96: Catching Up With Cantwell (and The Failures of the Prison Industrial Complex)
Sines v. Kessler is finally underway, and Christopher Cantwell is representing himself. Need we say more? Actually, yes. And hence, this episode. Content warnings. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Show Notes: Vice News, Charlottesville Race and Terror (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIrcB1sAN8I) Christopher Cantwell transferred to Communication Management Unit in Marion, IL. (https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1402292133483196422?s=20) Pro Se Letter regarding change of address by Christopher Cantwell.(https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120.968.0_1.pdf) Hilary Sargent coverage of the Cantwell criminal trial at The Informant. (https://www.informant.news/people/1157338-hilary-sargent) Cantwell Criminal Trial Testimony Day 3 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nhd.53269/gov.uscourts.nhd.53269.118.0.pdf) Cantwell Criminal Trial Testimony Day 4 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nhd.53269/gov.uscourts.nhd.53269.119.0.pdf) Jordan Green at Raw Story: ‘Crying Nazi’ Christoper Cantwell is getting legal assist from a white supremacist as he prepares for Charlottesville trial (https://www.rawstory.com/crying-nazi-trial/) While serving his sentence, Cantwell met Hale along with another man named William A. White, who has played an even more significant role in helping him prepare for his upcoming trial in Charlottesville. White, in turn, is in prison for soliciting violence against the foreman of the federal jury that convicted Hale. According to the US Justice Department, White created the now defunct Overthrow.com website in the late 2000s as a platform for the American National Socialist Workers Party. He used the website to post derogatory comments and personal information about the jury foreman, including their home address and phone numbers. "Anyway, so I run into these guys," Cantwell told a white supremacist podcaster during an interview last week from an Oklahoma prison where he is awaiting transfer to Charlottesville to stand trial. "And allegations against them notwithstanding, they're good to me." Sines v. Kessler at Courtlistener (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6168921/sines-v-kessler/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order_by=desc) Document 1108 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120.1108.0.pdf) In addition, it has now become apparent that Cantwell, who has been proceeding pro se and has been afforded its corresponding protections and leniency, may be using another inmate, William A. White, to participate in this litigation and “ghost-write” his recent filings. See ECF 1063 at 1 (“Christopher Cantwell ... Moves this Court ... To Provide Cantwell and his Lay Counsel, William A White, Adequate Access to The Electronic Materials...”); ECF 1063-2; compare ECF 1055 (handwritten filing written largely in first person) with ECF 1063 (typewritten filing written in third person). That provides yet another basis to deny these motions. Ghost writing plainly violates legal rules and only reinforces the inappropriate and harassing nature of Cantwell’s numerous recent filings, including ECF 1062, 1063, 1064, 1065, 1066, 1077, 1078, 1084, 1085, 1086, 1087, 1088, 1089, 1090, 1096, 1097, 1098, 1099, 1102, 1103. See Wojcicki v. SCANA/SCE&G, 947 F.3d 240, 244 (4th Cir. 2020) (“Allowing individuals to represent themselves pro se reflects a respect for the choice of an individual citizen to plead his or her own cause, but so does the bar preventing individuals without legal expertise from representing others.” (quotation omitted)); Greene v. United States Dep’t of Educ., No. 4:13cv79, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 143678, at 26-27 (E.D. Va. Oct. 1, 2013) (“During the course of this appeal it came to the Court’s attention that Greene, although proceeding pro se and receiving the forbearance afforded such status, was utilizing the services of a ghost writer for many of her filings. The Court emphasizes that the practice of ghost-writing is in no way permissible in the Eastern District of Virginia, or any federal court for that matter. Even if the ghost writer is not an attorney, such practice is still considered the unauthorized practice of law. Those who proceed pro se are afforded certain amounts of leniency that are not afforded represented parties. Ghost writing inexcusably abuses this leniency."). Document 1134 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120.1134.0_1.pdf) Document 1185 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120.1185.0.pdf) Document 1306 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120.1306.0_1.pdf) While Plaintiffs remain adamant that any further delay would be extremely prejudicial given the fact that this case was filed four years ago, jury questionnaires have already been sent out, and many parties, counsel, and witnesses are already in or on their way to Charlottesville, see, e.g., ECF Nos. 1108, 1113, 1196, Plaintiffs are also aware that Mr. Cantwell likely will continue to assert these arguments, which