The people behind the violence in the American protests of George Floyd.

hanimmal said:

So if I am, lets say, robbing a convenience store, and as I am leaving someone tried to hit me with a skateboard to disarm me, I am ok to shoot and kill that person, because of 'self defense' according to the kid killer in Kenosha's white nationalist funded lawyer.

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mooray said:

The crime makes a huge difference, so you would not if you were robbing a store, but you would if you were jaywalking. It will be interesting to see how much weight is placed onto the original crime: minor in possession of a deadly weapon, which is only a misdemeanor. But, it's not just a minor in possession of a deadly weapon, it's really a minor in possession of a deadly weapon heading out into public streets to play superhero. My personal opinion is that the minor in possession of a deadly weapon heading out into the streets to play superhero is the proof of the "utter disregard" required for the reckless homicide.

This is all just incredibly poor judgement fueled by trumpism and he was fine to shoot the skateboard guy and the dude with a gun, though I have no idea about the guy chasing him, because you can't tell what's going on very well. I don't think there's enough for the intentional homicides, but the reckless homicide is really clear(to me).

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CatHedral said:

The fact that he was out there with a loaded rifle and with one in the chamber says premeditation to me.

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Prosecutors trying to convict Kyle Rittenhouse of murder have been working to paint him as an inexperienced teenager who misrepresented his age and medical training to other armed civilians in his group on the night he shot three men during a protest against police brutality in Wisconsin last year.

Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger has drawn out testimony during the first week of Rittenhouse’s trial from several witnesses, including two military veterans, saying the Illinois teen appeared inexperienced, that he falsely claimed that he was old enough to possess a gun and that he was a certified medic when he was really just a lifeguard.

Phil Turner, a former federal prosecutor and attorney in Chicago who isn’t involved in the case, said Binger is trying to show jurors that Rittenhouse didn’t know what he was doing and that they shouldn’t believe his self-defense claims.

“In terms of how he reacted, they want to show it in context that he’s young and he’s not experienced and would be more likely to perceive (the protest) as a more threatening situation (than an older person),” Turner said. “A younger guy is going to think this guy is going to hurt me when really it’s not true.”

Rittenhouse brought a semi-automatic rifle to the protest in Kenosha in August 2020. The city on the Wisconsin-Illinois border was in the throes of several nights of chaotic demonstrations after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, who was resisting arrest during a domestic dispute. Rittenhouse was 17 years old at the time and said he had gone to Kenosha to protect downtown businesses from looters.

Just before midnight, he shot Joseph Rosenbaum, killing him, after Rosenbaum chased him into a parking lot. Bystander video shows a crowd chasing Rittenhouse down the street. In a matter of seconds an unidentified man tried to kick him in the head, Anthony Huber hit him in the head with a skateboard and Gaige Grosskreutz charged him with a pistol. Rittenhouse fired at the man who kicked him but missed, shot and killed Huber and wounded Grosskreutz in the arm.

Prosecutors have charged Rittenhouse with multiple counts, including homicide and being a minor in possession of a firearm. Rittenhouse has argued that he shot the men in self-defense. That means his attorneys must persuade jurors that he reasonably believed his life was in danger and that the amount of force he used was reasonable. Binger maintains that Rittenhouse was the aggressor and overreacted to the situation.

Ryan Balch, a former U.S. Army soldier who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, testified Thursday that he traveled to Kenosha on the night of the shootings armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a pistol to help protect businesses, and that he met Rittenhouse there.

Balch later told FBI investigators that Rittenhouse seemed very interested in him and his military deployments. He said Rittenhouse told him that he was 19 and a certified emergency medical technician; he was actually a lifeguard at a recreational complex in nearby Pleasant Prairie, which is between Kenosha and Rittenhouse’s hometown of Antioch, Illinois.

“He seemed like a young and impressionable kid,” Balch said. “He seemed a little under-equipped and under-experienced as well, which is one of the reasons we kind of stayed with him.” Balch did not say why he felt Rittenhouse was under-equipped.

Balch said he kept an eye on Rittenhouse throughout the evening, protecting him as Rittenhouse walked around shouting that he was a medic and could help anyone who was injured. Balch recounted one protester insulting Rittenhouse with profanity and Rittenhouse yelling back “I love you, too, ma’am.” Balch said he told him not to respond because it would only antagonize the crowd further.

“That’s when I told him, ‘hey, don’t say that,’” Balch testified. “It can cause somebody to escalate the situation if they feel like you’re making fun of them a little bit. So, just wasn’t needed.”

Former Marine Jason Lackowski testified Friday that he also traveled to Kenosha armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a knife to protect businesses.

