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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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Talking about fundraisers is comparable but peripheral.

It's not peripheral to what we're actually talking about here. I really don't care to relitigate the Rittenhouse case. What @FCfromSSC pointed out was that the legal defense fund for Rittenhouse was shut down, whereas the legal defend fund for Karmelo Anthony was not.

No matter how wrong or guilty you think Rittenhouse was, would you not agree that he was entitled to a legal defense? And that people who sympathized with him had the right to donate to it? And that it would be wrong to decide whose legal defense funds people are or are not allowed to donate to?

Regardless of which of us comes out the victor, either of us could be plausibly at fault.

Yes, of course the facts of the case are going to matter a lot, and we can construct hypotheticals where pulling a knife when being threatened by fists would be considered justifiable. But most of the time, it's not.

I am not rushing to judgment on the Karmelo Anthony case, because often some details emerge over time that change what everyone thinks they know, but based on what I've heard so far, if a teenager pulls a knife and stabs another teenager who was threatening, or even shoving him, I would expect him to have a hard time making a convincing case that it was justified.

To be fair, Anthony is fundraising on GiveSendGo, the same place Rittenhouse eventually got shoved to. To be less naive, I'll notice that GiveSendGo has not lost credit card processors for it (nor for the Luigi fandom), nor has a Harvard-backed organization hacked into GSG and doxxed contributors such that any have been fired.