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Nazis’ Lawyers Accuse Charlottesville Victims of Being Communist Sympathizers in Sixth Day of Wild Trial
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia — As the second witness in the landmark lawsuit against white nationalist organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally took the stand on Monday, defendants sought to discredit the victims of violence that engulfed the city in August 2017 by attempting to make strained connections to violent left-wing counter-protesters and communists.
During jury selection, several prospective jurors expressed negative opinions about “antifa,” revealing how deeply right-wing conspiracy theories falsely portraying left-wing, antiracist activists as uniformly violent have become entrenched since the election of Donald Trump. Lawyers for the plaintiffs were able to get several of the prospective jurors with the most extreme views of “antifa” struck.
Defense counsel began cross-examination of Devin Willis, a plaintiff who was an 18-year-old African-American student at the University of Virginia in August 2017, on Monday morning. Willis and fellow plaintiff Natalie Romero, who testified on Oct. 29, were the only people of color among a group of counter-protesters who were surrounded by a torch-bearing mob as they linked arms around the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the University of Virginia campus on Aug. 11, 2017.
White nationalists in the mob yelled, “Go back to where you came from,” made monkey noises at them, and hurled lit torches at their feet.
A member of the Black Student Alliance at the University of Virginia, Willis helped organize a respite area in nearby McGuffey Park, where antiracist counter-protesters could find food and water, listen to poetry or take time for meditation, during the day of the Unite the Right rally on Aug. 12, 2017.
Defendants questioned him about the language in a press release announcing the project by asking him to distinguish between “nonviolent civil protest” and “direct action.” Through cross-examination, the defendants attempted to cast the respite effort in a sinister light by highlighting the fact that Willis also went to what was then Emancipation Park and stood with a group of people who attempted to block the white nationalists from traversing the street.
Richard Spencer, the one-time figurehead of the alt-right movement, asked Willis if his intention of maintaining a “safe space” at McGuffey Park would “have included blocking people from traveling to a permitted rally.”
“I don’t think so,” Willis replied. “The first thing is the safe space was in McGuffey Park. I think what you’re referring to took place somewhere else.”
But Willis also rejected the defendants’ attempt to characterize his participation in the blockade as “direct action,” instead describing it as “a symbolic gesture,” similar to when he joined counter-protesters to surround the Jefferson statue the previous evening.
“That’s why there was space left to walk around,” he added.
Bryan Jones, counsel for the two League of the South defendants, used his cross-examination of Willis to attempt to undermine the plaintiffs’ characterization of themselves as peaceful counter-protesters. Jones presented images of the counter-protesters blocking Market Street adjacent to Emancipation Park that included at least two individuals holding sticks or flagpoles. Others in the line were wearing red bandannas, which Jones suggested in his cross-examination were indicative of support for communism.
Willis acknowledged on the stand that he joined what Jones called “this human barricade” on at least two occasions.
During direct examination, Willis had testified that he had witnessed people using sticks and poles as weapons to hit people near Emancipation Park. When Jones showed Willis a photo of person who appeared to be a counter-protester in the human chain holding a flagpole, Willis acknowledged that it was consistent with, as Jones worded it, “the type of weapons you saw used during the confrontation and conflict that day.”
Willis also identified co-plaintiff Romero in a photograph of people on the line.
Jones referenced Romero’s earlier testimony when she said that white nationalists spit at her and threw her against a police car next to Emancipation Park on the morning of Aug. 12. She testified that she couldn’t understand why they assaulted her because there was plenty of room to go around her.
“If someone were to say that Natalie was only standing on the side of the road, that would be incorrect, wouldn’t it?” Jones asked.
“I don’t think that invalidates the other thing she said,” Willis responded.
Jones also questioned Willis about red bandannas worn by people in the line blocking Market Street.
“You didn’t realize that there were communist supporters?” Jones asked.
“I wasn’t really paying much attention to that,” Willis replied.
Jones’s questioning also sought to shift blame for the violence from the defendants to members of law enforcement, who stood on the sideline as hand-to-hand combat raged on the Market Street on the morning of Aug. 12, before declaring the event an unlawful assembly and ordering people to leave.
Jones contrasted the police handling of Unite the Right with their response to a rally a month earlier by the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Willis agreed with Jones that the Klan rally was relatively uneventful and that there was a significant police presence at the earlier rally, in comparison with Unite the Right. In contrast to Unite the Right, during the Klan rally, police kept the two groups separated.
“Could it be that one of the reasons you experienced violence at the August rally is that you were standing with other counter-protesters blocking a roadway, but in July you didn’t do that?” Jones asked.
Willis responded: “I don’t think standing in the roadway is an invitation to be attacked, but you could say that, yes.”
