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.
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.