Tucker: Why did they let Kenosha burn?
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host discusses the Kyle Rittenhouse trial
Just another evening in what has become a pretty high drama country, really. The jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial has gone home for the night after many hours of deliberations today. The average jury reaches a verdict in just a few hours, so these jurors are taking much longer than most.
But it's probably not because the evidence they have heard is confusing them. In a typical trial, an insider trading trial for example, something complex, an honest observer might be able to see both sides of the case and probably can. But that is not true here, far from it.
In fact, it's the opposite. From the very first moments of this trial it was obvious that Kyle Rittenhouse never should have been indicted in the first place. The key question was: Did Kyle Rittenhouse act in self-defense that night in Kenosha? And the answer unequivocally is yes. Obviously, it's a no-brainer. It's like the O.J. trial, no honest person could reach a different conclusion.
Kyle Rittenhouse shot men he believed were trying to kill him. Now, why did Kyle Rittenhouse believe that, you may ask? Well, in one case, the man he shot told him so directly, "I plan to kill you." Of the other two men Kyle Rittenhouse shot, one repeatedly bashed him in the head with a skateboard as he lay on the ground. The other stuck a loaded gun in his face. So Kyle Rittenhouse fought back in order to save his own life.
RITTENHOUSE TRIAL: JURORS TO RESUME DELIBERATIONS THIS MORNING: LIVE UPDATES
We're not guessing about that, even the prosecution's witnesses made that point. So once that happened, once Kyle Rittenhouse's life was threatened on the street in Kenosha, what were his options exactly? Well, he could fight back, or he could allow himself to be murdered by the rioters. And allowing himself to be murdered by the rioters is essentially what the prosecution has argued: Kyle Rittenhouse had a duty to submit to the mob.
Well, that's lunacy, and no sane jury could agree with that for a second. So the question is why is it taking so long for this jury to produce a very obvious verdict? For answer, look outside the courtroom. There are hundreds of National Guard troops assembled tonight in Kenosha. Why are they there? Well, they've come in case Kyle Rittenhouse is acquitted. Not in case he's convicted, in case he's acquitted. At which point if he is acquitted, pretty much everyone expects the usual mobs of Joe Biden voters to burn and loot and destroy.
People gather outside the Kenosha County Courthouse, during jury deliberations for Kyle Rittenhouse's trial, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Nov. 16, 2021. (REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein)
Why does everyone expect this? Because people on the left are openly calling for it. "Now the jury deliberation has begun, I think every city in America should prepare for what could happen if Rittenhouse gets acquitted. It may get RIGHTFULLY unpleasant." That's the message from an actual teacher from the state of Indiana on Twitter today and it echoes what many others are saying tonight.
So imagine if you were a juror in this case? How would you feel about this? You're not sequestered, you know how the country feels. You know what the threats are. Well, you might think twice before you acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse, no matter what the evidence was.
Remember what happened after Rodney King. They burned Los Angeles to the ground. You wouldn't want to be responsible for that. You wouldn't want to spark riots. And of course, that's the whole point of the exercise. The mob threatens violence, the rest of us tremble, and pretty soon the mob controls our justice system. Pretty soon, the enemies of civilization, which is what they are, are in charge of the country. That's what's happening now.
So it's worth pausing for a moment to ask, how did we get here? Well, here's one summary that caught our eye. Today, a Hill staffer called Billy Gribbin summed it up in the following way, "We're waiting to see if riots break out because of media lies about a case from a riot that happened because of media lies."
Well, that's nicely put and it's totally true. The August 2020 riot in Kenosha wasn't really a riot in the way that we understand riots. It was an outbreak of political violence. It began three days after the Democratic convention. That was the context for it. It was, in fact, one of many riots that summer across the country, all of which were explicitly supported by the leadership of the Democratic Party. We're not making this up. Look it up.
What was the point of these riots? Big picture, the point was to unseat Donald Trump. In the specific case of Kenosha, we know exactly the chain of events that led to where we are today. A man called Jacob Blake was shot by the police. Immediately, the media and the Democratic politicians they serve lied about what happened. So they told us that a cop shot Jacob Blake in the back for no apparent reason – and by the way, Jacob Blake was unarmed, he was helpless, they just pulled him out of a lineup and shot him because that's what America is like.
Kyle Rittenhouse during a break in his trial at the Kenosha County Courthouse on November 15, 2021 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (Photo by Sean Krajacic-Pool/Getty Images)
Kamala Harris then jumped in and said she was "proud" of Jacob Blake, like he was a civil rights hero, like he was shot for being the wrong color, as so often happens in a systemically racist country. But it was all totally untrue. Not just the themes, but the facts. They were lies.