He said Rittenhouse introduced himself and said he was an emergency medical technician. Rittenhouse didn’t say how old he was, but Lackowski testified that he thought Rittenhouse was at least 18 because minors can’t possess firearms in Wisconsin and he thought a person had to be 18 to get an EMT license.

He went on to testify that Rosenbaum was acting “belligerently,” tried to start fights with Lackowski’s group and asked members of the group to shoot him. He said he didn’t consider Rosenbaum a threat to him or anyone else, however.

Richie McGinniss, a videographer for the conservative website The Daily Caller, testified Thursday that he met Rittenhouse while documenting the protest and asked him how old he was.

“I believe the response was something along the lines of ‘I’m an adult,’” McGinniss said. “I actually told police the night of that I believe that he was in his mid-20s. But I believe I said exactly that he had a baby face.”

Rittenhouse’s attorneys pushed back at any suggestion that Rittenhouse overreacted to a non-threat. They noted that Lackowski’s encounter with Rosenbaum occurred in a group setting and that he never faced Rosenbaum one-on-one like Rittenhouse did. When defense attorney Corey Chirafisi asked Lackowski if he would feel threatened if Rosenbaum charged him at full speed and tried to take his gun, Lackowski responded, “Yes.”

But Rittenhouse’s team left unchallenged the testimony that Rittenhouse had lied about his age and his medical certification and that he appeared inexperienced.

Turner, the Chicago attorney, said the defense may be content to let jurors believe Rittenhouse is basically just a kid.

“If I was defending this case, I would be happy with that because it’s true. He’s young and inexperienced and that goes to your intent to kill because you perceive a situation as being dangerous,” Turner said. “His youth actually helps him. If it’s an older person, then they think ‘this guy knows better.’”

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CHARLOTTESVILLE — 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 needs to keep drilling down for more names,” one user wrote in the chat the afternoon Willis testified.

The brazen display of doxing — or publicly uncovering personal information about a private individual — revealed the ways that white supremacists are weaponizing this federal civil trial about the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally weekend into a spiteful stage.

Some of the defendants have been ousted from social media such as Facebook and the dating site OkCupid, but in this courtroom, they’ve found a new platform to amplify their racist views, put on performances they boast about on podcasts, radio shows and in live during-the-trial chats, and to attack their opponents.



Neo-Nazi fans celebrated in far-right chatrooms Monday as some listeners on the public access line, which caps at 500 people, appeared to be able to unmute themselves during the trial’s afternoon break and troll the court — saying the n-word multiple times, declaring “Make America Great Again” and promoting a white supremacist podcast on which Cantwell recently spoke.

Since the trial began late last month, at least three of the defendants have called into far-right podcasts or radio shows, bragging about how well the defense is performing.

If the defendants’ behavior in court goes unchecked, experts warned of harmful consequences, raising questions about the ability of the country’s legal system to safely allow people to file lawsuits against violent racists.

“It screams the whole, if a Black person dares to try to hold a White person, particularly a White male, accountable that not only will they be threatened, but everyone around them,” said Shireen Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, a group that has tracked online extremism since 2013 and supports women of color who are harassed online. “It’s a very clear indicator of organized and targeted attacks.”

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. He is also serving a 41-month sentence in an Illinois federal prison after being convicted of extortion and threat charges.



In a recent interview with an extremist podcast, he said that he was held in a communications management unit, which severely limited his ability to speak to the general public. But for this trial, Cantwell said he was transported to the Central Virginia Regional Jail, providing a respite from communication restrictions and an opportunity to call into podcasts and speak to his followers through court proceedings.

Cantwell is one of two defendants who have represented themselves in the courtroom, presenting unique circumstances in which they directly confront and question their accusers.



In the past several years, there have been massive efforts to silence the kinds of hateful, violent speech that can spurn real-life harm.
Anti-fascist organizers and researchers have been pushing tech companies to deplatform white supremacists for their incendiary, threatening speech that often targets people of color, women and religious minorities.

Facebook has kicked off defendants Jason Kessler, the lead organizer of the Unite the Right rally, Cantwell and Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right,” though Kessler and Spencer still appear to be active on Twitter. And OkCupid banned Cantwell.

The neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, published by Andrew Anglin, also a defendant in this case, has been removed from domain registration systems including Google. As a result, many extremists have migrated to more obscure platforms.

Charlottesville activists have been urging journalists to avoid interviewing the defendants. After spotting a Vice reporter speaking with Spencer outside the courthouse, anti-racist activists issued this statement through a freelance journalist: “if vice sincerely wants interviews with us, maybe they should stop talking to Richard Spencer.”



Advocates for the plaintiffs said the lawsuit aims to bankrupt white supremacists and their groups, and there have already been results with default judgments against several defendants who did not cooperate in the case. Spencer called the suit “financially crippling” and at least three defendants already face tens of thousands of dollars in sanctions for flouting court orders, documents show.

