In a sermon this past Sabbath, Pastor Lawrence Dorsey II of the Altadena SDA Church made a passing reference to the Kyle Rittenhouse case.
The thesis of Lawrence Dorsey’s sermon was that Jesus carefully limited his interactions with non-Jews in order to protect his ability to reach the Jews of His day. In other words, during his earthly ministry Jesus had to meet the bigoted Jews where they were in order to work for their salvation. Dorsey gave three examples of Jesus’ interactions with non-Jews and explained why, in each case, those interactions were acceptable to the racist Jews.
First, Dorsey argued that the woman at the well was acceptable because she was a Samaritan woman, and Samaritans were a middle ground between Jew and gentile, and thus she was not completely unclean or haram. Dorsey’s second example was the healing of the centurion’s servant; he argued that the Jews excused this because they understood the political importance of doing good for the Romans, who were masters of much of the civilized world—“we should do good for the Romans; maybe Jesus isn’t that bad,” Dorsey has the Jews saying to themselves.
Dorsey’s third example was the demoniac whose demons Jesus cast out and into the pigs, as recorded in Mark 4:
“The funny thing about this one is that the leaders of the day were okay with Jesus doing a miracle and having interactions with a non-believer, a gentile in this case, because—I’m gonna sit down for this one [Dorsey sits down]--Jesus was acting in self-defense! [congregation audibly reacts]
Demon came out of nowhere! Jesus had to react--Cast the demons out, put ‘em in the pigs! Self-defense was defined differently back then, huh? Self-defense, huh? We want everyone to be thankful today . . . but you absolutely know what I’m talking about.
Yes, Pastor Dorsey, we do. Dorsey’s idea that the exorcism was in self-defense might seem eccentric, but he understands the politics of his parishioners:
The section of interest begins at about the 1.13 mark and ends at the 1:15 mark (it should be cued):
(Reportedly, Pastor Dorsey has been periodically grumbling about the piece I wrote last year, in response to his father, Pastor Lawrence Dorsey, Sr., saying that he could not see how any Christian could support “that man,” referring to then President Trump. It was the longest piece we’ve ever published. It was long because I wanted to fully suss out the historical reasons why blacks vote Democrat as a bloc despite the fact that the Democratic Party was organized in the 1820s to expand slavery and the Republican Party was organized in the 1850s stop the spread of slavery. This piece will give the younger Dorsey a new outrage to grumble about.)
Compared to the dose of Left-leaning politics I imagine many black-church congregants are subjected to on a weekly basis, this was mild. In fact, I’m probably nit-picking. The reference was brief, not explicit, and certainly is not going to put anyone’s tax-exempt status in jeopardy due to the Johnson Amendment (not that that law would ever be deployed against a black church).
But I think the reference was still wrong, for two reasons. First, it is wrong for a pastor to bring politics into a Sabbath-morning sermon even if almost all of his parishioners agree with his politics:
Those who teach the Bible in our churches and our schools are not at liberty to unite in making apparent their prejudices for or against political men or measures . . . The Lord would have His people bury political questions. . . . We cannot with safety vote for political parties; for we do not know whom we are voting for. We cannot with safety take part in any political scheme. Counsels for the Church, p. 316.
Second, Dorsey, who was communicating unhappiness with the verdict, is wrong on the merits. The Rittenhouse verdict was a foregone conclusion, so much so that it was a significant miscarriage of justice that the young man was charged and tried. The only evidence, including from the state’s own witnesses, was that Rittenhouse was forced to defend himself. The prosecution was trying for what lawyers call “jury nullification,” asking the jury, as the ultimate arbiter, to act contrary to the facts and the law. They were essentially asking the jury to nullify the law of self-defense. In fact, one of the prosecutors stated in closing argument that “sometimes you just have to take a beating.”
