There is a tendency in American society to ignore the ugliest parts of our history, and to imagine that the legacy of racism and Jim Crow is long behind us. It is not. Kyle Rittenhouse went to BLM protests in Kenosha Wisconsin because he saw himself as an agent of white supremacy. He saw BLM protests as an insult to his notions of white supremacy, and he was apparently supported in that belief by his mother, who drove him to the site of the protest, knowing that he would be circulating in public with an illegal firearm. Rittenhouse’s trial apparently suffered from a police department that was either comically inept, or willfully negligent in providing support to the District Attorney’s office, and the judge in the case refused to permit adequate cross-examination of Rittenhouse to determine his true motives.

Kyle Rittenhouse murdered 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum, of Kenosha, and 26-year-old Anthony Huber, of Silver Lake, Wisconsin because they were white liberals out in public showing their support for equal treatment of African-Americans before the law, and white supremacists hate white liberals who support equal rights for African-Americans just as much as they hate people of color. The Rittenhouse case is substantially similar to the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner in 1964. In that case, which later became the basis of the film Mississippi burning, three Civil Rights workers had gone to Mississippi to investigate the burning of the Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Longdale Mississippi. The murders of the three Civil Rights Activists were committed by members of the Lauderdale Ku Klux Klan. “In addition to the Klan’s resistance, the state of Mississippi itself was continuing to monitor activists through the Sovereignty Commission, which worked in conjunction with the White Citizens Council, to use economic intimidation and threats to attempt to keep blacks in subservient positions.” In Kenosha Wisconsin in the summer of 2020, that same role was performed by the Department of Homeland Security under the direction of Trump appointees Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, who both conspired to amplify rhetoric about BLM and “Antifa” while downplaying infiltration of protests by right-wing groups such as the Proud Boys. Local officials in Wisconsin willfully ignored online threats from right-wing extremists, and when those extremists showed up at the sight of the protest, they were welcomed by police officers with words of thanks and gifts of bottled water.

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