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KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — The defense rested its case Thursday at the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, setting the stage for closing arguments Monday in the shootings that left Americans divided over whether he was a patriot taking a stand against lawlessness or a vigilante.

Rittenhouse’s lawyers completed their side of the case on Day 9 of the trial, a day after the 18-year-old Rittenhouse told the jury he was defending himself from attack and had no choice when he used his rifle to kill two men and wound a third on the streets of Kenosha in the summer of 2020.

Prosecutors have sought to portray Rittenhouse as the instigator of the bloodshed, which took place during a tumultuous night of protests against racial injustice.

Rittenhouse could get life in prison if convicted of the most serious charge against him.

The defense put witnesses on the stand across 2 1/2 days. Prosecutors presented testimony over a span of about five.

After closing arguments, names will be drawn to decide which 12 members of the jury panel will deliberate and which ones will be dismissed as alternates. Eighteen people have been hearing the case. The panel appeared overwhelmingly white.

The protests in Kenosha were set off by the wounding of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by a white police officer. Rittenhouse, then 17, went to Kenosha from his home in Antioch, Illinois, in what the former police and fire youth cadet said was an effort to protect property after rioters set fires and ransacked businesses on previous nights.

Rittenhouse is white, as were those he shot.

One of the final witnesses for the defense was a use-of-force expert, John Black, who testified that less than three seconds elapsed between the time a protester fired a shot in the air and Rittenhouse opened fire with his rifle.

Black took the stand as part of an effort by Rittenhouse’s lawyers to show that he had reason to fear for his life and acted in self-defense.

The defense has suggested to the jury that the relevant timeframe for determining whether Rittenhouse’s use of force was reasonable consists of just a few minutes around the shootings.

Black said it took 2 minutes, 55 seconds, from the time the first man who was shot that night, Joseph Rosenbaum, chased Rittenhouse across a car lot to the time Rittenhouse approached police, after the shootings.

Prosecutors, for their part, have stressed a much longer window, saying the tragic chain of events occurred over hours, starting with Rittenhouse’s fateful decision to go to a volatile protest with a rifle.

On Wednesday, Rittenhouse spent most of the day on the stand giving his account of what happened in those frenzied minutes, declaring: “I didn’t do anything wrong. I defended myself.”

Rittenhouse testified that he heard a gunshot directly behind him as he was being chased by Rosenbaum, but also that he never saw Rosenbaum with a gun. Authorities said the shot was a bullet fired into the air by someone else in the crowd.

On Thursday, Black testified that about 2 3/4 seconds elapsed between that shot and the first one fired by Rittenhouse.

The account Rittenhouse gave has largely been corroborated by a wealth of video and the prosecution’s own witnesses: Rittenhouse said that Rosenbaum cornered him and put his hand on the barrel of his rifle, the second man hit him with a skateboard, and the third man came at him with a gun of his own.

At one point Wednesday, his lawyers angrily demanded the judge declare mistrial and bar Rittenhouse from being retried — essentially asking that the whole case be thrown out. They accused the chief prosecutor of asking Rittenhouse out-of-bounds questions.

Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder, though plainly mad at the prosecutor, did not immediately rule on the request, and pressed on with the case.

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Plowing forward in a civil conspiracy trial against the organizers of the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally, the plaintiffs called an expert witness who methodically examined the defendants' private communications and social media posts, explaining how they exemplify the classic markers of violent white supremacist organizing.

The plaintiffs' attorney showed the jury a tweet sent by James Fields, who slammed his car into a crowd of antiracist marchers at the culmination of the rally, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others. The tweet displayed an image of a smiling white family, accompanied by the text, "Love your race, stop white genocide."

"Essentially you have this message that if you love your race, you will be committed to stopping 'white genocide,'" Peter Simi, an associate professor of sociology at Chapman University, testified. "People in the know understand that 'stop white genocide' is a call to violence."

Simi's testimony took most of the day on Thursday, with nearly all of the defendants in the lawsuit brought by nonprofit Integrity First for America cross-examining him. The time taken by defendants' counsel to cross-examine Simi likely indicates how damaging they view his testimony or their recognition that they're running out of time to undermine the plaintiffs' case.

Simi and co-author Kathleen Blee, a sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, concluded in a report prepared for the plaintiffs that the defendants "quite plainly followed the playbook" of the white supremacist movement through their participation in the Unite the Right rally.

"Our exhaustive review of their planning materials makes it apparent that the defendants utilized WSM tactics, principally the reliance on racial animus as a motivator, the intentional use of violence to achieve their goals, and a coordinated strategy to obfuscate their aims through the use of 'double-speak,' 'frontstage/backstage' behavior, and a discrete and new-age communication platform," they wrote.

