The parallel universe of liberal elites

 Tom Slater:

America’s liberal elites are broken. They are now totally deranged and detached from reality. That’s become brutally clear in the past 24 hours. While we all knew it was coming, the collective media and political meltdown over the acquittal of 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse has revealed a ruling class so warped, so unprincipled, so governed by partisan prejudice, that it essentially lives in a parallel universe.
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As the trial wore on, it became all the more clear that the narrative cast about Rittenhouse and that night last August was utterly false. A narrative neatly summed up by Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who said Rittenhouse was a ‘17-year-old white supremacist domestic terrorist’ who ‘shot and killed two people who had assembled to affirm the value, dignity and worth of black lives’.

There is no evidence that Rittenhouse has white-supremacist leanings. Unless being pro-cop and pro-Trump counts, which apparently it does for many allegedly intelligent people. The idea that he was some out-of-towner who went to Kenosha just to take aim at protesters is also nonsense. While he lives in nearby Antioch, Illinois, his father, grandmother, aunt and uncle live in Kenosha. He also had a job there and was staying with a friend that night. Those he clashed with weren’t all ‘protesters’, either. Joseph Rosenbaum was, by all accounts, a deeply disturbed individual who went downtown that night to look for trouble.

But, with some notable exceptions aside, much of the great and good doubled down on their ridiculous takes even as the trial disproved them. ‘White supremacy maintains its cover’, thundered one MSNBC contributor in the wake of the acquittal. The fact that the three people Rittenhouse shot were white continues to escape the attention of many, including the UK’s Independent newspaper, which told its readers yesterday that Rittenhouse had killed two black men.
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For much of the American elite, the Rittenhouse trial was not about proving him guilty beyond reasonable doubt. It wasn’t about trying to uncover the truth of what happened that awful night. It was another showdown in some fantasy battle against white supremacy that exists entirely in their imaginations. The jurors were being called on not to weigh the evidence and testimony, but to deliver the ‘right’ verdict and so strike a blow against evil.
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The elites who argue that Rittenhouse should not have been there is utterly beside the point.  He still had the right to defend himself from attacks by people who wished him harm.  You do not lose that right by being in a bad situation.  The assertion that he was a "white supremacist" is totally without merit.  It has become just another slur that the left uses against people they disagree with.