Kyle Rittenhouse, acquitted in 2021 after fatally shooting three rioters in Kenosha during August 2020’s politically fueled unrest, reveals how media smears, death threats, and civil lawsuits—like one from Joseph Grosskreutz—have haunted him since. Legally armed under Wisconsin law, he criticizes the NRA’s silence and Governor Tony Evers’ delayed National Guard response while warning gun control erodes self-defense rights amid rising tensions. Now 20 and battling PTSD, Rittenhouse remains a polarizing figure, supported by conservatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene but isolated until after his trial, as he fights lawsuits with his service dog Milo while questioning whether America’s future holds more unrest. [Automatically generated summary]
Looking back, the Kyle Rittenhouse story is one of the most important and significant in recent memory.
It was only a little over three years ago.
It was in August of 2020 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, an industrial town in that state.
And riots had broken out after the death of George Floyd.
And at the time, a lot of people imagined these were a direct response to George Floyd's murder.
But, of course, they weren't.
The entire thing was orchestrated, and the people you saw rioting were, in fact, militia working on behalf of the Democratic Party with funding from some of the richest people in the United States.
The whole thing had a political purpose, and, of course, that was achieved in the end, beating Donald Trump or getting him out of office.
But at the time, in the middle of that chaos, almost nobody, and that would include the local police department, stood up to defend the town of Kenosha.
And so that job was left to, among just a few others, a teenager called Kyle Rittenhouse.
Rittenhouse showed up in Kenosha that night in August to defend a car lot that its owner thought would be burned.
So Rittenhouse showed up with nobody else with a rifle to defend this lot.
During that riot, several people tried to murder Kyle Rittenhouse, including a recently released mental patient who had a history of raping children, who tried to seize Kyle Rittenhouse's rifle and kill him with it.
He was not the only one who tried to do that.
Kyle Rittenhouse defended himself with force and survived.
For doing that, he was charged with murder.
He went on trial and was ultimately acquitted.
But in the process, we really saw who's on which side.
People looked to Kyle Rittenhouse and said, obviously, you're on the right side.
You're trying to defend the town of Kenosha against rioters and then your own life against murderers.
And those who saw Kyle Rittenhouse as a threat to their plans to acquire more power, because Kyle Rittenhouse exercised the most basic right of all, and that's the right of self-defense.
Well, it's hard to believe, but Kyle Rittenhouse today is only 20 years old.
That's how young he was when that happened.
He's had a remarkable life, and he's written about it in a new book called Acquitted, and we're honored to have him here on the set.
I'm still learning life lessons, but going through that trial, spending time in jail, and just having the trajectory of my life change from wanting to be a firefighter, EMT, or a police officer to becoming this person of having to defend myself and being thrust into the national spotlight, being used on.
Political campaigns such as Joe Biden's campaign where he called me a white supremacist and just having my face plastered everywhere, calling me a white supremacist, a racist, a vigilante, and just smearing my name.
I saw an interview you did the other day with someone I actually like and know well.
But the framing of your story was really striking to me.
Effectively demanded that you apologize for not being killed in Kenosha.
The idea is that you had no right to defend yourself and you should have been murdered by the child molester or the apparent Satanist who went after you later with a gun.
Like, you should have submitted to that.
Is that a little bit weird to have people say to your face, I'm sorry that you weren't murdered?
I think I know what you're talking about is some of the questions he asked me.
I personally think they were out of line questions because I don't think he would have asked a person who was, say, in Israel who had to defend himself or defend his country.
I don't think he would have asked him the same questions, but I don't know why he asked me.
I mean, the only reason I'm bringing it up is because I think he speaks for many, and the person I'm talking about is a thoughtful, nice person, in my opinion.
But those questions perhaps reflected his having not thought about it.
That's kind of the view of a lot of people.
Like, how dare Kyle Rittenhouse use force to defend his own life?
So there's been so much lying about what happened to you, but you're in this kind of amazing position where there's a contemporaneous video record of what happened, so anyone who's actually interested can watch.
And I would strongly recommend that.
It's one of the reasons I wanted to champion your cause, because I watched the tape, and that's just, there's kind of no denying what happened.
At one point, and pardon my bad memory, there was a guy who stuck a gun right in your face.
To some left-winger, which of course I would not do, but if I saw someone I didn't like him and I just went up and pointed a gun in his face, I'm pretty confident I'd be arrested for that.
So, I want to get to what your life has been like since that day in August of 2020, but I have to ask, has it ever occurred to you, so you're 17 years old at the time, literally a child, And from a working-class background, for sure, you've worked all through high school, you have no privilege whatsoever, and you're a kid.
And this town starts burning because the militias show up to burn it.
And, like, where are the men?
Why does it fall to you to do this?
Like, where are the men of Kenosha?
Why aren't they standing outside their homes and businesses with firearms to defend their property, their families?
You just hear them saying 17-year-old vigilante, 17-year-old white supremacist, and a bunch of other slurs, which I talk a lot about in my book, which is available for pre-order at writtenhousebook.com, where I go more into the story.
