1. Now THIS is an intellectually dishonest op-ed…even for the New York Times, and even for Charles M. Blow. “Rittenhouse and the Right’s White Vigilante Heroes” made my mind snap back decades to a Phillip Roth anti-Nixon satire called “Our Gang.” At one point, as Nixon tries to scapegoat the Boy Scouts of America for something (I can’t remember what, but it doesn’t matter), the White House issues a statement explaining that the Scouts carry scout knives in numbers exceeding “the entire population of Chevy Chase, Maryland” and leaps to announcing preventive measures against the BSA “in order to prevent the slaughter of the residents of Chevy Chase.” Blow condemns the verdict in the Rittenhouse trial as “another data point in the long history of some parts of the right valorizing white vigilantes who use violence against people of color and their white allies.”
On the way to that hysterical conclusion, he writes, “One can argue about the particulars of the case, about the strength of the defense and the ham-handedness of the prosecution,” which is a weasel-worded way of saying that Rittenhouse was acquitted because of the facts of the case. “One can argue” about the verdict, but only if “one” knows nothing about the law and has swallowed the Left’s false narratives. Next thing you know, Blow is drawing, Roth-like, an imaginary line from Rittenhouse defending himself against three attacks by white felons to Jim Crow lynchings. Then, of course, the line goes to the January 6 riot at the Capitol, because until Donald Trump gets a stake through his heart, this is all the Democrats have as they fight not to be swept out of office. “One could argue”—there’s that “one” again!—” that the entire Jan. 6 insurrection was one enormous act of vigilantism,” Blow intones. First, that riot was not an insurrection by any rational definition of the word. Second, all riots are “enormous act[s] of vigilantism,” especially the rioting that Rittenhouse foolishly and recklessly injected himself into.
2. One more reason Donald Trump has reason to feel that the election was stolen...The facts as they unfolded in the trial showed that Politifact, the flagrantly left-biased fact-checking group, wrongly called Trump’s statement “False” when he said during an August 31, 2020, news briefing that Rittenhouse had acted in self-defense. “You saw the same tape as I saw,” Trump said. “And he was trying to get away from them, I guess; it looks like. And he fell, and then they very violently attacked him. And it was something that we’re looking at right now and it’s under investigation.”
PolitiFact wrote that while Trump “correctly describes some minor details about that night,” it insisted that his comments “grossly mischaracterize what happened — leaving out that by the time of the events he described, prosecutors say Rittenhouse had already shot and killed a man.” Right—in self-defense. Since when is “what the prosecutors say” “fact” before a trial?
PolitiFact was working at linking Trump to a “white supremacist” as further advancement of Big Lie #4. It was wrong, Trump was correct. Now, neither Trump nor Politifact should have had anything to say about what happened before the trial; Trump, because Presidents should not comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations and prosecutions, PolitiFact because it cannot declare what “facts” are before the facts have been determined.
The factchecking operations, which dishonestly claim to be non-partisan, were used by the media to compile their biased “lies lists” on Trump and by social media to justify banning him as soon as he had been vanquished. In this instance, PolitiFact implied that Trump was distorting the truth to defend a “white supremacist” …who, in fact wasn’t, but the news media and pundits kept saying he was.
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Ethics Alarms 