DL Open Thread: Saturday, November 20, 2021

‘Kyle Rittenhouse And The New Era Of Political Violence’.  Might as well go back and place the burgeoning movement featuring Rittenhouse and like-minded individuals in context.  Add to that blatantly-biased judges, and the notion of justice in America is more besmirched than ever, at least in recent times.  Yet another supporter of armed ‘self defense’ appears in Kenosha.  Cawthorn and Gaetz have already offered Rittenhouse gainful employment.

Here’s How Laws Enacted By Gun Nuts Paved The Way For Rittenhouse Verdict:

The United States is a nation awash in firearms, and gun owners are a powerful and politically active constituency. In state after state, they have helped elect politicians who, in turn, have created a permissive legal regime for the carry and use of firearms, rules that go far beyond how courts originally understood the concept of self-defense.

These laws have made it difficult to convict any gun owner who knowingly puts themselves in circumstances where they are likely to use their weapon—that is, anyone who goes looking for a fight. It should come as no surprise then, that Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges after shooting three men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020, killing two of them.  Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber were killed; Gaige Grosskreutz was injured but survived to testify against Rittenhouse at his trial.

According to Wisconsin law, Rittenhouse need not have proved that he acted in self-defense—rather, the state had to prove that he did not. Even if Rittenhouse traveled to Kenosha with a firearm because he wanted to put himself in the position to use it, as David French writes, “the narrow nature of the self-defense inquiry is one reason people can escape responsibility for killings that are deeply wrongful in every moral sense.” Under some circumstances, Wisconsin law allows an individual to provoke an attack and still claim self-defense.

More Attacks On Elections Systems By Trump Rethugs.  Featuring more than a cameo by the MyPillow guy:

Federal and state investigators are examining an attempt to breach an Ohio county’s election network that bears striking similarities to an incident in Colorado earlier this year, when government officials helped an outsider gain access to the county voting system in an effort to find fraud.

Data obtained in both instances were distributed at an August “cyber symposium” on election fraud hosted by MyPillow executive Mike Lindell, an ally of former president Donald Trump who has spent millions of dollars promoting false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.

The attempted breach in Ohio occurred on May 4 inside the county office of John Hamercheck (R), chairman of the Lake County Board of Commissioners, according to two individuals with knowledge of the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigations. State and county officials said no sensitive data were obtained, but they determined that a private laptop was plugged into the county network in Hamercheck’s office, and that the routine network traffic captured by the computer was circulated at the same Lindell conference as the data from the Colorado breach.

Together, the incidents in Ohio and Colorado point to an escalation in attacks on the nation’s voting systems by those who have embraced Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud. Now, some Trump loyalists pushing for legal challenges and partisan audits are also targeting local officials in a bid to gain access to election systems — moves that themselves could undermine election security.

What do you want to talk about?