The Rittenhouse verdict exposed more hypocrisy and bad faith from Democrats | Opinion

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I chuckled the other day when the Aspen Institute sounded the alarm on “information disorder,” contending that the “seams are splitting” in a “world disordered by lies.” The Aspen elites made several recommendations on combatting our information crisis in a widely covered report.

It’s not that I don’t agree, mind you. I was simply unprepared for the farce that one of the report’s co-authors – celebrated journalist Katie Couric – recently admitted to publishing brazen misinformation.

In October, Couric released a memoir called “Going There,” in which she revealed that following a 2016 interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she withheld a good chunk of social commentary made by the liberal icon. Why?

To “protect” her, Couric said, claiming that RBG was “elderly and probably didn’t understand the question.” In Couric’s estimation, RBG was lucid enough to sit on the Supreme Court, but not answer questions from a journalist? OK.

The topic was Ginsberg’s views on the racial and social justice protests gripping the United States, which included prominent athletes refusing to stand for the national anthem.

Ginsburg said that not standing for the anthem showed a “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life… Which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from… as they became older, they realize that this was youthful folly. And that’s why education is important… I think it’s a terrible thing to do, but I wouldn’t lock a person up for doing it. I would point out how ridiculous it seems to me to do such an act.”

But we didn’t hear that from Couric in 2016. Instead, she deep-sixed the comment at a time when the country sorely needed RBG’s patriotic voice.

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The galling lack of self-awareness from someone like Couric, intentionally censoring a Supreme Court justice one day while decrying misinformation the next, is precisely why average Americans’ trust in institutions is crumbling.

If we are coming apart at the seams, the callous deceptions from our society’s arbiters of truth is a core reason. That’s not to excuse anyone else, from Donald Trump to Joe Biden to online misinformation “superspreaders,” as the Aspen report calls them. But it is to question the dominant corner of our information ecosystem — media, entertainers, sports figures, influencers, left-leaning all — who operate with dishonest impunity while smugly decrying every other liar on the field.

Take the Kyle Rittenhouse saga in Wisconsin, the latest example of a coordinated attempt to create a mythology to support a narrative. Regardless of what you heard from the media outrage machine, Rittenhouse did not cross state lines with a weapon. He did not illegally possess a firearm. He did put himself in the middle of a dangerous situation in which crazed rioters — including one who suffered from mental health concerns and sexually assaulted children — attacked him with a skateboard and threatened him with a gun.

Jeff Jared of Kirkland, Wash., holds a sign outside the Kenosha County Courthouse during the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha on Thursday. Kyle Rittenhouse is charged with homicide and attempted homicide in the Aug. 25, 2020, fatal shootings of two people and the wounding of a third during unrest in Kenosha that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake. His attorneys say he acted in self-defense.

The left’s prevailing narrative is that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist, a lie told by everyone from the President of the United States to virtually every other Democratic politician and pundit. The race of those who attacked Rittenhouse is often omitted — they were all white — to lead the casual news consumer to believe he shot peaceful African American protestors.

Also omitted is what the jury saw plainly on video: that Rittenhouse was running away, shooting the first person who trapped him against a car (the child rapist) and the next two after they chased him down the street, violently attacking him and brandishing a gun. Rittenhouse feared for his life, and the jury resisted calls for mob justice by acquitting him on the grounds of self-defense. Outrageously, part of the mob’s myth is that Rittenhouse’s attackers were brave “heroes” when the prevailing evidence is that they were mentally unstable and turned loose in a chaotic situation. Rosenbaum had been released from the mental hospital that very day.

But the inconvenient facts don’t fit the preferred narrative. The left wants a clean story here, one in which a future KKK Grand Dragon earned his spurs by wading into a crowd of brave social justice warriors, mowing them down one by one. But since that isn’t the story — Rittenhouse openly declared his support for the BLM movement in an interview with Tucker Carlson! — they simply made one up. Even ESPN’s sports commentators were spewing lies about the situation on-air, claiming that Jacob Blake — the original cause of the Kenosha riots—was unarmed and murdered by police (he was armed with a knife and is still alive!).

It’s an all-too-common tactic. This left is good at recognizing moments to advance its cause of uprooting and destabilizing American society. When the facts don’t match up, they shape a narrative around it. Remember “hands up, don’t shoot!” in Ferguson, Missouri? Never happened, but the ensuing riots and property destruction certainly did.

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The creation of these myths is dangerous. It leads to civil unrest and puts real people in real danger. It causes Americans to question our bedrock institutions like the criminal justice system, which stands as a bulwark against mob rule.

And that’s the point. Creating an atmosphere of instability in which a population grows to hate its own government is exactly what some people want as they seek to discredit and bury the American experiment. Tear down the statues of our Founding Fathers in the name of equity and justice. Lie about the transformative results of their leadership. Create a sense of injustice where none exists and voilà — you can tear out the most successful experiment in self-governance the world has ever known, root and branch.

The Rittenhouse verdict exposed more hypocrisy and bad faith than could possibly be documented. Congressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a rising member of Democratic House leadership who has called for defunding prisons and ending mass incarceration, tweeted: “Lock up Kyle Rittenhouse and throw away the key.”

Joe Biden, our president who claimed he didn’t watch the trial, said he was “angry and concerned” by the verdict. Why? If he didn’t watch the evidence presented in court, how could he be angry about a jury verdict? Biden has consistently botched criminal justice statements and delivered unconstitutional orders during his presidency. His words only reaffirm his commitment to the left’s emerging ideology of neo-lawlessness, in which mobs, narratives and passions take precedence over laws, facts and the Constitution.

His number two, Kamala Harris, said the Rittenhouse verdict wasn’t “equitable.” Never mind if someone is innocent; in Harris’s worldview, some people must go to jail (or worse) to balance the cosmic scales. To be fair to the Vice President, she spent most of her career throwing Black people in jail for non-violent offenses, so her impulse for atonement is understandable, especially with the holidays coming up.

How do you defeat misinformation when it is literally spread at the highest levels of the American government and loyally repeated by armies of sycophants? If you were asking this about Trump’s post-election claims, you ought to be asking it about the Rittenhouse verdict as well.

Scott Jennings is a Republican adviser, CNN political contributor and partner at RunSwitch Public Relations. He can be reached at Scott@RunSwitchPR.com or on Twitter @ScottJenningsKY.

Scott Jennings is a Republican adviser, CNN political contributor and partner at RunSwitch Public Relations. He can be reached at Scott@RunSwitchPR.com or on Twitter @ScottJenningsKY.
Scott Jennings is a Republican adviser, CNN political contributor and partner at RunSwitch Public Relations. He can be reached at Scott@RunSwitchPR.com or on Twitter @ScottJenningsKY.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kyle Rittenhouse verdict exposed more hypocrisy from Democrats