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.
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
Careful, he may feel the urge to self-defend again from hecklers.
He crossed state lines to hunt people, and now has a taste for human blood.
Your warning is legitimate.
I honestly feel bad for this kid. His parents are clearly unhinged, which caused him to end up thinking he needed to defend businesses in another state from rioters, and the right using him as a tool of propaganda along with the expectations that come with that cannot be healthy for the mind.
Fuck off with that bullshit. He is a murderer who should be rotting in jail. Instead he is gifting off those murders and deserves every misfortune that comes his way.
Overly simplistic, but ok. I don’t think he should be walking about freely either. Just saying, we’re all products of our genetics, environment, and upbringing.
He’s clearly making a decent living from this, all because he murdered someone and got away with it. I feel much worse about the family of the dead, or people working minimum wage trying to get by. I feel just about zero sympathy for this kid. Sure, maybe he was raised in a bad position, but it was his choice to do what he did. Do you see many other people raised in bad situations doing what he did? That’s on him, not his parents.
I get you on this. A lot of people really struggle to maintain empathy with people they may otherwise find despicable, but to me, increasing empathy in the world among and for literally everyone is a paramount goal. Take this example: A huge percentage of men who sexually assault children were sexually assaulted themselves as children. It’s easy to dehumanize someone in this situation, but the reality is they have been both a victimizer and a victim in their lives. People are way more complex than our present instant judgment-based society allows for.
All that said, all Kyle Rittenhouse has to do is shut his ugly goddamn mouth if he wants to stop getting lambasted by the public.
I get what you’re saying. He was a kid and probably had a fucked up childhood that led to everything. It’s rare that people like that develop in a vacuum. But that’s an explanation of how he got here, not an excuse.
Now he’s an adult. There are definitely people on the right using him, but he made the decision to let them. He could have easily slunk into the shadows and gone on with his life. Instead, he felt the court acquittal wasn’t enough and had to continue to prove he was right for his actions on the public stage. That’s his choice and his alone.
He deserves the ridicule.
I’m sure a significant number of people in his life told him how to do the right thing and he choose racially based violence and murdered people.
There is no reason to feel sorry for him. At best we understand how he got to be such a waste of oxygen and try to counter that.
I feel like the right will abandon him completely someday soon. He keeps messing up, and has zero charisma to really be a figurehead or an icon.
He will then attempt to find himself and show so much remorse in an attempt to grift the left side of politics. Something something “what happened was awful, and a 17 year old should have never been allowed to have a weapon” - and it will all be said without ever taking responsibility or admitted to wrongdoing.
“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.
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.
“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.
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.
