The defense rested its case in the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Thursday, after neither side presented any evidence of his “white supremacist” opinions or views, as the media and Democrats had initially claimed.
The prosecution in the case attempted to show that Rittenhouse had deliberately provoked the confrontations that led him to shoot several Black Lives Matter rioters, killing two and wounding one. But it never cited any racial bias by Rittenhouse — not even when Rittenhouse took the stand in his own defense, an extremely rare thing for a defendant to do in a murder case.
To the extent that it brought up political bias of any kind, it tried to do so in cross-examining defense witness Drew Hernandez, suggesting he had a negative view of protests “that you call riots.” (The judge rebuked the prosecution for those questions.)
The issue of Rittenhouse’s alleged “white supremacist” leanings emerged in the aftermath of the Aug. 25, 2020 incident, when Democrats and the media claimed that the teenager was a racist who had committed “mass murder” for that reason.
As Breitbart News reported in 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden claimed that Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist”:
Former Vice President Joe Biden tweeted a video Wednesday in which he depicted Kyle Rittenhouse — the 17-year-old who shot and killed two left-wing rioters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last month — as a white supremacist, without any evidence.
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Biden included footage of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia — whom he has falsely accused Trump of calling “very fine people” — and other extremists. But among those images, he included a still photograph of Rittenhouse.
Rittenhouse’s mother, Wendy Rittenhouse, told Fox News’ Hannity on Thursday that President Biden had “defamed” her son.
The only evidence of racial bias came with regard to a member of the jury, who was dismissed after making an allegedly racist joke about Jacob Blake Jr., the young man shot and wounded by police on Aug. 23, 2020, in an incident that triggered the rioting in Kenosha. The prosecution claimed that the joke was racist.
As National Public Radio reported: “It was my understanding [the joke] was something along the lines of, ‘Why did the Kenosha police shoot Jacob Blake seven times?'” said prosecutor Thomas Binger. “It’s my understanding that the rest of the joke is: ‘Because they ran out of bullets.'”
The only racist language mentioned was used by alleged victim Joseph Rosenbaum, who, according to the testimony of several witnesses, used the “N-word” before charging Rittenhouse. All three alleged victims of the shootings were white.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.