Kyle Rittenhouse

Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy
by Jennifer Carlson
Published 2 May 2023

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 was deemed straightforwardly undeniable. Rittenhouse was ultimately acquitted in late 2021,76 and for some on the Right, he was not merely exonerated, but also elevated as “a folk hero”: “For millions, 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 skeptical stance that many conservatives brought to bear on the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, and eventually the results of the 2020 presidential election?

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Rittenhouse was ultimately acquitted in late 2021,76 and for some on the Right, he was not merely exonerated, but also elevated as “a folk hero”: “For millions, 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 skeptical stance that many conservatives brought to bear 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 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 “good guys with guns” willing to wield violence against those they deemed acute threats (in Rittenhouse’s case, Black Lives Matter protesters).

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The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond. Verso 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/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. New York Times. Accessed May 9, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/trump-proud-boys-biden.html.

Health and Safety: A Breakdown
by Emily Witt
Published 16 Sep 2024

Two days after the shooting, a group of self-styled militia members convened a Facebook group called the Kenosha Guard, which posted an event titled “Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property.” Facebook 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 shot and killed two white protesters, Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, and wounded another white protester, Gaige Grosskreutz, with a Smith & Wesson M&P, an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle that had been purchased for him by an eighteen-year-old friend because Rittenhouse was underage.

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She wore a gray beanie and was surrounded by a tattooed and pierced group of friends with scrapes on their elbows and gauges in their ears. Later that night, I clicked through Facebook memes of Anthony Huber clutching the fatal gunshot wound on 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’s girlfriend. A GoFundMe had started for Rittenhouse’s defense. “Don’t beat yourself up, you did what you had to do, and it was the people who attacked you who determined your actions,” wrote someone who donated fifty dollars.

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It was all starting to fold in on itself: the murders committed by police in Ferguson, Staten Island, Louisville, and Minneapolis; the teenage shooters of Parkland and Santa Fe, Texas; the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The right-wing militia movement was now making 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 and a little bit of Alex Jones. In Kenosha, political affiliation did not determine who had a gun; I saw holstered sidearms on all sides. And in Kenosha, as in other places I’d been, calls for calm were seen as either paternalistic admonishments or just ignored.

American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15
by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson
Published 25 Sep 2023

He used both publicly available manufacturing data published by the federal government as well as confidential numbers provided by gunmakers. “It looked cool”: Paige Williams, “The Complex Task Facing the Kyle Rittenhouse Jury,” 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/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, January 20, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/virginia-officials-on-guard-for-pro-gun-rally-in-richmond-11579516202.

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One person told police, “He definitely has an AR-15.” In fact, the man carried a pellet gun made to look like an M4. The man called police for help when protesters confronted him. What 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 him and igniting protests. Rittenhouse and a friend, who was also armed, said they were there to protect the business from looters. Rittenhouse wasn’t allowed to purchase such a gun because he was under eighteen, so a friend bought the rifle for him.

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
by Jeff Sharlet
Published 21 Mar 2023

The red car followed. “She kept ramming into me.” Eight times. Maybe more. “A lot of times.” The student shook and shook. “Half my body went numb.” ›‹ Had Evelyn not 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 original defense attorney declared Rittenhouse had fired the first shot of the “Second American Revolution.”1 Instead, Evelyn is just a woman who went too far—or, from the point of view of QAnon, not far enough.

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At the podium now was John Pierce, Esq., a ruddy-faced Harvard man in a pink Brooks Brothers shirt who boasted a roster of past and present clients representing nearly the full range of 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. Just like me and you; perhaps she was even more.” Even more like “us” than we are ourselves. Yes, I thought, considering the range of the gathering, the grief at the podium and the violent glee in the street.

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Will this bend? Will this one break? I was visiting friends in Wisconsin when we drove past the coffin. They let me out to make a picture. “Careful,” they said, and, “We’ll 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 which players shoot at turkeys labeled “fake news.” I read on Twitter that Wisconsin Republicans had refused an effort by the governor to convene a special legislative session to repeal a dormant 1849 law making any abortion—including for rape or incest—a felony.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

Facebook acknowledged it was ‘a means for those seeking to spread hate and cause harm’ in what has since been described as the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority.12 (Facebook would later reject a request to share data that could have helped hold the Myanmar military accountable at the International Court of Justice.13) Facebook 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 it more than 455 times, but the company left it visible.14 Many platforms make an apparently arbitrary distinction between what is acceptable to say and what isn’t.

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid
by Lawrence Wright
Published 7 Jun 2021

DARK SHADOWS “Biden says he’s going”: “Donald Trump Laura Ingraham Interview Transcript August 31: Says People ‘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, gender, education,” Pew Research Center, Nov. 9, 2016. “unbreakable lead”: Nate Silver, “The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election,” FiveThirtyEight, May 3, 2016.

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy
by Jamie Raskin
Published 4 Jan 2022

Banks had been trashing the idea of a select committee, saying that we should instead look at the violence that broke out around the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020—giving us 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 in a Black Lives Matter protest.) Jordan, of course, was a political intimate of President Trump’s and was present in at least one strategic session with the White House to plan the January 6 offensive.

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
Published 25 Apr 2023

They surrounded a police car and kept the president from leaving for two hours. Not surprisingly, he left for a new job on another campus within a year. SDSU’s next president, Adela de la Torre, took a different approach, 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… lead to certain members of our community experiencing much higher levels of stress. This is especially true for those who experience unfounded biases and microaggressions in their day to day lives.… These recent years have been challenging and, at some times, devastating.