Kyle Rittenhouse, who as a teenager shot three people, killing two of them, remains somewhat of a B-list celebrity in conservative circles and recently appeared on the Fox News show hosted by Tucker Carlson.
While there, Rittenhouse sought donations ostensibly in support of his legal defense as he faces court challenges like new litigation from one of the men he shot, Gaige Grosskreutz. Rittenhouse characterized the cases as meant to burden him and those who may be targeted with substantial legal expenses and insisted that what he was facing was emblematic of a broader attack plotted against Americans seeking to exercise their rights under the Second Amendment, or whatever. In reality, not everybody is going to show up in a city where they don’t even live and tote around a large firearm, subsequently killing multiple people amid a night in which police have faced accusations of physically forcing protesters against police brutality towards an area where far-right extremists were known to have gathered — so no, this is not some kind of conspiracy against conservatives. It’s just that Rittenhouse shot people.
“Gritty Grifterson grifting a grift,” former GOP Congressman Adam Kinzinger quipped on Twitter in response to a clip of Rittenhouse asking for donations on Fox. One could imagine Kinzinger was attempting to call Rittenhouse “Grifty” before auto-correct made his tweet instead reference the mascot, but you get the idea. Carlson was predictably making moral judgments during the broadcast about the supposed rightness of what Rittenhouse did, which one wouldn’t ordinarily expect from a news program — but just delivering the news, of course, isn’t what Carlson is generally doing. In a notable example of this, Carlson pushed in text communications with fellow Fox hosts for Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich to be fired after she fact-checked false comments from Trump about the presidential election that had just happened in 2020.
Carlson expressed concerns about… wait for it… the stock price (not a shock). “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight,” he told Hannity and Ingraham. “It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Carlson also, though, acknowledged some of the ridiculousness of the lies about the election from Trump’s corner, although some of this nonsense still went up on Fox’s various broadcast avenues anyway — preceding Dominion’s defamation litigation.
Gritty Grifterson grifting a grift https://t.co/zvfEX8PglW
— Adam Kinzinger #fella (@AdamKinzinger) March 2, 2023
