The verdict shows very clearly that you don't have the right to bash someone's head in with a skateboard. You don't have the right to advance on someone with your handgun and raise it to firing position while they are trying to get away. You don't have the right to yell that you're going to kill someone when you get them alone, then run at them and reach for their weapon when you do get them alone. Especially if you're doing those things in the context of a "protest" where the protestors are lighting things on fire and smashing stuff.

Why are you generalizing to peaceful actions?

You can argue that showing up armed in the vicinity of a protest ought to be a felony all on its own, or that Wisconsin shouldn't be a permissive open carry state, or that if they didn't mean for 17 year olds to carry around rifles like that then they should have consulted with someone who would have helped them write the law they meant to, or that intent in showing up matters (not sure there'd have been a conviction on that one either, but it wasn't even on the table), or that it was godawful stupid to think that showing up to a violent situation armed and untrained was going to lead to being able to do more good than harm and that this level of godawful stupid should count at least as criminal negligence, or any number of other reasonable inferences or conclusions.

I don't understand what the value is of handing a rhetorical victory on this one to loathsome groups like Proud Boys. "He came to do good: to protect and to give aid. He was attacked and defended himself using the minimum force needed to ensure his safety. And everyone lies about what happened and hates him and wants to ignore the law and send him to jail, except for us!" is the most awful twisted pro-Proud Boys (and similar extreme right wing) message we could send.

If the counter-narrative instead was: "Rittenhouse took advantage of lax laws and a misguided sense of heroism to end up in mortal danger where he felt (justifiably, according to a jury) it necessary to kill two people and seriously injure a third to save himself. This shows exactly why permissive gun ownership and vigilante action is such a disaster. The whole right-wing fantasy of citizen policing was shown to be just that: a fantasy. We do NOT need citizens marching around armed, getting themselves in danger, and shooting people. We need well-regulated police and emergency services and, in times of great need, the National Guard. And we need to fix our laws to better ensure exactly that." Then the Right has egg on their face (as they very well should!), Proud Boys looks like the losers they ought to, people in the center don't wonder why the left is misrepresenting the case, and everything turns out better.

I think it's very likely that if Rittenhouse were black, his human rights would have been lethally violated that very evening: the police would, I expect, have shot him and then done their usual song and dance about how they were afraid of a fleeing (but armed) black man who was being attacked by whites and trying to surrender to police. That doesn't tell me that Rittenhouse should have gotten a guilty verdict...that tells me that I don't have confidence in our criminal justice system to not routinely violate people's human rights on the basis of race. They didn't get the chance to prove themselves here, but they have committed violations many times in the past, and that's tragic and needs to be fixed.

And that is, actually, a reason to not feel safe when peacefully protesting. The country has a long and inglorious history of police violence against peaceful protestors, especially (but not only) when the protestors are black.

But this verdict shouldn't move the needle.