Kyle Rittenhouse included in heroes list in school

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Oh okay I see. So when you call 911 they would dispatch police and a social worker or more then, instead of just police?

Oh okay. If the police do not end up getting reformed though, could perhaps the social workers up their game, such as having police radio scanners, and intercepting all the calls where they think they would be useful and go down there themselves to try to take care of the situation?

I'm not sure you'll find many people interested in taking on that role. The whole point of advocating for the services to work together is to reduce the likelihood of the officer becoming involved while still having them close enough to respond if deescalation fails.

Well you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. If the social workers can't even do this, then how do we expect them to work in the same capacity as the police?

For $30, you can buy a white T-shirt on eBay that says “Don’t make me RITTENHOUSE your ass!! !” on the back, from a seller named Gabby in Anson, Texas. The sleeves are adorned with stencilled semi-automatic rifles, a skull and “2A,” for the Second Amendment. It’s one of dozens of shirts just like it. When 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse used a semi-automatic rifle that had allegedly been purchased illegally to shoot and kill two men and wound a third during Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August, he became a hero to a large swathe of the right-wing, someone to wear your support for on your chest, or between your shoulder blades. There are now corners of the internet full of merchandise in his honor: T-shirts adorned with drawn portraits of him pointing his rifle with slogans like “Don’t Tread On Me” and “I Stand With Rittenhouse.” A photo of the teen in a Captain America mask as “Captain Rittenhouse.” The most common slogan, across dozens of shirts and multiple sites, is simple: Free Kyle.

His insistence that he was acting in self-defense, and his self-appointed mission to cross state lines from Illinois to “protect” Kenosha businesses, as he told a Daily Caller reporter that night, was almost immediately taken up by figures across the right. Among Rittenhouse’s many defenders were President Donald Trump, who claimed the shooter “would have been killed”; Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, who told a West Virginia radio station that Rittenhouse had shown “incredible self-restraint,” and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who said the shooting happened because authorities had stood back and “let Kenosha burn.” The right-wing media apparatus has made heroes of killers before — cops being the primary beneficiaries — creating the figures they need to sustain the notion of a nation under siege. But it would seem, with Rittenhouse, that the recruits into a deadly culture war now extend to a pool of civilian foot-soldiers for white supremacy — no matter how young, or how far outside the law.

Of course, white vigilante violence long predates the Trump era. It’s possible to trace a line from today’s murderous celebrities back to people like Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, who is the subject of countless statues in public squares across the country.

A more recent move to embrace vigilante violence, however, suggests a self-deputization en masse. The right-wing is no longer content to leave the power of violence in the hands of the state, no matter how eagerly and often that power is used.

With his youth, whiteness, and tousled cap of curls, Rittenhouse is precisely the type that captures an American ideal of “wholesomeness.” In his mugshot, he looks small and forlorn against the gray wall of the jail, wide eyes staring back bewildered at the camera. It was that profile that enabled him to prowl with a rifle, to kill, and to be held up, thereafter, as an avatar of innocence. His age was cited by Carlson, among others, as evidence of the extremity of social crisis that unfolded this summer, as activists took to the streets to oppose needless deaths at the hands of police. According to this argument, mass-scale political dissent entailed a calamity so dire it required the services of volunteer child soldiers. “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” Carlson asked his audience.

In the minds of those who laud a gun-wielding teenage killer, who perhaps harbor arsenals and fantasies of their own, a decayed, degenerate social order can only be restored with shed blood. There is “order” in the act of killing, as long as the killer is white and the victim is a perceived political enemy. In the right-wing authoritarian imagination, “order” does not equate with justice, nor with the equal application of the law. It means enforcing a hierarchy of racial caste, of gender-based submission, of a Christian-centric polity. There is laudability in violence, even extrajudicial violence, that works to achieve these ends.

The embrace of Rittenhouse on the right has played out in a kind of parallel to the results of the 2020 presidential election. You could call it evidence of an epistemological crisis — if killing is morally just when it is done to maintain “order,” to thwart one’s political opponents, what else can be justified under that framework?

The Proud Boys, having successfully swept through D.C. in November with little opposition, plan to return later this week.

A retreat into mirrored realities — in which a killer is a hero, an election was compromised — happens in pieces. It happens in viewers’ descent from Fox News to Newsmax to One America News Network, searching for the dream of a Trumpian United States. It happens in the growing spread of militia groups, whose recruitment has ballooned in recent weeks, and in the armed protests moving through city streets, anyone in the way serving as potential collateral damage. Cornered by the loss of an election, and with it a figurehead in which tens of millions have invested much of their identities, the right has been consumed by a bunker paranoia. A retrenchment into an apocalyptic worldview and a readiness to defend its tenets is happening all around us. Such a world needs people like Kyle Rittenhouse to keep itself spinning. What other reason does it have to keep going?

I think it would be better if they hired people who were more of social worker calibur to be police officers rather than brutes. Or at least have a certain percentage of police officers trained to act only in a social worker type capacity. The idea behind law enforcement is that it's supposed to be mainly implemented psychologically rather than physically.

I didn't think that Kyle was against the BLM movement, was he, or did he say he was?