In fact, the police were responding to a call from a woman who said Jacob Blake was trying to kidnap her child. So the police showed up as they should have. They tried to detain Jacob Blake and Jacob Blake fought the cops. Then he grabbed a knife. Jacob Blake was holding that knife when he was shot by the police. Jacob Blake admitted that on television. It was too late.
Based on the first false stories from the news media told intentionally, our leaders suggested that these riots in Kenosha were somehow justified and then allowed them to continue. So this is what Kenosha looked like the night that Kyle Rittenhouse arrived to help defend local businesses.
Various scenes of vandalism, looting, arson and rioting
Well that's not a civil rights protest, that's not people fighting back against oppression, systemic racism. That's just people destroying things they didn't build. That's people wrecking our civilization. In no normal country would that be allowed, it would be put down immediately with force. That's why we have police.
You can't allow that because if you do allow that, people get killed – as they did. But local police, you should know, did virtually nothing to stop any of the things you just saw. From the very top of the power structure, the state of Wisconsin, the word was let it happen.
The governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, turned down an offer from Washington to send federal officers in order to help get Kenosha under control, to save the city. That was a shockingly irresponsible decision, it was an immoral decision. But Tony Evers still defends it, "I have no regrets." Really? That's because he doesn't live in Kenosha.
Downtown Kenosha burned. It will never be rebuilt. Talk about a city that doesn't deserve any of this. Kenosha is just a town of 100,000 people, many of them Hispanic, if that even matters. But it's true, they're not rich people who live there.
Kenosha is far past its prime. It was part of the industrial base that built this country that built the modern world. Now it's suffering even more than it was before the riots because a bunch of entitled antisocial lunatics broke things for no reason. Because our leaders allowed them. A city official estimates the damage from last summer's riots at about $50 million. That's a lot in Kenosha, in fact it's about more than half the entire municipal budget for the city of Kenosha.
So why did the people in charge allow Kenosha to be destroyed? This happened over days. They allowed this. Why?
Well, for the same reason they indicted Kyle Rittenhouse. To send a very clear message to the rest of us watching on television: Don't resist. When the mob comes, you can't fight back. We're in charge. We'll do what we want. All summer they made that very clear.
Here's what happened to one man who foolishly tried to defend his own business from looters in Dallas.
Video of man being stomped and attacked by mob
There's so much video like that. And at the time, we restrained ourselves and didn't show all of it, we're not going to show all of it tonight because it's too divisive. It's too awful. It hypes people up too much, it's too emotional, but it's totally real. That happened across the country to people who did nothing wrong.
So the message over time was very, very clear. And again, it's the same message they're sending us with the Rittenhouse trial: resistance is futile. Try to defend yourself and we're gonna throw you in jail.
During closing arguments, in case you missed the point, one of the prosecutors, in this case, said it out loud: When the mob comes, he said, just let them beat you.
KRAUS: Everybody takes a beating, sometimes, right? Sometimes you get in a scuffle and maybe you do get hurt a little bit. That doesn't mean you would just start plugging people with your full metal jacket, AR-15 rounds and no bullets or not bullets.
Everyone takes a beating? How dare you talk like that in court. In a sane, civilized society you can't condone violence just because the people committing it vote for the candidate you like.
Notice the change here, though. This case has gone from "White supremacist hunts down and executes BLM protesters" – like it was a racial case, everyone's White – to the new theme "that teenager should have accepted his beating from the child molester arsonist who was chasing him and threatening to kill him and because he didn't he needs to go to jail." Once again, a very clear message: submit. The prosecution hammered this again and again and again.
KRAUS: Why do you get to immediately just start shooting? As Mr. Binger said, he brought a gun to a fistfight. And he's too cowardly to use his own fist to fight his way out. He has to start shooting.
Really? Too cowardly? A 17-year-old should have gotten into a fistfight with a 36-year-old violent pedophile? Right.
Speaking of cowardly, where were the police who are paid to stop this stuff? Who are paid to keep mob violence from happening in the first place? Where's the governor, who's under too much political pressure to protect his own people? Talk about cowardly. Blaming a 17-year-old who shows up because the city his dad lives in is on fire and he wants to do something? He shouldn't have been there in the first place, he shouldn't have had to have been there. The adults should have been there. They're the cowards.
These prosecutors are appalling, this whole spectacle is appalling. At the same time, watch how the prosecutor characterizes the pedophile's actions the night he was shot.
