A video director who saw firsthand the events that unfolded when Kyle Rittenhouse fatally shot two men and injured another during the riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, exactly two years ago declared that the now 19-year-old was neither “good nor evil.”
Richie McGinnis, who was a witness in the trial during which Rittenhouse claimed he was acting in self-defense, tore into the media for crafting “caricatures” of Rittenhouse in a lengthy op-ed for Newsweek for the anniversary of that fateful night. McGinnis also threw shade at the media for stoking violence.
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“It’s also easy to forget that the violence was part of a national tsunami that was encouraged, if not outright stoked, by media chieftains in Washington and New York. Kyle Rittenhouse was broadly presented as either a force for good or evil. In my view, he was neither,” McGinnis wrote.
The op-ed was titled, “I Was in Kenosha Two Years Ago, Kyle Rittenhouse Is Not a Hero.”
McGinnis was dispatched to Kenosha in August 2020 on assignment for the Daily Caller following an uproar in the city that was sparked by a police shooting of Jacob Blake. The protests and riots that consumed Kenosha came amid a national wave of unrest over the death of George Floyd weeks earlier.
Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, arrived in Kenosha armed with a semi-automatic rifle asserting that he was keen on safeguarding local businesses in the area. McGinnis recalled crossing paths with Rittenhouse that night and interviewed him briefly. About 13 minutes later, he saw Rittenhouse open gunfire on three individuals in what Rittenhouse argued was self-defense.
One of the men had chased down Rittenhouse and grabbed his gun, and another had smacked him with his skateboard, Rittenhouse claimed. He was acquitted by a Wisconsin jury last November of all charges stemming from his actions that night, including intentional homicide.
“To his detractors, Rittenhouse was a white-supremacist vigilante, and, to his lionizers, a hero standing up for law and order. The left ignored the fact that Rittenhouse had come out that day to clean graffiti,” McGinnis wrote.
“Conservatives, champions of family values, didn’t bother to ask why Rittenhouse’s family had allowed him to venture out onto the streets of Kenosha, in the middle of violent demonstrations, in the first place,” he continued. “Nor did they seem to mind that their hero, instead of calling 911, as I’d asked him to do after he shot [the first victim], had fled on foot.”
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McGinnis traveled back to Kenosha earlier this summer to shoot a documentary about that tragic night.
After being acquitted, Rittenhouse announced plans to go after media outlets and others whom he claims defamed him as part of the Media Accountability Project. Earlier this summer, he unveiled a new video game in which players can assume a carton iteration of him and hunt “fake news turkeys.” The game is intended to fund his legal challenges to media companies and Big Tech.
