The ruling didn’t get everything, but let’s see it for what it was: a $26 million win.

BY Dahlia Lithwick, Slate

Excerpts:

"A federal jury in Charlottesville, Virginia awarded more than $26 million in damages against two dozen white supremacists and violent right wing organizations who had organized the 2017 Unite the Right rally that ended in the death of a counter-protester and injuries to many others.

"The jurors deadlocked on two federal conspiracies charges rooted in the 150-year-old Ku Klux Klan Act, an 1871 statute that allows parties to sue for damages in response to race-based violent actions.

"But they did find the defendants had violated Virginia state civil rights laws against racially motivated harassment and intimidation.

"The jury sent a $26 million message that the defendants had participated in a conspiracy to commit racially motivated harassment and intimation, and that makes them losers.

"The jury saw them for what they were: sad little violent white men begging for relevance if nothing else. They failed even at that.

"This lawsuit was a template for how to hold violent white racism to account without giving it a platform, and a guide for how to do so with dignity and decorum and compassion for the hurting and traumatized and the dead."

"The plaintiffs were nine individuals who had mostly been injured either when the car driven by James Alex Fields killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer on a Charlottesville street, or during a torchlit march on the University of Virginia grounds the night before.

"The defendants—including white supremacists Richard Spencer and Chris Cantwell—had spent the weeks before the rally amassing foot soldiers to march, making plans to arm themselves with makeshift weapons, and chatting online about the legality of running over protesters with cars.

"They claimed at trial, two of them ostentatiously representing themselves, that this was all just big performative hilarity and protected First Amendment speech. But as the plaintiffs showed, the far-right groups were always planning for racial violence, and claiming that everyone in a bandana was part of an Antifa plot to entrap them.

"As one of the organizers, Jason Kessler, put in a text to Spencer: “We are raising an army, my liege, for free speech but the cracking of skulls, if it comes to it.”

"Spencer himself, on leaving the courthouse, pronounced the “alt-right long dead and gone.”

[slate.com]