Kyle Rittenhouse and the collapse of media neutrality

Anyone who thought the jury’s verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case might prompt some reflection among the political and media classes will have been rudely disabused over the last five days. The teenager was convicted in the court of elite opinion long before he set foot in the Kenosha County Courthouse and that sentence isn’t about to be overturned. The response underscores how far American liberals have drifted from liberalism and how their total surrender to progressivism has rendered them incapable of understanding events except through the prism of ‘anti-racism’.

Newsweek told its readers that ‘emboldened white supremacists and neo-Nazis have celebrated the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse in far-right channels online’. A Guardian op-ed pronounced: ‘The Rittenhouse verdict is proof that it is reasonable to believe that the fear of Black people can absolve a white person of any crime.’ Another termed the verdict ‘the latest in a centuries-old American tradition of protecting white terror and vigilantism’ and said the jury’s decision meant ‘it is now open hunting season on progressive protesters’.