Jury Bankrupts Charlottesville Rally Organizers

This more bad news for free speech. Dozens of lawyers and millions of dollars were used to sue some political activists into bankruptcy.

BuzzFeed reports:

A Charlottesville Jury Ordered White Nationalists To Pay $25 Million To Victims Of The "Unite The Right" Rally

The jury found the white nationalists violated Virginia state laws, but they could not reach a verdict on federal conspiracy charges.

Apparently the trial consisted mostly of a character assassination.

I am no fan of the defendants. They could be all racists and horrible people, for all I know. But all they did was to organize a political rally in favor of preserving Civil War monuments. Their rally was canceled when counter-protesters showed up and started a riot, and police did not stop it.

One man got caught in the riot, and appeared to panic and drive his car into a crowd. One woman died. He was found to have a racist paper trail, so he is in prison for the rest of his life.

It did not look like murder to me, but I did not follow the trial. He had nothing to do with the organizers. The organizers had left by the time the riots started.

I doubt that the plaintiffs will collect as much money as they spent on the lawsuit. So why did they do it? They obviously want to initimidate right-wingers out of existence. Very few will dare defend something like a Civil War monument now.

The London Guardian has this complaint:

In America, it is reasonable to believe that Black people are scary. ...

The idea of the “scary Black person” manifests itself in every segment of the US criminal justice system. ...

The Rittenhouse verdict is proof that it is reasonable to believe that the fear of Black people can absolve a white person of any crime.

The only scary Black man in the case was Jump Kick Man, but his race was withheld from the jury.

The scary Black men are the ones the Left has lionized -- Trayvon Martin, Ferguson's Michael Brown, the Waukesha WI man who just drove an SUV into a Christmas parade, etc.

Not all Blacks are criminals, of course, or apologists for crime and parasitism. Here is one who has been driven to conservatism:

Seventy-three-year-old Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, was a conservative, then a progressive, and now he’s back on the right: “What has happened to public discourse about race has radicalized me.” ...

Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government. Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps. Loury asserted that as a Black man he is the proud inheritor of the great Western tradition: “Tolstoy is mine! Dickens is mine! Milton, Marx, and Einstein are mine!” He declared that his people are Black, but also proudly American. “Our Americanness is much more important than our Blackness,” he said, before adding, “We must strive to transcend racial particularism and stress universality and commonality as Americans.” This is the classical-liberal case against racial separatism and in favor of integration.

The rest of the essay is a Jewish complaint that, while Jews control most of the media and culture, there is a strain of Christian conservatism that is not under their control.

Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere. The public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite. If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.

Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order — a collective cultural identity.

The history of Judaism demonstrates, Haivry argues, that you don’t need a state or a political order to be a nation.

For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian — and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate.

The Orthodox Jews probably are better off if America becomes a more Christian nation. It is mostly the non-orthodox Jews who are at war with Christianity.

Update: Trial commentary here and here.

What this verdict means is that white Americans have effectively lost their First Amendment right of assembly. The precedent this sets: from now on, if white Americans dare to exercise their right to assemble and protest for the redress of their grievances in our increasingly anti-white country, Leftist authorities can engineer mayhem (as they did in Charlottesville) and then use private civil plaintiffs to levy astronomical damages against the organizers, for the sole purpose of bankrupting said organizers.