Tag: heather heyer
Charlottesville Jury Holds 'Unite The Right' Nazis Liable For $25 Million In Damages

Charlottesville Jury Holds 'Unite The Right' Nazis Liable For $25 Million In Damages

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos

Integrity First for America successfully made the Nazis involved in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville pay for their violence. The jury in the civil trial ruled decisively against a group of two dozen defendants, which included the likes of Richard Spencer and Chris "Crying Nazi" Cantwell representing themselves, as well as hate groups like Identity Evropa and League of the South -- finding that all parties violated the Virginia state law against civil conspiracy.

The jury failed to reach a verdict on counts one and two, which related to conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence and failure to stop the conspiracy. For the third claim, individuals must pay $500,000 in punitive damages while groups like Vanguard and Trad Workers Party must pay $1 million per group.

Eliott Kline, Robert "Azzmador" Ray, Spencer, and Cantwell were found liable for racial intimidation and will pay $200,000 apiece in punitive damages. Plaintiffs Natalie Romero and Devin Willis will receive $250,000 each. Liability was found against James Fields in count four, which encompasses "civil action for racial, religious, or ethnic harassment, violence or vandalism," according to the Virginia state code. For his role in claim five as it relates to assault and battery, Fields must pay $6 million in punitive damages.

Multiple plaintiffs will receive compensatory damages for claim five: April Muniz will receive $108,000, Marissa Blair will receive $200,000, Marcus Martin will receive $157,000, Thomas will receive $318,575, and Romero will receive $217,715. Fields must pay an additional $6 million as it relates to claim six, which is intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The total amount that these reprehensible Nazis must pay is around $25 million. Integrity First for America Executive Director Amy Spitalnick summed things up perfectly: "This case has sent a clear message: violent hate won't go unanswered. There will be accountability."

"These judgments underscore the major financial, legal, and operational consequences for violent hate—even beyond the significant impacts this case has already had. And at a moment of rising extremism, major threats to our democracy, and far too little justice, this case has provided a model for accountability," Spitalnick said in a statement.

The plaintiffs issued a statement praising Tuesday's verdict: "It has been a long four years since we first brought this case. Today, we can celebrate the jury's verdict finally holding defendants like [Jason Kessler, Richard Spencer, and Christopher Cantwell] accountable for what they did to us and to everyone else in the Charlottesville community who stood up against hate in August 2017. Our single greatest hope is that today's verdict will encourage others to feel safer raising our collective voices in the future to speak up for human dignity and against white supremacy."

On Charlottesville Anniversary, Activists Hit Organizers With Anti-KKK Act

On Charlottesville Anniversary, Activists Hit Organizers With Anti-KKK Act

Two years have passed since the Unite the Right rally of August 2017, when hundreds of white supremacists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia and one of them murdered counter-demonstrator Heather Heyer by driving his vehicle into a crowd of counter-demonstrators. Many other acts of white nationalist terrorism have occurred since then — mostly recently, an anti-Latino attack in El Paso, Texas that left 22 people dead. But activist Amy Spitalnick, in an August 12 article for NBC News, explains how a law used to fight the KKK in the 19th century can be used to fight extremists in Charlottesville in 2019.

Spitalnick, who heads the organization Integrity First for America, notes that her organization is “working with a coalition of Charlottesville community members injured in the Unite the Right rally to sue the two dozen individuals and organizations responsible.” And the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, Spitalnick stresses, is “central to our case” and is “one of the few legal remedies intended to deal with private — rather than government — conduct that violates civil rights.”

The KKK was founded in 1865 and quickly became a major source of domestic terrorism in the United States. Six year later, the Ku Klux Klan Act was passed by a post-Civil War Congress and signed into law by Republican President Ulysses S. Grant — and it offered a “civil remedy,” Spitalnick explains.

“Following its passage,” Spitalnick recalls, “the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan organization was effectively dismantled and did not resurface until decades later.” And 148 years later, that law is still on the books and can be used to address the harm caused by events like “what happened in Charlottesville.”

The organizers of the Unite the Right Rally, Spitalnick emphasizes, engaged in activity that violated the civil rights of Charlottesville residents.

“Over August 11 and 12, 2017, they marched military-style on the University of Virginia and downtown Charlottesville,” Spitalnick asserts. “They carried semiautomatic weapons, swastikas and other hate symbols — as well as torches to evoke the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. They chanted ‘Jews will not replace us,’ ‘blood and soil’ and ‘white lives matter.’ They violently attacked students, clergy and other community members.”

Spitalnick goes on to discuss her lawsuit against the Unite the Right organizers, writing, “If everything they own now and in the future can be jeopardized, it makes it much more difficult to recruit followers for these horrific causes. Some defendants cited the lawsuit in deciding against returning to Charlottesville last August.”

Spitalnick wraps up her article by noting that the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 can be used not only against extremists in Charlottesville, but in other places as well.

“The last two years have proven that Charlottesville was not an isolated incident, but a flashpoint in the rise of extremist violence that’s connected to the attacks that followed,” Spitalnick writes. “Before killing 11 Jews in a synagogue last October, the Pittsburgh shooter communicated with some of the Charlottesville leaders…. With this trial — and the judgments we expect to win against these extremists — we can help reverse that deadly and hate-filled cycle.”

