In my observation, most of the people who want Rittenhouse to be punished are doing so because they are ideologues, not necessarily because they believe he is guilty of anything.

These folks believe he is guilty simply because he exists, and that undeniable fact forces them to confront the unreality of their own views. Rittenhouse shows the power of an armed citizenry against the sanctioned criminal storm troopers of the left.

And they can’t handle that.

They can process the idea of “mostly peaceful” protests that are just mostly violent riots, but the Rittenhouse Dialectic produces the one cognitive dissonance they cannot preserve.

As a result of the past several years of racial radicalism, CNN and other leftist outlets have decided that angry white men are dangerous, to be feared, and the chief barrier to a diverse, democratic society. John Blake, a writer and producer for CNN, wrote that he has “come to a sobering conclusion: There is nothing more frightening in America today than an angry White man.”

My first thought?

If us being angry is a problem, maybe you should stop pissing us off.

Maybe stop and think about why white men are angry in the first place – maybe it isn’t about being white, maybe it is about being slandered as being genetically predisposed to be racists and being blamed for things over which we have no control.

Second thought:

Angry white men changed the course of this country when they conceived and fought a war to create a representative republic, not a democracy, where the tyranny of the majority is blunted, and everybody has a shot, regardless of race, creed color or sexual orientation.

I’ve always thought something Thomas Sowell said has wider relevance.

Sowell noted that slavery was more supply and demand rather than racist, that black Africans were enslaved because they were available, not because they were black. There was a need for labor, slavery was common around the world, and the slave trade rose to meet that demand.

Doesn’t mean it was morally right, as many things are, it just WAS.

To a large extent, the same reasoning applies to America’s founding. White men founded this nation, not because they were white, but because they were the segment of the population best suited to pursue the ideals of freedom and liberty for all. There was a demand for freedom and the supply rested in the white population.

America’s form of Western civilization, perhaps more than any other, was founded on principles that led to the abolishment of all sorts of morally wrong things that for centuries, just WERE. Without the sanctioning of those beliefs as a people, change was never going to be possible.

But now the radicals want to end the protections of Western civilization and replace it with some kind of totalitarian system based on what?

Race? Ideology? Theocracy? Power? Technocracy?

Curiously, those are all things that have proven to enslave, oppress and control every time they have been tried. To paraphrase James Madison, if men were angels, there would be no need for protection from government – but men are no angels. Madison wrote “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”

Any organization, including government and all its subdivisions, is subject to the same human nature as the larger population, so it should be no surprise it is capable of any mistake, avarice, ambition, arrogance, or atrocity as any other individual member of society – and our form of freedom and representative republican government is especially vulnerable to these evil motivations. That is why John Adams proposed our Constitution, and by extension, our nation, is only for a moral and religious people.

As G.K. Chesterton noted, just because you want to tear down a fence, doesn’t mean that fence isn’t still necessary. Maybe when you figure out why the fence was put there in the first place and prove it is no longer needed, only then will society agree to allow you to remove it – but maybe not. Maybe it is still there for a reason.

A broader application of Chesterton’s paradox of the fence, is this:

Maybe you should figure out why Western civilization is there before you try to destroy it.