Kyle Rittenhouse acted like a real tough guy when he was strolling the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin in August 2020 with a semi-automatic rifle in his hands. Back then, he was a 17-year-old who (in his telling) was just protecting businesses from protestors at the shooty end of the barrel of an AR-15.
But when confronted with an expletive on a social media platform, suddenly he’s a poor widdle boy who shrinks from a mean, mean lady that uses scary words that start with the letter F.
Believe me when I tell you that the last thing I want to be writing about right now is Kyle fucking Rittenhouse. I wish I didn’t know his name. I wish none of us knew his name.
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I wish he was just some anonymous, gun-fetishizing 20-year-old high school dropout. Alas, that was not our collective good fortune. Instead, we got Kyle, the self-styled “good guy with a gun,” who was hailed a “hero” by the Right after he shot three men, two of them fatally, on that dark Wisconsin night.
And he is anything but content living a life of anonymity, which I (rather unexpectedly) experienced first-hand.
Last Saturday, finally home after a long drive from visiting relatives over Thanksgiving weekend, I poured myself a big glass of wine, let out a deep sigh, kicked my feet up, and opened up the X app (which I still call “Twitter”).
Instantly, I noticed my notifications were blowing up on something I had posted days before—which was my own spin on a trend where users described something about themselves and then stated that we were voting Biden/Harris in 2024.
Not particularly unusual for me. Not especially divisive.
And yet, there it was, at the top of the replies, like an eight-year-old teasing a classmate he secretly thinks is pretty—a one-word reply to my tweet.
“Gross,” tweeted Kyle Rittenhouse.
But why? I don’t post about him anymore. So why out of the blue would this punk jump on my tweet about Biden with such petulant, adolescent nonsense?
And then it hit me, he’d been trending for days. Days earlier, he announced he was releasing a book, his “story of survival, resilience, and justice.” I’ve got almost a million followers, and for the most part, they’re not likely his target audience.
I don’t know it for sure, but my guess: He was trying to piggyback on my engagement.
Trolls do this shit all the time, as do fading culture war figures that are no longer front page news nor regular Fox News guests.
Kyle Rittenhouse speaks to supporters of the 2nd Amendment at a rally on July 19, 2023 in Ionia, Michigan.
Bill Pugliano / GettyI really should know better than to give someone like him any oxygen on social media—which is almost certainly what he wanted—but I also felt compelled to (metaphorically) bop him in the nose once or twice. (I am from Jersey, after all.)
So, I went short and sweet, and told him to “fuck off.” (It’s like “Aloha” in New Jersian.) And I let him know that the grownups were talking.
I didn’t post it to bait a response. I didn’t want a response. I said what I said and walked away. But Kyle had more to say.
“So much for a grown up telling a 20 year old to fuck off but I guess that’s the left for you,” he wrote.
The entirely predictable responses came pouring in immediately. From both sides—like moths to a “Twitter fight” flame, they came.
But wait—was he really playing the “I’m just a kid” card? The guy who crisscrossed the country post-acquittal on a media blitz victory tour?
We went at it a bit more, as did many others in each of our mentions. On one side, you have those who believe he carried out some sort of vigilante-style justice, and on the other, you have those who believe that he is a murderer. There’s not much middle ground there.
But here’s the thing—at the end of the day, he doesn’t want to let that horrible night in Wisconsin be an unfortunate moment of his past. He wants to be well-known, hence the book painting himself as a hero.
At the same time, he wants to paint someone like me—a suburban mom who writes pugnaciously about politics—as a horrible, scary person. Not only that, but he wants his followers to believe my supposed monstrousness is typical of “the left,” as evidenced by my willingness to tell a 20-year-old to fuck off.
So what image is he trying to project? Is he the hero who bravely faced down unarmed protesters, killed two of them, and survived to tell the tale? Or is he trying to wind back the clock a few years to the time before he was an adult, in order to make it sound as if being told to “fuck off” is an act of political violence?
It’s time to be a grownup and choose a lane, Kyle.
