Over the past few days, there have been genuinely baffling moments of idiocy on display by the Nazis on trial in Charlottesville in the case of Sines vs. Kessler. Chris “Crying Nazi” Cantwell screamed passages from a Slate article at Rev. Seth Wispelwey on Wednesday because he was mad that Wispelwey had praised the people who protected him from Cantwell and his ilk. Broke-as-a-joke Nazi Nathan Damigo revealed that Nazis are easier to hack than Donald Trump’s long-banned Twitter account.
Damigo, who tried filing for bankruptcy to outrun his mistakes (it didn’t work), sent a DM with the login information to the Twitter account @AntiWhiteReport. Turns out the password was a predictable mix of racism-meets-slogans-against-racism. Private messages factored heavily into the trial as it continued on Thursday. Expert witness Pete Simi, an associate sociology professor at Chapman University, took the stand and seemingly effortlessly took the defendants to task.
Simi and University of Pittsburgh psychology professor Kathleen Blee reviewed hundreds of thousands of Discord posts, thousands of messages on the Charlotteville2.0 server, and depositions and trial testimony. Their report on the defendants is alarming and crystal-clear in its assessment: “The coordinated race-based violence facilitated and committed by Defendants at [Unite the Right] is emblematic of [white supremacist movement] tactics.”
Simi is an expert witness for a reason: He’s conducted more than 100 training sessions on white supremacy for agencies like the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, published dozens of academic articles on white supremacy, and wrote the book American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate. There are plenty of cases in which Simi was an expert witness that did not result in white supremacists being so blatantly revealed as violent menaces. This trial is different.
Simi laid out exactly how the dozens of Nazis being sued in this case used racism and calls for violence, juxtaposed with humor, to not only make such horrifying beliefs more powerful but also to evoke a false sense of plausible deniability. The hope, or the defense, in this case, is that racists and fascists can post memes calling for ethnic cleansing but claim they’re “just a joke,” followed by yet another epithet. Such was the case in an alt-right server associated with Cantwell.
Through examples of racist tracts, texts, pledges, and more, Simi showed that the white supremacists on trial revere literal terrorists and white ethnostate fantasists yet are aware enough of optics to occasionally condemn some of their more abhorrent contemporary brethren. Richard Spencer made a pathetic show of trying to defend himself by revealing he rebuked Dylann Roof for murdering nine people and injuring another in a racist attack at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Simi immediately called out his behavior.
“I wrote a long article condemning him. Does that surprise you?” Spencer asked.
“No, that’s a strategy in the white supremacist movement,” Simi said, before Spencer abruptly cut him off.
The Nazis have shown their true selves time and time again. They’ve been grasping at straws for over two weeks in this trial. Even Judge Norman Moon has had enough of the pageantry and bullshit, at one point on Friday telling a lawyer that “you’re as concerned as I am about getting this case over with.” It’s more than obvious the 25 defendants are going to lose this case, yet Nazi idiots like Cantwell are dancing in court as if the trial is an extended white supremacist rally. Plaintiffs and the lawyers representing them on behalf of Integrity First for America are hitting the Nazis where it hurts and will render them as broke and toxic as they deserve to be.
Damigo, who tried filing for bankruptcy to outrun his mistakes (it didn’t work), sent a DM with the login information to the Twitter account @AntiWhiteReport. Turns out the password was a predictable mix of racism-meets-slogans-against-racism. Private messages factored heavily into the trial as it continued on Thursday. Expert witness Pete Simi, an associate sociology professor at Chapman University, took the stand and seemingly effortlessly took the defendants to task.
Simi and University of Pittsburgh psychology professor Kathleen Blee reviewed hundreds of thousands of Discord posts, thousands of messages on the Charlotteville2.0 server, and depositions and trial testimony. Their report on the defendants is alarming and crystal-clear in its assessment: “The coordinated race-based violence facilitated and committed by Defendants at [Unite the Right] is emblematic of [white supremacist movement] tactics.”
Simi is an expert witness for a reason: He’s conducted more than 100 training sessions on white supremacy for agencies like the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, published dozens of academic articles on white supremacy, and wrote the book American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate. There are plenty of cases in which Simi was an expert witness that did not result in white supremacists being so blatantly revealed as violent menaces. This trial is different.
Simi laid out exactly how the dozens of Nazis being sued in this case used racism and calls for violence, juxtaposed with humor, to not only make such horrifying beliefs more powerful but also to evoke a false sense of plausible deniability. The hope, or the defense, in this case, is that racists and fascists can post memes calling for ethnic cleansing but claim they’re “just a joke,” followed by yet another epithet. Such was the case in an alt-right server associated with Cantwell.
Through examples of racist tracts, texts, pledges, and more, Simi showed that the white supremacists on trial revere literal terrorists and white ethnostate fantasists yet are aware enough of optics to occasionally condemn some of their more abhorrent contemporary brethren. Richard Spencer made a pathetic show of trying to defend himself by revealing he rebuked Dylann Roof for murdering nine people and injuring another in a racist attack at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Simi immediately called out his behavior.
“I wrote a long article condemning him. Does that surprise you?” Spencer asked.
“No, that’s a strategy in the white supremacist movement,” Simi said, before Spencer abruptly cut him off.
The Nazis have shown their true selves time and time again. They’ve been grasping at straws for over two weeks in this trial. Even Judge Norman Moon has had enough of the pageantry and bullshit, at one point on Friday telling a lawyer that “you’re as concerned as I am about getting this case over with.” It’s more than obvious the 25 defendants are going to lose this case, yet Nazi idiots like Cantwell are dancing in court as if the trial is an extended white supremacist rally. Plaintiffs and the lawyers representing them on behalf of Integrity First for America are hitting the Nazis where it hurts and will render them as broke and toxic as they deserve to be.