For its first week, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial was unusually quiet. That in itself was odd, considering the Illinois teen is there because he shot three people, killing two, during a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. But in its second week things, uh, picked up. Rittenhouse himself took the stand and launched into what many found an unconvincing crying jag. The judge proved unhinged and even had a curious ringtone. A Fox News host, who runs their “comedy” show, said he “did the right thing.”
And now this: As per The Wrap, the prosecutors, during their closing statements, busted out a still from the movie Road House. You know: The about-to-be-remade 1989 action movie that’s also a semi-camp classic, in which Patrick Swayze plays an NYU philosophy grad student-turned-Deep South bar bouncer, who does roundhouse kicks and rips out people’s throats like it was nothin’. The image shows Swayze’s character is about to duke it out with one of the baddies in the midst of a large-scale bar fight at the Double Deuce.
Can my American friends explain why in the double murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the prosecutor is using screenshots from 1989 Patrick Swayze action movie ‘Road House’?
The USA never ceases to surprise me. Insane.#KyleRittenhouse #Kenosha pic.twitter.com/FIbfcZ3E0O
— Andrew Quinn (@AndrewEQuinn) November 15, 2021
What point was Kenosha County Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binge trying to make here? The caption read “The Defendant brought a gun to a fistfight.” Binge called what Rittenhouse did “reckless conduct,” adding, “What the defendant wants you to believe is that because he’s the one who brought the gun, he gets to kill.”
It seems Binge meant to argue that Rittenhouse escalated the situation by running around with a semiautomatic rifle. Had it just been akin to a bar fight, waged between fists, perhaps no one would have been shot. “That’s why he’s got to come up with this cockamamie theory that Joseph Rosenbaum was not only going to take the gun, but take it and then turn it on the defendant,” Binge added.
Then again, maybe you don’t bring a ridiculous movie in which a guy is crushed by a stuffed polar bear to a murder trial.
(Via The Wrap)