Spencer is one of 24 white supremacist organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville being sued under the Ku Klux Klan Act for damages and to bankrupt and dismantle the white supremacists’ organizations, BuzzFeed News reported.
According to BuzzFeed, Spencer “strode confidently” to the witness stand Thursday morning but by lunchtime became “frazzled and irritated” as plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Bloch, “stripped away the polished veneer that Spencer, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has called 'a kind of professional racist in khakis,' typically presents."
Raw Story has a good rundown of the series of unfortunate events for Spencer. For starters, there was the audio of Spencer’s tirade after learning about counter-protester Heather Heyer’s death (a car driven by one of Spencer’s cohorts deliberately drove into a crowd and killed her):
"Little fucking k*kes," Spencer said. "They get ruled by me. Little f*cking octoroons… I f*cking… my ancestors f*cking enslaved those pieces of f*cking sh*t. I rule the f*cking world. Those pieces of f*cking sh*t get ruled by people like me. They look up and see a face like mine looking down at them. That's how the f*cking world works. We are going to destroy this f*cking town."
Spencer tried to argue that that wasn’t the “real” him:
"There are also moments like that that capture my most childish, embarrassing sentiments," Spencer testified. "The animal brain. That's me as a seven-year-old. It's a seven-year-old that is probably still inside me. I'm ashamed of it. That is a childish, awful version of myself."
Bloch seems to have done an excellent job of proving that that is indeed the real, adult version of Spencer:
Plaintiffs introduced additional evidence supporting their claim that Spencer and the other defendants conspired to commit racially-motivated violence. A video played for the jury showed Spencer giving a speech at a drunken after-party following the May 13 torch rally in Charlottesville in which he can be heard saying, "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."
Another video showed Spencer giving a straight-arm Nazi salute and participating in a call-and-response of "Sieg heil, sieg heil, sieg heil," at the party, which was also attended by Kessler, Damigo and co-defendant Matthew Heimbach.
"Was that the seven-year-old again?" Bloch asked.
Spencer stammered as he attempted to articulate himself, finally settling on, "I bet it was. That's fair."
I don’t know whether the plaintiffs proved everything required to satisfy the legal aspects of their case. But they sure put a lot of dents in Spencer’s veneer. More from BuzzFeed:
Presented with evidence of dozens of text message exchanges between himself and neo-Nazi and codefendant Christopher Cantwell after claiming they had communicated a handful of times and “ate lunch once,” Spencer stumbled.
“Between July and August you exchanged 88 text messages with Mr. Cantwell,” Bloch told him, referring to evidence submitted to the court. “But you said, ‘We shared a few text messages, seven in total.’ Isn’t that what you told the jury?”
Spencer fell silent. After a long pause, he said, “I think I was referring to instances.”
Couldn’t happen to a more deserving fellow.