This Week In Crazy: David Crosby Faces Fire, Fury From Ted Nugent

This Week In Crazy: David Crosby Faces Fire, Fury From Ted Nugent

Statue fetishists, blubbering neo-Nazis, and Cat Fight Fever. Welcome to This Week In Crazy, The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Scott Adams

The Dilbert cartoonist is secondarily known as an inflammatory right-wing Twitter kook. His response to the weekend’s deadly clash between neo-Nazis and “antifa” protesters at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was no exception. On Wednesday, Adams tweeted what I’ll admit I at first thought was a sarcastic response to President Donald Trump’s continued both-sides-ism during an impromptu presser at Trump Tower on Tuesday:

Everybody knows that one guy in the office that listens to NPR, canvassed for Bernie last year, and gets all jacked up at the sight of a hunking Confederate general cast in copper. Y’know, a “pro-statue” kind of guy.

Of course, that guy doesn’t exist and so he wasn’t marching with a TIKI torch on Friday nor ramming down dozens of counter-protesters on Saturday.

4. Michele Bachmann

Skyline Church’s Pastor Jim Garlow announced on Saturday the appointment of the former Minnesota congresswoman and 2012 Republican presidential candidate to the undoubtedly made up position of “pastor to the United Nations”:

https://www.facebook.com/jimgarlow/posts/10213723930229797

“I don’t know a darker, more deceived place on earth than the U.N.,” Bachmann told the congregation during Garlow’s Sunday service. “Because as we saw at the Tower of Babel, that’s probably the last time when we saw all the nations of the earth come together in a moment of deception … Their goal has been from the very beginning, the creation of a one-world order; but not a one-world order under the umbrella of the Holy Spirit, a man’s attempt at a one-world order that only brings about chaos, confusion, deception, delusion, pain. And that’s where, rather than cursing the darkness, Skyline Church is about to light a candle.”

What does it mean to be “pastor to the United Nations”? Don’t ask me. I can only imagine Bachmann delivering rambling end-times sermons surrounded by tourists with selfie-sticks. Or maybe she’ll hide in the bushes — like she did as a Minnesota state senator in 2005 — outside the entrance and wait to ambush departing delegates with guerrilla gospel.

3. Alex Marlow and Milo Yiannopoulos

The former is Breitbart‘s editor-in-chief. The latter resigned from Beitbart in February after video surfaced of him endorsing pedophilia. Yet the two met on Monday’s episode of Breitbart’s Sirius XM radio show to discuss “virtue signaling” in GoDaddy’s decision to stop hosting The Daily Stormer, an infamous neo-Nazi blog that ran an incendiary article about Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer.

Marlow was quick to distance his publication — itself frequently bookmarked by neo-Nazis — from The Daily Stormer, which, “by the way, has boycotted Breitbart because we let [Milo] write for us and other gay people.”

“You’ll never hear that in the media,” Yiannopoulos said. (And, because I’m petty, I’ll note that I wrote about the antisemitic family feud in Salon in September.) He adds: “The Daily Stormer, the white supremacist hub on the Internet, hates me and hates Breitbart. That’s not coming to CNN anytime soon.”

Marlow initiates the craziness: “The Daily Stormer was white supremacist yesterday too, and the day before, and a year ago, and two years ago, yet GoDaddy decides to ban them today. This virtue signaling is just getting absolutely ridiculous at this point.”

Only the originalist trolls at Breitbart would even think to whine about the unconstitutionality of censoring “the white supremacist hub on the Internet” for calling a murdered counter-protester a “Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut.” If that’s not hate speech, I don’t know what is.

2. Chris Cantwell

And speaking of whining neo-Nazis, this “Unite the Right” organizer — featured prominently in the Vice documentary Charlottesville: Race and Terror — couldn’t even pretend to be tough for a less-than-five-minute vlog after he found out a warrant had been issued for his arrest.

In the documentary, Cantwell claims his band of white supremacists who infested the Virginia college town over the weekend is “not non-violent. We’ll fucking kill these people if we have to” — evidenced by the death of Heather Heyer.

But when the effects of adrenaline and mace wore off and the fuzz got his number, a softer, self-doxxing Cantwell surfaced:

1. Ted Nugent

When in November the United States elected a taller, less literate Alex Jones to run the country, there was concern over which jaundiced, nouveau-riche cretin would fill which cabinet position. Amid the confusion, I totally forgot about all two of candidate Trump’s so-called celebrity endorsers: Kid Rock and Ted Nugent.

The former got the better end of the deal: he’s running to be a U.S. senator in a possibly illegitimate campaign cosigned by Warner Brothers that’s definitely not just some stunt to sell hats.

Nugent, on the other hand, peaked when he grabbed his crotch on stage at a Trump rally in November. He’s since gone back to appearing sporadically on Fox News and claiming the only reason he’s not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is because he’s on the NRA’s board of directors and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation member Jann Wenner “hates the Second Amendment.”

Hall of Famer — as part of Crosby, Stills, and Nash — David Crosby posited another reason the deer-hunting rocker didn’t make the cut:

Nugent then took to (where else but) Fox News to air his rebuttal.

“With all due respect to David Crosby — if any is due,” Nugent told Fox’s Specialists, “here’s a bloated carcass that has abused his body all his life. He’s a repository for every chemical and drug known to man. And if he doesn’t have that much respect or soul, then his criticism to me is a badge of honor. He can kiss my ass.”

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!Get This Week In Crazy delivered to your inbox every Friday, by signing up for our daily email newsletter.