Rittenhouse Speaks After Verdict: 'Self-Defense Is Not Illegal…' – WAPO Implies That It SHOULD BE

Shortly after a jury on Friday acquitted 18 year-old Kyle Rittenhouse on all five criminal charges – including two accusations of murder – stemming from his August 25, 2020, use of a semi-auto rifle to defend himself in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson released what appear to be the young man’s first recorded statements, and they hold serious import for Americans who believe in Natural Rights and individual liberty.

Notes Amanda Prestigiacomo, for The Daily Wire:

’Self-defense is not illegal,’ 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse asserted Friday after he was acquitted on all charges against him related to a deadly riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year.

The teenager, appearing in a teaser clip for a December documentary from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, can be seen in the back of a vehicle speaking to a cameraman following the reading of his not guilty verdict.

The video preview came in a tweet from Tucker a few hours after the verdict, and it features a compilation of clips that focus on Rittenhouse discussing his nightmares following August 25, 2020, culminating in footage recorded after he left the courthouse, as he sits in a vehicle, a free – but still threatened -- man.

Related: Leftist Tears Marathon: Far-Left Twitter Melts Down After Rittenhouse NOT GUILTY Verdict

"The jury reached the right verdict Self-defense is not illegal, and I believe they came to the correct verdict, and I’m glad that everything went well," Rittenhouse said in the clip.

"It’s been a rough journey, but we made it through it," he added at a different point in the clip. "We made it through the hard part."

He, his loved ones, supporters, and lawyers have made it past the biggest and most predatory threats, but others remain, and, more broadly, they will persist for all Americans who believe in the right to self-defense.

Rittenhouse likely will be attacked via numerous vectors through civil suits that will require him, his family, and legal team to expend thousands of hours and millions of dollars in defense.

And, as a Norfolk, Virginia, police officer already has experienced, some politically-connected forces don’t like seeing people donating to help Rittenhouse handle those kinds of financial burdens. In the case of 19-year veteran officer Lt. William Kelly, he is asking for his job back after he anonymously donated to Kyle’s defense fund, hackers got the information, The Guardian published it, and the Norfolk Police force fired him (despite the chief employing tax funds to attend a Black Lives Matter protest – while ON THE JOB – last May).

Another threat to Rittenhouse’s well-being, and to our rights, comes in the always-present, growing, collectivist political and media antipathy towards the right to armed self-defense. The most virulent new strain of this illogical and immoral hatred comes in two forms: first, people like NY Congressman Jerry Nadler (D) who wants slippery Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland to pursue clearly inappropriate and inapplicable “federal charges” against Rittenhouse, and, second, the sophistic, illogical, aggressive philosophy exhibited by the Washington Post (WaPo), which just published a dark, unhinged piece of agitprop titled, “After Rittenhouse: Will Deadly Clashes Multiply As the Right To Self-Defense Expands?”

Journalistically, this revolting header is as reprehensible as the political attack, beginning with the sly editorial tactic of removing the word “Trial”, and making the name Rittenhouse a one-word emblem similar in brevity to the expression “9/11.” This dehumanizing, linguistic sleight of hand provides a sense of iron-clad offense, turning the man’s name into a term, a blemish or confirmed wrong against some imagined American paradigm that every mild-mannered collectivist backer of glorious “communitarian” state power “ought to see” is under threat.

Worse, this headline dismisses the violence inflicted on innocent people and their homes and businesses in Kenosha and many other cities thanks to rioters – many ideologically tied to "Marxist" Black Lives Matter and AntiFa, and coddled by WaPo, by its televisual allies at CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, and NBC, and WaPo’s leftist friends in government. There can be no doubt that the vast, vast majority of politically-connected violence and property damage visited upon American cities for years has been committed by those rioting not for so-called “right-wing” causes, but those rioting for causes promoted by collectivists.

Related: Hateful Stephen King Says That Rittenhouse Reminds Him of Columbine School Shooter

But the most insulting and dangerous facet of this WaPo headline comes in its assumption that the right to self-defense is the cause of deadly violence and that, somehow, this fundamental RIGHT, can be “expanded.”

Let’s dispense with the illogic and ignorance exhibited by the latter insinuation.

If something is a RIGHT, it is universal, and, therefore, cannot be expanded, because it already covers everyone and every situation of DEFENSE. WaPo actually implies here that the right to self-defense is not a right, even though they use that very term.

What WaPo does in the headline is lay a baseline that self-defense is NOT a right, but something that is, or, in the case of collectivists like WaPo and mass-murdering political despots throughout history, IS NOT “allowed” by the state.

This shouldn’t sit well with anyone who knows the history of genocide or has even the faintest concept of peace and respect for one’s neighbor.

And let’s dispel with the childish idea that the right to self-defense leads to aggressive violence. Such a view is manifestly absurd, and recognized as such, even by a kid who can see the difference between the words “defense” and “aggression.”

Self-defense is always DEFENSIVE, not AGGRESSIVE, oh, great editors of The Washington Post. Get it?

Perhaps they need journalist James Bovard to set them straight, because he noticed just this kind of narrative-flipping-to-promote-forced-disarmament tactic when, on November 21, Bovard tweeted the WAPO story and wrote:

That says it, very succinctly.

This is what Kyle Rittenhouse – and the rest of those who acknowledge Natural Rights as apart from, a priori to, and superior to, the polis – face: the mindset of the tyrant, the illegitimate claim to control others.

The next phases of the fight will come soon, and they will require education and the indomitable spirit of free will.