Kyle Rittenhouse abruptly departed the stage during an appearance at the University of Memphis on Wednesday, after he was confronted about comments made by Turning Point USA founder and president Charlie Kirk.
Rittenhouse was invited by the college’s Turning Point USA chapter to speak at the campus. However, the event was met with backlash from a number of students who objected to Rittenhouse’s presence.
The 21-year-old gained notoriety in August 2020 when, at the age of 17, he shot and killed two men—Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, as well as injuring 26-year-old Gaige Grosskreutz—at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
He said the three shootings, carried out with a semi-automatic AR-15-style firearm, were in self-defense. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest where the shootings took place was held after Jacob Blake, a Black man, was left paralyzed from the waist down after he was shot by a white police officer.
For anyone interested the full trail is still available online and is a very interesting watch for anyone even remotely interested in the US justice system. I do feel a lot of the commenters above may feel differently after watching the entire trial and viewing the evidence presented first-hand rather than skewed through the lenses of journalists from either side of the political compass.
I think that most critics of Kyle Rittenhouse don’t disagree with the carriage of justice as much as the disgusting capitalization of his person after the fact. And the entire rationalization for bringing a weapon to a protest is frankly sick, whether he used justified force or not.
This very thread is full of people saying that the judge was biased and lying with what actually happened.
edit: look no further that people are comparing the trial to OJ Simpson kek.
And those folks wouldn’t be commenting at all if he wasn’t paraded around like some “get away with murder” mascot. It was a massive and heinous childhood fuckup and he’s giving speeches at colleges now like he’s something one should aspire to be. Technicalities of the trial are not the real problem people have.
Bro all this crap started since day one, nothing is new here, all the parade and everything happened afterwards.
I think this is some russian bot propaganda thing, because it can’t be that the same lies from day one are still being repeated over and over, including the one that kyle shot black people.
To be fair I was under the assumption that he wasn’t intending to capitalize on this situation at all, he did surrender the firearm used and requested it to be destroyed after the proceedings concluded so that it wouldn’t be sold-off and used as some sort of political symbol… It saddens me to learn that he is using such a tragedy to push any form of message other than a anti-firearm cautionary tale.
Yeah so I don’t think he went and killed some folks to get famous, I think he happened to kill some folks and got famous. And he’s malaligned, certainly a dumb kid like most of us were.
My criticism of Kyle is more around conservative folks who want to lean into that dumb kid fuck up like it’s something aspirational.
I think absolutely if you want to hold it up as a triumph of the justice system I’m with you. But as an example of a good human not so much.
Naw can’t watch the trial, then you’d find out that Rosenbaum had an encounter earlier in the night at a gas station with a guy dressed like Kyle (but +plate carrier) who put out Rosenbaum’s dumpster fire (the infanous “Shoot me n-word” video where Rosenbaum gets a pass to say “it.”) Then a little while later the drone video where Rosenbaum, still starting fires, crouches behind a car while Kyle walks past, steps out supposedly saying he was going to kill Kyle, and chases him/throws the bag, corners him, someone fires a shot from the crowd (likely Ziminski) while Kyle gets trapped by cars, and turning around hearing a shot Rosenbaum grabs for the gun, so Kyle shoots him. Then he makes the phone call (IIRC to Dominick Black), hears “GET HIM” and he starts running, gets hit in the back of the head with a rock that takes him down, he rolls over as jump kick man gets a hit, points it but doesn’t fire as dude was already retreating, Huber hits him with the skateboard and attempts again to take his rifle, shoots Huber, and the other guy who just surrenders, then Gage’s fake surrender (war crimes much?) then Gage takes one in the bicep, then Kyle gets up and continues running towards police.
You’d also find out that not only was all that justified, he never “crossed state lines with the gun” as the gun lived in Kenosha at Dominick’s house, and he could in fact legally possess the rifle at 17 due to local laws. Furthermore he worked in Kenosha and his dad lived there. While he did travel from his mom’s in Antioch 20mi away, Huber came from Silver Lake also 20mi away, and Gage came from 46mi away.
That wouldn’t be good, can’t learn the actual facts of the case, just gotta hang your hat on “he shouldn’t have been there.”