The Right Wants the Culture War to Turn Deadly

For $30, you can buy a white T-shirt on eBay that says “Don’t make me RITTENHOUSE your ass!!!” on the back, from a seller named Gabby in Anson, Texas. The sleeves are adorned with stenciled semi-automatic rifles, a skull, and “2A” (for the Second Amendment). It’s one of dozens of shirts just like it. When 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse used a semi-automatic rifle that had allegedly been purchased illegally to shoot and kill two men and wound a third during Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August, he became a hero to a large swathe of the right wing — someone to wear your support for on your chest, or between your shoulder blades. There are now corners of the internet full of merchandise in his honor: T-shirts adorned with drawn portraits of him pointing his rifle with slogans like “Don’t Tread On Me” and “I Stand With Rittenhouse.” A photo of the teen in a Captain America mask as “Captain Rittenhouse.” The most common slogan, across dozens of shirts and multiple sites, is simple: Free Kyle.

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