Apparently, a spider bite was all the excuse NBC News needed to dust off the media’s favorite 2020 fairy tale and take another swing at Kyle Rittenhouse.
Rittenhouse revealed this week that he landed in the hospital after being bitten by a brown recluse spider. True to form, the 23-year-old cracked jokes from his hospital bed instead of throwing himself a pity party.
“The communists couldn’t take me out and i’ll be damned if I let a brown recluse take me out,” Rittenhouse posted on X. “The spider, like the commies, also thought it was a good idea to come after me while I was armed. He did not survive.”
Goofy? Sure. Worth a national news write-up? That’s debatable.
But NBC News didn’t just report on the spider bite. The network used the opportunity to squeeze in another round of revisionist history about the Kenosha chaos of 2020 — and the wording was about as subtle as a Molotov cocktail through a storefront window.
NBC described Rittenhouse as “the gunman who opened fire in Kenosha” and claimed he “gained fame for opening fire at a 2020 civil rights rally in Wisconsin.” There’s just one problem: a jury already settled that narrative years ago.
Rittenhouse was acquitted on every charge after jurors concluded he acted in self-defense during the violent unrest that erupted in Kenosha after the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Prosecutors themselves struggled against mountains of video evidence showing Rittenhouse being chased, cornered and attacked before firing his rifle.
That inconvenient fact rarely stops corporate media outlets from slipping in loaded language whenever his name resurfaces. And calling Kenosha a “civil rights rally”? Please.
Americans watched businesses burn on live television. Cars were torched. Rioters smashed storefronts and battled police for days while politicians and media personalities hid behind the now-infamous “mostly peaceful protest” spin.
Even NBC’s own reporting admitted the city was engulfed in “civil unrest.”
But years later, legacy media still can’t quit trying to airbrush the riots into a sanitized morality play where every left-wing protest was noble and every armed citizen was automatically the villain.
The facts remain stubborn things.
Joseph Rosenbaum pursued Rittenhouse before being shot. Anthony Huber struck him with a skateboard. Gaige Grosskreutz admitted on the witness stand that he advanced on Rittenhouse with a handgun pointed in his direction before being shot in the arm. The jury saw the footage and returned unanimous not-guilty verdicts. Yet NBC’s framing still reads like it was ghostwritten by a progressive activist group.
Predictably, social media piled on after the spider-bite news broke, with critics joking about “Team Spider” and asking whether the arachnid survived. Reddit threads filled with the same tired “crossed state lines” talking points that have been debunked for years. That’s the real story here: six years later, the media ecosystem that got the Rittenhouse case wrong the first time still hasn’t learned a thing.
For the activist press, every Kyle Rittenhouse headline is apparently another opportunity to replay the same political script — facts optional.
