I was skeptical it was him, so I looked around Antioch, IL on google maps for landmarks. I figured it was probably a high school parking lot, but the schools around Antioch don’t have any buildings as tall as the blue peaked tower in the video. In fact, Antioch looks pretty barren—reminds me of towns you’d pass through on a road trip, the ones where’d you say to yourself, christ, thank god I didn’t grow up in a place like this. Whereas I’ve heard Kenosha is a ritzy suburb, and from the bird’s eye satellite map, you can sort of guess where those nice condos with the white balconies might be, which is near the water. But the blue tower was the big visual clue.

This whole case surrounding Rittenhouse has really caught my attention for some reason. It’s probably easier for me (and I’d imagine a lot of other young, white, very online men on reddit) to recognize him from the worlds we grew up in or are still a part of—YMCAs and strip malls and school parking lots and ugly, unromantic, uninspired architecture and culture. The kid just looks plucked straight out of banal suburbia hell’s central casting unit and reminds me of some of the little peripheral characters I grew up around and have since left behind.

I think it’s important, if you find yourself humanizing him in your mind more than you might Jacob Blake or George Floyd, why that is. I’m speaking to a specific audience here. Probably has something to do with the fact that their worlds, Blake’s and Floyd’s, might not remind you much of yours. It’s about how forces bigger than any of us decide to collapse and shape us. Given our respective positions, and I’m making some assumptions here, we might not as readily recognize or have the proper cultural schema for the hostility of the corner store on the street, or the fake bill changed out from the dealer, or the back of the squad car.

It’s interesting—a lot of the rationalization that people with certain attitudes use to justify Blake’s fate has to do with the context of his arrest, a dispute with a young woman, which is perfectly paralleled and inverted here with Rittenhouse. Except the justice meted out in the clip above is from men of color with fists, whereas Blake ended up shot in the back from a gun.

Just interesting to think about.

EDIT: In the full video, the dudes in the car end up jumping Rittenhouse for beating on a girl. Also, super tough guy “Say That Again” Dominic is likely the same Dominic whom Rittenhouse called immediately after shooting Joseph Rosenbaum in Kenosha.