could complicate the issues on appeal. As a result, Plaintiffs have concluded that the best way to resolve the tension between the need to proceed to trial and Mr. Cantwell’s due-process arguments would be for the Court to sever Plaintiffs’ claims against Mr. Cantwell from their claims against the other Defendants in this case for a separate trial pursuant to Rule 42 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Document 1307 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120.1307.0.pdf) (Kolenich on behalf of Kessler, Damigo, and Identity Evropa) The Court has been aware of Mr. Cantwell’s objections since at least April 2021. The plaintiffs have been opposing Cantwell and not caring about his allegations of procedural or substative rights for at least that long. See ECF 945 filed April 26, 2021. Defendants object to the Court flip flopping on its Cantwell rulings, at the mere letter based request of the plaintiffs, less than 48 hours before trial. The defendants have invested considerable time and expense into preparing a defense strategy that assumes the presence of Mr. Cantwell as a party defendant at trial. Document 1309 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120.1309.0.pdf) (Smith on behalf of Parrot, Heimbach, and TWP) Plantiff's counsel want to take a “mulligan” here because, prior to Friday’s final pretrial conference, they had their army of jury consultants analyze the jury questionnaires, and concluded (rightly) that they have very little chance of winning their case in front of the eventual jury (even with adverse inferences). In order to manufacture a basis for their mulligan, they’ve been intentionally not caring about Mr. Cantwell’s situation, which they’ve known about for many months now; that way, if they drew an unfavorable jury pool, they could fake a sudden onset of empathy and concern for Mr. Cantwell’s predicament, and bait the Court into postponing the trial with their ridiculous “two Charlottesville trials” (i.e., the regular one, and then some kind of Cantwell-only “mini-trial” a couple years from now) proposal. Document 1314 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120.1314.0.pdf) (Bloch reads the amended letter.) Document 1328 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120.1328.0.pdf) Cantwell pro se defendant woes Document 1329 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120.1329.0.pdf) More Cantwell pro se defendant woes Document 1330 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120/gov.uscourts.vawd.109120.1330.0.pdf) THIS IS NOT FAIR document Molly Conger Twitter (https://mobile.twitter.com/socialistdogmom) Molly Conger Patreon(https://www.patreon.com/socialistdogmom/posts) Molly's Trial Coverage Day One (https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1452622192555053069?s=20) Jury Selection Day Two (https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1452977775749500930?s=20) Jury Selection Day Three (https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1453344852016607234?s=20) Jury Selection Day Four (https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1453699603879141381?s=20) Opening Arguments Day Five (https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1454066857418362880?s=20) Plaintiff's first two witnesses Emily Gorcenski and Molly Conger. White Supremacists Have Returned to Charlottesville in Another Attempt to ‘Unite the Right’(https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/with-the-charlottesville-trial-white-supremacists-try-again-to-unite-the-right.html) Christopher Cantwell opening statement (https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1453795094591639562?s=20) (Paraphrase) "If you've ever had the intellectual curiosity to read Mein Kampf then you know this case is Mother Jones level nonsense." Trey Garrison dox at the SPLC (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/01/18/spectre-unmasked-racist-alt-right-podcaster-used-be-local-reporter)
You know, one thing that's damning, I'll just say this real quick, one thing that's damning about the hearings today is that the pro se defendants, you know, whatever you might think of them, did better than most of the lawyers.
Do you agree?
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Yeah, so this is episode 96, so this is episode 96, 96.
And, well, I mean, for Russ, it's, well, I mean, for me, it's now, it's like a minute until the clock ticks over to Halloween.
In a minute, it'll be the 31st of October.
For me, I don't know where you are.
I can never remember if you're ahead of me or behind me.
You're ahead of me, aren't you?
I'm behind you.
I'm behind you.
Yeah, I'm 50 chance.
So I went for the wrong one.
Yeah.
So I got to Halloween ahead of you.
Yeah, you did.
Well, you know, happens every year.
Yeah.
So Halloween, but tomorrow, but this time tomorrow when you're exiting Halloween, I'll still have several hours of it to enjoy.
So yeah, bastard.
And of course, our clocks go back tonight.
Well, in the morning, I should say.
Right.
Because British summertime ends in the morning of the 31st.
So, yeah.
Ours is a week away, so we will be six hours apart, I think, instead of five.
Yeah, for a week.
