The Response to the Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict Encapsulates why I Walked Away

The media and the left continue to push lies, and they’ll keep losing supporters because of it.

Yesterday, now 18 year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty of all charges of murder and reckless endangerment. If anyone is unaware, Kyle Rittenhouse shot 3 men and killed 2 of them during the Kenosha riots/protests that took place last summer after the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

However, after the verdict social medial was filled with hot takes, and it became obvious who did and did not watch the trial.

For those who were unaware:

1. Kyle Rittenhouse DID NOT take an AR-15 across state lines; his friend gave it to him when he was in Kenosha.

2. Kyle Rittenhouse was LEGALLY allowed to carry the AR-15. The laws of Wisconsin are strange, but they certainly indicate that Rittenhouse was allowed to carry.

3. Kyle Rittenhouse DID NOT shoot 3 black men. All of the people who were shot were white, and all had a very horrendous history of felonies.

If you were to follow the mainstream media, the results of the trial may have come as a surprise, because the media has been repeating lies ad infinitum since the incident occurred. Even now, even after the verdict, even after the 3-week long trial, the lies persist. When mainstream media continue to reiterate the absolute lies of him crossing state lines, of him shooting 3 black men, it points to the notion that those who are weaving narratives are doing so without any actual evidence, and it remains obvious that they never intended to search for the evidence in the first place.

A blatant lie put out by a media outlet. Even AFTER all of the evidence has come out!

We’re bearing witness to a world where one movie is telling 2 dichotomous stories, where somehow 2 diametrically opposed views are living simultaneously with one another. But reality doesn’t exist in a realm of cognitive dissonance; one story exists in truth and logic, while another exists in the realm of falsehoods, gaslighting, and pure ignorance. I know full well the realm of lies and deceit, because I lived in it for many years, and believed everything I was told without hesitation. I felt that the Democratic party was the party of truth, and the party of civility and justice, but I no longer feel that way. In fact, that feeling left me years ago, and it’s never coming back.

Like many of you out there, I had to come to terms that I was being “red-pilled”; at some point things didn’t make sense, and by trying to make it make sense I just wound myself up into becoming even more confused.

It’s difficult to rationalize things that are irrational, especially when the irrationality is intended to obfuscate the truth. When you are told the shooting of 3 white men are indicative of white supremacy, there’s no good way to rationalize how such a scenario can exist. When you are told that a black man running for the governor of California is somehow the “black face of white supremacy”, there’s no good way to rationalize that either, because once again it’s rationalizing the irrational. When you are told to live in a world of cognitive dissonance, and are told to willingly accept what is being presented, at some point there has to be some give, and it’s then when you realize that things aren’t right.

I won’t go into full details about my #walkaway journey (I may save that for another post), but I’ll mention something highly controversial; I wanted Donald Trump to win the 2016 election.

No, I did not vote for him; I thought he was far too rowdy and unpredictable at the time. But I saw what was happening to the Democratic party, and as someone who saw myself as a lifelong Democrat I was horrified to see what was happening.. It was the banning of speakers from campuses over presupposed “hate speech” culminating into campus riots and destruction, and the large movement against sudden incidences of racism occurring all over these college campuses, areas most likely to represent bastions of diversity and equality. I was suddenly told to believe in the idea of the boogyman of white supremacy, that every little thing was an offense to someone and that I should watch out for any -ism that may be directed at me or committed by me.

Take the following phrase. It encapsulates the mentality that began to pervade the left and became the mantra of social justice:

“Everything is racist, everything is sexist, everything is homophobic, and you have to point it all out.”

It seemed that overnight the entire country was covered with eggshells that we were intended to maneuver, but when you are playing a game where the rules are not fair, and that those who are laying the eggshells are not doing so out of good faith, it becomes easy to see that the game is not worth playing anymore.

Take the night of the 2016 election. I was watching NBC’s coverage of election night. As it became clearer that the electoral college was moving in favor of Trump, Chuck Todd started making the argument that if Hillary Clinton was to lose the election it would be because of “working class white voters”. Of course, as what has become custom of the left and the media in general, is the sudden narrative pivot that happened right in front of my eyes. As soon as the election was called for Trump, it was no longer “working class white voters”, but instead the narrative became “uneducated white voters”. It was now the fault of those stupid, uneducated white people who decided to vote for Trump that Hillary lost.

