When The Free Market Chooses Slaughter: Rittenhouse and Radicalization For Fun and Profit

[Nevilledog]

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Jared Yates Sexton
@JYSexton
All right, we need to talk about the celebration and marketing of Kyle Rittenhouse by the GOP.

Market forces have corrupted our society, dismantled our politics, and have ensured that Right Wing violence and authoritarianism will only grow with time

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When The Free Market Chooses Slaughter: Rittenhouse and Radicalization For Fun and Profit
The moment Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges stemming from his killing of two protesters in Wisconsin, he became the hottest commodity in all of the Right Wing ecosystem. Before that...
jaredyatessexton.substack.com
8:15 AM · Dec 16, 2021

https://jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/when-the-free-market-chooses-slaughter


The moment Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges stemming from his killing of two protesters in Wisconsin, he became the hottest commodity in all of the Right Wing ecosystem. Before that moment, he had served extremists within the movement as a means of fundraising spectacular amounts in his “defense,” all of it more or less being filtered to shadowy political action committees or, most likely, just the pockets of the grifters pushing the scheme. Sure, mentions of the incident made mainstream news. Pundits on Fox, AM radio, and on social media touched on the subject and voiced their concern, but the lingering uncertainty kept a lot of the hyperbole at bay.

Well, time for restraint is over. Rittenhouse, who traveled from his home in Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin and used an AR-15 rifle to kill two fellow human beings, has been let loose and is perhaps the biggest celebrity the Right has had since Donald Trump rode the golden elevator into our nightmares. It has happened so swiftly and predictably that when news broke that Rittenhouse would be appearing as a paid speaker at Turning Points USA “America Fest 2021” in Phoenix, Arizona later this month that hardly anyone was surprised.

After all. This is what you do now.

The culture war we are embroiled in is stupid. There’s really no other way to put it. Every thing in our culture, from Black Panther to Dr. Seuss, now exists as a manichean battleground to the death between polarized cultural interests. This has to do with ideology, to an extent, but much of what we are navigating and battling over is actually an expression of politics as identity, or, more specifically, politics as an expression of consumer identity.

Or, to put it another way, to support Kyle Rittenhouse, or champion Kyle Rittenhouse, or pay for a ticket to see Kyle Rittenhouse spit out platitudes in front of a digital waving flag, is to say, I Am The Type Of Person Who Would Buy A Ticket To See Kyle Rittenhouse. It is to tell the world that you are, very specifically, the kind of a person who is more than okay with a 17 year old traveling across the state in order to use an AR-15 to take the lives of two other fellow human beings.

*snip*


Author's companion thread
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1471499351222460422.html

[Nay]

1. An excellent pair of essays. It truly is all about the grift, as consumerism and

neocapitalism are all about the grift. The welfare of human beings is not even being considered at all.