‘Kyle Rittenhouse is Not a Hero,’ Writes Daily Caller Journalist Who Covered Kenosha Riots and Witnessed the Shootings

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Daily Caller video journalist Richie McGinniss, who covered the Kenosha riots, wrote an op-ed Thursday declaring that “Kyle Rittenhouse is not a hero.”

McGinniss witnessed Rittenhouse, who was in Kenosha during the protests and riots that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake, shoot three men, killing two.

Rittenhouse was acquitted in November on all state-level charges related to the shootings. McGinniss testified in the trial.

In a Newsweek opinion piece on Thursday, two years since he was in Kenosha, McGinniss recounted what he witnessed in Kenosha, including helping one of the men Rittenhouse shot, Joseph Rosenbaum.

McGinniss criticized both sides of the ideological spectrum in their response to the Rittenhouse case:

In the months after the Rittenhouse shooting, most mainstream reporters and producers immortalized Rosenbaum as a Black Lives Matter martyr, even though he’d been caught on camera earlier that day using the n-word. Conservatives called him a “pedo”—he’d been convicted of having sex with a minor, in 2002—who’d had it coming.

Meanwhile, 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. 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. Nor did they care that he’d lied about being a medic. Nor did they seem to mind that their hero, instead of calling 911, as I’d asked him to do after he shot Rosenbaum, had fled on foot.

McGinniss blasted Rittenhouse for appearing at Turning Point USA’s Americafest a month following the trial. TPUSA invited McGinniss, who said he declined.

Instead, I watched the segment, “Kenosha On Camera,” from home. Pyrotechnics exploded before a cheering audience of thousands of self-proclaimed young conservatives as the surprise guest took the stage. The panelists joked with Rittenhouse about how good his aim was. I felt sick watching them laugh about the man whom Rittenhouse had shot in a used-car lot. The guy I promised I’d get a beer with right before they loaded him onto a gurney and his terrified, wide eyes turned into a frozen stare.

“Kyle Rittenhouse was broadly presented as either a force for good or evil,” wrote McGinniss. “In my view, he was neither.”