Before the trial started, Jones had unsuccessfully sought to introduce the 220-page Heaphy Report, an independent review of the breakdown of order during the Unite the Right rally that was commissioned by the former city manager, into evidence in entirety.
The Heaphy Report concluded that the city of Charlottesville failed to protect both free expression and public safety on Aug. 12, 2017.
“The city was unable to protect the right of free expression and facilitate the permit holder’s offensive speech,” the report said. “This represents a failure of one of government’s core functions — the protection of fundamental rights. Law enforcement also failed to maintain order and protect citizens from harm, injury and death.”
Timothy Heaphy, the lead author of the report, is a former US attorney for the Western District of Virginia who was recently hired as chief investigative counsel for the US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol.
The plaintiffs have argued that the Unite the Right organizers sought to use the report “as a central pillar in their defense at trial” in an effort “to shift the blame of their racially motivated violence onto others.”
Judge Moon turned down the defendants’ request, ruling the report inadmissible as hearsay.
The defendants are likely to sharpen questions about plaintiffs allegedly impeding their access to Emancipation Park, where they held a permit for a rally, when the Rev. Seth Wispelwey takes the stand. Wispelwey, who is a plaintiff in the case, organized a response from clergy. As Wispelwey and other clergy members, including Professor Cornel West, marched arm-in-arm to Emancipation Park, white nationalists charged through them, knocking Wispelwey into a bush.
Defendant Christopher Cantwell, a neo-Nazi podcaster, took the defendants’ efforts to link plaintiffs to violent left-wing activists a step further by extensively questioning Willis about various individuals who counter-protested the Aug. 11 torch march. At one point, Cantwell asked Willis to name the people who were in the car with him when he traveled to campus to counter-protest the torch march. During his direct examination, Willis had explained that when the white nationalists attacked them at the Jefferson statue he covered his face to avoid being doxed.
Responding to Cantwell’s question on Monday about his fellow counter-protesters, he told the court: “I’m hesitant to name them. Some of them live here.”
“You have to name them,” Judge Moon told Willis.
Plaintiffs’ counsel asked to approach the bench for a conference.
Cantwell resumed his line of questioning, and Willis asked if he had to respond.
“This is your lawsuit, and this is information they need to ask,” Moon said.
Cantwell, whose legal strategy has occasionally earned the scorn of counsel for his fellow defendants, has aggressively cross-examined the first two plaintiff-witnesses, running the risk of alienating jurors who sympathize with the injuries they incurred during the weekend of violence. At times, Cantwell’s courtroom comments have seemed more directed towards his white nationalist podcast audience than the court.
Jordan Green covers right-wing extremism for Raw Story. A Kentucky native, he now lives in North Carolina, where he spent 16 years writing for alt-weeklies and freelancing for the Washington Post and other publications.
Image: Peter Cvjetanovicm (Twitter)
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U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has declared that the Trump administration’s massive deportation plans will continue without any amnesty for migrant farm workers, and insisted that “able-bodied” American adults who access Medicaid for health care insurance should be the ones to replace deported migrant farm workers. Critics have pushed back.
“I can’t underscore enough,” Secretary Rollins said at a press conference at the USDA on Tuesday, ahead of a White House Cabinet meeting. “There will be no amnesty, the mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way, and we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation.
She added that, “with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.”
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Secretary Rollins’ remarks do not take into account that nearly two-thirds (64%) of adults under 65 accessing Medicaid are already working, according to KFF. Another 28% are exempt due to illness, school, or care-giving responsibilities.
Her statistic of 34 million able-bodied adults on Medicaid is promoted by a right-wing think tank, the Foundation for Government Accountability, which advocates for reducing work restrictions on teenagers, and opposes expanding Medicaid.
Also, there is not large-scale farm work available in every state, nor, does it appear, that would many Americans want to perform that work, especially for low wages. Farm work rarely offers employer-paid health care. And farm work is often seasonal.
Critics blasted Secretary Rollins.
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“They’re like cartoon villains,” wrote Bloomberg Opinion columnist Patricia Lopez. “So send Medicaid recipients in as field hands? Also, what is meant by strategic mass deportations? Just Blue states?”
“Lol,” exclaimed Yahoo News reporter Jordan Werissmann, “we’ve gone from ‘the USAID program analysts will make shoes’ to ‘people will pick strawberries to keep their health care’.”
“I have talked to literally thousands of MAGAs and have not found a single one who will work on a farm. Not one,” wrote New York Times bestselling author Ramit Sethi. “This is simply anti-immigrant bigotry from Republicans.”