It was her time, and those stupid white people are the reason why she didn’t get it!

Not only was this shocking, it was so blatantly obvious that the media was crafting a narrative for why Hillary lost. How could it be possible that just a few minutes ago voters were referred to as working class, an endearing group of people who the Democrats have become the representation of. But now it seemed like they couldn’t control the way they voted, and instead of wondering why they lost a voter base that they had a grasp on, they doubled down and the disdain came forth.

And we recently saw those same sentiments occurring with the victory of Glenn Youngkin, when middle class white women who voted mostly for Biden turned out to vote for Youngkin. They didn’t do so because they were concerned about the teachings of Critical Race Theory, or the masking of their children. It was because they suddenly found their inner white supremacists, and were far too stupid to figure out that they were voting for the wrong person. Again, the disdain for the voter base arose, and white people were once again to blame for the results.

I wanted the 2016 election to be a referendum on the direction I saw the left heading, but instead of gaining some introspection and understanding why they were losing voters, they decided to fall further into the -ism hole and doubled down even more. And it was not just the party, the media seemed to follow suit as well. Both were now in lockstep with one another, pushing forth false narrative in order to gain sway viewers and the voting base.

Now, I won’t go too deep into the lies against Trump that were brought forth over his presidency (Sharyl Attkisson has done a good job covering it in her book Slanted as well as in this speech at Hillsdale College), but here lies the issue; if Trump was the bumbling buffoon who constantly lies, as the media portrays him to be, why would the media need to take things out of context and create false narratives to impede his character?

This doesn’t mean Trump isn’t without faults- he certainly has plenty! But what does it mean when the media, instead of focusing on the actual lies and falsehoods of his presidency, decide to craft their own stories such as Russiagate? And what does it mean when progressives like Matt Taibi, Glenn Greenwald, and Jimmy Dore, all of who are very unlikely to align with Trump’s political beliefs, are the ones to call out the media’s lies about Russiagate, the Steele Dossier, and even COVID, when even the establishment left is not willing to do so?

And the media lies didn’t stop there! This won’t be an exhaustive list, but see if any of these following instances were things that you were lied to about:

James Damore

• Former Google employee James Damore released a memo in 2017 about ways to modify Google’s work environment to benefit both men and women. He was castigated by the media and by the left as being a “sexist” for somehow denigrating women and calling them “neurotic”. This was a mistake on Damore’s part for using technical terms (he refers to the Big 5 Personality Types, of which “neuroticism” is one), but that was not the crux of his argument, and you certainly wouldn’t know from the media’s portrayal. Damore wasn’t exerting some form of toxic masculinity, but was arguing that a work environment that strives to maximize the benefits for both men and women need to take into account the differences between men and women. Don’t take my word, you can read his own memo and figure it out yourself.

“Papa” John Schnatter

• John Schnatter, the founder of Papa Johns, was ousted from his own company 3 years ago. The story, as told by the press, was that he used a racial slur in a conference call and thus was forced out. But what did he actually say? Well, the media never cared to contextualize the reason the word was used. In a meeting John Schnatter condemned KFC’s Colonel use of the n word. In Schnatter’s mind, he was condemning the actual racist acts of another chain restaurant owner, but what was reported was his use of the n word, lacking context, resulting in his ousting over ideas that he was a racist. This is a common occurrence as I saw it when it came to the left; no context and nuance is allowed. You cannot use the n word, even if it is done when quoting others in order to castigate and contextualize the actions of actual racists. The same issue has occurred with some professors who were fired for using the n word to contextualize classic forms of literature or add perspective to some of America’s racist past. Now, Schnatter wears the label of being a racist by people who are not even aware of what took place, something that seems to be occurring far too frequently with the modern left. For those who are still unaware, I suggest listening to Tim Pool’s podcast with Papa John for some perspective:

