On Friday, November 19, 2021, just after 1:00 pm EST, a citizen jury serving at the Kenosha County Courthouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, acquitted a young white man named Kyle Rittenhouse of first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted first-degree intentional homicide, and two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety.
The verdict, as with virtually every public decision nowadays, divided the populace of the United States. A large percentage of citizens celebrated the Rittenhouse verdict for strengthening an individual’s right to defend themselves. Another bemoaned the verdict as yet another data point in the criminal court system’s historical defense of white power.
While members of the ruling classes debated the verdict from their laptops and television studios in the country’s major metropolitan areas, a doctor in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, named Kyle Pfefferle, contacted an LSU student he met at the university’s library, a man named Kyle Sellers. Dr. Pfefferle knew Sellers was a double major in computer science and computer engineering set to graduate in December. Dr. Pfefferle challenged Sellers to build a data-mining tool to scrub the Internet for any bit of contact information belonging to each of the Kyles in the United States.
By Saturday evening, Sellers accomplished the task, and at 6:39 pm CST, Pfefferle and Sellers possessed a Google Sheet with the phone numbers and email addresses of over 160,00 individuals in the United States whose names began with Kyle. Based on Social Security data from the past 100 years, experts estimate that over 460,000 Kyles currently reside in the country.
I received my first text from Dr. Pfefferle on Sunday, November 21, 2021, at 8:03 pm EST. It read:
My name’s Doctor Kyle Pfefferle, and I invite you to join a Zoom call tonight to discuss with 163,631 other Kyle’s [sic] what our response will be to the Rittenhouse verdict.
Astounded, I confirmed my interest and attendance.
At 11:10 pm EST, I received an invitation to join the Zoom call, but due to the technical limitations of the service, when I logged on, I found only 99 other Kyles in attendance. Dr. Pfefferle was not one of them. Instead, a middle-aged man named Kyle Pretsch greeted me. Pretsch was a Vice President of IT Development for a company in Phoenix, Arizona, and he introduced himself as the group’s facilitator.
Pretsch announced that out of all the Kyles invited to the emergency conference, 87,917 signaled their willingness to attend. Dr. Pfefferle asked the first respondents to facilitate meetings of 100 Kyles each. Our task was to determine how we felt as a group about the Rittenhouse verdict and to elect a representative who would attend a second gathering to speak on our behalf later in the night.
The meeting lasted 75 minutes. The conversation covered everything from the validity of The New York Times’ 1619 Project to the wisdom of constructing a physical wall along the nation’s southern border. Our facilitator successfully navigated the noisy voices of the rest of us, and as we approached the end of the meeting, he called a vote on whether we, as a group, approved of the Rittenhouse verdict.
With a majority opinion decided, we spent the last five minutes constructing an acceptable statement of our feelings. At the end of the meeting, the group nominated three potential representatives to attend the second meeting. I was humbled when a plurality of these strangers elected me to speak for them. I don’t know why they did so, but I vowed to take the responsibility seriously.
On Monday, November 22, 2021, at 1:30 am EST, I attended another Zoom call with 999 other individuals named Kyle. Each of us represented roughly one hundred other Kyle. I learned that not every Kyle who had signaled their willingness to attend the first meeting had done so, but most had. A few individuals in this second meeting represented groups with odd numbers, but most of us represented 100, and none of us knew who represented the smaller groups.
Dr. Pfefferle facilitated the conversation, but he did not get a vote in the meeting and did not express his opinion. Instead, in his role as facilitator, he wielded the mute button. From my perspective, Dr. Pfefferle restricted his use of the mute button to enforce unspoken rules of time and decorum, but I suspect some of those he muted may have felt slighted.
When Dr. Pfefferle turned the microphone over to me, I spoke on behalf of my constituents to express their opinions and concerns. Out of a sense of fairness to the minority opinion-holders in our group, I also expressed their significant positions. I believe I represented our group fairly.
At the end of the call, Dr. Pfefferle called for nominees to speak on behalf of America’s Kyles. Over 139 names were called in the first round. The voting lasted for 29 rounds, but in the end, the group reached a majority conclusion.
At 6:11 am EST on Monday, November 22, 2021, I was rewarded (or perhaps cursed) to be elected to submit that conclusion for public review.
And so, on behalf of the majority of Kyles of the United States of America whose contact information could be scrubbed from the Internet, I now offer this brief statement:
Fuck Kyle Rittenhouse.
