Kyle Rittenhouse

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

“Blue Lives Matter” and thin blue line flags, symbolizing law enforcement as the barrier between order and chaos. Conservatives lionized figures like seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, whose entire life accomplishment was crossing state lines into Wisconsin with an AR-15–style rifle, killing two protesters, and being acquitted. That summer of

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today’s most unfathomably wealthy and the triumph of the sore winner.” But Ye was hardly the only controversial figure of the new right. After Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal for killing Black Lives Matter protesters, he received a standing ovation at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in 2021. “You’re a hero

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/14/support-for-the-black-lives-matter-movement-has-dropped-considerably-from-its-peak-in-2020. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse: Joseph Ax, “Hero or Vigilante? Rittenhouse Verdict Reignites Polarized U.S. Gun Debate,” Reuters, November 21, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hero-or

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,” Washington Post, December 26, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/2024/12/26/kanye-west-ye-legacy-decline. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal: Maya Yang, “Conservative Event Gives Rittenhouse a Standing Ovation a Month After Acquittal,” Guardian, December 21, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news

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/2021/dec/21/kyle-rittenhouse-turning-point-usa-standing-ovation. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “You’re a hero to millions”: Yang, “Conservative Event Gives Rittenhouse.” GO TO NOTE

Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy

by Jennifer Carlson  · 2 May 2023  · 279pp  · 100,877 words

. Largely peaceful, though sometimes not, the sheer number of cities in turmoil raised the specter of civil unrest. Some, like the armed 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, brought firearms as a counter-protest; Rittenhouse killed and maimed protesters, but his actions were deemed acts of self-defense by a Wisconsin court a

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rebels were dupes of a left-wing plot to undermine the integrity of the United States. The Truth About Guns In late August 2020,71 Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old from Illinois, traveled to Wisconsin to attend a Black Lives Matter protest being held in the aftermath of the police

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murder?”75 In posing that rhetorical question, Carlson conveyed what many within conservative circles saw as the obvious import of arming up amid civil unrest: Kyle Rittenhouse, and perhaps any American who turned to guns in search of security, acted on a natural proclivity for self-preservation. The appeal of the gun

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, he’s become a positive symbol, a young man of action who stepped up when the police (allegedly) stepped aside.”77 When it came to Kyle Rittenhouse and other armed white Americans who used their guns in reckless, negligent, or even criminal manners amid the civil unrest of 2020, where was the

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on the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, and eventually the results of the 2020 presidential election? Instead of galvanizing skepticism, the iconography of Kyle Rittenhouse as a white teenager standing up to hordes of Black Lives Matter protesters galvanized many conservatives’ sympathies through the circuitry of whiteness that, as scholars

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of race have analyzed, the Rittenhouse case illuminated.78 And listening to gun sellers, I soon realized that Kyle Rittenhouse couldn’t be the enemy within conspiracist thinking because he was, rather, its avenger—an exemplar of the heroic individualism that designated some Americans as

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as they spliced willful not-knowing with proactive self-education. And in doing so, conspiracism provides a subtle, but powerful, defense of armed people like Kyle Rittenhouse, who was understood by many conservatives not as an inexcusable agitator of white supremacy and thus a distressing threat to democratic order (as he was

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Books. French, D. (2020). Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. St. Martin’s Publishing Group. French, D. (2021). Kyle Rittenhouse’s Acquittal Does Not Make Him a Hero. The Atlantic. Accessed December 2, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11

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/kyle-rittenhouse-right-self-defense-role-model/620715/. Frenkel, S. and Karnie, A. (2021). Proud Boys Celebrate Trump’s “Stand By” Remark About Them at the Debate.

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: “A Bonanza for the Far-Right.” The Guardian. Accessed April 21, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/24/historian-white-power-reacts-kyle-rittenhouse-verdict-far-right. Glatter, R. (2020). Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Go to a “Covid Party.” Forbes. Accessed August 10, 2021. https://www.forbes

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Charged in Killings of Kenosha Protesters. The Guardian. Accessed August 16, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/aug/26/tucker-carlson-kenosha-shooting-teen-kyle-rittenhouse. Gutowski, S. (2020). African American Gun Group Saw Membership Surge After George Floyd Killing. Washington Free Beacon. Accessed April 18, 2022. https://freebeacon.com/issues

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-election-numbers. Lipsky, M. (2010). Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service. Russell Sage Foundation. Litke, E. (2020). Fact Check: Police Gave Kyle Rittenhouse Water and Thanked Him before Shooting. USA Today. Accessed August 16, 2021. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/29/fact-check-video

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-police-thanked-kyle-rittenhouse-gave-him-water/5661804002/. Liu, G. and Wiebe, D. J. (2019). A Time-Series Analysis of Firearm Purchasing after Mass Shooting Events in the United

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Syedullah, J. (2016). Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation. North Atlantic Books. Williams, P. (2021). Kyle Rittenhouse, American Vigilante. The New Yorker. Accessed August 16, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/kyle-rittenhouse-american-vigilante. Williamson, E. (2022). Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth. Dutton. Winfrey

Health and Safety: A Breakdown

by Emily Witt  · 16 Sep 2024  · 242pp  · 85,783 words

moderators had allowed the group to remain on the site, despite the fact that it was flagged by users as dangerous 455 times. That night, Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old Donald Trump supporter and an aspiring police officer from across the state line in Antioch, Illinois, drove to Kenosha, where he

