In the case against Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, the left-wing corporate fact-checkers did what they do best and made up their own facts, specifically about the then-17-year-old’s right to carry a rifle.
“‘Perfectly legal’ for Rittenhouse to carry a gun? False,” said the leftist Poynter Institute’s Politifact in a phony fact-check, a talking point that picked up steam and undergirded the prosecution’s case against the teen.
Judge Bruce Schroeder put the so-called fact-checkers in their place on Monday, however, when he dismissed the misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous weapon, a charge that had previously been considered the easiest for the state to prove.
WATCH: Judge Bruce Schroeder throws out the charge against Kyle Rittenhouse of possession of a dangerous weapon. pic.twitter.com/yJFCupnscC
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) November 15, 2021
That’s a huge blow to the prosecution not only because it was supposed to be the surest conviction, but because so much of the public case against Rittenhouse was that he illegally carried an “assault weapon” across state lines to murder people.
It turns out the gun was actually never in Illinois, where Rittenhouse lived with his mother.
“There is no evidence the gun was ever physically possessed by Kyle Rittenhouse in Illinois,” said the Illinois State Attorney’s Office in October last year, shattering the prevailing media narrative.
Nor was it illegal for Rittenhouse to carry the gun in Wisconsin, where his father lived. The fact-checkers and the outraged public were dead wrong.
Lawyer Will Chamberlain explained last year why it was a legal carry when journalists were publishing their ill-informed interpretations of the Wisconsin statute. While the law does say that anyone under 18 who is armed with a dangerous weapon is guilty of a misdemeanor, it includes a number of exceptions including carrying a long rifle, as Rittenhouse was doing.
As I read it, Rittenhouse was under 18, but he was carrying a rifle
So to have violated the statute, he either had to be "in violation of s. 941.28" or "not in compliance with ss. 29.304 and 29.593."
Section 941.28 prohibits sawed-off shotguns/rifles. That doesn't apply pic.twitter.com/oIk3U6x8zE
— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) August 27, 2020
And section 29.593 talks about the need to have a certificate to go hunting
Rittenhouse wasn't hunting, so it's hard to see how he could have been violating that statute either pic.twitter.com/jjJc3CIath
— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) August 27, 2020
It’s really not surprising that Politifact slapped a bogus fact-check on the true statement about Rittenhouse’s rights. That’s not only because the author of it has written phony fact-checks in the past, such as claiming that Joe Biden didn’t spend the dignified transfer ceremony of the 13 service members killed outside the Kabul airport repeatedly checking his watch, an erroneous fact-check that later added a massive “correction” and completely changed the meaning of the headline.
It’s also not surprising because corporate self-described fact-checkers don’t actually exist to check facts and correct the record. They’re merely another arm of the corrupt media that works to create and reinforce the left’s agenda. Left-wing media create false accounts, the fact-checkers use those accounts to substantiate their fact-checks, and Big Tech uses those fact-checks to nuke from the public square those opinions that don’t align with the left-wing narrative.
Of course, the narrative at play here is that guns are bad and law-abiding citizens are wrong to have firearms to protect themselves from lawless rogues.
In the Rittenhouse trial, that’s the prosecution’s entire case, a point it reiterated during closing arguments on Monday: “You can’t claim self-defense against an unarmed man like this. You lose the right to self-defense when you’re the one who brought the gun.”
Those statements from the prosecutor are bald-faced lies, but that’s what happens when fake facts fall apart. Lies beget more lies, so the straw-grasping has begun — because if the easiest charge could be so easily dismissed, what chance does the state really have here of securing a murder conviction?
