The Patriot Post® · Rittenhouse Tells His Story

If you followed the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, you probably didn’t learn anything about him during his interview with Tucker Carlson last night that you hadn’t already sensed from his appearance on the witness stand 13 days ago. The kid comes across as earnest, humble, honest, matter-of-fact, and fundamentally decent.

And at times, we need to remind ourselves that he’s just that: a kid. That’s not to diminish him in any way. Indeed, just the opposite: Try to think back when you were his age, and consider how you’d have handled yourself under the same conditions. When we see the occasional deer-in-the-headlights look on his face, we sometimes forget that this is an 18-year-old boy, still three years from being able to legally buy a beer, and that the Left has put him through one hell of an ordeal during the past 15 months.

None of this is to say that the Carlson interview wasn’t worth watching. It was.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from the interview was Rittenhouse’s insistence on what the case was about, and what it wasn’t about. “This case has nothing to do with race,” he said. “It never had anything to do with race. It had to do with the right to self-defense.”

“In retrospect,” Carlson began, “it’s remarkable just how dishonest, how thoroughly and intentionally dishonest, the media coverage for the Kyle Rittenhouse story turned out to be. All of it was a lie. Rittenhouse was not a white supremacist. He was never in a militia. He never crossed state lines with a firearm,” and on and on.

Then he introduced Rittenhouse as coming from the least privileged sector of American society — as a kid who worked as a janitor and a fry cook to help support his family, as a kid who wanted to keep anarchic thugs from destroying his Kenosha community. And when he said the now-deceased child molester Joseph Rosenbaum’s first words to him were, “If I catch any of you em-effers alone, I’m going to effing kill you,” you believed him. Later on, Rosenbaum told Rittenhouse and his fellow property defenders, “I’m gonna cut your hearts out, you effing n-words.”

The prosecution apparently thought Rittenhouse should’ve just surrendered his weapon, taken his beating, and prayed that it would stop somewhere short of having his heart cut out.

Rittenhouse sounded both sensible and apolitical, especially when Carlson asked him why the rioters sought to burn down the car dealership he’d been asked to defend: “I don’t know. I think it was opportunists taking advantage of the [Black Lives Matter] movement. I agree with the BLM movement. I agree everyone has a right to protest and assemble, but I do not agree that people have the right to burn down [buildings]. … I don’t appreciate that people are burning down American cities to try to spread their message. I think there’s other ways to go around and do that.”

“I’m not a racist person,” he insisted. “I support the BLM movement. I support peacefully demonstrating. I believe there needs to be change. I believe there’s a lot of prosecutorial misconduct, not just in my case but in other cases. It’s just amazing to see how much a prosecutor can take advantage of someone.”

True that. Prosecutors Thomas Binger and James Kraus should hang their lousy heads in shame for the way they conducted themselves during the trial. But they won’t.

What does BLM think of Kyle Rittenhouse and his support? They called him “that little racist/terrorist,” and they likened him to George Zimmerman, who gave birth to the BLM movement more than eight years ago when he stopped Trayvon Martin from bashing his brains in by shooting him.

Rittenhouse will learn one day that no good deed goes unpunished, and that there’s no finding common ground with violent, money-grubbing, Marxist pressure groups like BLM.

Rittenhouse shared his thoughts on returning to a normal life, though he also told Carlson that he’d retained legal counsel for possible defamation lawsuits against then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and the corrupt mainstream media. We hope he’s a multimillionaire someday soon, just like young Nick Sandmann of Covington Catholic fame.

Rittenhouse talked about the humanity and the professionalism of his jailers, while also noting that he went for a month without taking a single shower. Why not? Because the water in his cell didn’t work, and he didn’t want to cause a fuss.

He also talked about the death threats, though, and the need for protection — and here he seemed remarkably composed. Especially for a young man of 18 who’s been forced to grow up far faster than most.