Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.

It turns out that account was mostly wrong.

Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.

This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.

CNN and Rep. Ayanna Pressley examples snipped.

But just as in the cases of Covington Catholic’s Nick Sandmann or Jussie Smollet or the “Russia-collusion” narrative, almost none of the details holding up that politically convenient position (boys in MAGA hats are bigoted; racism is as much a blight as it has always been; Trump conspired with Putin) were true.

Take each in turn:

First, the idea that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist.

There was zero evidence that Rittenhouse was connected to white supremacist groups at the time of the shooting. He was a Trump supporter, yes, though he wasn’t old enough to vote. He was an admirer of police and firefighters, also true. He was a lifeguard. He’d been part of a “police explorer” program, and was also a firefighter/EMT cadet with the fire department in Antioch, Illinois, where he lived with his mom and two sisters.

That Rittenhouse had no connection to Kenosha.

In addition to having a job in Kenosha, Rittenhouse testified that much of his family lived there: his father, his grandma, his aunt and uncle, and his cousins. He also testified that on the morning of the shootings, he went downtown with his sister and friends to see the damage done by rioting the night before, and spent about two hours cleaning graffiti off of the local high school.

That Rittenhouse drove across state lines with a gun that night to oppose the protests.

This was a line that we heard constantly—never mind that Antioch, Illinois, is about 20 miles from Kenosha, Wisconsin. As the trial has shown, Kyle Rittenhouse did not travel to Kenosha to oppose protesters. He testified under oath that he had traveled to Kenosha for his job the night before the shootings, and was staying at a friend’s house.

So what about the gun?

Rittenhouse didn’t bring the gun to Kenosha. The gun was purchased for Rittenhouse months earlier by a friend and stored in Kenosha at the home of that friend’s stepfather, as then-17-year-old Rittenhouse was too young to purchase it.

But it was illegal for him to even have the gun given that he wasn’t yet 18 years old, right?

That is not true. Under Wisconsin law, 17-year-olds are prohibited from carrying rifles only if they are short-barreled. The weapon Rittenhouse was carrying was not short-barreled. Which is why, during closing arguments, the court threw out the charge.

He was out there looking for a fight, and he got one: He killed two people and severely wounded a third.

Unless there’s evidence we haven’t seen, there’s no clear indication that Rittenhouse sought to kill anyone. What we know is that he showed up with a first aid kit and an AR-15-style rifle. Video evidence, and Rittenhouse’s own testimony, indicates that he offered medical assistance to protestors and ran with a fire extinguisher to try to put out fires—and that later, after being pursued, he killed two people, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and severely wounded a third. Both video evidence and the only living person that Rittenhouse shot that night, Gaige Grosskreutz, undermined the idea that Rittenhouse was simply an aggressor looking for a fight. During cross examination Grosskreutz acknowledged that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz had pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse. Here’s how it went down:

Defense attorney: When you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right?

Grosskreutz: Correct.

Defense attorney: It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun—now your hand’s down pointed at him—that he fired, right?

Grosskreutz: Correct.

The Court ordered that “Enforcement of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s ‘COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing; Emergency Temporary Standard’ remain[] stayed pending adequate judicial review of the petitioners’ underlying motions for a permanent injunction.” It further ordered that “OSHA take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.”

Behind this language lies a forceful critique of the Biden mandate. The opinion is here.

One of the factors a court considers in deciding whether to issue a stay is the likelihood that the party seeking it will prevail on the merits. The petitioner must make a strong showing of likelihood of success.

The Fifth Circuit found that the petitioners in this case made that showing. This finding means that the Biden administration almost surely will lose in the Fifth Circuit when the court makes its definitive ruling on the merits.

The court cited a “multitude of reasons” why those challenging the mandate will likely succeed on the merits. The first one, which it described as “obvious,” is this:

The Occupational Safety and Health Act, which created OSHA, was enacted by Congress to assure Americans “safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources.” See 29 U.S.C. § 651 (statement of findings and declaration of purpose and policy). It was not—and likely could not be, under the Commerce Clause and nondelegation doctrine—intended to authorize a workplace safety administration in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.

Furthermore, the “sweeping pronouncements” implicit in OSHA’s order are badly flawed. For example, the court noted that the mandate is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. On one hand, it covers employees in nearly every industry regardless of their risk of exposure (there is “little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night
shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse”) and “doesn’t exempt those with natural immunity.” On the other hand, it arbitrarily excludes employers with fewer than 100 workers.

Fatally to the mandate, the court found that its promulgation “grossly exceeds OSHA’s authority.” It noted that OSHA’s statutory authority to establish emergency temporary standards “is an ‘extraordinary power’ that is to be ‘delicately exercised’ in only certain ‘limited situations.’”

Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.

The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically.

Wait, the warm bucket of spit feels “constrained”? Do tell…

And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.

Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.

The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically. And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.

Social justice “first woman of color” blather snipped. But lets skip down to where Team Harris gets all snippy over a potential rival:

Last month, White House aides leapt to the defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who was being hammered with outrage by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and like-minded online pundits for taking paternity leave after the adoption of his twins in September. Harris loyalists tell CNN they see in that yet another example of an unfair standard at play, wondering why she didn’t get similar cover any of the times she’s been attacked by the right.

“It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a White man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves,” said a former Harris aide, reflecting conversations last month among several former aides and current allies.

(Imagine there’s an animated hissing cat gif here.)

Anyway, it’s worth reading the whole thing to read how incompetent she and her staff seem at just about everything, and to tote up all the petty slights to Harris, who was only there to bring in black votes in (and didn’t do a great job of that), and now she’s completely disposable.

Despite ending her lackluster campaign for president with a mere 3 percent support among the Democratic electorate, Harris was nevertheless the most obvious pick within the narrow bucket to which Biden had been confined. (Never mind that the apex of her support during the primary campaign came when she savagely attacked Biden on the debate stage, essentially calling him a racist for opposing busing during his time in the Senate, and that she repeatedly said she believed women who had accused Biden of sexual misconduct.)

The simple fact is that Harris is not a good national politician. She is ineffective and unlikeable at best, and, at worst, so unpopular that she’s actively damaging to the administration, likely why Psaki has had to turn to absurdities in an effort to defend her. (Democrats have developed a nasty habit of responding to voters who don’t like them by accusing said voters of racism.)

In Harris’s case, these excuses are because the truth hurts. She has little to no sway with key votes in Congress. She has next to no relevant policy or diplomatic expertise. These facts shouldn’t come as a surprise, seeing that she holds her office not because of her popularity or any relevant skillset but primarily because of her identity.

Had she not been picked as Biden’s running mate, she would’ve remained in a far more advantageous position, keeping a comfortable position in the Senate that would be nearly impossible for her to lose. She was already a media darling, popular among progressives for her supposed ability to “own” conservative nominees during hearings. Rather than winding up in a position with little chance to showboat or collect media accolades, she might’ve remained right there, where her lack of popularity with the national electorate was essentially irrelevant.

In a backwards way, Harris finds herself holding a position in which she’s ill-equipped to succeed precisely because of identity politics, which motivated Biden to pick a running mate so ill-suited to the job.

That America’s voters disdain Harris as much as they obviously do gives me an extraordinary amount of hope for our future. In December of 2019, I celebrated Harris’s departure from the presidential primary with a “good riddance” that turned out to be woefully premature: “May Harris’s failed attempt,” I hoped, serve to “destroy her career and sully her reputation for all time.” Alas, the first part did not happen; on the contrary, Harris was springboarded up to within a heartbeat of the most potent office in the land. But the second part? Well, I got that in abundance. We are now ten months into this baleful presidency, and already Harris is the most unpopular vice president in history. And they say Christmas doesn’t come early!

Harris’s apologists like to insist that she is as unpopular as she is because she’s a non-white woman. But this explanation gets the cause of the disapproval backwards. Kamala Harris isn’t disliked because she’s a non-white woman; Kamala Harris was chosen as vice president because she’s a non-white woman, and she’s disliked because she has nothing to recommend her beyond those facts. In the highest of high dudgeon, her defenders will propose that this is Joe Biden’s fault, for not “using” Harris correctly in her role. But this too is unjust. In truth, there is no good way to “use” Kamala Harris, because Kamala Harris is a talentless mediocrity whose only political flair is for making things worse than they were before she arrived.

want to thank the Democrats for giving me, a trial lawyer living in Los Angeles, exactly what I need – a big, heaping tax cut. In their reconciliation bill, there are plenty of giveaways for lay-abouts, losers, and grifters, but also for us living by the beach getting hit with huge state taxes rendered un-deductible by that evil Donald Trump, notorious friend to the rich who he…shafted. Anyway, the Dems are going to wrong this right and fix this manifest justice, though – they are going to make essentially all the money I hand over to the socialist clique that runs the formerly Golden State (and it is a lot) deductible once again.

Cool. Well, for me and other lawyers and similar blue state swells.

People often ask me why I stay in California, to which I reply, “I don’t explain myself to people – buzz off.” But if I were to explain myself to people, I would point out that despite being awash with Californians, California has beautiful weather, my family is nearby, and here I get to be part of the feudal aristocracy sucking the life from working people to fuel my extravagant lifestyle.

See, California was designed for lawyers and similar high-status low-lifes, and the beachside communities where the petty royals dwell do not experience a fraction of the hellish nightmare you see on TV. Oh, what you see is real, just not for those in the Birkenstock nobility. You see videos of hordes of hobos leaving their junkie spoor on the sidewalks and that happens, just not to the people that Prince Gavin of Newsom cares about. I don’t think he cares about me personally mind you, but he cares a lot about my ZIP code.

