CHARLOTTESVILLE — Richard Spencer, the white supremacist who led the 2017 torchlight march through the University of Virginia campus where the crowd chanted “Jews will not replace us!” became increasingly agitated as he was questioned in court.
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He claimed he didn’t lead the march, despite evidence showing he did. And he attempted to dodge questions about whether he intended to surround a group of counterdemonstrators, mostly college students, who were far outnumbered at a Thomas Jefferson statue that night.
Spencer, of Whitefish, Mont., is arguably the most prominent of two dozen defendants in the ongoing federal civil trial of leaders of the Unite the Right rally, which turned deadly when an avowed neo-Nazi drove into a crowd of counterprotesters and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Throughout the trial, Spencer has presented himself as a suit-and-tie-wearing intellectual whose beliefs are simply “controversial.”
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But on Thursday and Friday, when he took the witness stand for questioning, his carefully crafted persona was challenged by plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Bloch, who presented evidence of Spencer’s racist statements, his planning for the Unite the Right rally and his celebration in its aftermath.
On Thursday, Bloch displayed a tweet from the night of the torch march, in which anti-fascist activist Emily Gorcenski wrote, “They surrounded us at the statue, they wouldn’t let us out.”
About 15 minutes after Gorcenski tweeted, Spencer responded by quoting Gorcenski’s tweet and adding, “Fact check: true.”
“Would you agree with me, Mr. Spencer, that the reason why you were trying to pin them in at the statue was as a sign of dominance?” Bloch asked.
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“Um. Yes,” he responded.
The exchange came as Block questioned Spence, who was the national leader of the “alt-right” movement at the time of the rally, and it came as Bloch questioned Spencer for hours on Thursday and sought to persuade the jury that his actions in Charlottesville were driven by racism and violent intentions.
Spencer is one of two dozen alleged white supremacists and hate groups accused of conspiring to commit racially motivated violence that weekend in Charlottesville. Integrity First for America, a civil rights nonprofit organization, is backing the lawsuit, which is underpinned by a Reconstruction-era statute designed to protect newly emancipated Black people from the Ku Klux Klan. The trial began last week and is expected to last until Nov. 19.
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Bloch, one of the attorneys representing nine plaintiffs who allege physical harm and emotional distress from that weekend, presented evidence of Spencer’s close relationships with other defendants.
When Spencer tried to distance himself from his co-defendants, Bloch pointed out that in the summer of 2017, he hosted many of them at multiple parties at his Alexandria apartment, referred to as “the fash loft.”
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Spencer was also cross-examined by attorneys representing his co-defendants, and by defendant Christopher Cantwell, known as the “crying Nazi,” who is representing himself in this case.
Cantwell used his time to defend himself and to claim that the defendants’ calls for violence and references to “battles” or “wars” were simply hyperbolic jokes.
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“In your experience,” Cantwell asked, “was violent humor part of alt-right culture?”
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“Yes, there was a subculture in which it was the coolest thing in the world to be as edgy as possible,” Spencer said, adding that it was “very juvenile and silly.”
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During questioning, Spencer tried to translate his past racist statements into something more palatable for the courtroom.
“You also believe that, in your words, Black and Hispanic immigrants are part of an ‘underclass’ we don’t want in our society, correct?” Bloch asked.
“I said that? Or that was the question?” Spencer replied.
“My question is: Did you believe that?”
“They’re part of an ‘underclass’? No.”
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Bloch then played audio of Spencer making that exact claim.
Spencer’s distancing from his past statements differed sharply from the testimony of co-defendant Matthew Heimbach, who expressed his adoration of Adolf Hitler on the witness stand this week.
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Spencer, who has degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago, has expressed his desire for an all-White “ethno-state” and frequently gave far-right speeches on college campuses. (The Southern Poverty Law Center describes him as “a kind of professional racist in khakis.”)
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In his opening statement and again under questioning, Spencer sought to portray himself as a victim. He invoked an incident in early 2017 when he was punched in the face in downtown Washington.
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But when Spencer tried to say in court this week that he did not view White people as superior, Bloch played a video of Spencer making racist remarks about the Black former vice-mayor of Charlottesville. And Bloch played audio of Spencer’s tirade after the deadly Unite the Right rally when he used slurs for racial and religious minorities, saying they “get ruled by people like me.”
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In court, he said that audio, originally published in 2019 by Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right figure, was him at his “absolute worst” and called it his “animal brain.”
“That was me as a 7-year-old and it’s a 7-year-old that’s probably still inside me. I’m ashamed of it. Those are not my sincerely, thoughtful beliefs,” he said. “That is a childish, awful version of myself.”
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Bloch also brought up an earlier Charlottesville torch march led by Spencer, in May 2017, to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. During part of that event, which right-wing activists called “Charlottesville 1.0,” Spencer addressed a crowd of about 200 white nationalists, Bloch said, and quoted a meme: “I was born too late for the Crusades, I was born too early for the conquest of Mars, but I was born at the right time for the race war.”
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The crowd “exploded into cheers and applause,” Bloch said. Bloch also played video from an after-party for that event, in which Spencer was seen in the crowd participating in a call-and-response Nazi salute of “Sieg Heil.”
Spencer justified this in court as “a subcultural thing of being outlandish and stupid while drinking.”
“This was the 7-year-old you again?” Bloch asked.
The next month, Jason Kessler, the lead organizer of the Unite the Right rally and another defendant in the trial, texted Spencer: “We’re going to start the promotional material for ... Unite the Right; Battle of Charlottesville.”
“I’m there,” Spencer wrote later in the conversation.
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“We’re raising an army my liege,” Kessler wrote to Spencer. “For free speech, but the cracking of skulls if it comes to it.”
When Spencer expressed remorse about the events at the deadly Unite the Right rally, Bloch read him something he said in an interview hours after the neo-Nazi drove into the crowd: “It was a huge moral victory in terms of the show of force.” Bloch continued to play clips and read quotes from Spencer where he praised the events in Charlottesville.
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Bloch played an audio clip from October 2017, two months after the deadly rally, where Spencer talked about an “irl war,” meaning an “in real life war.”
“2016 was the meme war. 2017 is the irl war and beyond,” Spencer said. “This is a very interesting development. Like we all met each other in 2016 on Twitter and in 2017 we’re, you know, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder in the streets, doing real activism.”