Conservative commentator Ann Coulter tweeted support for accused Wisconsin shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, saying "I want him as my president".
Twitter removed Ms Coulter's statements for violating the platform's rules after users took offence at her opinion, made in response to a user saying they wanted the teenager as a "bodyguard".
Mr Rittenhouse, 17, was charged with first-degree intentional homicide in connection with shootings that left two people dead during the violence in Kenosha on Tuesday night.
Analysis of the video from the scene of Tuesday night's shootings showed a man pursued by a group before an unknown gunman fires nearby. He turns in the direction of the shots. As someone else lunges towards him, the teenager appears to fire four times.
The second shooting occurs after the man trips and falls while leaving the scene of the first shooting. As three people rush toward him, he appears to fire four times while at least 16 other gunshots sound out around him.
This timeline of events has left some observers to question whether the man was acting in self-defence, with Fox News host Tucker Carlson also being criticised for considering that scenario.
"A court will decide whether what you just saw qualifies as self-defence. As of tonight, we really don't have more details," Mr Carlson said on his show Wednesday. "We do know why it all happened, though. Kenosha is devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it. People in charge, from the governor of Wisconsin on down, refused to enforce the law. They stood back and they watched Kenosha burn.
"So are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would? Everyone could see what was happening in Kenosha. It was getting crazier by the hour," he continued.
The 17-year-old suspect in the shooting at Kenosha protests sat front row at a Trump rally in January
The suspect in a shooting at the Kenosha protests attended a campaign rally for President Donald Trump in January, event footage and a social media post show.
Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, of Antioch, Illinois, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with first-degree intentional homicide after he opened fire on protesters Tuesday night, killing two and injuring one.
The teenager attended the Trump rally at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 30, and can be seen in a screenshot of the C-SPAN broadcast of the event, BuzzFeed News first reported.
The teenager expressed support for "Blue Lives Matter" — a counter-movement to Black Lives Matter that supports police officers — and idolized the police in posts shared on social media.
The suspect behind a shooting at Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, sat front row at a campaign rally for President Donald Trump in January, event footage and a social media post show.
Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, was arrested Wednesday at his home in Antioch, Illinois, and charged with first-degree intentional homicide in connection with the shooting.
BuzzFeed News first reported that Rittenhouse attended the Trump rally at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, at the end of January. A screenshot of a C-Span broadcast showed the teenager just a few feet away from President Donald Trump in the crowd. Rittenhouse also posted a TikTok video of the event.
A Trump campaign spokesperson told Bloomberg's Mario Parker that Rittenhouse, who was not named in the statement, had "nothing to do with our campaign."
"President Trump has repeatedly and consistently condemned all forms of violence and believes we must protect all Americans from chaos and lawlessness," the spokesperson said. "This individual had nothing to do with our campaign, and we fully support our fantastic law enforcement for their swift action in this case."
Armed with an AR-15, Rittenhouse shot into a crowd of protesters Tuesday night in Kenosha, killing two people and injuring another, who is now hospitalized.
The protests in Kenosha were sparked by the shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who was shot seven times in the back by police officer Rusten Sheskey as he opened the door to his vehicle with three of his children inside. Blake's family told reporters on Tuesday that he was in stable condition but is still in the ICU. He is paralyzed from the waist down, his family and attorney said.
A teenager armed with an AR-15 shot three protesters, killing two.
Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Koerri Elijah, a Kenosha resident who was filming the protests, told Insider's Haven Orecchio-Egresitz that Rittenhouse seemed "on edge" but didn't initially pose as a threat.
"I noticed him the entire time. He didn't seem like he was there with anyone," he said. "He was armed. He didn't seem like he was a threat, but I thought maybe I should keep an eye on him."
Video taken at the scene shows a teenager who appears to be Rittenhouse running with the gun, before he trips and falls to the ground. As protesters approached him, shots rang out and the crowd scattered.
RNC Speaker Removed After Retweeting, Recommending Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory
J. Clara Chan
RNC Speaker Removed After Retweeting, Recommending Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory
Conservative activist Mary Ann Mendoza was pulled from the Republican National Convention’s Tuesday speaker lineup just hours before she was supposed to speak, after she retweeted and recommended an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to her 41,000 Twitter followers.
“Do yourself a favor and read this,” Mendoza, who was suspended from Twitter last year for hate speech, said in a now-deleted tweet. She was directing her followers to a thread by a QAnon follower who advanced a racist conspiracy theory, drawing from several similar racist conspiracy theories, that Jewish people are plotting to commit genocide against gentiles, enslave them, steal their property and start wars. The thread also directed readers to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an infamous anti-Semitic hoax first published in 1903 that later influenced Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler.
