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.
“Charlie Kirk has said a lot of racist things,” said a student addressing Rittenhouse from the audience.
“What racist things has Charlie Kirk said?” Rittenhouse challenged. “We’re gonna have a little bit of a dialogue of what racist things that Charlie Kirk said.”
The student responded of Kirk: “He says that we shouldn’t celebrate Juneteenth, we shouldn’t celebrate Martin Luther King day—we should be working those days—he called Ketanji Brown Jackson an affirmative action hire, he said all this nonsense about George Floyd, and he said he’d be scared if a Black pilot was on a plane. Does that not seem racist?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Rittenhouse said from the stage, prompting jeers among the audience.
“Does that seem racist is a yes or no question, Kyle,” yelled one attendee.
“Well, after all the things I just told you, would you consider that hate speech,” the student asked Rittenhouse, who had a dog with him onstage.
“I’m not gonna comment on that,” Rittenhouse said, sparking more noise from the crowd.
Seconds later, Rittenhouse abruptly exited the stage to cheers from the crowd. The attendees were then promptly ordered to depart the venue.
They fly him around the country, but the media outfit he’s working for didn’t bother to invest in media training for their homicidal poster boy?
So much for standing your ground.
Fuck yeah, make that piece of shit feel bad. Pure uncut Colombian schadenfreude.
“Uncut Colombian” is a drug reference for cocaine. He’s just trying to say it’s the “best of the best”.
“I don’t know anything about that,”
This seems to be the canned response to all “uncomfortable” topics.
It seems that right-wing “debates” are not about arguing a point or another, but bringing up the “right” talking points, and backing out the wrong ones.
Please don’t normalizing hating on people for not knowing something. If you think he actually knows kirk said these things, then please provide the proof. But if you are simply attacking him for admitting he doesn’t know something, then you’re part of the problem.
There’s a very simple way to answer this sort of question that was posed — by condemning the blatant racism of the statements themselves while acknowledging he didn’t know if Kirk had said them — and he decided not to do that.
“We’re gonna have a little bit of a dialogue of what racist things that Charlie Kirk said.”
“I don’t know anything about that,”
Not much of a dialogue lol
Someone taught him how to have the aesthetics of a rational argument, but forgot the part about the substance.
They haven’t yet taught him how to deflect the truth. Teach him that what he believes is bullshit, but profitable. Teach him how to understand and ignore the truth. Teach him how to just be louder than opposition. Have him memorize talking points and teach him to always retreat to them (especially when not appropriate). Give him 15 years of practice doing that, then he’ll be great at owning college libs, preferably on camera.
I mean that seems fair that he wouldn’t comment on something he doesn’t know about
“I haven’t heard those quotes before. Presented without context, they sound pretty bad but I will reserve judgement until I’ve had a chance to do more research.”
That wasn’t that hard of a question to duck.
Yea, I bet he wished he could have illegally crossed state lines with a firearm he wasn’t legally allowed to have again to protect himself from these organized students
Even if you don’t think it was murder, it’s repulsive that he is trying to make a career out of killing two people.
just watch how many will refute being “racist” or a “murderer”
not both; because that would be messed up
He’s a mascot for the GOP - I doubt he’d have that hard a time getting a job at Fox or some other misinformation distributor.
Who the fuck would listen to him? He’s got all the charisma you’d expect a snot-nosed faux-crying-at-trial murderous teenager would have. Playing the “victim” of the “woke leftist mob” only gets you 15 minutes- just ask that dipshit AR-wielding ambulance chaser and his mustard-covered wife in Missouri how famous they are these days.
To be a fox news anchor, you have to have a personality. I mean, it can be one where you scream and yell, but you can’t walk off the stage—because the show must go on. He’s annoying, even to his own, and a liability.
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TPUSA is running the show, not Rittenhouse. They recruited him like an intelligence asset by showering him with praise and “favors” in a time where he was (deservedly) receiving national ire.
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People need to understand that the American right has a pervasive violent ideation. His actions are repulsive to you, but they are normal, necessary, and a sign of strength to the gun-owning right. Many, many Americans love what he did.
These people Want. To. Kill. You.
I think the debate is nuanced so I’m not trying to say it’s absolutely equatable, I’m more trying to feel out your actual position.
If a woman was being abused by her husband, stood up to him and killed him in self defense…if domestic abuse/survivor groups invited her to speak, would it be also repulsive?
Or say that woman armed herself as a child(17 yr old) and walked into a tense situation of strangers untrained and ready to shoot someone… and then ends up shooting someone. Might be a better comparison.
Perfect example. She shoots him with a gun she bought and then brought back home. To the people who think he’s a victim, you’re the one saying “well, she should have left him and certainly not brought the gun into the house!”
But I understand that the question will be avoided at all costs, because that’s the only way to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
Maybe I’m missing something as I’m not from the states. Why the hell is a guy who is famous for murder invites to talk at a university?
Rittenhouse was invited to speak at Wednesday’s event by the university’s Turning Point USA (TPUSA) chapter. Founded in 2012, the non-profit promotes conservative politics at schools and college campuses.
