Socially conscious NBA superstar LeBron James weighed in on the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial Wednesday by mocking the 18-year-old defendant for becoming emotional and beginning to cry on the witness stand.
James — reacting to a USA Today headline saying Rittenhouse “broke down in tears” — told his 50 million Twitter followers that he wasn’t buying it, among other things.
“What tears?????” James asked in his now viral
tweet. “I didn’t see one. Man knock it off! That boy ate some lemon heads before walking into court.” He finished off his message with a trio of laughing-crying emojis.
As of Thursday morning, James’ tweet garnered nearly 170,000 likes, nearly 29,000 retweets, and over 23,000 comments.
Oops
Of course, not all of the comments were favorable. In fact, James — who’s unwisely opined on a number of issues beyond the basketball court — got his head handed to him by a several prominent Twitter users:
And conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller called James a “f***ing coward” while mocking him back, asking if he plans on offering “any support for your fellow NBA player @EnesKanter speaking out against the mass extermination of ethnic Muslims in China?”
But notable blue checkmarks agreed with James
As you might guess, a number of Twitterverse luminaries saw things the way James did.
“Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed Anthony Huber, 26, and Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and injured Gaige Grosskreutz, now 27,” CNN commentator Ana Navarro-Cárdenas tweeted. “Think about how much their loved ones have cried, real anguish and grief, not crocodile tears.”
“F*** this brat’s crocodile tears,” Amanda Marcotte, a politics writer for Salon,
tweeted. “Self-defense is when you are minding your own business, someone attacks you, and you have to fight back. Rittenhouse picked up a gun and went looking for trouble. He found it and, in a sane world, would go to jail for it.”
And Carli Pierson — an attorney and USA Today opinion writer — also invoked the “crocodile tears” charge while writing that Rittenhouse came across as “melodramatic” and shouldn’t be believed.
“Regardless of how Rittenhouse tries to twist his story — or twist his sad face into tears — his innocent kid act shouldn’t fool anyone,” Pierson said, adding that he “could get life in prison if convicted, and that’s what he deserves.”
Oh, and how can we leave out this one?