BINGER: So what does he do that night? Oh, let me tell you all the awful things Joseph Rosenbaum did. He tipped over a porta-potty that had no one in it. He swung a chain. He lit a metal garbage dumpster on fire. Oh, and there's this empty wooden flatbed trailer that they pulled out in the middle of the road and they tipped it over to stop some bearcats and they lit it on fire. Oh, and he said some bad words. He said the N-word.
Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger gives his closing argument during Kyle Rittenhouse's trial at Kenosha County Courthouse, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S., November 15, 2021. Sean Krajacic/Pool via REUTERS (Sean Krajacic/Pool via REUTERS)
That's one of the weirdest thing that's ever happened in an open court. That's the prosecutor. That's a government official mocking the idea that it's a big deal to light cars on fire to keep the police from coming in and restoring order. It's just not a big deal at all, is what the prosecutor is telling us. He's also saying it's not a big deal to scream racial slurs in public. Really, since when is that true?
This is lunacy. The jury was never allowed to hear the details of the life of this guy, Joseph Rosenbaum. He had quite a history that does seem sort of relevant, actually.
The rest of the media is not going to tell you anything about it, so we will. In 2002, Joseph Rosenbaum was charged by a grand jury with 11 counts of child molestation, including forcible sodomy. This wasn't, him at 19 with a 17-year-old girlfriend. No, no. He raped children. The victims were five boys between the ages of 9 and 11.
Ultimately, Rosenbaum was sentenced to 10 years in prison for this. When he got out of prison, Rosenbaum destroyed his ankle monitor that he was required to wear. The day he died, Rosenbaum had an open case for domestic abuse. They're defending this guy. Just hours before he threatened to kill Kyle Rittenhouse, Rosenbaum had been released from a mental hospital being treated for some sort of disorder, obviously. He tried to go back to his fiancee, but she had a no-contact order after she pressed charges against him a month earlier for hitting her. So this is the man they're telling you was a model citizen.
JOY REID: Let me just remind people of the names of the victims. Joseph Rosenbaum, who was 36 years old. Anthony Huber, who was 26. Gaige Grosskreutz is only 27 years old, was injured. These are the victims. These are the people that people ought to remember, these are the people who were hurt here, not the person who was crying on the stand today.
So if you are an honest progressive, wouldn't you ask yourself, "What are all these people doing at a Joe Biden rally? Three days after the Democratic convention. They're all on my side, but I notice that all of them are actually horrible."
This is not a cross-section of America. These are the worst people in America. Joseph Rosenbaum, the child rapist. What about the other victims? Our media tells you a main victim is a guy called Gaige Grosskreutz. He's the guy who ran up Kyle Rittenhouse and pointed a loaded gun in his face, for which he's never been charged. That's not a big deal because he votes the right way. Who is this guy?
Well, Grosskreutz, it turns out, also has a lengthy criminal history that includes an arrest for hitting his own grandmother in the face. Just six days before he testified in the trial Grosskreutz was in court on a DUI charge, which Joe Biden says is not a big deal, but most of us grew up thinking, you were not supposed to do that. Several years ago, Grosskreutz was charged with smashing the bedroom window of his ex-girlfriend's home at 4 a.m. On the night Kyle Rittenhouse shot him, Grosskreutz has admitted he was carrying an illegal firearm. Oh, no longer a big deal, either. Gun crimes don't matter if you vote the right way.
So what about Anthony Huber? He's the man who hit Kyle Rittenhouse twice in the head with a skateboard. Who was he? He's a convicted domestic abuser. According to court records, Huber once told his brother that if he didn't clean a room in his house, he was going to "gut him like a pig." Huber said that while he was holding a six-inch knife to his brother's stomach. Then he grabbed his brother's neck and said, "I'm going to burn this house down with all of you in it." Huber pleaded guilty to one count of strangulation that time.
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So I guess the point is pretty simple: there were a lot of violent criminals at this particular Joe Biden rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last summer. What are the odds of that? Kind of hard not to contrast it with what happened on Jan. 6, the insurrection they never stopped telling us about. No one has been charged with carrying a gun inside the Capitol building that day. How many fires did they set? None that we're aware of, but they get to rot in solitary confinement anyway while Gaige Grosskreutz gets the seal of approval from MSNBC anchors for pointing a loaded gun he was carrying illegally in the face of a child.
So the Kyle Rittenhouse trial is wrapping up, but the people who engineered the political prosecution behind this are still in power. One of the main takeaways from all of this is that those people are now more brazen than they have ever been. They're just saying it out loud now.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the November 16, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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