NBC News delivered a master class in craven propaganda this week, casually rewriting one of the most destructive episodes of the 2020 summer of riots as a genteel “civil rights rally in Wisconsin.”
David K. Li’s May 7 tweet about Kyle Rittenhouse’s hospitalization after a spider bite opened with this jaw-dropping distortion:
The post racked up millions of views and swift, predictable backlash. It wasn’t a slip of the keyboard. It was deliberate, agenda-driven ideological malpractice dressed as journalism.
The facts remain stubbornly unchanged, no matter how hard legacy media tries to memory-hole them. In August 2020, after Kenosha police shot Jacob Blake — a man with an active warrant who was armed with a knife and resisting arrest — the city did not host thoughtful, mostly peaceful civil rights discussions. It burned. Local leaders let it burn. Tony Evers let Kenosha burn. For multiple nights, rioters torched businesses, looted stores, attacked police and civilians, and caused an estimated $50 million in damage. Parts of the city still bear scars years later.
Rittenhouse, then 17, traveled from nearby Antioch, Illinois, to protect small businesses amid the chaos. He was pursued and attacked by a mob that included Joseph Rosenbaum, a five-time convicted child molester; Anthony Huber, a domestic abuser; and Gaige Grosskreutz, a felon carrying a concealed pistol. Rittenhouse shot all three in self-defense. Two died. A jury acquitted him on all charges after deliberating the clear evidence of imminent threat. Video captured the entire sequence. No serious person disputes what happened.
Yet NBC News — the same outlet that once described fiery riots across America as “mostly peaceful protests” — now sanitizes Kenosha as a “civil rights rally.” The phrasing is textbook Orwell: War is peace. Riots are rallies. Self-defense is “opening fire.”
Sensible people on X weren’t having it. Andy Ngo, who has documented Antifa and BLM violence for years, called the post “a good example of liberal legacy media disinformation.”
Libs of TikTok posted side-by-side images of burning buildings under the sarcastic caption: “This is simply a ‘Civil rights rally.’
Mollie Hemingway labeled the outlet “pure evil.”
Nick Sortor shared footage of the destruction with the dry remark: “Just a mostly peaceful ‘civil rights rally.’”
The backlash was instant and overwhelming because Americans who lived through 2020 remember the truth. They remember the nightly scenes of arson, the “fiery but mostly peaceful” chyron on CNN, the media’s refusal to acknowledge the death and destruction until the political damage became impossible to ignore. They remember how Kyle Rittenhouse became the villain in the narrative while the actual rioters were cast as victims or erased entirely.
This isn’t mere bias. It’s intentional historical revisionism designed to protect a crumbling progressive storyline: that in 2020, while liberal governors like Tony Evers were masking children, closing churches, letting grandparents die alone, leftist ‘health leaders’ said it was okay to protest “systemic racism” and that violence was justified resistance. The predictable result was riots because Democrat-led cities are refusing to enforce the law. By laundering riots into “civil rights rallies,” outlets like NBC keep the narrative alive for a new generation that wasn’t old enough to watch the flames in real time. It’s propaganda with a purpose: to delegitimize self-defense, demonize law-abiding citizens who step up when government fails, and smear anyone who dares push back.
The Rittenhouse acquittal exposed the lie once and for all. NBC’s latest sleight of hand proves the corporate media learned nothing and regrets nothing. Six years later, they’re still peddling the same fiction to an audience that increasingly tunes them out.
Americans don’t need another lecture on “disinformation” from the very institutions that specialize in it. They need the truth: Kenosha wasn’t a rally. It was a riot. Kyle Rittenhouse wasn’t the aggressor. He was a kid who defended his life when the authorities wouldn’t. And the media that keeps rewriting that story isn’t confused — it’s complicit.
