The way lawyers for Kyle Rittenhouse tell it, he wasn’t just a scared teenager acting in self-defense when he shot to death two Kenosha, Wisconsin, protesters. He was a courageous defender of liberty, a patriot exercising his right to bear arms amid rioting in the streets.
“A 17-year-old citizen is being sacrificed by politicians, but it’s not Kyle Rittenhouse they are after. Their end game is to strip away the constitutional right of all citizens to defend our communities,” says the voice-over at the end of a video released this week by a group tied to Rittenhouse’s legal team.
“Kyle Rittenhouse will go down in American history alongside that brave unknown patriot ... who fired ‘The Shot Heard Round the World,”’ lead attorney John Pierce wrote this month in a tweet he later deleted. “A Second American Revolution against Tyranny has begun.”
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But in a TV appearance and a blizzard of social media posts, they doubled down on the hero theme, describing Kenosha as a “war zone” and the young shooter as an “American patriot” and a “shining symbol of the American fighting spirit.”
“This is the sacred ground in Kenosha where a 17-year old child became a Minuteman and said ‘Not on My Watch,’” Pierce tweeted above a photo of the city where rioters burned and looted just days before.