A controversial Kyle Rittenhouse event will be held at a Texas government site.
The Lone Star Convention and Expo Center, a venue owned by Montgomery County, will now host the Jan. 26 event.
Since being cleared of killing two people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Rittenhouse has become something of a conservative icon, developing a small anti-media and anti-censorship platform.
Rittenhouse, the event’s organizer Defiance Press, and Southern Star Brewery, a privately owned establishment whose owner claimed it received numerous threats, harassment complaints, and accusations of censorship after it announced it would not permit the event to be held there, reached an agreement on a new location after days of back and forth.
Rittenhouse and other prominent right-wing individuals have denied statements made by Southern Star Brewery CEO Dave Fougeron that he canceled the event as a result of pressure from a “woke mob” or businesses like San Antonio-based H-E-B. Fougeron added that Rittenhouse was the event’s “special guest,” but he was unaware of this fact until last week.
Judge Mark Keough of Montgomery County is one of Fougeron’s detractors and, like Rittenhouse, charged the brewery with adhering to “cancel culture.”
“While I support a business or property owners’ right to hold or not to hold an event based upon their values, giving in to woke organizations, especially in the current cancel culture environment is foolish,” Keough told the Conroe Courier.
Jason Millsaps, Keough’s chief of staff, claimed that the judge was not involved in the choice to reserve Rittenhouse at the convention center. This is a facility that is open to anyone in the public that can reach the agreement to rent the space,” he said. “… We don’t discriminate on events wanting to rent our space.”
An event featuring Rittenhouse that was scheduled to be hosted by a gun rights organization earlier this week was also canceled by a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip because it “did not align with our property’s core event guidelines.”
Daniel Miller, the founder of TEXIT, a group that supports Texas’s secession from the United States, will also be present at the Conroe event. The company that organized the event, Defiance Press, is based in Conroe and describes itself as active in the fight against censorship through publishing conservative books which have been widely censored from mainstream media,” It has published books like “Corona-fascism” and a biography of Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who defied a judge’s order to stop his department’s racial profiling.
Additionally, Defiance Press has released pro-Texas secessionist literature.
Rittenhouse has recently engaged in conflict in Conroe; last year, he declared his intention to enroll at Texas A&M University but later withdrew that statement after learning he had not been accepted. Rittenhouse, an Illinois native, later revealed his plans to attend two-year Blinn College in Brenham before transferring to Texas A&M.
