Montgomery County-owned venue will host Kyle Rittenhouse rally against censorship

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Texas — Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in the Texas Tribune here.

The “Rally against Censorship” that includes Kyle Rittenhouse has discovered a brand new venue in Conroe, days after an area brewery pulled out of the occasion.

The Jan. 26 occasion will now be held on the Lone Star Convention and Expo Center, a Montgomery County-owned facility.

Rittenhouse has emerged as one thing of a conservative icon, constructing a minor anti-media and anti-censorship platform since being acquitted of fatally taking pictures two folks at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The venue change follows days of forwards and backwards between Rittenhouse, the occasion host Defiance Press and Southern Star Brewery, a privately owned enterprise whose proprietor stated it was inundated with threats, harassment and accusations of censorship after it introduced it will not enable the occasion to be hosted there due to complaints from patrons.

Southern Star Brewery CEO Dave Fougeron has disputed claims by Rittenhouse and different distinguished right-wing figures that he canceled the occasion due to stress from a “woke mob” or retailers corresponding to San Antonio-based H-E-B. Fougeron also said he was not conscious till final week that Rittenhouse was the occasion’s “special guest.”

Montgomery County Judge Mark Keough is amongst Fougeron’s critics and, like Rittenhouse, accused the brewery of submitting 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 informed the Conroe Courier.

Keough’s chief of employees, Jason Millsaps, stated the decide had nothing to do with the choice to ebook Rittenhouse on the conference middle. “This is a facility that is open to anyone in the public that can reach the agreement to rent the space,” he stated. “… We don’t discriminate on events wanting to rent our space.”

Earlier this week, a resort on the Las Vegas strip also canceled a reception that includes Rittenhouse that was to be hosted by a gun rights group, saying the occasion “did not align with our property’s core event guidelines.”

The Conroe occasion will additionally embrace Daniel Miller, the chief of TEXIT, a gaggle that advocates for Texas to secede from the United States. The occasion organizer, Conroe-based Defiance Press, describes itself as “active in the fight against censorship through publishing conservative books which have been widely censored from mainstream media,” and has revealed works corresponding to “Corona-fascism” and a biography of Joe Arpaio, the previous Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff who refused a decide’s order to cease racial profiling by his division.

Defiance Press has additionally revealed pro-Texas secessionist supplies.

The latest spat in Conroe is Rittenhouse’s newest in Texas: Last yr, he introduced that he deliberate to attend Texas A&M University, a declare he walked again after the college stated he had not been accepted. Rittenhouse, who’s from Illinois, later stated he plans to attend Blinn College, a two-year college in Brenham, after which switch to Texas A&M.