May 14, 2025 10:18 AM UTC

Jeffco GOP One-Ups Puppy Killer With Actual Killer

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• by: Colorado Pols

Readers will recall a controversy last year after the Jefferson County Republican Party led at the time by chair Nancy Pallozzi announced a fundraising event starring then-South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who now serves as the Secretary of Authoritarian Cosplay Homeland Security under President Donald Trump based on qualifications that have never been precisely articulated. Gov. Noem’s scheduled appearance in Lakewood came just after Noem’s memoir was published, in which Noem described personally shooting to death a young hunting dog she found difficult to train. After several days of mounting local outrage, Noem’s appearance was cancelled along with a planned peaceful protest of pooch owners.

This year, Nancy Pallozzi is out and convicted firearms felon Rich Wyatt is in charge at the Jeffco GOP. And as Westword’s Bennito Kelly reports, Wyatt, who warned during the Biden administration that the switch from “ballots to bullets” was imminent despite his legal inability to utilize the latter in a firearm, managed to find another fundraising headliner famous for shooting things, and who puts Kristi Noem to shame.

By that we mean, literal shame:

A week after Eric Trump comes to Golden for a fundraiser, infamous shooter Kyle Rittenhouse will be at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds on June 28 to raise money for the Jefferson County Republican Party, now headed by former jailbird Rich Wyatt.

Rittenhouse became a controversial figure in August 2020, when he drove to Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an AR-15 rifle and shot three people during a protest against police brutality; two died. But a jury acquitted Rittenhouse of murder charges.

“Kyle is a staunch advocate for the second amendment,” reads an online flyer for the event sponsored by the Jeffco GOP. [He] is widely recognized for his acquittal in 2021 after defending himself during the 2020 riots.”

Kyle Rittenhouse, for those who have followed his sad story, claims he was “defending himself” in August of 2020 when he shot three people and killed two on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin after traveling there from his home in Illinois to “assist” an informal group of people who claimed they were “protecting businesses” during riots over police brutality in that city. Rittenhouse carried an AR-15 assault rifle purchased by a friend because Rittenhouse was too young to buy one, which in our view would reasonably mean Rittenhouse was also too young to have the proper judgment to carry one into a riot setting. But Rittenhouse did exactly that, and being a little white boy running around in a riot with an AR-15 he naturally attracted some attention, to which Rittenhouse responded the way a frightened young boy with an AR-15 could be expected to, by opening fire.

The problem is, no one ever asked Rittenhouse to personally come to Wisconsin with his gun to “protect” anything, and if there had been any kind of process for such a request Rittenhouse would have been turned away at first sight. But in the same way that January 6th insurrectionists became peaceful tourists, Kyle Rittenhouse quickly became a mid-level celebrity on the far right after his acquittal on all charges, including the stuff he was obviously guilty of like breaking the city-imposed curfew.

Now, if you’re wondering how in all of this Kyle Rittenhouse became a hero, frankly so are we. But apparently being the little boy who could, that is could kill people in a place he had no business being with a gun he shouldn’t have had access to, is what passes for heroism in today’s Republican Party. The chairman of the Colorado GOP is a convicted gun runner who can’t legally touch a firearm, so perhaps he is envious of Rittenhouse’s ability to gun people down in the street and walk free.

It is our sincere hope that, notwithstanding the Jeffco GOP’s felonious chairman, the paying audience to see Kyle Rittenhouse will be very small.

But it probably won’t be, and that is its own imputation.