Kyle Rittenhouse, Vigilantism, and Me

Accused vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, captured on a cellphone video

I was seventeen years old when the 1992 Los Angeles Riots broke out, the same age that accused Kenosha vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse is right now. I remember sitting in a classroom with another high schooler, spitballing the idea of us taking rifles to LA and helping restore order. This other kid and I clearly had the same adolescent power fantasies which drove Rittenhouse to shoot three this week, killing two.

Why, then, did Rittenhouse do it, and we didn’t? Perhaps it's easy to say that, despite the power fantasies made possible by firearms and White teenage arrogance, I had enough empathy to avoid making that mistake. But saying that, elevates me, makes me the hero of this story, which I’m not. I’ve spent several days struggling to understand what motivated two different outcomes, and realized there’s no single answer.

Clearly our thinking began similarly. With the comfortable self-importance that comes with American Whiteness, we valued social stability and property rights more than justice and human life. We thought stopping “savage lawlessness” justified violence. Which, as I write it, seems really disingenuous, since the Rodney King riots actually killed sixty-three people, and Rittenhouse wanted to kill people waving placards. Maybe we were unified in general distrust of Black people.

Or perhaps Rittenhouse and I arose from remarkably different intellectual ecosystems. Like Rittenhouse, I was a conservative Republican in 1992; my views have shifted significantly since then. But in 1992, the Republican President, George HW Bush, promised a “kinder, gentler nation.” It’s hard to imagine even hard-line conservatives accepting civilian violence back then, when we still believed the state had a monopoly on legitimate violence.

Rittenhouse, by contrast, arose from a milieu where a Republican President called peaceful protesters “sons of bitches” and fantasized about knocking heads. Rittenhouse’s shootings happened the night after the President had Mark and Patricia McCloskey as keynote speakers at the Republican National Convention. The McCloskeys, of course, threatened a crowd of protesters in suburban St. Louis; like Rittenhouse, the McCloskeys raced around recklessly with their fingers on the trigger.

The McCloskeys were treated like heroes by America’s right-wing media. Their paranoid fantasies about crime and anarchy, patently absurd from suburbanites who clearly don’t know how to handle guns responsibly, have gotten repeated extensively. The media loves a simple, morally binary narrative of heroes and villains—a love made visible whenever they treat Black shooting victims, like Jacob Blake, differently than White shooters like Rittenhouse.

Such black-and-white thinking has undoubtedly contributed to the rise of authoritarians in American politics. While left-wingers like me have clogged many column inches with ruminations on how awful the President’s autocratic tendencies are, his leading challenger is hardly better. Besides his documented racist and sexist tendencies, Joe Biden has famously spitballed on solving crime using more private firearms. Voting Democratic won’t solve this problem, not this year anyway.

Then, it’s impossible to exclude the firearm from the ecosystem. My father, a career military man who graduated from two different boot camps, openly distrusts private firearms and refuses to own any. By contrast, Rittenhouse had an AR-15-style rifle, which it’s unlawful for minors to purchase or possess, so he presumably got it from a parent or other trusted adult. It’s impossible to have a shooting without a gun.

Yet, having said all that, I still feel dissatisfied using these data points to explain Rittenhouse’s violence. What, in this remarkable ecology of authoritarianism, provided sufficient authorization for actually shooting protesters? I’ll state again: as a teenager, with a teen’s inflated self-importance, I had power fantasies similar to those Rittenhouse displayed, but I didn’t act on them. What self-granted moral justification did Rittenhouse have, that I didn’t?

Would-be vigilantes Mark and Patricia McCloskey, captured on another cellphone image

Obviously there’s no single answer. I’m still struggling to comprehend all the influences which comprise this ecology of violence. Like a literal ecology, this violence is a complex balance of contributing factors which nourish one another. Just as you cannot have trees without moss, and birds without trees, you cannot have violence without authoritarianism, and so on. Identifying one sufficient cause is fruitless… yet it still feels somehow necessary.

Since at least John Locke, Western philosophy has contended that the state has a unique monopoly on violence. Leftists are quick to rebuke violence whenever protests turn into riots. But the degree to which some have made Kyle Rittenhouse a hero suggests conservatives no longer believe this. They think individuals have the right to take the law into their own hands. It feels like we’re living in a failing state.