PEAK SOCIOLOGY.

The Kyle Rittenhouse trial has gone to the jury, and the early candidate for most perverse take on the situation is a University of Wisconsin sociologist.

John Eason, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said closing arguments and the verdict will be a pivotal moment for America.

“I think the mood in Wisconsin, not just Kenosha, is that they’re over the whole racial awakening. All signs are this is going to be the case that vindicates white people,” Eason said, adding: "If the peak of the country’s social justice reckoning was George Floyd, then this is the pendulum swinging back. This is the tipping point back.”

The article, which is based on a Chicago television interview, missed the professor's promotion.  His research includes a focus on prisons, and he's participating in an Urban Institute project.  But what sort of scholarship is it to suggest that people are "over the whole racial awakening?"  Isn't it possible to be dismayed with the behavior of Minneapolis police without destroying your neighborhood, let alone parts of Seattle or Portland, and what sort of social justice is it to wreck the grocery stores in the poorer parts of Chicago?

I'm encouraged that there are people who might be dismayed with the prospect of Mr Rittenhouse successfully claiming self-defense who are also dismayed with the way the "reckoning" played out.  Consider Freddie DeBoer,  "When You Condone Chaos, You Condone the Consequences of Chaos."

At the time of the Kinosha [c.q.] riots, many many people along the left-of-center, including otherwise reformist liberals, endorsed riots to some degree or another. I know quite a few people who were willing to say that riots were just good on the merits, and there were also many saying in some terms or another that these particular riots could not be judged by progressive people due to what had inspired them. This sentiment stretches back a long way but has picked up steam in the last decade and the past year and a half particularly. Here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-rioting interview and here’s a pro-looting interview and here’s a riots-aren’t-necessarily-good-but-they-do-good-things piece and here’s a both-sidesy rioting piece and on and on. (And this is merely hilarious.) Pro-rioting sentiment is perfect for our edgelord media; it makes for good, click-farming headlines and engages in the kind of moral simplicity and righteous hectoring that defines our current culture.

And somewhere there might be minor-league Barrington Moores attempting to distinguish the good kind of revolutionary violence (burning down a station house in Minneapolis) from the bad kind of reactionary violence (storming the Federal Capitol while the electoral vote is being confirmed.)  "Moral simplicity and righteous hectoring," indeed.  What sort of a reckoning is it that turns out this way?

You endorsed chaotic violence. In that state, someone you don’t like engaged chaotically and violently. You said “riots are good.” But people get killed in riots! Now two people are dead, another is maimed, and the guy responsible may very well walk, as his actions took place against a backdrop of lawlessness and gunfire that gave him the legal arguments he needs to be acquitted. What else did you expect to happen, in that scenario? How did you think this would all go, this peacocking endorsement of violence for its own sake? Reap what you sow. Reap what you sow.

Amen.