It’s insane that the only reason he was noticed and brought into their political organization was through murder shooting and killing people.
That’s how gangs initiate people.
Edit: removed “murder” so nobody whines about whether he lawfully drove to another state with a gun and shot people.
for the express purpose of intimidating people and hopefully getting the opportunity to shoot them in ‘self defense’
Our gun culture is so nuts that it normalizes shit like this.
When you look at it this way, it is utterly unsurprising that we have so many mass shootings.
This isn’t normalisation, it’s celebration.
I’m not going to be coy about why they’re celebrating him either: The pro-gun community spends hour after hour theorycrafting about how they can shoot people with their cool guns and get away with it. Kyle is being celebrated for finding a new “get out of jail free” technique that specifically targeted undesirables for murder.
That’s all there is to it. They shower him with fame and money because he killed BLM protesters with America’s favourite gun. It’s his reward.
To me the nightmare is going to happen when we see more doxing with open carry. Imagine a situation where there will be apps listing the people to be targeted, people follow them around with guns, and the moment they react to the threat they get murdered under stand your ground. All perfectly legal.
Don’t forget that he murdered people at a BLM protest, so Cons also think he’s a hero.
It’s because the US right will celebrate literally any action that they perceive as working against what they think everyone left of them supports or enjoys. Kyle was a clean cut looking young white man who heroically skirted the edge of laws regarding firearm purchases and visited a town that was not his own where he made sure to keep looking until he find a situation that required him to use his gun. The context was protests fueled by the death of George Floyd and shooting of Jacob Blake at the hands of police.
There were probably folks who literally touched themselves after hearing a red blooded, AR wielding young white man was able to be acquitted of murder after shooting protesters at a BLM protest. On top of that, one of the men had some form of pedophilia in his past, boosting their drumbeat of messaging claiming that folks who support LGBTQ+, and by extension all democrats and leftists, are groomers out to molest kids.
It was a perfect storm of trump supporter daydreams all centered around Kyle Rittenhouse. Folks who buy into all or most of that view are big fans.
Because having someone else buy a gun for you that you can’t legally buy, traveling to a confrontational hotspot with your guns, failing to leave a situation that was escalating, and that choice leading to one shooting a mentally ill bipolar person is perfectly legal. And the right wing absolutely wants to make sure everyone knows that. So he gets to be trotted out for any occasion where they need a “famous” person who chose to exercise their right to self-defense, despite making every effort to place themselves in a situation where it might be necessary.
But that’s not his fault.
He also managed to escape open carry laws because the judge deemed any rifle above 15 inches was not a “Deadly Weapon” despite Rittenhouse using the weapon to cause multiple deaths, due to loose interpretation of the grammar of the written laws. And the state congress in IL did nothing to correct him.
Because of TP USA.
I feel now is a good time to pimp our community, !toiletpaperusa@lemmy.world
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !toiletpaperusa@lemmy.world
Because he’s famous for racist murder.
Yeah our country isn’t doing great. Send ethics
calling it a racist murder just shows how much you really know about the topic at hand 🤣 goodness
He went out of his way to go to a blm protest with a rifle to protect shops from protestors. Legally it wasn’t murder according to the jury, but I’m not charging him with that crime, I’m saying someone who isn’t a racist wouldn’t put themselves in that position
For better or worse rightwing groups often get to give talks at universities under freedom of speech laws. It is not an ideal situation. And frankly with the internet I don’t see why anyone can claim that they don’t have a medium to express their views.
It’s whatever, my uni had a few controversial speakers and I just didn’t attend their talks
- He’s not famous for murder.
- The university didn’t invite him to talk, it was just the venue.
He is only famous because he is a murderer and he got away with it. He has nothing else going for him at all.
He was literally acquitted of murder. I’m not saying he’s famous - he’s really an obscure nobody - but his biggest claim to fame not only is legally not murder, claiming it is murder in a way people might take seriously, like a newspaper article, would open you up to liability for slander, since you’d be making claims it would be easy to prove in court you knew to be false when you made them.
He’s a killer, yes. He killed people. That’s considered potentially distinct from murder in checks notes every country on Earth.
Because the actual story fits blearily enough well with republican’s “good guy with a gun” mythos. Trigger Warning: Violence, Death, and Bodily Injury.
If I’m wrong, please correct me and cite your sources.
a guy who is famous for murder
Correction: Famously accused of murder and acquitted of all charges despite rigorous cross examination and ever increasingly difficult hurdles to claiming self defence… such as assuming provocation incited the first attacker. Also despite intense political pressure from then and current POTUS Joseph Biden, who was vocally in favor of murder charges until after the not-guilty verdict was delivered.
His first attacker, Joseph Rosenbaum (deceased): “The man with a toothbrush.” A belligerent 36 year old bare chested man. Chasing a 17 year old with a firearm, who was running away. A convicted child molester. At the time being tried for assault and out on bail. Shot at close range.
His second attacker, Anthony Huber (deceased): An avid skater, chasing down a presumed murderer fleeing in the direction of the police. Assailed the accused in the shoulder, neck, and head with a skateboard and grappled over the rifle. Shot at close range.
