A former spokesperson for Kyle Rittenhouse says he became disillusioned with his ex-client after learning that he had sent text messages pledging to “fucking murder” shoplifters outside a pharmacy before later shooting two people to death during racial justice protests in Wisconsin in 2020.

Dave Hancock made that remark about Rittenhouse – for whom he also worked as a security guard – on a Law & Crime documentary that premiered on Friday. The show explored the unsuccessful criminal prosecution of Rittenhouse, who killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

As Hancock told it on The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 90-minute film’s main subject had “a history of things he was doing prior to [the double slaying], specifically patrolling the street for months with guns and borrowing people’s security uniforms, doing whatever he could to try to get into some kind of a fight”.

Hancock nonetheless said he initially believed Rittenhouse’s claims of self-defense when he first relayed his story about fatally shooting Rosenbaum and Huber. Yet that changed when he later became aware of text messages that surfaced as part of a civil lawsuit filed by the family of one of the men slain in Kenosha demanding wrongful death damages from Rittenhouse.

  • LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    none of the rioters who attacked Rittenhouse were known to have shoplifted/looted

    Shoplifters and especially looters is a common rightwing racist buzzword used to justify them being violent. It was never truly his intention to go after looters, that was always a codeword. Please look into people who patrol after hurricanes for looters - it’s a racist idea and they are forming little KKK groups literally. They did that as well in Oregon during the Blue River fires and literally almost got themselves and others killed, protecting “property from looters” that was literally going to be burned up anyway, and there weren’t any looters!!! Can’t emphasize this enough, no looters, so they were just delaying people escaping at gunpoint. Also can’t emphasize enough that looting and stealing is nonviolent, whereas shooting someone to death is quite violent.

    If Rittenhouse was explicitly supposed to protect a business from looters, he would have security guard clearances and a paper pay trail. No, he was there to be a violent, possibly racist, pos. Quite clearly.

    https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/864818368/the-history-behind-when-the-looting-starts-the-shooting-starts

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/us/looting-starts-shooting-starts.html

    https://harvardpolitics.com/a-peoples-history-of-looting/

    • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Nice work ignoring everything else and hyper-focusing on ‘he really meant black people when he said ‘shoplifters’, trust me’.

      Meanwhile, none of his attackers were black either, lol.

      Keep grasping at those straws.

      • LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Wdym? We are talking about his intent here, right? And YOU and the defense claim he was acting righteously because he was “stopping looters.” Well, if “stopping looters” is a codeword for an action which historically means “I’m going to go out and violently harm people that are black or poor or who fit my idea of a looter,” then it’s entirely relevant.

        • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          We are talking about his intent here, right?

          Yes, which is ultimately defined by his actions. If his actions contradict his words, you can’t pretend the words hold more weight than what he actually did.

          Nothing he did that day in Kenosha supports the assumption that his intention was to go there and shoot anyone. Nothing. Period.

          And YOU and the defense claim he was acting righteously because he was “stopping looters.”

          Uh, no, nobody claimed that. Did you even watch the trial?

          • LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            His actions and words are not contradictory though. There’s no contradiction. He wants to hunt down people under the guise of “looters”, by his own texts, and this historically is a justification for violence in this country. Then he conducted violence. Where’s the contradiction?

            Everything in his life for months indicates his intention that night was violence.

            • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              His actions and words are not contradictory though. There’s no contradiction. He wants to hunt down people under the guise of “looters”, by his own texts

              And then he…hunted down nobody. Aggressed on nobody. Fled as his first reaction every time unprovoked aggression came his way, instead of ever escalating. Only used his weapon when the alternative was literally to forfeit his own life.

              “No contradiction”, huh? Are you that foolish to really think that, or that scummy to claim it, fully knowing how bullshit it is?