But the smeary 17-year-old kid at the time saying I was all these bad things because I was attacked and I defended myself, and it's on video.
The other thing, and I hate to pick all these wounds.
I'm a wound picker.
But you used a firearm to defend your own life, okay?
So it turns out we actually have a fairly well-funded organization in this country designed to support you in that principle, which is foundational, self-defense.
And I just want to ask you point blank, how much help did you receive from the NRA? I didn't receive any help from the NRA. I know people who work with the NRA, and they don't want to touch my case.
They don't want to help with the civil lawsuits.
They didn't want to help with the criminal lawsuits.
One of the organizations that did step up and help me is the National Association for Gun Rights.
I don't know if you've heard of them, but they really helped with my legal bills and they helped.
Pay some of the bills that I were facing because my family wasn't able to work.
They really stepped up to the plate, and they're continuing to help me to this day with some of my legal fees that I'm facing with a little bit of that.
Absolutely, and hopefully in the future I'm able to go to college, but right now I'm just working a nine-to-five job, trying to pay rent and trying to live out as normal as life as possible.
I know that's difficult right now because I'm doing all this media to talk about my book and to talk about these civil lawsuits that I'm facing, but I hope five, ten years down the road, maybe even...
Is it weird to see, say, the leaders of BLM, who are at least in some sense responsible for these riots, get rich and get all this money from corporate America and have nine houses and become literally millionaires for not doing anything other than destroy things?
I don't know how people can donate to causes that they know are going towards buying bricks and billy clubs to bash windows and throw at police officers.
I think especially with the election season coming up, the Israel-Hamas war, I think there will be more Palestinian, because there's a lot of protests with the Palestinians sparking up right now.
I think those are going to turn into riots.
That's just my personal belief.
I think it's going to spark up the closer we get to an election.
A lot of people, they go out and it's deer season in Texas right now, rifle season.
A lot of people go out and they hunt and get their tag limit for their deer and they feed their family throughout the year with what they hunt and harvest.
I'll be sitting in a restaurant and then people will just be like, start staring at me and then they'll pull out their phone and they'll just try to sneak pictures of me.
There was in the in the exchange that you had recently in an interview that you just did, the one that I Referred to earlier, that I did feel was scolding you for living.
But there was one point that is actually a fair question, which is, like, what did that...
I mean, you defended yourself.
I think every man in that position would do the same, I hope.
And he knows, like, if I'm not waking up from a nightmare and he knows I'm having a bad dream, he'll, like, physically wake me up and he'll just be there for me and support me in a way.
I mean, I could talk about dogs for hours, but do you actually think, like, watching your life since you've gotten this dog, do you think your life has improved?
I'm not where I want to be or should be at my age.
I want to catch up to my peer group, maybe do some tutoring, and then go to college and get an education when this whole ordeal of I'm going on media and when I'm done promoting the book is over.
I felt Him saying, like, hey, whatever happens is going to happen, and I'm going to be with you through it all.
Because you're never alone because God's always with you.
I'm still working on growing my religion and having a better understanding of how God wants me to live my life and becoming a better, stronger Christian.
So I'm not calling for vindictiveness or anything like that.
However, I do think it's worth knowing the people who supported you, who have supported you over the last three years, and the people who have attacked you.
Who would you say your biggest supporters have been and who have your biggest detractors been?
Those have been my biggest supporters and mostly a lot of people on the conservative side of things, the constitutionalists, people who believe in the rule of law.
My biggest critics have been really people who don't really Have like a sense of what's going on.
They'll be like reporters from left-leaning news companies.
And then what they write goes into other people's heads, which I would say most of America is independent, slightly left-leaning, slightly right-leaning.
You're the second person we just interviewed, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and they've been trying to kill her at her house, kill her by swatting her for years, and she did not sound confident that law enforcement was doing its best to protect her.
I see that a lot with a lot of politicians and public figures.
I think sometimes law enforcement may be scared, like, oh, if we protect them, we're going to get scrutinized, they're going to sue us, or they're going to pull our funding, or they're going to label us far right, and we're just going to have riots and protests in our area, and I don't think they want that.
But there were definitely people who wanted to wait until a verdict out of political pressure that they'll lose voters or constituents if they come out strong support of me.
I can definitely see in the future that more of this will play out, more of this will happen, especially if the politicians who are running this country are still in office and they continue to enable it and they continue to encourage violence, encourage rioting.
I could definitely see more riots and more violence in the future.
Do you find it weird that there's a group with a name and, you know, a presence on social media, Antifa, Antifa, however we're pronouncing it, and they're a militia, an organized group, far bigger than the Proud Boys or whatever kind of...
Fake threat.
They're telling us exists.
Those guys are all in jail.
But there's this group and, like, no one's done anything to find out who they are, where's the money coming from.
No one's been indicted.
They're just free to kind of hurt people and wreck our cities.
I do think that looking back when, you know, people's...
Brains clear.
Hopefully it won't be too late at that point.
What happened to you, your response to what happened to you, your trial, the aftermath, all of it will be seen as a really significant moment in American history and I just hope that you're able to live a life fully in this country despite what happened.