Modern conservatives love to own the libs by supporting people who claim they’ve been “canceled.” Yet Kyle Rittenhouse can’t seem to draw a crowd, no matter how many times he gets shut down.
In January, Rittenhouse headlined the Rally Against Censorship in Conroe, Texas, an event you’d expect to draw a healthy turnout in a Texas county that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. But when I arrived, only about six people had lined up for the early-access VIP snaps with Rittenhouse, mostly paunchy older white men in black button-down shirts, black jeans, and cowboy hats.
In 2020, Rittenhouse, then 17, shot three people, killing two of them, during protests over police violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He became a household name. Prosecutors charged him with multiple felonies. During his trial, Rittenhouse testified that he’d acted in self-defense. The jury acquitted him of all charges in November 2021.
At first, Rittenhouse espoused a hope for a new life. Four days after his not-guilty verdict, he told NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield that he was considering changing his name, growing a beard, and losing some weight so people wouldn’t recognize him in public. “I just want to be a normal 18-year-old college student trying to better my future and get into a career in nursing,” he said, explaining that he didn’t like fans asking him for selfies. “I just don’t want to be taking pictures with people I don’t know.”
Yet there he was in Conroe, more than a year later, sporting not a beard but a suit and tie and mugging for photos with strangers who’d paid the $275 VIP fee to meet him. Rather than slink off into anonymity after his acquittal, Rittenhouse has spent the past year trying to rebrand himself as a free speech and gun-rights activist. Following the siren song of the right-wing industrial complex, Rittenhouse, now 20, spends his time going on podcasts, attending conventions, and taking selfies with fans. He tends to stick to safe spaces: Zoom interviews from his bedroom with sympathetic B-list right-wing media—Sebastian Gorka, fringy YouTubers—or the occasional star turn at scripted conventions hosted by the conservative youth group Turning Point USA. He risks few public appearances outside that cozy bubble.
The Rally Against Censorship—sponsored by Defiance Press, a publishing house that has put out books by controversial figures such as noted Islamaphobe Frank Gaffney and infamous Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio—should have been a hot ticket. Indeed, at least 1,000 people had registered for the event online. But as the night wore on, fewer than half of the 450 white chairs I counted ever filled up, even though general admission was free. The empty seats were a stark indicator that Rittenhouse’s quest for conservative influencer status isn’t winning many converts, even as it’s destroying whatever second chance his acquittal might have promised for a normal life.
Defiance had originally planned to host the rally at the local Southern Star brewery. When word spread on social media that Rittenhouse would be there, the brewery pulled out, prompting a wave of furor among conservatives and a barrage of death threats against the brewery owners. A week after the brewery cancellation, Rittenhouse was in Las Vegas during the Shot Show, the gun industry’s biggest trade show. He was scheduled to headline a private event sponsored by the National Association for Gun Rights at a Venetian hotel restaurant. But the hotel, located only two miles down the Strip from where a gunman slaughtered 60 people in 2017, pulled the plug on the event at the last minute, saying that it “did not align with our property’s core event guidelines.”
In an editorial in the Washington Times, Rittenhouse complained that he’d been “stripped of my right of expression at establishments in Texas and Las Vegas” by “far-left trolls.” Not to worry, however, Rittenhouse declared that he would never give up. “I’m sure left-wingers will continue to try to pressure venues to cancel my events,” he wrote. “I’m not deterred. I’m used to firing back.”
Apparently, not all killers can be right wing stars. I’m surprised.