Free Republic

<p>In August 2020, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and injured a third. He claimed self-defense. Then, in fall 2021, he was acquitted of criminal accusations in a controversial, heated trial, and became a hero of far-right politicians and Second Amendment advocates.</p>

Students at East Tennessee State University and others gathered to march in protest of Kyle Rittenhouse on Thursday evening. The protest came just a few hours before the controversial figure spoke at the Brinkley Center for a Turning Point USA event, which is a student-led group on campus. In 2020, a then 17-year-old Rittenhouse shot and killed two men during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In 2021, Rittenhouse was acquitted of homicide and other charges on the grounds of self-defense. When they announced they were bringing Rittenhouse to ETSU, a Turning Point representative said Rittenhouse would speak about the importance...

New York family court officials have denied a father the legal right to stop his eight-year-old son taking life-changing hormones that would begin his medical transition to a girl. Dennis Hannon, 32, a senior software engineer from Buffalo, has been locked in a 'nightmare' legal battle with Erie Supreme Court spanning seven years, fighting to retain his fundamental parental rights. He claims that the boy's mother 'pushed' their child's transition, and says the boy himself was not distressed about living as a boy.

Kyle Rittenhouse has been mocked for bringing his therapy dog to a TV interview. Rittenhouse, 20, rose to prominence when he was involved in the fatal shootings of 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum and 26-year-old Anthony Huber at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020. A 26-year-old named Gaige Grosskreutz was also injured by Rittenhouse, who was armed with a semi-automatic AR-15-style assault rifle. He argued he used the gun in self-defense and was acquitted of charges of first-degree intentional homicide, attempted first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, and two charges of first-degree recklessly endangering safety.

LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — A Las Vegas event that was set to feature Kyle Rittenhouse has been postponed. The "Guns In The Library" event was going to be hosted by Vegas CCW at the East Las Vegas library on May 13. However, officials said the event is being put on hold after event organizers confront Rittenhouse's booking manager, Brian Elliot of Premiere Speakers Bureau, due to that company exploiting speakers from both sides of the gun control issue. "This strikes a blow at an issue we are simply trying to understand," Nephi Khaliki, organizer for the mass CCW event, said....

At the present time, China is the greatest threat to world stability, Russia is the world’s premier aggressor-nation, and Islamist groups are the primary exporters of terror and (religious) totalitarianism. And, for the first time in history, America is the world’s major exporter of destructive ideas. This is hard for me to write. One of my books is titled Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. It contrasts American values with leftist values and makes the case that the American value system is the finest ever devised. I define American values — what I call...

Ultimately, they want to take down red America – duh. This thread from Nate Hochman is very long, very disturbing, and a total must-read. Yeah, we know, the words ‘MUST-READ-thread’ can sound sorta clickbaity but this time around, it’s just us being honest. It’s easy to take a red state for granted because in a red state you can typically make some general assumptions, especially a red state like South Dakota. Except folks, that’s not always the case. Grab a snack, get comfy, and take a gander at this:

Decades of writing about politicians has taught me that the successful ones generally do not make big decisions on the fly. If you watch and listen, you can usually spot a deliberative process and defensible reasoning behind their positions. But now comes a major exception: the decision by the Biden administration to throw open our southern border. Two years into this national disaster, I don’t have a clue about why the president and his team are still doing this. What started as a foolish bid to undo everything Donald Trump did has become a permanent policy that undercuts national security...

Last Tuesday, President Trump had lunch with hip-hop mogul Kanye West. That might have produced headlines on its own, but it wasn’t enough. West brought along with him alleged white supremacist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes and now-I’m-gay-now-I’m-not provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Former Trump campaign staffer Karen Giorno provided the transportation.

We're living in a golden age of awareness about white supremacy. You can't turn on your TV without hearing the phrase applied to the news, whether it's the explanation for Glenn Youngkin's victory in Virginia or Kyle Rittenhouse's actions in Kenosha. But more often than not, white progressives' newfound obsession with opposing white supremacy isn't helping. It's coming at Black people's expense. Reverend Jerry McAfee of New Salem Church in Minneapolis has described white supremacy as a situation where white people are defining your reality and then forcing you to live under that definition. And sadly, that's what we're seeing...