Third, Gaige Grosskreutz the star witness of the trial: a trained paramedic who chased the presumed murderer alongside Anthony Huber. Confronted the 17 year old, who had immediately prior, shot Anthony Huber while wrestling on the ground. Drew his pistol and immediately lost his right bicep upon pointing his weapon at the accused.
The 17 year old, Kyle Rittenhouse, then approached officers with his hands above his head, and was told to get out of the road. Fears of a mass shooter caused the crowds to disperse.
Please stop calling the idiot a murderer. He was acquitted, and the people who attacked him are none too heroic after looking at their part in the events, nor after seeing their criminal records.
Please stop calling the idiot a murderer.
Who, Kyle Rittenhouse the scared little boy who murdered two people? Nah, I think I’ll keep calling him what he is, but you keep on living in your fantasy world down there in the States where gunning down people in the streets and schools is a normal every day thing.
I would also like to remind people of Brock Allen Turner, the rapist, who changed his name to just Allen Turner, who is also still a rapist. Just so that we don’t forget.
Believe whatever you like, I’m not the world thought police. Discredit yourself if it please you. Fantasy is often preferable to reality and I won’t fault you for it.
you keep on living in your fantasy world down there in the States
You’re as likely to be Mr. United States as I am Mr. Canuk.
How many judges pose for photos with the defendant of violent crimes? That judge did.
That’s a new tidbit. Thank you.
As far as discrediting the trial, the jurors determine guilt.
In America, the judge is allowed to dismiss or accept evidence and facts, which can skew a trial one way or another. However, this trial was almost ridiculously thorough. The jurors were not aware of the attackers’ backgrounds, nor were allowed to consider the attackers’ other actions that night. Jurors were told to consider the defendant had instigated the incident. On the stand, the paramedic admitted he expected he wouldn’t have been shot if he didn’t point his firearm at the defendant, meaning he was aware he wasn’t chasing a mass-shooter, and might otherwise be called a murderer by everyone who is calling the defendant one.
Apologist, possibly. I will absolutely defend that which I hold true. As a pedant, I will assert molesters are not rapists for molesting, rapists are not murderers for raping, and correctly classifying terrible things or events is not apologising, defending, or minimising. By all means call him a killer.
Murder apologist is a straw man I won’t be stepping to.
Kindness to remind myself not to lash out or insult people over internet comments. What’s your username mean?
A. You don’t loose the right to a fair trail because you are a criminal, a former criminal, or even just an asshole. Nor are you allowed to be murdered. It doesn’t matter how shit these people were a random guy with a gun doesn’t get to decide if they live or die.
B. It is bizarre how prior situations only work against the victims. Everyone loves to point out that the victims were criminals and at the same time ignore the fact that Rittenhouse out himself in that situation
C. I will call that piece of shit a fucking murderer to his fucking face if I ever fucking see him. He is a murderer. Even if God were real, and came down and told me straight off that he is not a murderer in my assessment of the facts he is.
It doesn’t matter how shit these people were a random guy with a gun doesn’t get to decide if they live or die.
A valid point. Do you feel the same way about the paramedic?
Rittenhouse out himself in that situation
Another valid point. I agree.
C.
Please yourself. Your assessment and a definition are worth something.
How you sound to others is your problem, but personally I’d suggest you pick up a dictionary and then go with something more astute, such as killer, man-slayer, or gunman. Possibly gunboy.
I’m not defending him. But he was acquitted, so he’s not famous for murder. A bunch of people believe that he genuinely acted in legitimate self defense, and thus he is a symbol of the correct use of arms for self defense and a victim of a system that tried to jail him for doing so.
The Judge deemed a rifle above 15 inches was not a “Deadly Weapon” due to wild interpretation of the grammar of the state laws. He went to a protest with a military style rifle and shot people in two separate confrontations, killing 2 people. He is a murderer, it’s just been ruled that murdering political opponents was allowed in this case.
Hell he drove across state lines to get said protest. His whole purpose was to kill people he was itching to do so.
I am against killing people but if this little fucker was shot and killed I feel no remorse.
OJ Simpson was acquitted. What’s he famous for? Because it definitely isn’t football.
And does anyone actually legitimately think oj simpson acted in self defense? Or does everyone recognized that it was a botched prosecution.
But he was acquitted
Irrelevant.
He’s famous for being a murderer, whether he was found guilty or not doesn’t matter.
A bunch of people believe that he genuinely acted in legitimate self defense
They’re stupid, simple as.
Irrelevant.
Murder is literally the illegal killing of someone. So yes it absolutely matters whether he was convicted. To claim it’s irrelevant that he was found not guilty of murder just exposes how detached from reality your position is. We can argue that he should have been found guilty, but you have to realize that the people who disagree with you don’t think he’s a murderer.
They’re stupid, simple as.
And I’ve heard plenty of them make the claim anyone who thinks he is a murderer is stupid. In this regard, you’re just like them.
The legal system can piss on a person and tell them it’s raining, and you’d be willing to drink it.
Why the fuck is this person on a stage to begin with?
“Everyone, Kyle Rittenhouse is here to tell us about indiscriminately provoking people and killing them. Round of applause, please.”