“Ah, yes,” remarked journalist Lydia Polgreen, “those high paying farm labor jobs that include health insurance!”
“Did not think the script for 2025 would feature villains co-written by Charles Dickens and Pol Pot,” added historian Mike Cosgrave.
Watch the video below or at this link.
Brooke Rollins on farm laborers: “There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce toward automation and 100% American participation, which with 34 million able-bodied on Medicaid we should be able to do fairly quickly.” pic.twitter.com/GsLprEFImG
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 8, 2025
READ MORE: Democratic Strategist Warns Trump Could Try to Impose Martial Law Before 2026 Midterms
Image via Reuters
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy escalated his attacks on New York City Tuesday morning, slamming the subway system as unsafe—despite double-digit declines in several major crime categories and an overall drop in transit crime. Duffy also lashed out at the city’s highly popular and successful six-month-old congestion pricing program, denounced its bike lanes, and took aim at liberal policies more broadly.
“I’m laughing, but it’s not funny,” Secretary Duffy told Fox News on Tuesday morning, when presented with some NYC crime statistics (video below). “So if you include the pickpocketers in those stats, yes, pickpocketers might have gone down, but assaults have gone up,” he said, “by 66% since 2019.”
“It’s dangerous to ride the subway in New York,” Duffy alleged. “And again, if you’re Kathy Hochul, the governor, or if you’re MTA, you don’t ride the subway. This is a war on Middle Americans, working Americans who have to ride the subway, and these people don’t seem to want to make it safe.”
Duffy declared reducing crime on the subways is “very simple,” and charged that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which oversees the subway system, is “not willing to fight crime like they should.”
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“By the way,” he continued, “when they talk about congestion pricing, yeah, it’s when they say it’s working, it’s working because they’re raising money. That’s why they say it’s working, but congestion is horrible still in the city. That’s because they’re taking roads for buses and for cars, and they’re making them bike lanes.”
He then blasted “liberals.”
“So when you take away lanes, you get more congestion, and then they complain about congestion,” Duffy charged. “It’s just stupid liberals with stupid policies.”
Duffy’s remarks come just days after President Donald Trump’s attack on New York City mayoral Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani. The President vowed, “I’ll save New York City, and make it “Hot” and “Great” again, just like I did with the Good Ol’ USA!”
Secretary Duffy has targeted New York City’s subway system almost from the start of his tenure. In March, from New Jersey, he blasted New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul and threatened to pull federal funding from the MTA, which oversees the NYC subway.
“If you want people to take the train, to take transit, then make it safe, make it clean, make it beautiful, make it wonderful, don’t make it a s— h—, which is what she (Hochul) has done,” Duffy said in March, as NJ.com reported. “She could fix it in hours, not days, not weeks, and she chooses not to.”
He also insisted eliminating crime in the NYC subways, which stretch for 665 miles, is “simple.”
“This could be a non-issue, send law enforcement in, kick out the homeless, get rid of the drugs, put cops on the beat, making sure there is no violence, make sure people aren’t afraid of being punched or stabbed or pushed in front of a train,” Duffy said. “This isn’t hard — law enforcement is simple.”
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According to the MTA, 5.5 million people ride the subways each weekday—nearly 1.7 billion riders annually. There are 472 stations, with the busiest, Times Square, seeing over 65 million riders each year.
In April, Duffy toured the NYC subway with Mayor Eric Adams, denounced the subways as homeless shelters, and again insisted they are unsafe, despite statistics that show crime has dropped by double digits.
The MTA has pushed back strongly.
“Subway crime is down, ridership is up, and congestion pricing is working,” said MTA chief of policy and external relations, John McCarthy, as the New York Post reported. “We look forward to Secretary Duffy wrapping his head around the facts.”
The Post also reported that “NYPD data shows that overall transit crime is down 3% through June 29, compared to the same period last year — 1,051 incidents to 1,083.”
Critics blasted Secretary Duffy.
“Millions of people ride the subway every day, and every one of them is braver than Sean Duffy, apparently,” wrote attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
“Millions of people safely ride the subways every day. Just saying,” declared Ken Lovett, a senior advisor to Governor Hochul and a former MTA senior advisor. “And the subways have always, and continue to be, a great equalizer, allowing those who can’t afford cars in NYC to get to their jobs, schools, or groceries.”
Another social media user asked, “Serious question- what role does the federal Secretary of Transportation have regarding local crime?”
Adrian Benepe, a senior executive with a career in government and non-profits, asked, “You scared to ride the subways, son? 5 million people—unarmed men, women and children—ride @NYCTSubway every day. Come to NYC and we will ride together so we can make sure scary bad guys don’t get you.”