Why would you chase and lunge at, or otherwise attack, a young man who's carrying a semi-automatic rifle? This is what happened last August 25 in the Kyle Rittenhouse affair, and it's crazy behavior. With respect to at least one of the three men shot in self-defense by Rittenhouse, Joseph Rosenbaum, there may be a logical explanation for such craziness: Rosenbaum really was, clinically speaking, crazy.

AUSTIN (Texas Tribune) — Days after he told a conservative podcast that he was going to Texas A&M University, Kyle Rittenhouse corrected himself on Twitter to say that he is planning to attend Blinn College, a two-year public college, this year. His announcement comes one day after a Texas A&M spokesperson told The Texas Tribune on Sunday that Rittenhouse had not in fact been accepted at the Tier One research university for this summer or fall, despite his claims about his plans to attend. The university would not say whether Rittenhouse had applied to the school.

Before you throw a MAGA hat or a Let’s Go Brandon flag at me, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. If he is the nominee in 2024, I’ll vote for him again. But when we consider him in the context of the next election, we must employ the retrospectoscope, as I did months ago. After all, hindsight is 20/20. And, as Santayana said, “He who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it.”

This is one of those threads that need very little commentary EXCEPT if you’re a reader who hasn’t heard of the Great Barrington Declaration. Basically, the declaration says instead of lockdowns and other mitigation (masking, mandates, forced vaccination) during a pandemic we should work to protect the vulnerable while the young and healthy get back to normal.

How could public officials vowing to “follow the science” on Covid-19 persist in promoting ineffective strategies with terrible consequences? In a memoir of his time on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Scott W. Atlas provides an answer: because the nation’s governance was hijacked by three bureaucrats with scant interest in scientific research or debate—and no concern for the calamitous effects of their edicts. Atlas’s book, A Plague Upon Our House, is an astonishing read, even for those who have been closely following this disaster. A veteran medical researcher and health-policy analyst at the Hoover Institution, Atlas, a radiologist, joined...

Covington Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann has offered a voice of support for 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, having previously been slandered as a racist white supremacist by the left-wing media. In an op-ed for the Daily Mail, Sandmann recalled the horror of being a teenage kid being slapped with some of the worst labels imaginable by the likes of the establishment media, offering a kind of kinship with Kyle Rittenhouse.

As the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse has progressed, Americans who hope for a successful conviction have begun to focus their attentions on the true villain of the piece: the 75-year-old presiding judge, Bruce Schroeder. Among the many accusations that have been leveled at Schroeder this week are that he is “biased,” that he is “prejudiced,” that he is a secret “conservative,” “right-winger,” or “Trumpist,” that he is a “a gun nut,” that he is a “a racist” or wannabe member of the Klan, that he is the “worst judge in town,” and that he is attempting to parlay this trial...

(CNN)The judge in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who fatally shot two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, made headlines last week by reiterating his longstanding rule of not allowing prosecutors to refer to people as "victims" before juries in his courtroom. At the same time, Kenosha County Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder said at a pretrial hearing that the men who were shot could be described as "looters" or "rioters" if the defense can show they engaged in such activity during protests after a police officer shot Jacob Blake in August 2020, leaving Blake paralyzed.

KENOSHA -- The judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse case denied more prosecution motions Monday at the last scheduled hearing before the trial is set to begin in a week. Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger said he's concerned the defense will try to make the case about the police, by saying they encouraged Rittenhouse to wander around with an assault-style rifle in some sort of private law enforcement function, and that that would explain why Rittenhouse thought it was reasonable to shoot three people.

The lone surviving victim of a deadly August 2020 shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is suing the city and its leaders, claiming police conspired with vigilantes. Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, was volunteering as a medic for the Black Lives Matter movement when Kyle Rittenhouse, 18, shot him in the arm during the second night of civil unrest in Kenosha on Aug. 25, 2020, following the police shooting of a 29-year-old Black man, Jacob Blake.