Trevor Noah Quote Attacking Kyle Rittenhouse Defense Argument Resurfaces

A comment made by Trevor Noah in the aftermath of the Kenosha shootings has gone viral as the Kyle Rittenhouse jury deliberates on whether to convict the 18-year-old of murder.

Noah's remarks, from an episode of The Daily Show in August 2020, have been shared thousands of times on Twitter in the past few days.

Many social media users posting the comment agree with the host's view that Rittenhouse was not actually in the Wisconsin city to protect it from Black Lives Matter protests, which broke out in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake. A similar argument has also been made by Rittenhouse's attorneys.

Noah said: "Nobody drives into a city with guns because they love someone else's business that much. That's some bulls***.

"No one has ever thought, 'Oh, it's my solemn duty to pick up a rifle and protect that TJ Maxx.' They do it because they're hoping to shoot someone."

The comment was part of a longer monologue in which Noah argued that race played a huge part in the fact that Rittenhouse, who was then 17, had shot three people and yet was not even arrested at the scene in Kenosha.

"What happened with those shootings last night is tragic. What happened afterwards is illuminating," Noah said.

"Because it made me wonder. It really made me wonder why some people get shot seven times in the back, while other people are treated like human beings and reasoned with and taken into custody with no bullets in their bodies.

"How come Jacob Blake was seen as a deadly threat for a theoretical gun that he might have and might try to commit a crime with, but this gunman who was armed and had already shot people, who had shown that he is a threat, was arrested the next day, given full due process of the law and generally treated like a human being whose life matters?"

Noah then questioned why white supremacist Dylann Roof, who murdered nine Black people at a church in Charlestown in 2015, and James Holmes, the Aurora theater mass shooter, were able to "both live to tell about it?"

Noah adds: "Why is it that the police decide that some threats must be extinguished immediately, while other threats get the privilege of being defused? I'm asking these as questions but I feel like we know the answer.

"The answer is that the gun doesn't matter as much as who is holding the gun. Because to some people, Black skin is the most threatening weapon of all."

Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a group set up in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, was one of the social media users who posted a video of Noah's monologue shortly after it aired in August 2020. The footage has since been watched more than 3 million times.

The jury retired to consider its verdict in the Rittenhouse trial on Tuesday.

The defense argues that he had traveled to Kenosha to protect the city and offer medical assistance to people who might need it following two nights of disorder.

The defendant argues that he only shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and injured Gaige Grosskreutz, in self-defense while being attacked.

The prosecution accuses Rittenhouse of being a "chaos tourist" who was in Kenosha in order to instigate violence. It pointed out that he was the only person who killed anyone during the Kenosha protests and had no formal medical training.