Politics - News Analysis

Perennial Loser Kyle Rittenhouse Tries to Stay Relevant by Bringing Up Comparison to Luigi Mangione

This didn't go well for him.

Kyle Rittenhouse, the poster boy for birth control that just won’t go away, is still clinging to relevancy with his latest tweet. Latching on to the fame of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Rittenhouse tweeted this morning that people shouldn’t be comparing the two of them.

Newsflash, Kyle: Nobody was.

But Kyle thinks that Luigi is a murderer and he’s a hero for what he did in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake. The facts of the two cases couldn’t be more distinct, but he thinks people might be confused:

“Luigi Mangione shot and killed a man in cold blood and tried to get away with it. I, on the other hand, defended myself after being chased down and violently attacked. Luigi and I aren’t even remotely similar. If you’re comparing my case to his, you have some serious problems.”

We’ve been approaching the “Adjuster” case pretty gingerly here at Political Flare. Many people have a lot of feelings about it, and so we’ll reserve opinion on the circumstances and just say that we can see both sides of the issue. Mangione is, literally and figuratively, a hero and a villain, depending on your viewpoint.

But so has Kyle, it’s just that the viewpoints are reversed.

So really what it comes down to are the facts of each case, and whether or not it can be concluded — fairly or unfairly — that the victims involved had done anything to provoke a response that ended their life.

When Meidas Touch editor Ron Filipkowski tweeted a screenshot of Kyle’s tweet, the responses were nearly unanimous: Kyle had, unprovoked, killed two men who posed no threat to him before he posed a threat to them.

But folks, the number of people who saw a screenshot of the tweet and went over to find the original and comment on that one was enormous. And they were nowhere near as kind or even-handed to Kyle himself as they were in the thread from Ron.

But the real issue is that Kyle truly believes he was defending American values doing what he did. And the fact is, no one but the people whose values extend no further than their right to own and brandish a gun agree with him.

Luigi Mangione is still only accused of the death of Brian Thompson. But for people who are supporting what he did, it’s largely because they think Thompson’s killer WAS defending American values — namely, the right to get the services you pay for and not be systematically discarded by an algorithm designed to deny as many people help as possible.

In fact, I would so much say that people are “celebrating” Brian Thompson’s death. I think it’s more that they’re denying his claim to sympathy. It’s out of their emotional network, I suppose.

meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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