Activism, Uncensored: Dueling Protests Outside the Rittenhouse Courtroom

Everybody in America you don't like, gathered in one place

The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse began as a screaming headline toward the end of a summer of historic unrest, and concluded as all public spectacles in America seem to these days, in an ugly farce. As TK partners News2Share documented, dueling groups of protesters gathered outside a courthouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin in expectation of a verdict, and through a series of charged-but-incoherent scenes, reminded us all that 21st-century American political culture has become an ever-widening suckhole of cringe.

As News2Share’s Ford Fischer put it, it was like Twitter in real life. Every person you never want to meet appeared to be present: the sweatshirt-clad white guy with the “Black Crime Matters” sign firing N-bombs in all directions while arguing (God knows why) that Mike Tyson and Dave Chappelle also use the dreaded word, the Eminem wannabe shouting “Bullshit!” a half-dozen times while shouting, “If he was black he woulda got executed in the fuckin’ street!”, the activists on both sides making heroes out of the combatants from last year’s melee, the traveling McCloskeys (the gun-wielding couple Mark and Patricia of St. Louis fame, with Mark now running for Senate, foreshadowing the possible future political careers of Rittenhouse trial participants), and many others.

The belle of the ball was “Maserati Mike,” a fired Ferguson, Missouri police officer. He pulled a Trump-era “white working class” version of the old Cleavon Little “Excuse me while I whip this out” gag, reaching suggestively in a Colt rifle bag in before withdrawing a giant black rubber dong and screaming, “Fuck Black Lives Matter!”, in a prank that might have interested Freud, if not so much those present.

Perhaps, this holiday week, we can at least be thankful this story is over. Thanks to Ford and the News2Share crew for their hard work in the last week.