Miranda Devine: Kyle Rittenhouse finally gets his say against all the media ‘lies’

Teenager Kyle Rittenhouse endured a nightmare you wouldn’t wish on anyone but now he is showing himself as a young man of character and integrity, writes Miranda Devine.

Kyle Rittenhouse is the most demonised teenager in America. But now he has been acquitted of murder by a jury and is free to tell his story, he is revealed as a fine, upstanding representative of a maligned generation that offers hope for our salvation. He has been falsely branded a “white supremacist” by everyone from then-presidential candidate Joe Biden to a dishonest media.

Speaking for the first time to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson this week, a composed Kyle, now 18, described Biden’s smearing of him as “actual malice, defaming my character … Watch the trial and understand the facts before you make a statement”.

As for the media: “The lies they can get away with spreading is sickening. It’s a disgrace to this country.”

It’s hard for anyone who didn’t live through it to understand the circumstances which led to Kyle’s travails. The entire country was convulsed by violent riots last year after the death of a black career criminal, George Floyd, at the hands of a white policeman in May.

Kyle Rittenhouse speaking to Tucker Carlson on Fox News.

Law and order fell apart and it felt like a civilisation in collapse.

Tens of thousands of well-meaning Americans joined “peaceful protests” staged by Marxist movement Black Lives Matter, the only allowable public gatherings during the pandemic. The violent revolutionary group Antifa joined in to create mayhem at night, with riots, arson and looting. BLM was lionised by corporate donors, yet it was intensely partisan, with one recent poll finding it enjoyed 85 per cent approval among Democrats but only three per cent approval among Republicans.

In August 2020, the broken-down rust belt town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, had been abandoned by its leaders as the media whipped up a racial frenzy over the police shooting of another black criminal.

Jacob Blake was wanted for the sexual assault of his ex when he violated a restraining order by going to her house.

Police tried to arrest him as he was stealing her car with her kids in it. He pulled a knife before he was shot and paralysed. Biden hailed him a BLM martyr and visited him in Kenosha, as part of a cynical campaign of racial division designed to paint Donald Trump as a white supremacist in the run-up to the 2020 election. Much of the media was complicit, telling lies or omitting salient facts about Blake to paint him as the victim of systemic police racism.

A man looks over police tape in Kenosha, Wisconsin during a second night of rioting last August following the shooting of Jacob Blake. Picture: AFP

The BLM-Antifa caravan moved to Kenosha and began terrorising residents, while Democrats such as Wisconsin governor Tony Evers added fuel to the fire condemning police.

Into the vacuum came a kind-hearted, civic-minded 17-year-old who did what any good man would do, and stepped up to help protect his community. The working-class son of a single mother, Kyle had taken on responsibilities well beyond his age after his parents had split up when he was four.

His father, Mike, a former machinist who fell prey to the opioid crisis which has decimated the Rust Belt, reportedly was violent and Kyle’s mother, Wendy, escaped with her two young daughters and sons to a shelter.

Mike was ordered to pay $75 a week in child support when they split and Wendy worked as a nurse’s assistant but, typical of America’s working poor, the family struggled financially and was repeatedly evicted, according to the New Yorker. At the time Kyle was arrested, Wendy had $1.20 to her name. Kyle helped support his mother and two sisters, working after-school jobs as a janitor and a “fry cook” at a fast food restaurant. He wanted to become a policeman and took up cadetships at his local police and fire departments in Antioch, Illinois, a half-hour drive from Kenosha.

Kyle spent a lot of time in Kenosha, where his father, grandmother, uncle, aunt, cousins, and best friend lived, and where he had a job as a lifeguard.

Rittenhouse had a difficult childhoood and worked several jobs

On August 25 last year, he had stayed overnight in Kenosha after finishing a shift and went the next day to a school to clean graffiti left by rioters. Then he joined a group of good Samaritans helping immigrant Indian owners of a local car dealership protect their business, after they had lost 100 cars to arson the first night of rioting.

He shot three violent men later that night in self-defence, two fatally, when they attacked him and tried to take his AR-15, the jury found. All three rioters had violent criminal records, including one for pedophile rape of little boys and another for domestic abuse. One pointed a Glock pistol at his head before Kyle shot him once and injured him.

Kyle told the court he would have been killed if he had not defended himself and the jury agreed. It is hard to understand how a 17-year-old could be legally armed with an AR-15 but that is the law in Wisconsin and many of the rioters were similarly armed. Gunshots rang out every night of the rioting.

Joe Biden had smeared the character of Kyle Rittenhouse. Picture: AFP

“Kenosha is my community and my home and I just was upset seeing the community up in flames,” Kyle told Carlson. “I agree with the BLM movement. I agree everybody has a right to protest and assemble but I do not agree that people have the right to burn down … American cities to try to spread their message. I’m not really sure (where the police presence was), because they have a hard job (but) the governor, Tony Evers, failed the community.”

As the unrest grew, Evers rebuffed the offer of then-president Trump for federal backup and the police were ordered to stand down.

A curfew was imposed and the good people of Kenosha were told to stay in their homes and allow a mob of armed, violent, drug-affected, psychotic criminals to roam the streets, setting fire to businesses, and destroying everything in sight. They weren’t supposed to defend their property, and Kyle wasn’t allowed to defend his life, according to prosecutor James Kraus.

The media should not have insisted Kyle Rittenhouse, who has been found not guilty of murder, was a white supremacist killer.

“Everybody takes a beating sometimes, right?” he told the jury. Luckily for Kyle, there was video of the mob chasing and attacking him that night.

The media tried to make the Rittenhouse case about race, but it’s about class.

Wealthy elitists punched down at the white working-class son of a single mother because they don’t see him as fully human and it made them feel good.

But, against the odds, this marginalised boy survived an attempt by the most powerful forces in the country to bury him.

It is left to the rising Generation Z to rebuild the moral capital destroyed by their forebears and Kyle has shown himself equal to the task.

Miranda Devine is in New York to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph