Buzzfeed News: White Supremacists Used Racist Slurs And Cursed In Bizarre Opening Statements For The Charlottesville Trial

By Christopher Miller, Buzzfeed News. Read the full article here. 

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia — “Check. Check. Check,” neo-Nazi shock jock Christopher Cantwell spoke into the courtroom microphone.

Wearing a blue shirt without a tie or jacket, he proceeded to name-check Mein Kampf, drop the n-word, plug his far-right radio program, call himself “good-looking” and a “professional artist,” and blast antifascist activists all in a matter of minutes. Surprising nobody in the courtroom, Cantwell, who prepared for this moment with help from two other neo-Nazis in prison and spending evenings watching Tucker Carlson, said “I’m not a lawyer … [but] I'm the best attorney I could afford.”

He added, “And I didn’t even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.”

It was much more a racist, stream-of-consciousness diatribe than an opening statement in the landmark civil lawsuit trial that could bankrupt Cantwell and several other white supremacists and dismantle their organizations.

But that was how one of 24 organizers and participants of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville four years ago began what’s expected to be an emotionally charged trial that will last through much of November. Cantwell’s codefendants didn’t do much better...

...Supported by Integrity First for America, a civil rights nonprofit, the lawsuit against the “Unite the Right” white supremacists aims to remedy that. It was filed under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which was key in dismantling that group as it swept across the South in the wake of the Civil War. The statute allows victims of racially motivated violence to sue when there’s a conspiracy to carry it out. The law is currently being used in two cases against former president Donald Trump and his allies in relation to the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol, including one brought by Black Capitol Police officers and another by members of Congress.

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