Nick Sandmann

• One of the most egregious examples of defamation, one that was jumped on immediately by the media as an example of white supremacy and racism was the incident involving Nick Sandmann, a Covington Catholic school student who was defamed by the media for “mocking” a Native American man Nathan Phillips, and immediately soon after came to be know as the face of “white supremacy” because of the incident. Not only was this story an egregious mischaracterization, but it empowered moral grandstanding by celebrities to tell their followers to find the identities of the Covington kids. Even after new evidence came out that indicated the incident was not what it appeared to be, the narrative still stood and the media persisted on this point, culminating into Sandmann suing CNN over defamation and settling out of court. A bold faced lie, crafted into a narrative to target children, with the approval of the media and millionaire celebrities, serves to epitomize the entirety of what the left now considers approved activism under false pretenses.

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There are far, far more incidences than the 3 I just pointed out, but I wanted to point out that this is not a rare occurrence, and it actually can’t be further from the truth. Even now, many people are waking up to the fact that the entirety of this pandemic has been full of lies, including Dr. Fauci hiding information about gain of function research, or the lockdown and masking policies that were never predicated on actual information.

Heck, I wrote an entire piece on Joe Rogan’s interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta and the lies about Ivermectin as a “well-known horse dewormer”! Even there, I noted my disdain for the media for spouting lies and misinformation.

The Kyle Rittenhouse incident, in particular, struck a close chord with me because my perspective on gun laws and self-defense have drastically changed over the past few years, in particular the past 20 months. I used to be a big anti-gun fanatic; I always thought there was never a need to own a weapon or defend yourself. My mind began to change over the past few years, definitely helped along by doing research after mass shooting incidents such as the Pulse Nightclub Shooting and the Parkland Shooting.

But then the pandemic happened.

I never mentioned it here, but I’m Asian American, and when reports of hate crimes began to spring up even ardent anti-gun Asian Americans I know decided to try and obtain guns for self-defense. Of course, I’m in a state that has strict gun laws and so it wasn’t as easy to obtain a gun as people thought, and eventually they gave up on even trying and remained empty-handed.

Regardless, that settled the debate for me. As soon as that happened, and as soon as so many other ardent gun control advocates began to come out in droves to obtain guns, I believed the argument was settled.

There was absolutely no way, after hundreds of thousands of Americans became new gun owners, after people within my own community thought they would be targeted and wanted to defend themselves, could I argue that there was absolutely no reason for anyone to own a gun. My mind was permanently changed, and I thought it would be the same for many other Americans, especially the ones in the Asian American community.

And just like that, I was shocked, because as the incidences of hate crimes began to spring up against Asian Americans, I witnessed my community be taken advantage of by the media apparatus and political party that I used to side myself with for years. Soon thereafter, assaults targeting Asian Americans were plastered on all forms of media. These incidences, propped up by the likes of legacy media, highlighted the race of the victim (an Asian American) yet never indicated the race of the assailant. And this did not occur just once; in fact, it occurred nearly every time a hate crime was reported.

What’s worse, the motives of the assailants were attributed to Trump; these hate crimes were used by the media to make the claim that Trump egged on suspected white supremacists (remember, we were never told the race of the assailants) due to his anti-Chinese, anti-Asian rhetoric. Again, we were fed unsubstantiated lies that were intended to push the idea that rampant racism was alive and well, and my community was made to be the newfound poster child of such victimhood ideology.

As we later came to find out, most of the assailants were in fact not white, and using the logic of the left they were most likely not to be neither Trump supporters nor white supremacists (although that’s even hard to argue against these days). Fortunately, one of Bari Weiss’ early Substack pieces pointed out this absolutely egregious obfuscation by the legacy media. So why was it that an independent journalist, a former New York Times writer, is the one to call out the emperor’s lack of clothes? Here, the established media obfuscated the truth and fed lies, while those who have taken the deviant path are the ones to tell the actual truth.

Unfortunately, it didn’t matter; the damage was done, and the narrative was set.

