After being acquitted of murder on Friday, Kyle Rittenhouse, the 18-year-old who shot and killed two people during last year’s Kenosha, Wisconsin, Black Lives Matter protests, began his public relations campaign with help from Tucker Carlson. That night the Fox News host tweeted a promotional clip from an upcoming Fox Nation documentary on Rittenhouse, which unsurprisingly appears sympathetic to the budding right-wing hero. Part of an interview with Rittenhouse will also air on Monday’s Tucker Carlson Tonight. “This case has nothing to do with race. It never had anything to do with race. It had to do with the right to self-defense,” Rittenhouse said in a clip released in advance. “I’m not a racist person. I support the BLM movement. I support peacefully demonstrating.”
Rittenhouse went on to say that he believes “there needs to be change” in America’s criminal justice system: “I believe there’s a lot of prosecutorial misconduct, not just in my case but in other cases. It’s just amazing to see how much a prosecutor can take advantage of somebody.” He also described the mental state he was in after the shooting, saying, “I [told] everybody there what happened. I said I had to do it. I was just attacked. I was dizzy. I was vomiting. I couldn’t breathe.”
Rittenhouse’s conversation with Carlson, especially his stated support of Black Lives Matter, has been viewed by some as a calculated P.R. strategy. Former Newsmax host John Cardillo said that he had “no problem with Rittenhouse’s BLM comment. The kid is trying to avoid both violent backlash to himself and his family, as well as a weaponized biased DOJ investigation. From a crisis comms perspective, it was a smart move.” However, Glenn Greenwald, no stranger to Carlson’s Fox audience, doubted that Rittenhouse’s support of BLM would change anyone’s mind: “If you think this will cause anyone to reevaluate their decree that he’s a ‘white supremacist,’ you’d be incorrect.”
Carlson’s interview with Rittenhouse was filmed as part of a Tucker Carlson Originals documentary special that will air on Fox Nation in December. (Prior to the upcoming Rittenhouse documentary, Tucker Carlson Originals was perhaps best known for portraying the Capitol riot as a “false flag” operation carried out by the U.S. government in an attempt to smear and imprison Trump supporters; the conspiracy-addled series apparently drove longtime Fox News contributors Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg to quit. The filming of the new documentary was conducted via an embedded film crew that followed Rittenhouse and his legal team throughout the trial.
But this form of content creation did not sit well with Mark Richards, a lawyer who worked on Rittenhouse’s defense. “I did not approve of that,” Richards said in a post-trial appearance on CNN. “I threw them out of the room several times. I don’t think a film crew is appropriate for something like this.” Richards also described the filming as “a definite distraction. And I didn’t approve of it, but I’m not always the boss.” Justin Wells, one of Carlson’s producers, noted that Fox News did not pay “for any access, footage rights, legal fees, or made any other payments in the production of the episode on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.”
As Rittenhouse makes his case before a national cable audience, his acquittal has already been met with cheers from Republican members of Congress, conservative media figures, and far-right groups. Kevin Mathewson, a Kenosha local who formed an armed civilian watchdog group “to deter rioting/looting” during last year’s protests, told The New York Times he was “walking on sunshine” after hearing that Rittenhouse got off. “It vindicates Kyle. I felt vindicated by it,” said Mathewson, adding: “It vindicates people that say, ‘Look, no one’s coming to help, we have to help ourselves.’”
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