The Media Research Center got mad that Kyle Rittenhouse’s crying at his trial for killing two people was mocked:
- Curtis Houck huffed in a Nov. 10 post that MSNBC’s Joy Reid was being “ghoulish” by claim that Rittenhouse was “currying favor with a nearly all-white jury by crying” and that hhe “worked with his legal team to perform in a way that would ‘disrupt his image as a trigger happy vigilante who went on a shooting spree.'” Houck went on gush that the performance showed that “Rittenhouse excelled on the jury stand.”
- Another Nov. 10 post, by Nicholas Fondacaro, complained that a CNN guest “mocked him for breaking down and crying on the stand.”
- On Nov. 11, Kristine Marsh huffed that the co-hosts of “The View” “cruelly mocked Kyle Rittenhouse’s tearful testimony that he acted in self-defense, with Behar scoffing it was the ‘worst acting’ she’d ever seen and Ana Navarro sneering the teen would eventually run as a Republican Congressman if he escaped jail.”
- Tim Graham devoted his Nov. 19 column to defending Rittenhouse against Reid: “Rittenhouse scrunched up his face and lost his composure when describing how he shot and killed two men. And if he hadn’t cried? Then he’d be trashed by Reid as a sociopath.” He then played whataboutism: “No one’s going to find Joy Reid mocking a ‘Karen-out’ when Hillary Clinton teared up on the campaign trail in 2008, or when she teared up in a Benghazi hearing in 2013. The networks touted that as a masterful performance.” Graham omitted the fact that Clinton wasn’t running around shooting and killing people. He concluded by grousing: “The common thread is the Left’s cynical accusation that these incidents of white-male crying or choking up on television were insincerely staged for personal gain or political effect.”
Similiarly, in a Dec. 20 post, Mark Finkelstein complained that MSNBC commentator Elie Mystal commented on the case of Kim Potter, a police officer on trial for killing a suspect with her gun when she claimed to have been reaching for her taser, and “rejected Potter’s tears as phony during her testimony,” complaining further thaot host Tiffany Cross “seconded Mystal’s accusation that Potter was faking her tears.”
As Graham hinted at, what you never see at the MRC is any sympathy for a non-conservative caught crying over a traumatic event. Last February, the MRC melted down over Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talking about how the Jan. 6 Capitol riot a few weeks earlier affected her, getting particularly worked up over an Instagram video she made emotionally describing the events of that day. As part of that meltdown, MRC writer Alexa Moutevelis dismissed AOC’s video a “performance”, then tried to fact-check it and baselessly suggested she was lying about a reference to a earlier sexual assault against her.
So, the MRC will fully invest in your trauma only as long as your politics align with theirs and it advances their right-wing agenda.