Why? Because the Leftist prosecutors wanted to create a precedent for a different principle, to wit, that when the Democratic Party’s paid street thugs are rioting, looting, and destroying property, no one else, no other class of citizen, has any right to protect life and property from them, or otherwise intervene to stop them, and anyone who is not a Democrat rioter who attempts to defend life and property has forfeited his right to defend his own life. They did not put it quite like that, but that is exactly what the Rittenhouse prosecutors were asking the jury to say.
As an aside, the prosecutors’ lack of ethics was astonishing. First, they charged Rittenhouse with reckless endangerment of a man referred to as “jump kick man”; the prosecutors knew the man’s identity but did not disclose it to the defense until a week into the trial.
Second, in front of the jury, ADA Binger questioned Rittenhouse about his silence during the time between his arrest and the trial, but it has been “black letter law” for two generations that the prosecution may not use against the defendant his exercise of his 5th Amendment right to remain silent. In fact, all lawyers, not just criminal specialists, know that a prosecutor may not comment in any way on a defendant’s silence.
Finally, prosecutors had in their possession, and used it in the trial, high-definition FBI drone footage that was disclosed to the defense very belatedly, and only in a compressed file. Apparently, ADA Binger used a program called “handbrake” to convert his file into a lower quality video before providing it to the defense.
Probably most of you will not be as shocked as I was by these ethical lapses, but to me they indicate that the prosecutors’ ideological commitments took precedence over their ethical obligations as officers of the court. Cutting ethical corners is one way to procure an unjust verdict.
Many lay people do not understand that prosecutors and defense attorneys are not identical opposite counterparts. Defense attorneys’ sole obligation is to advocate for their clients, whereas prosecutors have a duty to see that justice is done, which means declining to file or pursue questionable charges, ensuring that false evidence is not presented to a jury, and supplying any and all even arguably exculpatory evidence to the defense as quickly as is reasonably possible. The common law of the English-speaking peoples was developed under the principle that it is far better to see a guilty person acquitted than an innocent person convicted. A strong revulsion against wrongful conviction and unjust imprisonment is a bedrock value of our legal system.
By the way, this isn’t the first time corrupt or ideologically bent or just plain cowardly prosecutors have yielded to mob blood-lust to deny (or try to deny) someone his right to self-defense. A previous incident in Omaha, Nebraska, did not end nearly as happily as the Rittenhouse case.
On May 30th, 2020, Jake Gardner found a mob of "mostly peaceful protesters" being mostly peaceful outside his bar, the Hive & Gatsby's, in downtown Omaha. They broke the windows and were pushing his elderly father around. When Jake intervened, a group of people surrounded him and tackled him; Gardner fired two warning shots, but despite the shots a man named James Scurlock jumped on him and began assaulting him. After yelling for Scurlock to get off him, Gardner shot Scurlock, who died.
After carefully reviewing the surveillance video, the County Attorney, Don Kleine, concluded that the shooting was in self-defense and declined to bring charges against Jake Gardner. But this was America in 2020, and Black Lives Matter protesters began a campaign of pressure against Kleine. A week later the County Attorney caved and submitted the case for “outside review.” A black special prosecutor named Frederick Franklin was appointed to review the case; Franklin charged Jake Gardner with murder.
Gardner then launched a legal defense fundraising page on “GoFundMe.” You can probably guess what “GoFundMe” did next—yes, the same thing they did to Kyle Rittenhouse. They shut it down.
Kyle Rittenhouse’s case was much higher profile than Gardner’s, and Rittenhouse was able, with the help of Lin Wood (Nicholas Sandman’s civil attorney) and a non-profit called “fight back,” to raise $2 million to post his bail, to hire the very capable criminal defense attorney Mark Richards to defend him, and to secure the inestimable advantage of preparing for trial outside of jail (so that Rittenhouse could participate in mock trials and other trial preparation).
Jake Gardner, by contrast, was not able to find a work-around. He well understood that without money, a lot of money, to mount an excellent legal defense, he had no realistic chance to fight the special prosecutor. He committed suicide.