Simi and Blee reviewed about 575,000 posts in Discord, a gaming platform with a private communication feature that was used to organize Unite the Right. Simi testified that he and Blee expect to receive $30,000 for 1,000 hours of work from Integrity First for America.

The plaintiffs introduced a raft of evidence showing that Fields harbored exterminationist views and worshiped Adolf Hitler, including a photo of his bedroom taken on the day after the car attack that showed photos of Hitler on his wall and bedside table.

In one tweet, Fields wrote, "Shit's going to hit the fan and you k*kes will know the wrath of the west once more."

Fields' Twitter history showed that he followed at least two of the defendants, Richard Spencer and Augustus Sol Invictus, as well as David Duke, who was invited as a surprise guest at Unite the Right. Fields retweeted or tagged Spencer at least 16 times on Twitter between March and August 2017, although there's no evidence that Spencer, the most prominent figure in the alt-right movement in 2017, ever responded.

Fields drove from his home in Ohio to Charlottesville, and wore a white polo shirt and khaki pants, the uniform of defendant organization Vanguard America. When he arrived at Emancipation Park, Thomas Rousseau, the ground commander of Vanguard America, handed him a shield with the organization's emblem, one of the defendants has testified.

Fields's social media history, which was shown to the jury on Thursday, pointed to even further engagement with prominent organizers and participants. Fields tagged Anthime Gionet, a white supremacist livestreamer also known as "Baked Alaska" who is currently facing charges in connection with the Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol on July 8, 2017. He also retweeted and tagged Brad Griffin, a member of the League of the South who heavily promoted Unite the Right, and retweeted a video of Identity Evropa founder Nathan Damigo, who is a defendant.

The court played a recording of a jailhouse phone call between Fields and his mother after Aug. 12, 2017 in which Fields said the United States should have a one-party government and that he thought Spencer would be a good president.

While Simi was on the witness stand, the plaintiffs played a clip of defendant Christopher Cantwell speaking on his podcast five days before the Unite the Right rally in a bid to make the case that other defendants' shared Fields' exterminationist aims. The recording also supported Simi's testimony that white supremacists view "communists" — a loose term used to denote multiculturalists, leftists and Jews — as a threat.

"Let's gas the k*kes and have a race war," Cantwell said. "When I realized they're responsible for communism, that's a really good reason to genocide a people."

At the end of the statement, Cantwell can be heard giggling.

"There's quite a bit going on there," Simi told the court. "There's a call for violence multiple times. A reference to genocide. A reference to gassing. Clear expression of anti-Semitism. Mention of communism."

Simi and Blee's report also cited a Discord post by Cantwell as an example of white supremacists utilizing doublespeak to motivate participants to engage in violence while claiming not to do so.

While planning for Unite the Right was underway in June 2017, Cantwell wrote in Discord: "If you kill the Jew, the Jew in you dies with him I heard (This is a tasteless joke, relax k*ke)."

Cantwell asked Simi to read the post aloud to the jury, and tried to trip him up by asking if it was representative of "frontstage or backstage behavior."

"This is an example of how humor is used in the white supremacist movement to create doublespeak," Simi told Cantwell. "In this instance, humor is conveying violence while simultaneously making the case that it's just a joke."

Plaintiffs showed Simi a Discord conversation that included Michael Chesny, an active-duty Marine Corps member involved in planning for Unite the Right. The discussion began with a link to Amazon.com to purchase flagpoles, escalated into a conversation about using flagpoles as weapons, then to a reference to an ax handle as a weapon, and concluded with an image depicting people impaled on spears that was posted by Chesny.

After considering the plaintiffs' request for clarification, Judge Moon instructed the jury on Thursday morning: "I did not give a complete and accurate statement of all his testimony, and you should disregard it."

"What the reverend said is not a foundation for what Mr. Damigo said," Moon continued. "You should try to remember all of the reverend's testimony, and don't try to draw any inference from what I said. It's improper for me to make any statements that reflect on anyone's testimony. Disregard anything I say to the lawyers about the testimony. It's up to you to find the facts, not me. Just disregard anything I say when I'm talking to lawyers or instructing witnesses on how to testify. Anything like that is something you're sworn not to rely upon."

Defendants are expected to start calling witnesses tomorrow. The jury has yet to hear testimony from Jason Kessler, who obtained the permit and is considered the primary organizer of the Unite the Right rally.

To speed the trial along, the plaintiffs have agreed not to call Kessler and co-defendant Cantwell as witnesses, but instead to question them through cross-examination when the defense calls them to testify. But plaintiffs' counsel Karen Dunn told Judge Moon the plaintiffs want to hold their case open until they get an opportunity to question Kessler and Cantwell. James Kolenich said the soonest Kessler will be available is Monday.

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