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.
There’s a very simple way to answer this sort of question that was posed — by condemning the blatant racism of the statements themselves while acknowledging he didn’t know if Kirk had said them — and he decided not to do that.
The issue is he couldn’t know at that moment if what the students said or their portrayal of it is accurate. Furthermore, people can’t just instantly reach informed conclusions about things, a lot of people need, yk time to think. If I try to think about something on the spot I’ll just stutter and not make any sense
“I am not aware of these comments or their context, but if said—yes, I agree they are racist.” Not hard.
That’s easy to say in retrospect, it’s hard for a lot of people to answer something they didn’t expect on the spot, even if they know the answer