The Cynical and Dangerous Weaponization of the “White Supremacist” Label – by Glenn Greenwald – Glenn Greenwald
Within hours of the August 25, 2020, shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin not days, but hours it was decreed as unquestioned fact in mainstream political and media circles that the shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, was a “white supremacist. Over the next fifteen months, up to and including his acquittal by a jury of his peers on all charges, this label was applied to him more times than one can count by corporate media outlets as though it were proven fact. Indeed, that Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist was deemed so unquestionably true that questioning it was cast as evidence of one’s own racist inclinations (defending a white supremacist).
Yet all along, there was never any substantial evidence, let alone convincing proof, that it was true. This fact is, or at least should be, an extraordinary, even scandalous, event: a 17-year-old was widely vilified as being a white supremacist by a union of national media and major politicians despite there being no evidence to support the accusation. Yet it took his acquittal by a jury who heard all the evidence and testimony for parts of the corporate press to finally summon the courage to point out that what had been Gospel about Rittenhouse for the last fifteen months was, in fact, utterly baseless.
I’m just going to charitably put a lot of this utterly indefensible hostility to the truth down to the collateral effects of The Covid. If it’s not that, and it may well not be, then the Woke Left, or whatever else you want to call it, is just *really bad*. A lot of it, perhaps most of it, is the product of a nasty collaboration of Social Media and the legacy media. In any event, let’s hope it goes away, hanging its head in shame.