Yeah.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
But I don't know when you, dear listener, will be hearing this, but either way, you know, have a happy and safe and prosperous Samhain, Halloween, however you conceptualize it.
Or, you know, I hope you had one if you're getting this well after it's all over.
Either way, you know, a nice late October, early November to you, dear listeners.
And yeah, this is episode 96.
And this one is called Catching up with Cantwell.
And wow, I'm so excited.
Not nearly as excited as I am, because I'm about to lose control.
And I think I like it.
You know, last time we recorded, I mentioned, oh yeah.
Faint memory.
I was like, you know, I'm really tired of reading scientific papers and other academic and pseudo-academic papers for this project.
Well, this episode is all about reading trial transcripts and legal filings.
And I am not a lawyer.
And also long, long Twitter threads of people saying, Incredibly awful things.
Yeah, this is, you know, this is a case of be careful what you wish for, you know, because you said you were sick of reading scientific papers.
So what life served you up was the opportunity to read an awful lot of incredibly stupid bullshit.
Indeed, much of it handwritten, we will get into that.
This is, of course, the Synes v Kessler civil court case is finally underway and Mr Cantwell is one of the defendants.
So, yeah, I mean, tell us what's happening.
Tell us why we're doing this.
Well, Science v. Kessler is a civil case.
Now, we have spent a lot of time, so this is not going to be our Science v. Kessler episode, although we will kind of cover some of that.
This case started, this is, you know, again, this is the 31st, or 30th or 31st we're recording this.
We have had one week of this case.
It is expected to last for four weeks.
If you want the ins and outs and excruciating detail, you should go follow Molly Conger, aka Socialist Dog Mom, on Twitter.
She is... Which, frankly, why aren't you doing that already?
I can't imagine there's anyone listening to this podcast who is not aware, you know, you're either following her or you have chosen not to for whatever reason.
I don't know why you would choose to, but, you know, it does, it does happen and she does block people, but, you know, whatever.
She has been going through, she's basically spending 14 hour days listening to this case live.
You're not allowed to record or rebroadcast, but you can call into the courtroom of the judge and listen live to what's going on.
And then live tweeting that experience.
And she has been going through these documents for the four years this case has been pending.
And then at night, she does a live Twitch stream from 830 to 930, kind of just talking to a chat and answering questions about what happened that day.
And so she will be doing this.
She'll be doing this for the next month.
She must be.
I just I can't imagine being as over anything as she must be over this.
And yet she she carries it on.
And yet this is, you know, this is, this is, you know, I won't speak for her honestly, but, you know, she, she got into this because of Unite the Right.
And this is, this is definitely a passion project.
And, you know, we have enormous, I have so much respect for her and what she's done over this time.
Science V. Kessler, just to kind of get us into the headspace here, is the, it is a civil, not criminal case.
So no one is facing- Even so, the law and order donk donk is going to be all over this fucking episode.
I hope you realize that.
Yeah, just trying not to get us copyright strike.
But yeah, so she, pardon me, so Science V. Kessler is a civil case.
Not a legal case.
No one is being threatened to go to jail over this.
This is for monetary damages.
It is essentially alleging what's called a Section 1985 in the Virginia Code conspiracy to deprive certain individuals of their civil rights, etc., etc.
This is a fairly You know, novel way of kind of going about this, from what I understand.
But it is, they're trying to make this a landmark case in order to kind of go after these kinds of white nationalists, far-right, violent organizations, and the kind of the people that fund them, the kind of ideological leaders, kind of like, you know, make this sort of a test case for how this can work.
The lawyers involved in this case have spent four years collecting a whole lot of evidence in favor of the conspiracy charge that they have put forward.
I shouldn't say they have done it, they have taken the work of Hundreds of anonymous antifascists who have painstakingly collected that evidence and provided it to the lawyers.
But the lawyers have done, you know, enormous amount of work.
But there is a lot when the lawyers are saying like, oh yes, and we served in an enormous victory and the dirty antifascists, we just don't talk too much about those people.
You do get a certain vibe from time to time.
And so, However much we appreciate the lawsuit and its possible positive effects on the world, it would be nice to get a little bit more acknowledgement to the people who actually did a lot of the groundwork on this.
So anyway, just saying that out loud here.
Again, we're not going to be talking in detail about Science V. Kessler, about all the ins and outs of it.
