There was no reason for the world ever to hear the name Kyle Rittenhouse. Except that in the summer of 2020 the USA was staring over a precipice. The Covid lockdowns effectively ended after the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesotan policeman. Suddenly mass gatherings in the name of BLM were a public-health duty and, because it was an election year, neither Democrats nor Republicans seemed to know how to react to protests that soon degenerated into serious disorder.
For a country that is only one bad police interaction away from meltdown, it was inevitable that something would happen again. Sure enough in August a man called Jacob Blake was shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. There was a warrant out for Blake’s arrest and he was shot after fighting with police, wielding a knife and having already been tasered. Though Blake was not killed, BLM and other protest movements immediately had another martyr to hold up as evidence of systemic racism in America.
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