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his chest, photoshopped as the cover of the PlayStation game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. These memes, along with others—one of Jesus guiding Kyle Rittenhouse to shoot his rifle; comments of “Die Commie Scum” and “skate off a cliff you Marxist refuse”—were posted on the wall of the deceased

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itself a presence at protests for racial justice. I was writing the same story over and over; and recent history was mutating and becoming recombinant. Kyle Rittenhouse was like a Muppet Baby version of George Zimmerman; in the trolls who slandered the dead online was a little bit of Westboro Baptist Church

American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15

by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson  · 25 Sep 2023  · 525pp  · 166,724 words

would happen if someone came to one of these protests with a real AR-15? On the night of August 25, 2020, seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, armed with an M&P 15, stood outside a car dealership in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Two days earlier, Kenosha police had shot a Black man, paralyzing

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,” The New Yorker, November 15, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-complex-task-facing-the-kyle-rittenhouse-jury. at a highly publicized trial: Anthony DeRosa, “Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict: Teen Found Not Guilty of All Charges in Killing of Two,” The Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles

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/kyle-rittenhouse-verdict-not-guilty-11637347243. The rally in Richmond: Scott Calvert and Jon Kamp, “Thousands of Pro-Gun Advocates Rally in Virginia,” The Wall Street Journal,

Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse

by Thomas Chatterton Williams  · 4 Aug 2025  · 242pp  · 76,315 words

have by Nature to protect themselves when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished.” * * * — When a doughy seventeen-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse, too young to purchase the AR-15 assault rifle he’d armed himself with, ventured from his home twenty miles away in Antioch, Illinois, into

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a statement that began like this: ‘We are disheartened and dismayed by this morning’s not guilty verdict on all charges in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse…. We join in solidarity with all who are outraged by this failure of accountability.’ ”[*13] The fact that UC Santa Cruz is an enormous public

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$1 million on August 25, the night that Rittenhouse and others attempted to dissuade them. *11 “More of a royalist than the king.” *12 “How Kyle Rittenhouse and Joseph Rosenbaum’s Paths Crossed in a Fatal Encounter | Visual Forensics,” Washington Post, YouTube, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=LBM9Ke_JI1Q @16:16. *13

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Conor Friedersdorf, “Universities Try to Force a Consensus About Kyle Rittenhouse,” Atlantic, Nov. 26, 2021. *14 The Kalven Report, a 1967 document commissioned by the University of Chicago and officially titled Report on the University’s

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gun possession. But we do not live in a just world; we live in a white one.” Elie Mystal, “I Hope Everyone Is Prepared for Kyle Rittenhouse to Go Free,” Nation, Oct. 27, 2021. Nikole Hannah-Jones on Twitter: “In this country, you can even kill white people and get away with

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violence to assert their power, and more importantly that they are above the criminal justice system when they do.” “Reactions to Not Guilty Verdict in Kyle Rittenhouse Trial,” Reuters, Nov. 19, 2021. Kathleen Belew (historian): “The other part of it has to do with white power and militant right groups that are

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years had been so flagrantly neglected?[*17] The answer came swiftly. Schools that had rushed to issue definitive statements on every ethical controversy from the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict to the scandal of awkwardly executed cafeteria offerings[*18] were overnight committed to circumspection and institutional neutrality, an about-face that was understandably infuriating

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet  · 21 Mar 2023  · 308pp  · 97,480 words

crashed into a concrete pylon, she might have committed murder. She was trying. And if she’d done so, she might be as infamous as Kyle Rittenhouse, the White seventeen-year-old who brought his gun to a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he killed two protesters, and whose

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right-wing concerns: many January 6 defendants, Rudy Giuliani, lesser-known Trump minions, Proud Boys, and—the name for which the crowd gave a rouse—Kyle Rittenhouse, the babyfaced MAGA icon who’d be acquitted after killing two men at a Black Lives Matter protest. Ashli, said Pierce, “was all of us

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come back for you,” because they didn’t want to linger. Nobody home. I made my picture. I waited. I read on my phone that Kyle Rittenhouse, the dough-faced seventeen-year-old acquitted for shooting to death two men at a Black Lives Matter demonstration, was launching a video game in

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It

by Azeem Azhar  · 6 Sep 2021  · 447pp  · 111,991 words

also allowed imminent threats to American citizens to stay live on its site in the face of dozens of reports from users. A day before Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two unarmed protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a Facebook page he had visited was urging people to take up arms. Facebook users reported

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future

by Jean M. Twenge  · 25 Apr 2023  · 541pp  · 173,676 words

, regularly sending out emails not just about campus incidents but about national ones. In November 2021, when the news was dominated by the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse in Wisconsin and the killers of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, she sent a campus-wide email noting that “these types of highly visible trials can

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

by Jamie Raskin  · 4 Jan 2022  · 450pp  · 144,939 words

a preview of the diversionary diatribes he would bring to the committee. (Much of the violence he referred to came from right-wing sources, like Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old vigilante from Antioch, Illinois, who traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an assault rifle and allegedly shot and killed two people participating

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright  · 7 Jun 2021  · 391pp  · 112,312 words

‘in the Dark Shadows’ Controlling Biden,” Rev Transcripts, Sept. 1, 2020. seventeen-year-old Trump supporter: John Fritz, Kevin Johnson, and David Jackson, “Trump defends Kyle Rittenhouse on eve of visit to Kenosha,” USA Today, Aug. 31, 2020. widest margin: Alec Tyson and Shiva Maniam, “Behind Trump’s victory: Divisions by race