David Neary, a filmmaker and archivist added, “There are very few things I do on a daily basis that feel more safe than riding the subway.”
Amateur historian and native New Yorker Russell Drew wrote, “The fact that Sean Duffy is a Cabinet member shows how far we’ve fallen. It used to be that Cabinet members showed professionalism and restraint. Now they go on Fox News to call Americans ‘stupid.’ Unprecedented partisanship. Unprecedented nastiness.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
Sean Duffy on Fox: “It’s dangerous to ride the subway in New York … it’s just stupid liberals with stupid policies that impact the lives of New Yorkers” pic.twitter.com/Y5RnePMgpF
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 8, 2025
READ MORE: Democratic Strategist Warns Trump Could Try to Impose Martial Law Before 2026 Midterms
Image via Shutterstock
An increasingly “anxious” White House is lashing out at Democrats and the media, accusing them—without providing evidence—of blaming President Donald Trump for the catastrophic Texas floods that have killed over 90 people, including many children.
Critics are questioning whether cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) by the Trump administration hampered accurate forecasting and slowed emergency warnings. Others point to failures by local officials to communicate timely alerts to the flood-stricken area along the Guadalupe River.
“Former federal officials and outside experts have warned for months that President Donald Trump’s deep staffing cuts to the National Weather Service could endanger lives,” the Associated Press reported Monday afternoon. “The Trump administration has cut hundreds of jobs at NWS, with staffing down by at least 20% at nearly half of the 122 NWS field offices nationally and at least a half dozen no longer staffed 24 hours a day. Hundreds more experienced forecasters and senior managers were encouraged to retire early.”
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“The website for the NWS office for Austin/San Antonio, which covers the region that includes hard-hit Kerr County, shows six of 27 positions are listed as vacant,” the AP also reported, noting, however, that there were the usual number of staff members on hand the night of the flood.
Now, veteran foreign policy journalist Laura Rozen writes that the White House is “very anxious that administration/DOGE massive staffing cuts to national weather service and related agencies not be seen as connected to flooding deaths in Texas, inadequate warning.”
Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Monday, in a letter to Roderick Anderson, the Commerce Department’s acting inspector general, urged him to immediately “open an investigation into the scope, breadth, and ramifications of whether staffing shortages at key local National Weather Service (NWS) stations contributed to the catastrophic loss of life and property during the deadly flooding,” The Hill reported.
“He noted that The New York Times reported that key forecasting and coordination positions at the San Antonio and San Angelo offices of the NWS were vacant at the time of the Friday storm,” The Hill also reported. “Those local offices were missing a warning coordination meteorologist, a science officer and a senior hydrologist, among other ‘vital forecasting, meteorology and coordination roles.'”
Only once in Schumer’s letter does he mention Trump, and it is not to blame him for the flooding.
But White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday strongly suggested Senator Schumer was indeed directly blaming Trump for the flooding.
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“Unfortunately, in the wake of this once in a generation natural disaster, we have seen many falsehoods pushed by Democrats such as Senator Chuck Schumer and some members of the media. Blaming President Trump for these floods is a depraved lie, and it serves no purpose during this time of national mourning,” Leavitt told reporters (video below).
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz on Monday also falsely claimed that President Trump is being blamed for natural disasters, telling reporters, “you see that with a hurricane, with a tornado, with a wildfire, with this flooding, where people immediately say, ‘Well, the hurricane is Donald Trump’s fault.'”
Critics pushed back at the White House.
“Nobody is blaming Trump for the floods,” wrote journalist and environmentalist Michael Dominowski. “But he did decimate National Weather Service forecast offices, despite being told doing so would hamper the agency’s ability to accurately predict storms. He did it anyway. Look at what happened. Cause/effect is a thing.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
Leavitt: Unfortunately in the wake of this once in a generation national disaster, we have seen many falsehoods pushed by Democrats, such as Schumer and members of the media. Blaming President Trump for these floods is a depraved lie pic.twitter.com/eOB4tk3xSh
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 7, 2025
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‘Depraved Lie’: White House Claims Democrats Are Blaming Trump for Texas Floods
‘Stupid Liberals With Stupid Policies’: Trump Transportation Secretary Slams NYC
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‘Cartoon Villains’: Ag Secretary Under Fire for Medicaid-to-Farm-Work Plan
‘Stupid Liberals With Stupid Policies’: Trump Transportation Secretary Slams NYC
‘Depraved Lie’: White House Claims Democrats Are Blaming Trump for Texas Floods
Ted Cruz Blasted for Defending Trump, Dodging Questions on Flood Warning System Failures
‘Authoritarian’: Trump Treasury Chief Ripped for Call to Punish Private Citizen’s Speech
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