If you're experiencing feelings of despair about the Rittenhouse verdict and your impulse is to publicly grieve for the victims...
...You should probably just stop if you care about healing our atomized nation.
Consider this a coda:
Never have I ever thought I would say this, but it’s probably not the best idea to grieve for a slain child rapist.
In all seriousness, that seems to be happening in much of the progressive sphere of social media, from random citizens to celebrity members of the Elect like Mark Ruffalo. How much of this grieving is due to ignorance and how much of this is due to a pretzel of moral justification is anyone’s guess, but it ultimately doesn’t matter all that much when explaining why it’s probably a bad idea, even if the argument is seen as irrelevant or made in bad faith.
On the one hand, it doesn’t really matter; much of this will be forgotten by much of the people participating and spectating within the next week or two, as often happens with most stories where the emotions are high and their expression is performative. However, what will not be forgotten is the performative grief being felt for a man who raped and tortured children, however ignorant that performative grief might be. And, to bring it back around to my previous post on this here Substack blog, that’s going to have a ripple effect in this ecosystem of ours that will be very hard to undo.
You see, there are certain moral lines that no one (or almost no one) will dare cross. Believe it or not, even the supposed anti-PC crowd has limits when it comes to serious discourse. There is, for most people—progressive, conservative, libertarian, puritan—no discussion to be had on these particular topics. One of them is the abuse of children, especially when it is sexual. This shouldn’t be strange to us; it’s a modern norm, yes, but we live in modern times. We don’t live in ancient Greece. We understand the value of consent and, more importantly, the ability to grant it. And we have decided, however haphazardly, that you can’t really grant consent up until a certain point in maturity. For some, that point is different than it is for others, but we have largely decided as a society that this doesn’t matter; a firm line needs to be drawn.
When that firm line is questioned, it’s usually (god willing) in response to stories of adolescents hooking up with adults (usually teachers). It’s never for the prepubescent. And given the evidence out there, I suspect there’s something much deeper than “social norms” at work as our disgust rises as we hear the age of the minor in question decrease, especially to the level of Joseph “JoJo” Rosenbaum’s victims. These were children, young boys, aged 9 to 11, that he had robbed of their agency, what little they had of it, and forced them to mature much faster than any child should be forced to. Whatever mental illness he was suffering, pederasty being a result of it doesn’t paint a great picture of this man’s moral compass.
Rosenbaum served his time (though probably not nearly enough, despite receiving lifetime probation) for his crime; he served two years and some change of a ten year stretch starting back in 2002. His victims are adults now, likely still bearing the scars of their ordeal. In 2021, he had been discharged from a hospital after a suicide attempt; clearly things had not gotten much better for this man. And yet the very fair question should be asked: what does Rosenbaum’s past crimes have to do with his interaction with Kyle Rittenhouse, an interaction that ended his pathetic life?
Absolutely nothing. And yet that doesn’t really matter.
To explain: the way we treat sex offenders in American society is one of extreme stigma. One can argue that this is cruel, especially when it involves a relatively minor infraction, since it follows the offender for the rest of their life. But very few people outside of NAMBLA and certain extreme anarchist circles (and yes, I’d be remiss not to mention Hollywood, considering my track record) would argue that this stigmatic treatment is unfair when it comes to those like Rosenbaum, however mentally ill he was. This socially proactive stigma against child rapists is known and understood and even accepted by most people who are invested in this stage of the Rittenhouse Affair, even by those who despair at the verdict. And yet there are those who, despite being told—however bad faith in which it might be—that they’re defending a child rapist, are simply doubling down, pretending that this dark cloud does not hang over their words. They might deflect, saying it’s about gun rights mattering more than human rights. They might deflect harder, bringing up abstract hypotheticals and sometimes anecdotes about the treatment of “black and brown bodies” at the hands of law enforcement showing disparities. But they never address the child-raping elephant in the room.
And that, right there, is the problem.
This absence of acknowledgement will be enough to seal the fate of how anyone right of center (or even left of center in some cases) will view any future reference to this whole Affair (which will, no doubt, play a part in the campaigns in 2022 and perhaps even 2024), and those who reference it from a progressive position. “Oh right, that time you defended a child rapist,” will be the response. Simplistic, yes. But completely understandable and, most importantly, effective. And what it’s effective at doing isn’t just forming greater disdain for our increasingly dismissive, elitist progressive America, but furthering the toxic development of our current ecosystem that makes them so dismissive and elitist in the first place. To see progressive America get taken down a peg can be nice, just as it was nice to see neoconservative America get taken down a peg by that shoe thrown at George W. Bush. But in the end, this is eternal reactionary nihilism, the characterizing aspect of this ecosystem in which we find ourselves.
It’s true that there are jerks who won’t stop bringing up the fact that “JoJo” was a child rapist and it’s certainly true that it’s going to get really annoying (if it hasn’t already); it’s likely we’ll be seeing yet another awful take from the likes of Vox about this. But it’s also true that you don’t have to say you mourn for Rittenhouse’s victims in order to say that you find something truly distasteful about the outcome of this whole Affair. Those who celebrate the outcome are going to celebrate no matter what and have no choice but to celebrate the slaying of a child rapist and (it should be noted) a domestic abuser. That’s what makes them happy about Rittenhouse’s acquittal; not that “he’s allowed to shoot people.” They’re happy that he’s allowed to shoot bad people, especially in self-defense. And one of these bad people, like it or not, is basically impossible not to characterize as a truly bad person to most of Americans.
In other words, those who have decided celebrating is necessary don’t really have a choice in what they celebrate—be honest: who would actually celebrate “the right to kill with impunity?” And even if they held that level of base evil in their hearts, why on earth would they ever do so openly? That’s beyond a straw man: that is Saturday morning cartoon villain logic. On the other hand, those who have decided mourning is necessary, do have a choice—many choices, in fact, that don’t involve lionizing people who raped and tortured children. It may also be a straw man to suggest progressives are lionizing a child rapist full stop—that is obviously not why they are lionizing anyone, get real—but it’s also not untrue that that’s what they are, in effect, doing.
It’s understandable to be angry at this state of affairs in this Affair of Affairs that we find ourselves. I’d be angry too if I had become emotionally invested in that particular outcome. And, like many, I’d want to make it clear just what my values are and where I want to go from here. And if “from here” is to nihilistically rage against the machine and just say what everyone around me already thinks for varying reasons—that this system is rotten and corrupt—then I can publicly mourn the victims of Rittenhouse. But if “from here” is to heal our ecosystem and learn to live in it together as a truly strong people, then maybe it’s time for me to shut up for once.