“Mr. Rittenhouse, if you were in fear for your life, why did you put yourself in a situation that – to judge by the weaponry with which you equipped yourself – you anticipated to be extremely dangerous? Would it not have been safer to remain at home, and not put yourself in peril?”
“What, and leave the Rite-Aid unprotected?”
“Excuse me?”
“Would you have me just stand by while unhallowed hands possibly desecrated that sacred temple of commerce? Emptying its shelves, despoiling its revolving racks, even, God help us, brutally violating its cash registers?”
“Let me understand you, Mr. Rittenhouse. You went to Kenosha because you were afraid that someone might loot a chain store.”
“Exactly.”
“Mr. Rittenhouse, do you have a personal or financial relationship with the Rite Aid Corporation?”
“No, sir.”
“So your spontaneous defense of their property was purely altruistic.”
“Did the GIs who stormed ashore at Omaha Beach have a personal or financial relationship with France?”
“You are comparing yourself now to American soldiers in the Second World War?”
“I am a soldier of capitalism. Wherever one person takes something that is not theirs without passing by the register, wherever one heinous villain helps themself to an extra plastic bag at the self-checkout, wherever an expired coupon is slipped past an overworked clerk, wherever some enemy of the American Way scratches off a sticky label to reveal a previously-lower price, I will be there.”
“No further que–”
“We shall fight them in the Rite Aids. We shall fight them in the Old Navies, and the Olive Gardens, and the Marshalls. We shall never surrender!”
