Every American has a fundamental right to self-defense. That right has been recognized in the law since ancient times. As Andy McCarthy has detailed, the Rittenhouse prosecution tried to criminalize that right by arguing that defending himself against his first attacker made him fair game for the next two. The prosecution also rested a good deal of its case on a dubious charge that Rittenhouse’s carrying of a rifle was illegal, a strained reading of Wisconsin law that was rightly rejected by the trial judge.

You would never know any of this from listening to hysterical media reports obsessing over the fact that Rittenhouse crossed state lines to be in Kenosha and baselessly calling Rittenhouse a “white supremacist,” a charge shamefully repeated by President Biden and other Democratic politicians — never mind that all three of the men he shot were white. The same media are now stoking misplaced anger at the verdict, practically begging for more riots. Biden, to his belated credit, now says that the verdict should be respected.

The trial was conducted in a shameful circus atmosphere, in which national journalists demonized the trial judge (a Democrat with decades of experience on the bench and a reputation for favoring criminal defendants), the prosecutor pointed a rifle at the jury with his finger on the trigger, and MSNBC ended up getting kicked out of the courtroom after a stringer was caught following the bus carrying the jurors. It is to the jury’s credit that they did not crack under the pressure to throw the defendant to the wolves.