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.
Did you even watch the video? He clearly acted in self defense, there’s no question about it. Although he clearly did seek trouble by coming to the protests with weapons, which was reckless AF, he didn’t actually attack anyone. And even when he was assaulted, he didn’t dump his mag (like we see in virtually every cop video when cops just routinely dump their mags into perps), but shot just enough to stop the assailants. That doesn’t make him a murderer. He was a stupid kid making really stupid decisions that put him in a dangerous situation, but he did act in accordance with the law. I am glad for him to be alive, he could easily have been killed that day himself.
I also saw the other videos from the same night where people pointed at Rittenhouse and claim they would have left if he hadn’t gone after them everytime they went for their cars. The ones where Rittenhouse lied to police about being a trained EMT when they told him he was violating curfew and to go him (Protip: If he hadn’t have done that no one would be dead), the ones where Rittenhouse said he couldn’t wait to shoot people after seeing some antifa guys leaving the CVS, the ones where he bragged about not using non-lethal…
The ones that prove this was premeditated!
Or how about the one where he stands over the body to brag about the kill over the phone to Dominic Black, or how about how the “Chase” was immediately after Rosenbaum, most of the people he shot that night were heroes trying to stop what they thought was a mass shooter fleeing the scene.
And then there’s the fact that he came from the next state over specifically TO KILL! He may have finish the fight when it got bad for him, but he was looking for it to begin with.