Even the right wing grievance industry is sick of this moron high school dropout killer.
Kyle Rittenhouse, the MAGA Star That Wasn’t
After his acquittal, the Kenosha shooter has gone on the right-wing media circuit—with mixed results.
STEPHANIE MENCIMER
MARCH 8, 2023
Modern conservatives love to own the libs by supporting people who claim they’ve been “canceled.” Yet Kyle Rittenhouse can’t seem to draw a crowd, no matter how many times he gets shut down.
In January, Rittenhouse headlined the Rally Against Censorship in Conroe, Texas, an event you’d expect to draw a healthy turnout in a Texas county that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. But when I arrived, only about six people had lined up for the early-access VIP snaps with Rittenhouse, mostly paunchy older white men in black button-down shirts, black jeans, and cowboy hats.
In 2020, Rittenhouse, then 17, shot three people, killing two of them, during protests over police violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He became a household name. Prosecutors charged him with multiple felonies. During his trial, Rittenhouse testified that he’d acted in self-defense. The jury acquitted him of all charges in November 2021.
At first, Rittenhouse espoused a hope for a new life. Four days after his not-guilty verdict, he told
NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield that he was considering changing his name, growing a beard, and losing some weight so people wouldn’t recognize him in public. “I just want to be a normal 18-year-old college student trying to better my future and get into a career in nursing,” he said, explaining that he didn’t like fans asking him for selfies. “I just don’t want to be taking pictures with people I don’t know.”
Yet there he was in Conroe, more than a year later, sporting not a beard but a suit and tie and mugging for photos with strangers who’d paid the $275 VIP fee to meet him. Rather than slink off into anonymity after his acquittal, Rittenhouse has spent the past year trying to rebrand himself as a free speech and gun-rights activist. Following the siren song of the right-wing industrial complex, Rittenhouse, now 20, spends his time going on podcasts, attending conventions, and taking selfies with fans. He tends to stick to safe spaces: Zoom interviews from his bedroom with sympathetic B-list right-wing media—Sebastian Gorka, fringy YouTubers—or the occasional star turn at scripted conventions hosted by the conservative youth group Turning Point USA. He risks few public appearances outside that cozy bubble.
The Rally Against Censorship—sponsored by
Defiance Press, a publishing house that has put out books by controversial figures such as noted Islamaphobe Frank Gaffney and infamous
Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio—should have been a hot ticket. Indeed, at least 1,000 people had registered for the event online. But as the night wore on, fewer than half of the 450 white chairs I counted ever filled up, even though general admission was free. The empty seats were a stark indicator that Rittenhouse’s quest for conservative influencer status isn’t winning many converts, even as it’s destroying whatever second chance his acquittal might have promised for a normal life.
Defiance had originally planned to host the rally at the local Southern Star brewery. When word spread on social media that Rittenhouse would be there, the brewery pulled out, prompting a wave of furor among conservatives and a barrage of death threats against the brewery owners. A week after the brewery cancellation, Rittenhouse was in Las Vegas during the Shot Show, the gun industry’s biggest trade show. He was scheduled to headline a private event sponsored by the National Association for Gun Rights at a Venetian hotel restaurant. But the hotel, located only two miles down the Strip from where a gunman slaughtered 60 people in 2017, pulled the plug on the event at the last minute, saying that it “did not align with our property’s core event guidelines.”
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In an editorial in the
Washington Times, Rittenhouse complained that he’d been “stripped of my right of expression at establishments in Texas and Las Vegas” by “far-left trolls.” Not to worry, however, Rittenhouse declared that he would never give up. “I’m sure left-wingers will continue to try to pressure venues to cancel my events,” he wrote. “I’m not deterred. I’m used to firing back.”
When Rittenhouse traveled to Kenosha from his home in Antioch, Illinois, in August 2020 and patrolled the streets with an AR-15 style assault weapon strapped to his chest, the city was on fire. Over that fateful summer of Covid lockdowns, the whole country was awash in protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota. Armed militia groups often materialized to greet the protesters, claiming they were there to “assist” local law enforcement in keeping the peace—so-called assistance that many local police departments tacitly sanctioned.
In Kenosha, the police shooting of a Black man named Jacob Blake had sent protesters streaming into the streets. Cars were torched, buildings burned. Right-wing media fanned the flames with endless footage of the smoldering city and mostly Black protesters. “Joe Biden’s voters really are a threat to you and your family,” Tucker Carlson said during a Fox News segment. “Nobody stopped them from burning down [a] business or burning down the city…The Democratic Party of Kenosha decided to embrace the mob.”
On Facebook, a newly formed militia group called the Kenosha Guard
issued a call for “patriots willing to take up arms and defend our City tonight against the evil thugs” to come to the city. Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory website InfoWars amplified the request. Some
4,000 people responded to the Facebook post, some with ominous responses: “Counter protest? Nah. I fully plan to kill looters and rioters tonight. I have my suppressor on my AR, these fools won’t even know what hit them,” one warned. “It’s about time. Now it’s time to switch to real bullets and put a stop to these impetuous children rioting,” wrote another. Groups like the
Boogaloo Bois, a far-right anti-government extremist group sometimes associated with white nationalists,
flocked to Kenosha.
Into all this chaos walked Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old high school dropout pretending to be an EMT, toting a Smith & Wesson assault rifle. He crossed paths with Joseph Rosenbaum, a suicidal convicted sex offender who just hours earlier had been released from a Milwaukee mental hospital. Rosenbaum had been raging, setting fire to a dumpster, tipping over a porta-potty, and screaming threats at random people. Rosenbaum chased Rittenhouse. He was carrying a plastic bag with a toothbrush in it, which he threw at Rittenhouse. A reporter from the
Daily Caller who filmed the episode
later testified that Rosenbaum lunged for Rittenhouse’s gun, at which point he shot him four times and ran away.
Others in the crowd gave chase, believing Rittenhouse was an active shooter. A protester tripped him, and he landed on the pavement. Another protester, Anthony Huber whacked him with a skateboard and tried to grab his weapon. Rittenhouse shot Huber in the chest, killing him. Another onlooker, Gaige Grosskreutz, ran to the scene.
Armed with a Glock pistol, he
pointed the gun at Rittenhouse, at which point Rittenhouse shot Grosskreutz, too, shearing off most of his biceps.
With his gun still strapped across his chest, Rittenhouse tried to surrender to the many police officers on the scene. They responded by pepper spraying him and telling him to get out of the way, believing that the real shooter was elsewhere. He went home. His mother later drove him to the police station to surrender.
The story went viral. Liberals saw Rittenhouse as a racist vigilante who killed people protesting police violence against Black people, and an emblem of the racial double-standard in the justice system. If he’d been Black, the argument went, police surely would have shot him. Meanwhile, conservatives celebrated a classic “good guy with a gun,” a patriot who’d come to defend a city under siege. After a televised trial that lasted over two weeks in 2021, a jury found that Rittenhouse had acted in self-defense. Rittenhouse famously burst into tears and fell to the floor when the jury forewoman read the not guilty verdict.
