Last Thursday afternoon, as the country was still awaiting the decision on the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial, the yahoos outside the courthouse in Kenosha were ready to riot.

Guilty, not guilty, hung jury or mistrial – it won’t matter to them what the verdict will be on the homicide charges against Rittenhouse.

The yahoos are going to make trouble in the streets whether they are enraged by the jury’s decision or pleased by it.

They’ve been taking photos of the jurors and threatening them to vote the “right” way – which means not acquitting Rittenhouse on grounds of self-defense. They’ve also been sending death threats to the judge.

The 500 members of Wisconsin’s National Guard that have been called in to handle the expected post-verdict violence will probably keep the yahoos from burning down what’s left of Kenosha.

But as we know, the National Guard has arrived a year and a half too late. The city of 100,000 will probably never recover.

Kenosha’s fate is to live on as the symbol of what happens to a town when spineless politicians and the deplorable liberal media allow, encourage and justify violent and destructive protests in the name of social justice.

The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse is the latest proof of how hopelessly the country is split between Republicans and Democrats on almost every issue.

Trump, the 2020 election, the so-called “insurrection” of Jan. 6, immigration policy, critical race theory in schools...

Everything political is a 50-50 split and the biased mainstream media always take the progressive side.

The liberal media have never stopped cheering for the arrests and prolonged imprisonments of some of the Trump people who broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6.

But you never heard the media call for the arrest and prosecution of the “peaceful” rioters who burned Kenosha and repeatedly rioted in a dozen other cities like Portland last summer.

And if any clown in the liberal media – Joy Reid of MSNBC comes to mind — has expressed outrage at the yahoos for threatening the jurors and the judge in the Rittenhouse case, it’s flown under my radar.

The big liberal media are so blinded by their hate of flyover country people, Republicans, Trump and kids like Rittenhouse they don’t care that President Brandon called the 17-year-old “a white supremacist” just two days after he shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz on Aug. 25, 2020.

Ever since last summer, the media have done their best to make the public think that Rittenhouse was a junior white nationalist, that he was illegally carrying a rifle, that he had no right to be in Kenosha where his father lived and that he was a vigilante looking to kill protestors.

The liberal media deliberately spread those lies and slanted their journalism for more than a year — until the televised Rittenhouse trial showed America the truth.

How long did it take for you to learn from the media that Rittenhouse’s victims all were white?

Or that one of the dead ones was a convicted pedophile with a serious violent streak? That the other fatality was a felon convicted in a strangulation case who was recently accused of domestic abuse?

Or that the guy who got his forearm blown off had drawn a loaded Glock from his ankle holster and pointed it at Rittenhouse’s face?

If you only watched MSNBC and CNN and didn’t watch the trial, you’d have thought Rittenhouse’s victims were good guys with families who cared deeply for social justice.

The liberal media never questioned what the yahoos were doing in the burning streets of Kenosha, but they all agreed Rittenhouse didn’t belong there.

Maybe he didn’t belong there. Maybe he should have stayed home and watched Kenosha burn like most of the adults in town did.

But the reality is, if you tell the cops to stand down, you can be sure some people will stand up.

Someone had to try to defend the city from the yahoos.

The tragedy – and the main reason Kenosha burned and two people died – is that because the adults in charge of the town hid behind their locked doors, kids like Rittenhouse had to go out to do their job.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com and follow @reaganworld on Twitter