Talia Lavin: Republicans 'make their violent fantasies clear' by embracing Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero

The Left last lost their minds over Kyle Rittenhouse in November when he was released on $2 million cash bail. Those who want to eliminate cash bail, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said it was an example of our current system being for the privileged. Both Ocasio-Cortez and MSNBC political analyst Mehdi Hasan asked us to imagine if Rittenhouse were a Muslim — would he be allowed to walk free then?

There’s a new piece in New York Magazine arguing that Republicans have made their violent fantasies clear: The Right wants the culture war to turn deadly. And that piece is by … drum roll … Talia Lavin, the former fact-checker who smeared a veteran of the Marine Corps and double amputee who now works for ICE as a computer forensics analyst as a Nazi because she misidentified his tattoo — but it was sharp observational skills like those that got her hired by Media Matters to keep an eye on the alt-Right, and offered a class at New York University, where she was to teach a class on “Reporting on the Far-Right.” The class was canceled, though, when only two students signed up.

She’s still drilling away at Republicans and the alt-Right, though (guess the two are interchangeable). She covered the “peaceful” gun rights rally in Virginia for GQ (the scare quotes are hers), but this time New York Magazine is giving up the print space.

By openly embracing Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero, Republicans make their violent fantasies clear https://t.co/EJPSESzBSY

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) December 11, 2020

A sample:

… The right-wing media apparatus has made heroes of killers before — cops being the primary beneficiaries — creating the figures they need to sustain the notion of a nation under siege. But it would seem, with Rittenhouse, that the recruits into a deadly culture war now extend to a pool of civilian foot-soldiers for white supremacy — no matter how young, or how far outside the law.

Of course, white vigilante violence long predates the Trump era. It’s possible to trace a line from today’s murderous celebrities back to people like Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, who is the subject of countless statues in public squares across the country.