You can drive ten minutes from my castle and be worried about someone stealing your hubcaps. Once you start heading east over the 405 (That’s I-405 to people who don’t live in LA) real life comes and bites you hard, and the farther east you go, the harder it bites. The roads are trash – gee, I sure expect the infrastructure bill will totally make them nice again – and the schools are cesspits of violence and commie indoctrination, but the peasants just need to accept their lot in life and not complain. Their bitching would ruin our wine tasting.

Of course, I might have more sympathy for these poor devils if they had not lobbied so hard for the role of “Serf #3” in California’s production of “Game of Bums.” They voted for this. They got this. It’s all theirs.



When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. But when asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.

The biggest disconnect came on education. Barefoot found that school closures were likely a big part of their votes for Youngkin and that frustration at school leadership over those closures bled into the controversy, pushed by Republicans, around the injection of “critical race theory” into the public school setting, along with the question of what say parents should have in schools. One Latina woman talked about how remote school foisted so much work on parents, yet later Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee and former governor, would insist that parents should have no input in their children’s education. (That’s not exactly what he said, but that’s how it played.) As she put it: “They asked us to do all this work for months and then he says it’s none of our business now.”

The anger they felt at Democrats for the commonwealth’s Covid-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and Democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. Those with means decamped: Enrollment in Fairfax County schools dropped 5 percent, and fell by 3.9 percent and 3.4 percent in Arlington and Loudoun counties, respectively. Those who were left behind organized parent groups to pressure the schools to reopen. Though the groups tended to be nonpartisan or bipartisan at the start, Republican donors and conservative groups poured money and manpower into them, converting them into potent political weapons that blended anger at the closures with complaints about Democratic board members prioritizing trendy social justice issues — all of it aimed at the November elections.

“They keep saying ‘a strong return to school,’ but there’s no details,” said Saundra Davis on Fox News over the summer, co-founder of one large group, called the Open Fairfax Public Schools Coalition. “Their attention is on other things, like their pet projects and social justice issues, and the kids have been left to flounder and there’s still no plan for fall.”

“You’ll be surprised to know I’m a Democrat,” she said. “I’ve tried to warn them that there’s a bipartisan tidal wave coming their way. They don’t look us in the eye, they don’t write us back. If we can’t recall them one by one, there’s an election in November.”

Ignore the parts where the writer regurgitates Democratic Party talking points (“for the portion of the Republican base heavily predisposed to racial prejudice,” “Few people read the full 1619 Project put out by the New York Times in 2019, which is a rich tapestry of thoughtful essays and reporting about the role of slavery in the development of the United States.”) and pay attention to what the focus group members of all races are saying. “The Democratic problem with working-class voters goes far beyond white people.”

The head of the Women’s Tennis Association Steve Simon has said he is willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business in China if tennis player Peng Shuai’s safety is not fully accounted for and her allegations are not properly investigated.

“We’re definitely willing to pull our business and deal with all the complications that come with it,” Simon said in an interview Thursday with CNN. “Because this is certainly, this is bigger than the business,” added Simon.

“Women need to be respected and not censored,” said Simon.

Peng, who is one of China’s most recognizable sports stars, has not been seen in public since she accused former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of coercing her into sex at his home, according to screenshots of a since-deleted social media post dated November 2.

Her post on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, was deleted within 30 minutes of publication, with Chinese censors moving swiftly to wipe out any mention of the accusation online. Her Weibo account, which has more than half a million followers, is still blocked from searchers on the platform.

The mother of a Virginia girl who was raped by a classmate inside a school bathroom reportedly said that she and her husband had been pressured to keep quiet about the incident — and had no clue the 15-year-old boy was then transferred to another school until last month.

“We were silenced for many months,” Jessica Smith told the Daily Mail in her first interview since her daughter was raped at Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County in May. “We were told not to say a word that could jeopardize our daughter’s case.”

The boy was found guilty last month of the sexual attack, which sparked a heated confrontation between the victim’s father and school board members.

There seem to be no crimes the left wing won’t condone in their quest to impose “Social Justice” on resisting Americans.

While talking with Joe Rogan, Dr. Peter Attia tells a story about woke ideology in a medical school Urology lecture. It’s remarkable. pic.twitter.com/mftjjNZww1

— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) November 18, 2021

Right on the money. This is his best work. pic.twitter.com/dE9xRn8xSX

— THE NEVER DEAD IRISHMAN (@DNTCAREFU) November 16, 2021

“I get it! Your ideas are stupid!” Though his “I’m going to pause here for the applause” delivery here is still annoying.

You're welcome. pic.twitter.com/C9Ibo1h9fs

— I'm Thankful To Be Jeff (@fyvie2) November 8, 2021