Thread by @Jbloeffler

Week 2 of Charlottesville Trial begins today, w/ more testimony from plaintiff Devin Willis, first direct examination then cross by defense.

No references to the VA elections happening tomorrow thus far, but the trial did surface in the VA gubernatorial race washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/…

Devin Willis continues his testimony on events and lasting impact, how he "struggled and stumbled" academically, socially, professionally for rest of college and since. "The nightmares subsided until I came back here for this trial."

League of the South lawyer launches his cross by discussing an Aug. 8, 2017 activist statement Willis helped prepare, searching for clues to counter-protestor violence, BLM ties, and evidence of anti-police sentiment.

Willis is calm and collected as he's pressed on where he was, what he shouted, how many red bandanas -- "antifa symbol" -- are visible in crowd pics, if all people around him were students, weaponized, and so forth.

Defense closes by pressing on his motives, and whether his group was seeking confrontation w/ UTR protestors. If not, who was the audience for your own counter-protest?

"That's a good question," he replies. Our audience was "actually the other counter-protestors" to voice symbolic support for "standing up to hate...If you look at the video, our back is to the [UTR] protestors."

Next is Spencer, who begins by asking about Willis's studies as a Political & Social Thought Major. He read ancient classics like Aristotle and also moderns like Nietzsche and Isaiah Berlin...

pst.as.virginia.edu

Berlin impressed Willis w/ "his pretty relentless intellect, he could make critiques of the Left and the Right."

Spencer: "I agree."

Spencer moves on to Black student politics, campus protest, and "Do we live in a White Supremacist society?"

"I think we live in a very complicated society and there's lots of white supremacy in it."

Describes his own reactions in thoughtful terms & his naïveté in going on A12 after already being attacked on A11: "I was young and not as cautious and risk-averse as I am now" and "I had a responsibility" to help his peers run a counter-protestor "safe space" at McGuffey Park.

Spencer queries on protest chants, tossing various hypotheticals that Willis patiently engages, at one point suggesting Spencer has led them into "the weeds" of "semantics" when asking about the meaning of "the people united"

Last cross before lunch is Cantwell, who wants to know how much Marx he read in PST major. He replies he read section of Kapital but never read Communist Manifesto. Cantwell seems surprised and disappointed.

Tries to poke other holes in his account, incl. his contacts w/ BLM Charlottesville, his activism, his knowledge of antifa violent tactics.

At one point, plaintiff counsel objects to his line of questioning: "I understand he’s pro se but this isn’t a podcast."

Cantwell ferrets out of him the names of other students who'd joined him at rally, despite his obvious discomfort at having to identify them publicly out of safety concerns.

Judge declares it valid and necessary.

Cantwell accuses him of convenient memory lapses:

"I can’t help but remember that you say, 'I don't remember' a lot. Is everything okay?"

"No, everything is not okay..."

After Cantwell comes James Fields Jr.'s lawyer, very briefly, and then Kessler's lawyer. But his regular counsel is not present, instead a substitute via zoom.

The limits of tech:

Judge reminds jurors that no, they're not eligible to do their jury service via zoom.

Defense attorney Joshua Smith's cross is full of false starts as he lapses repeatedly into argumentation and requests for witness speculation.

Judge, exasperated, to Smith: "You can argue the case in summation, but you may not argue it with the witness."

The day closes w/ video testimony of Samantha Froelich, former lead member of Identity Evropa. It's devastating in its frank disclosure of genocidal fantasies and antisemitic demonic obsession with Jews.

Also, the strange dualism of Alt-Right Holocaust denial -- "Either the Holocaust didn't happen or Hitler didn't kill enough Jews."