Devin Willis testified for hours about the racist vitriol he endured as a young Black man while a torch-carrying mob marched on his college campus four years ago, surrounding him and his friends, spraying chemical irritants and making “monkey noises.”
Now, one of those violent white supremacists, who is representing himself without an attorney in this trial, stood in front of Willis in a federal courtroom, badgering him to name his friends in public proceedings that hundreds of people are listening in on each day.
“I’m hesitant to name them,” Willis told Christopher Cantwell — a neo-Nazi defendant who is serving a prison sentence for extortion and threat charges from a separate case. “Some of them live here.”
Judge Norman K. Moon told Willis he had to answer the question.
Within minutes, the names of Willis’s friends, and photos of at least one of their faces, spread to far-right chatrooms where extremist supporters were following the trial. The chatroom was led by another defendant, who was also live-tweeting this information.
Cantwell,
a far-right podcaster who has been
dubbed the “crying Nazi,” has pleaded guilty in a separate case to two counts of assault and battery stemming from his use of pepper spray near the University of Virginia rotunda during the Unite the Right rally weekend. [as well as the 41 months unrelated to the Rally in the OP]
‘They know who’s watching’
On any given day, this trial sounds like an open spigot of hate. Defendants have dropped the n-word, admired Adolf Hitler, joked about the Holocaust and trafficked in racist pseudoscience.
Melissa Ryan, author of the Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter that tracks online extremism, called their use of the trial platform “desperation.”
“Part of it is the addiction to the attention; part of it is the need to raise money to keep the grift going,” said Ryan
From the beginning, Cantwell had known this trial was a chance to promote himself. After delivering his opening statements last month, he predicted on a right-wing radio show that he had the plaintiffs “shook up.” And comparing himself to other attorneys in the courtroom, he claimed: “I look like a star next to them.”
