I have to confess, I can’t figure Kyle Rittenhouse out. One minute, his lawyers are repeatedly throwing out a Tucker Carlson film crew. The next minute, Rittenhouse is sitting down for an interview with Carlson, and is traveling to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump.
Whatever the case, it looks like one element of the deplorable world is turning hard on one of its latest heroes. Apparently the QAnon world is not pleased that Rittenhouse dared speak ill of one of its top luminaries—his former lawyer, Lin Wood. It turns out that Rittenhouse and Wood are currently in a legal battle over the money raised to get Rittenhouse out on bail last year.
According to HuffPost, the feud between Rittenhouse and those who are still “trusting the plan” dates to Rittenhouse’s interview on Tuesday night with Ashleigh Banfield on NewsNation:
Rittenhouse said that he has no desire “at all” to get involved in politics. He claims that’s part of the reason he and his family axed Wood as his lawyer in December. Apparently the Rittenhouses had more than their fill of Wood’s bloviating about QAnon and the Big Lie, as well as claims that he was part of a militia—a term Rittenhouse claimed he’d never heard before he was finally bailed out on Nov. 20. They also didn’t like Wood: Not only did it seem to them that Wood had a god complex, but he was claiming that Rittenhouse was likely going to stay in jail because “there’s not going to be any civil or criminal cases before the election.”
To add insult to injury, Rittenhouse told Banfield that shortly before his family formally cut ties with Wood, he found out that the lawyer had raised enough money to bail him out by September—and yet didn’t hand it over. As a result, he believes Wood “kept me away from my family for 87 days.” He told a similar story to Carlson two months later, saying that Wood actually advised him to stay in jail “where he would be safer.”
He also claims that Wood and his partner John Pierce were responsible for setting him up with the now-infamous footage of him throwing the “OK” sign with the Proud Boys. Rittenhouse says that he didn’t even know that sign had been appropriated by white supremacists. He also says that Wood and Pierce contracted Proud Boys members for security without telling them they were actually Proud Boys—and that he never would have approved it had he known.
Rittenhouse also revealed that literally at the same time that the verdicts were being read out acquitting him, Wood and Pierce filed a motion seeking to reclaim the money they raised for him—even though it's supposed to help with his legal expenses. For his part, Wood claims that he raised it on behalf of his own FightBack Foundation, and tax law requires him to claw it back.
What is beyond dispute is that, according to Business Insider, the QNuts are up in arms. One of the biggest QAnon influencers, John Sabal, took to Telegram to lecture Rittenhouse for “shit(ting) where you sleep”—prompting Sabal’s fans to call Rittenhouse, among other things, a “little bastard,” a “crisis actor,” and a “money puppet.”
A similar scene played out with Ron Watkins’ followers, who claimed Rittenhouse was a “false flag” being used as a “psyop” to split QAnon followers. One user accused Banfield and NewsNation of using CGI in the video, while another went as far to say that Rittenhouse was really Noah Pozner, who died in the Sandy Hook shooting.
But there’s one high-profile deplorable who hasn’t broken ranks with Rittenhouse—Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Mad Georgian, who has been publicly feuding with Wood since dumping him as her lawyer in a defamation case, took to Twitter soon after Rittenhouse’s interview with Banfield to say that what she’d seen proved what she now knew—Wood was indeed a slimeball.
If you’re a QNut and you’ve lost Greene, that says something.
I have to confess, I’m taking Rittenhouse’s desire to stay out of politics with a grain of salt given his trip to Mar-a-Lago. But it seems Rittenhouse is telling the truth about Wood trying to screw him. After all, he told Carlson the same thing on the deplorables’ favorite network. Moreover, his portrayal of Wood hews closely to what his former law partners are saying about him in a suit they filed against him in August 2020. They claim that they severed ties with Wood in response to a long pattern of bizarre behavior, including rambling and incoherent communications and claims that God himself was directing Wood.
It says a lot about QAnon that it’s siding with a guy who not only sat on money intended to get Rittenhouse out of jail, and is now trying to claw it back.
