Has Joe Biden said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Kyle?”
Of course, he hasn’t: Biden has a son, and we know more than we ever wanted about what he looks like (warning!). But I pose the question, of course, in relation to Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama’s, famous statement about Trayvon Martin. Obama’s statement was pure, race-baiting theatre. So, not coincidentally, have been Biden’s statements about Kyle Rittenhouse: Biden notoriously claimed that Rittenhouse was a member of a “white supremacist militia” — none of which was true. Biden now faces likely defamation proceedings.
But it wasn’t just Biden who defamed Rittenhouse — virtually the entirety of the political left and the media joined the pile-on, clearly having learned nothing from the “Covington Kids” debacle the previous year.
In fact, the difference between the demonising of Kyle Rittenhouse, in contrast to the lionising of Trayvon Martin, says everything about the race-baiting media-left. Instead of merely reporting facts, these days the media is all about “narrative” — and the narrative they spin about America is nasty and divisive. Worse, rather than empowering black Americans, it demeans and demoralises them.
Kyle Rittenhouse was pursued by a mob screaming for blood. At least two of them were convicted, violent criminals, one of them a paedophile. Did anyone say, “That child had every right to be afraid of a strange man following him. … Did that child not have the right to defend himself from that strange man?”
No — that argument was reserved solely for Trayvon Martin.
“Child” Trayvon was a half-foot taller than either Rittenhouse or the man he savagely attacked in February 2012, George Zimmerman. Had a desperate Zimmerman not shot and killed his attacker, Trayvon would surely have been arrested.
And yet the media and the state prosecutors consistently portrayed Martin, an aspiring MMA fighter, as a boy or a child.
None of this means, of course, that Martin deserved to be shot. But that doesn’t justify the avalanche of lies from the media, either. The lies started when the media deliberately edited George Zimmerman’s 9-11 call, to make him sound like a racist vigilante. They continued with lies of omission: painting Martin as a helpless “child”, gunned down for no reason while trying to buy a bag of Skittles, with no mention that the hulking teen attacked and viciously beat Zimmerman.
Because, in the America of the media-left, black men are always victims, no matter what. Every black man in America is always Emmett Till, rather than Alton Coleman, let alone Jussie Smollett.
It’s an infantilising narrative that does nothing but a disservice to black men. Including Trayvon Martin.
Kyle and Trayvon have much in common. Besides becoming household names at 17, each of them endured family breakup when small.
Of the two, Kyle had the worst of it. His father was often unemployed, abusive and alcoholic. The mom scrambled to survive. She and her kids were evicted from time to time and once were forced to live in a shelter.
By contrast, Trayvon’s parents were both well-employed. His childhood pictures – and we saw tons of those – showed him skiing, riding horseback, playing football and flying on airplanes.
Yet, when their parents’ marriages broke down, the two boys’ lives took very different paths.
Trayvon began his long downward spiral into drugs, guns, fighting and burglary.
Coming of age among other fatherless boys, Trayvon fell hard for the gangster life, a life celebrated by the music he listened to and enabled by liberal prosecutors.
On the other hand, Kyle joined the local police department’s youth outreach program and a cadet program with the local fire department. He became a certified lifeguard and juggled jobs with the Y.M.C.A. and as a fry cook, to support his ailing mother. Kyle aspired to graduate high school and become a police officer.
When rioting mobs began tearing apart the town down the road, where he sometimes worked and where his father lived, Kyle joined other citizens in protecting their community — while the police cowered in their cruisers.
When interviewed that night, Kyle said calmly, “So, people are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business. Part of my job is also to help people. If there is somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle, because I have to protect myself, obviously. I also have my med kit.”
Despite their diverging paths, neither Kyle nor Trayvon’s lives were worthless. But if Trayvon was a victim, he was a victim of the infantilising narrative of black victimhood and black “gangsta” culture, and the continuing tragedy of generational black fatherlessness.
As adolescents, Kyle and Trayvon were getting different messages from the media and the people around them. In his excellent book, “Antidote,” black activist Jesse Lee Peterson explains how Trayvon’s death should have been a teachable moment.
“The media might have said,” Peterson argues, “that when a child is shuttled between relatives all his life, when he is trapped in a series of failing government schools, when he is instructed in ways big and small about the evils of the white man, bad things happen.”
WND
Instead, we had everyone, from the race-baiter-in-chief down, spinning the perpetual victimhood narrative. And so America spirals on into the abyss of a confected race war that serves no one.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD
