CNN: The Unite the Right trial is exposing the chasm between who plans White nationalism's battles and who does the fighting

By Elle Reeve, CNN. Read the full article here. 

A key federal defendant accused of conspiracy over the 2017 Unite the Right rally was forced this week to confront his own explicit calls for violence -- and who should do the actual fighting -- in the months before the deadly event unfolded in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Christopher Cantwell is among 25 defendants being sued for his role in the gathering that brought together far-right groups and racists for a weekend the main organizer had privately billed as "The Battle of Charlottesville."

Cantwell, who's known as the "crying Nazi," has tried to make the case that the threat that weekend from counterprotesters, including far-left antifa activists who track White nationalists online and try to disrupt their rallies, justified the White nationalists' acts of violence.

But on the stand, Cantwell had to listen to recordings of his own podcast, including one from January 2017 -- some eight months before the deadly Charlottesville rally -- in which he discussed Dylann Roof, who in 2015 murdered nine people at a Black church in South Carolina.

Roof "had no future" and so was "exactly the kind of person who should be committing acts of mass murder," said Cantwell's guest, a guy from the neo-Nazi gossip blog The Daily Stormer. Cantwell agreed: "Not everyone's going to be a professional propagandist, shall we say. Some of us got to be fucking cannon fodder for the race war."

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