Here’s a short summary of the Jake Gardner case:
1. Jake Gardner killed a someone while defending his father, his property, and himself during a BLM riot.
2. The county attorney found the shooting was in self-defense.
3. Under pressure, the county attorney reversed himself and appointed a prosecutor to indict Gardner.
4. Gardner's GoFundMe page taken down.
5. Gardner committed suicide.
To give Pastor Dorsey and his parishioners the benefit of the doubt, the “mainstream media” have done nothing but lie about the Rittenhouse case for 15 months, and anyone who subjects himself to their propaganda would have had no idea what the facts of the case actually were. The communist press is foremost in wishing to establish the principle that other citizens are required to yield to Democrat-sponsored street violence.
Most contemptibly, the media have relentlessly mischaracterized the incident as racial—notwithstanding that Rittenhouse and the three people he was forced to shoot were all white—and have smeared Rittenhouse as a “white supremacist.” They justify the racial angle because the riot was supposedly to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man, who refused to comply with police orders and pulled a knife on the police. The theory seems to be that if people want to riot in response to a police shooting of a black man (and, again, the Blake shooting was found to be justified) then anyone who doesn’t go along with the riot and yield to the rioters is a “white supremacist.”
But the real reason the Leftist-Media-“Biden Administration” cabal wanted Rittenhouse convicted is not racial at all. It has nothing whatsoever to do with race. The real reason is that revolutionaries need to take control of the streets.
I keep saying we’re in the middle of a communist revolution; I’m not joking or exaggerating. Think back to 1920s Germany, a country that was headed inevitably for totalitarianism. There were two major varieties of socialism competing for control of that country, the communists and the National Socialists, and both had their street brawlers. For the National Socialists, it was the SA or Brown Shirts. It is no accident that the socialist faction that eventually won control of the streets, the National Socialists, also won control of the country. Clearly, a party that hopes to impose its brand of totalitarian socialism needs its thugs to control the streets. Antifa and BLM rioters fill the role of the Brown Shirts on behalf of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
The Marxists have found a winning tactic in making everything about race; they know they can leverage white guilt in America. But this tactic has casualties. President Obama’s vicious and cynical fanning of the flames of racial unrest—telling blacks that the police were hunting them—caused blacks to engage in mass shootings of police officers in Louisiana and in Dallas, Texas. On July 7, 2016, Micah Johnson, a supporter of the “New Black Panther Party,” shot 12 Dallas Police officers, killing five; in the ensuing standoff, he told police he was upset about the recent police shootings, “and wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.” On July 17, 2016, Gavin Long, a black veteran, shot six Baton Rouge police officers, killing three, after telling his mother “somebody has to do something.”
This time around, a black career criminal named Darrell Edward Brooks, Jr, age 39, from Milwaukee Wisconsin, whose very long rap sheet includes pimping a 16-year-old girl, drove his red Ford SUV into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six people, and injuring and maiming 47 others. He seems to have been so enraged by the (media’s lies about the) Rittenhouse case that he felt he should just go kill as many white people as possible.
Of course, the authorities are denying that there was any connection between Brooks’ horrific mass murder and the Rittenhouse verdict. (I recently learned that the federal Department of Justice has a bureau called the “Community Relations Service” CRS, devoted to making high profile black-on-white crimes quickly fade away, whereas high profile white-on-black crimes, like the Dylan Roof church shooting in South Carolina, are played up for their value in supporting the anti-white official narrative.) The media, because they are deeply complicit in fanning the flames of anti-white race hatred, have no interest in digging into Darrell Brooks’ motives.
But then there’s the timing: the Rittenhouse acquittal being followed so closely by the Brooks atrocity is one mighty coincidence. And then there is the fact that Brooks was a black nationalist activist . . . and the fact that just two days before the atrocity, Brooks bailed out of jail where he was being held on charges of having attacked a woman and having tried to run over her with his vehicle.
Yes, there is a cost to accepting the media’s lies . . . and repeating them to your congregation with a wink and a nod.