Video: Angel Mom Mary Ann Mendoza previews her RNC speech
After her promotion of the conspiracy theory was reported by the Daily Beast, Mendoza apologized “for not paying attention to the intent of the whole message,” and said that it “does not reflect my feelings or personal thoughts whatsoever.”
Mendoza was the mother of an Arizona police officer killed in 2014 by an undocumented immigrant who was driving under the influence. She has since become known as a leading representatives of “angel moms,” a term promoted by Trump to describe mothers whose children were killed by people living in the U.S. without proper documentation.
I'm Billy Graham's granddaughter. Evangelical support of Donald Trump spits on his legacy.
As a proud granddaughter of the man largely credited for beginning the evangelical movement, the late Billy Graham, the past few years have led me to reflect on how much has changed within that movement in America.
I have spent my entire life in the church, with every big decision guided by my faith. But now I feel homeless. Like so many others, I feel disoriented as I watch the church I have always served turn its eyes away from everything it teaches. I hear from Christian women on a daily basis who all describe the same thing: a tug at their spirit.
Most of these women walked into a voting booth in 2016 believing they were choosing between two difficult options. They held their breath, closed their eyes and cast a vote for Donald Trump, whom many of us then believed to be “the lesser of two evils,” all the while feeling that tug.
I feel it every time our president talks about government housing having no place in America’s suburbs. Jesus said repeatedly to defend the poor and show kindness and compassion to those in need. Our president continues to perpetuate an us-versus-them narrative, yet almost all of our church leaders say nothing.
I feel this tug every time our president or his followers speak about the wall, designed to keep out the very people Scripture tells us to welcome. In Trump’s America, refugees are not treated as “native born,” as Scripture encourages. Instead, families are separated, held in inconceivable conditions and cast aside as less than.
The church honors Trump before God
Trump has gone so far as to brag about his plans, accomplishments and unholy actions toward the marginalized communities I saw my grandfather love and serve. I now see, through the silence of church leaders, that these communities are no longer valued by individuals claiming to uphold the values my grandfather taught.
The gentle tug became an aggressive yank, for me, earlier this year, when our country experienced division in the form of riots, incited in great part by this president’s divisive rhetoric. I watched our president walk through Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., after the tear gassing of peaceful protesters for a photo op.
He held a Bible, something so sacred to all of us, yet he treated that Bible with a callousness that would offend anyone intimately familiar with the words inside it. He believed that action would honor him and only him. However, the church, designed to honor God, said nothing.
It seems that the only evangelical leaders to speak up praised the president, with no mention of his behavior that is antithetical to the Jesus we serve. The entire world has watched the term “evangelical” become synonymous with hypocrisy and disingenuousness.
My faith and my church have become a laughing stock, and any attempt by its members to defend the actions of Trump at this time sound hollow and insincere.
One of my grandfather’s favorite verses was Micah 6:8, in which we are told that the Lord requires of his people to do justly, to love kindness and mercy, and to walk humbly. These are the attributes of our faith we should present to the world. We can no longer allow our church leaders to represent our faith so erroneously.
Women of faith know better
I have given myself permission to lean into that tug at my spirit and speak out. I may be against the tide, but I am firm in my faith that this step is most consistent with my church and its teachings.
At a recent large family event, I was pulled aside by many female family members thanking me for speaking out against an administration with which they, too, had been uncomfortable. With tears in their eyes, they used a hushed tone, out of fear that they were alone or at risk of undeserved retribution.
Jerushah Duford in May 2019 in Virginia.
How did we get here? How did we, as God-fearing women, find ourselves ignoring the disrespect and misogyny being shown from our president? Why do we feel we must express our discomfort in hushed whispers in quiet corners? Are we not allowed to stand up when it feels everyone else around us is sitting down?
The God we serve empowers us as women to represent Him before our churches. We represent God before we represented any political party or leader. When we fail to remember this, we are minimizing the role He created for us to fill. Jesus loved women; He served women; He valued women. We need to give ourselves permission to stand up to do the same.
If a plane gets even slightly off course, it will never reach its destination without a course correction. Perhaps this journey for us women looks similar. Perhaps you cringe at the president suggesting that America’s “suburban housewife” cares more about her status than those in need, but try to dismiss comments on women’s appearance as fake news.
When we look at our daughters, our nieces, our female students, and even ourselves, we feel the need to lean into that tug on our spirit. You might not have felt it four years ago; we do the best with what we know at the time. However, if we continue to ignore the tug we now feel, how will we ever be able to identify what is truly important to us? I chose to listen to my spirit to speak out. Not because doing so feels comfortable, but because it feels like the right way to leverage the voice God has empowered me with. Now I am asking all of you who feel as I do, to embrace your inner tug, and allow it to lead you to use the power of your God-given voice and not allow Trump to lead this country for another four years.
