Audience of violence: reacting to the Kenosha Paramilitary Drama

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 6. Far-Right Movements & Extremist Discourse

Abstract

Contemporary paramilitary violence in the United States is typically analyzed as a troubling phenomenon—seen as a nefarious threat to democracy. Most research has reasonably focused on its causes, with scholarly and policy-driven energies directed toward understanding where it originates and how it might be prevented. However, this focus has come at the expense of a broader sociological inquiry into its consequences. As a result, we know surprisingly little about how paramilitary violence shapes social life—whether it reorganizes public discourse, reconfigures symbolic boundaries, or influences political alignments in contemporary society, or whether it has any significant sociological effects at all.

This paper investigates how societies negotiate the meanings of paramilitary violence focusing on media responses to Kyle Rittenhouse’s 2020 infamous shooting of Black Lives Matter protesters in Wisconsin. It examines how the moral polarization of the contemporary American public sphere shaped the interpretation of the event, reconstructing the moral mythologies and iconographies (about vigilante justice, historical victimhood, and the sacred meanings of the U.S. Constitution) that shaped public responses to the shooting. It underlines how media and digital cultures transformed Rittenhouse into a contested moral symbol, and the development of such contestation during and after his highly mediatized trial (2021-2024).

The empirical analysis relies on audiovisual data. The corpus includes livestreamed videos recorded during the August 2020 Wisconsin protests, as well as a wide range of digital political commentary and accompanying comment sections produced in the aftermath of the shooting. The sampling was designed to capture the broadest possible ideological diversity—including extreme rhetoric across the political spectrum—by integrating mainstream media outlets and independent commentators.

Author

• Nicolás Neyra Rudas, Yale University