What’s worse, there were two harms that were committed. On one front, people were led to believe that bands of white supremacists supported by then president Trump suddenly popped up and began attacking Asian Americans. On another, more horrendous front, I saw members of my community march in protest under these false pretenses. Here, the same ridiculous mantras that have plagued the summer of 2020 were renewed: “Racism is the Real Virus”.

And just like that I became ashamed; ashamed at the fact that a community that has been stereotyped for our intellect could be so naive to fall for such nonsensical media narratives.

It’s a crude image, but I can’t see what happened to the Asian American community as nothing more than a community being used as a cheap prostitute with the Democratic party, needing a last-ditch effort to get off and finding any opportunity to do so, latching onto my community and using us to get their rocks off. Now that they’re done, they have abandoned us to the wayside. They were done with us, and began moving onto the next victimized group they can use to get off on and profit on their perceived victimhood.

And if you don’t think that’s exactly what’s happening, then tell me: when was the last time you saw any mention of “Asian solidarity” spouted by the news or any politician?

I finally saw the Democratic party in a different light. They became a party that preys on the ideas of victimhood, feeding off of national tragedies and horrendous incidences of human malevolence. I no longer argue that they need people to suffer, for it is from the suffering of others that they can draw their importance and urgency.

How else would you explain the nefarious relationship between the radical, social justice left, and that of the legacy media, an institution tarred with the insidious phrase, “if it bleeds, it leads”.

The Rittenhouse trial did more than just to act as a model of self-defense, but models something touted by so much on the left, and one that they have seemed to overlook in their cries of white supremacy; the Rittenhouse trial serves as a case model of injustice. It shows what happens when a government institution, so hellbent on finding a conviction instead of finding justice, would throw a then 17 year old to the wolves using horrendous evidence, engage in prosecutorial misconduct, and even question a defendant’s constitutional right to not speak or commit self-perjury in order to try to find a guilty verdict.

Not all prosecutors are evil, but evil prosecutors should be called out, and the prosecutors of this trial serve as nothing more than to epitomize a system to which so many have spent summers protesting and rioting over. And yet, when it is presented to us right in front of our faces, the choice is not to agree that injustice is taking place, but to retreat to a position that argues that Kyle Rittenhouse is nothing more than a white supremacist that deserves to be found guilty by a totally corrupt system. Remember, he committed the big no-no of crossing state lines.

It took a while to write this piece, mainly because I was astounded to find so many people repeating such horrendously false lies. It reminded me that so many people will speak so ardently on things that they so obviously do not know. They are not only ignorant to the facts, but are so arrogant to believe that they are not ignorant.

This doesn’t pertain to all Democrats; many people on the left still act in good-faith. But there are many who don’t, and many of these people hold offices and control many of our institutions. The ACLU, SPLC, ADA have all shown that not only are they partisan, but that they will lie and deceive in order to garner more money from their donors.

From the campus free speech debate, to the entirety of the Trump presidency, to the COVID pandemic response, to the Asian American hate crimes, all the way up to the Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict, the left has shown themselves to not be good-faith actors. Time and time again, I kept hoping that I would see some semblance of introspection that reminded me of the party that I used to align myself with. And yet, time and time again, it was not the case, and crept further and further away from that hope.

And at this point I’ve become tired. Tired of trying to find good-faith in their arguments, tired of trying to empathize with their position when they would never try the same for mine. Tired of being gaslit, lied to, mentally abused, and told to continue to live in a life of falsehoods and untruths.

So please, continue to make the claim that Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist who crossed state lines and shot black people. Keep telling me that my community has no right to defend themselves after parading us around as martyrs for your cause. Tell me that Critical Race Theory doesn’t exist at the same time teachers are coming out showing that yes, in fact, they are teaching students CRT; it’s been a part of their school curriculum for years. Tell me that I need to grant fealty to Big Pharma, that these industries who have not shown themselves to be acting in good-faith have my best interests in mind. And please, continue to tell me that I need to live in fear, that I am a danger to both myself and my community for being unvaccinated, and that I need the government to step in and tell me what is right for myself because I am too stupid to really understand why I am wrong.

Whether I left the left, or if the left left me, it doesn’t matter anymore. I have left, and I am not going back.

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