Jerushah Duford is an evangelical author, speaker and member of Lincoln Women, a coalition of women in the Lincoln Project. Follow her on Twitter: @jerushahruth
Sandmann, then a junior at Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Ky., was seen facing off silently with Nathan Phillips, a Native American protester. The standoff took place after Sandmann and his classmates had participated in the 2019 March for Life.
Trump quickly seized on the incident, praising Sandmann and the other students on Twitter and using the standoff to attack the “evil” news media.
“Nick Sandmann and the students of Covington have become symbols of Fake News and how evil it can be,” Trump tweeted.
Nick Sandmann, a student from Covington Catholic High School, stands in front of Nathan Phillips, a Native American protester, in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 18, 2019. (Kaya Taitano/social media/via Reuters)
“My life changed forever in that one moment,” Sandmann told the convention in a prerecorded speech from the Lincoln Memorial. “The full war machine of the mainstream media revved up into attack mode. They did so without ever researching the full video of the incident, without ever investigating Mr. Phillips’s motives or without ever asking me for my side of the story. And do you know why? Because the truth wasn’t important. Advancing their anti-Christian, anti-conservative, anti-Donald Trump narrative was all that mattered.”
Phillips, an elder of the Omaha people who had just participated in the Indigenous Peoples March, was beating a drum and praying. He said he approached the students because he heard them chanting “Build that wall.”
The "Build the wall" shouts were not heard on the video, and Sandmann denied that his group participated in them.
In his RNC speech, Sandmann referred to Phillips and other demonstrators as “professional protesters.”
“While the media portrayed me as the aggressor with a ‘relentless smirk’ on my face, in reality the video confirms I was standing with my hands behind my back and an awkward smile on my face that hid two thoughts,” he said. “One, don’t do anything that might further agitate the man banging a drum in my face. And two, trying to follow a family friend’s advice never to do anything to embarrass your family, your school or your community.”
Nicholas Sandmann at the virtual Republican National Convention on Tuesday. (Screengrab via Reuters TV)
“I wouldn’t be canceled,” Sandmann said in his message to the RNC. “I fought back hard to expose the media for what they did to me and won a personal victory. While much more must be done, I look forward to the day that the media returns to providing balanced, responsible and accountable news coverage. I know President Trump hopes for that too.
“I’m proud to say that throughout my media nightmare I have had President Trump’s unwavering support,” the 18-year-old added. “And I know you’ll agree with me when I say no one in this county has been a victim of unfair media coverage more than President Donald Trump. In November, I believe this country must unite around a president who calls the media out and refuses to allow them to create a narrative instead of reporting the facts.”
“I believe we must join with a president who will challenge the media to return to objective journalism,” Sandmann said before donning a red “MAGA” hat. “This is worth fighting for. This is worth voting for. This is what President Donald Trump stands for.”
OpEd: You know the type. There are some assholes who need a knee in the balls and a fist in the face followed by some broken ribs and a punctured lung before the will have ever some semblance of respect and humanity. We all have known punks like Nicholas Sandmann back in the day when DIY instant justice was not frowned upon and and honor was served. Are you listening Antifa?
If I were a Native American I'd go old school and split Nicholas Sandmann's wig with a tomahawk.
While it's doubtful if a rat bastard punk like Nicholas Sandmann is capable of learning a lesson in humanity, humility, respect and honor a good bully beat down is never a bad thing. Bullies can learn cause and effect. Be an asshole, get punched. Sadly in our politically correct blue post truth blue pill times, we are told a lot of bullshit. When some bleeding heart tells you, "violence solves nothing" remind that modern day Mary Poppins of how the moral North kicked the shit out of the savage South and freed the slaves. A lot of violence was used to end the Nazi holocaust but had less violence was used early on perhaps the Nazi's rise to power would have been nipped in the bud.
Don't be fooled by the peaceniks or the silly notion that there is good in everyone. There isn't. Nicholas Sandmann is the type of death deserving bitch who would have been a prime candidate for the Waffen SS, the Gestapo or some neo-Nazi organization.
The holy father, Pope Francis, would approve of a punk such as Nicholas Sandmann and if I were him, I would have Nicholas Sandmannexcommunicated but that's just me. I would hope that Covington Catholic High School would follow the humanity of Pope Francis instead of Nazi pope, Pope Pius the XII who could have stopped WW-2 before it started be telling Catholics not to fight for Hitler or Mussolini.
