watch on the roofs of their storefronts, armed with semiautomatic rifles to fend off would-be looters.

This is a much less morally complicated case than Kyle Rittenhouse’s. It’s easy to understand why the armed Koreatown shop owners were heroes. They didn’t go looking for trouble; the trouble came to them. When it did, they were ready to do what it took to defend their community.

But where — and how — should we draw the lines between moral and immoral use of force in defense of one’s own? Both Rittenhouse and the Korean shop owners were responding to the very ugly conditions that result from a breakdown in law and order. Moral lines quickly become blurrier in such situations. Many have argued that Rittenhouse shouldn’t have inserted himself into the situation in the first place, and that may be true. It is also true that Kenosha was his community in a number of important ways — he was not simply a “chaos tourist,” in the words of the lead prosecutor. He worked in the city, as did his father. His best friend lived there. These were his people, and he felt — perhaps foolishly, but not malevolently — that he needed to take up arms to defend them. For all the attempts to make him out to be a marauding killer, it’s worth watching the interview he gave to The Daily Caller just hours before the shooting, where Rittenhouse — armed with a medkit as well as a rifle — earnestly told the interviewer that he was there because “us citizens, we need to help each other.”

“People are getting injured,” Rittenhouse told the Caller. “Our job is to protect this business, and part of my job is to also help people.”

This is not a defense of Rittenhouse’s actions, per se. Vigilantism should be feared, not celebrated. But it is apparent he was acting on an impulse to protect in his decision to go to Kenosha, even if that decision was an imprudent and ultimately deadly one. An evil white supremacist he is not.

In all likelihood, he is neither a hero nor a villain here. Regardless of one’s personal view on these issues, any critiques of Rittenhouse’s actions should consider at what point a breakdown in law and order might justify armed intervention, and by whom. After all, the Second Amendment is organized around the insight that the state will not always be there to protect you. The right to self-defense is as much a moral claim as it is a legal provision. As long as authorities fail to provide security in lawless situations such as Kenosha, we will continue to reckon with these questions.