I think we will do something at the end and sum it up and talk about the larger issues once we get to the end of the story.
But our good, very dear friend Christopher Cantwell.
He's been making a complete ass out of himself.
And when I say dear friend, for any new listeners, that is said with significant irony, just to be clear.
There's a degree of sarcasm in play there.
He is a despicable, despicable human being among the worst of the Nazis that we've covered on this show.
But because he has the enormous talent of sticking his foot up his own ass or sticking his head up his own ass, you know, on a regular basis.
We end up, he ends up being a comic figure for us.
So I can't remember like the last kind of big Christopher Cantwell update we did, which We've been trying to stick Cantwell news segments in as we go along, but especially over this summer, a lot's been happening outside of the Cantwell stuff.
I think the last time we really covered him in a real way was right after he was arrested.
On his criminal case.
Well, yeah, we did a big episode with Hillary Sargent.
Yes.
Yeah, right.
So when so so the last episode that we did, in fact, I've included a link to Hillary's writing over at The Informant.
That she wrote about that trial, about his criminal trial.
So in the time that I've been tracking Cantwell, he had criminal charges relating to the actual events at Unite the Right on August 11th, the night before at the Torch Rally, where he assaulted some people.
Friends of the show, previous guests, Christopher Goad and Emily Groszynski.
So, he has criminal charges there.
He sued them, and they countersued over matters relating to, like, he claimed that they had perjured themselves, which they didn't, but all that got kind of swept away eventually.
He also is currently incarcerated because he threatened to rape the wife of an even worse Nazi than him.
And during that entire time that I've been tracking him, except for the first few months before Unite the Right, he has been subject to this civil lawsuit.
I think that's kind of where our story begins is with the civil lawsuit.
Is there anything you think we should say about Chris Cantwell before we kind of move forward on the ongoing saga of Chris Cantwell's fucking himself?
Well, if you want to, I mean, there's plenty of places you can go if you want to know more about Christopher Cantwell, but one place you could go is this very podcast, previous episodes.
As I say, I did a big episode with Hilary Sargent.
I believe that, I can't remember the number, but that episode is called The Trial of Christopher Cantwell.
And we also, well, I mean, first of all, we covered the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, Virginia, the infamous rally, which is the wellspring of all of this, in episodes three and four of this podcast.
And then we covered Christopher Cantwell, sort of an overview of his background, his origin story, if you know what I mean.
As a world class Dick Lord on the world stage in, again, I believe episodes five and six.
But basically, if you go to the if you go to the the IDSG site and you search Cantwell, then you will find the episodes.
And that's a good grounding.
I don't know.
Do we do we need to recap basically who he is?
I mean, failed stand up comedian, libertarian Wally.
Becomes a Nazi via libertarianism and race realism and stuff like that.
He was radicalized by his audience, essentially.
He was in this kind of far-right libertarian space.
He was part of the Free State Project.
He moved to Keene, New Hampshire.
the Free State Project, excuse me.
He moved to Keene, New Hampshire.
Yeah.
Ah, the Free State Project.
I remember when that was like the terrible thing.
We were all worried, you know?
Remember when that was what far-right extremism looked like?
Man, more comfortable times.
Some of his former pals at the Free State Project are going to come back at the end of this episode, by the way.
Ooh, foreshadowing.
Foreshadowing.
But yeah, he was he was a libertarian.
He was this kind of like socially conservative, right-leaning libertarian.
He is deeply, deeply substance abused.
He is a habitual user of, you know, illicit substances.
A raging alcoholic.
He, you know, anyway, he is, you know, I hate to sort of blame anyone for for substance dependency, but like he is really extreme on like every single measure.
He is a deep narcissist.
He had a Really hard right persona that he did on his radio show.
Yeah.
He has threatened several people I know personally in various ways.
He said he's in jail at the moment for threatening to rape the wife of.
Well, I mean, his defense in that trial, as I remember, it was that, well, I didn't actually use the word rape.
So in this in this scenario, she might have been into it.
So it's fine.
Exactly.
It gives you a little cameo of man's intellectual and moral calibre, I would say.
So in a previous version of the Catching Up with Chris Cantwell episode that I was planning, I had put together the trial transcripts from that criminal case that were finally released.
And I had gone through them and kind of picked out choice bits that I was going to read.
And there's a lot, there's a lot there because he did break down crying on the stand, which, you know.
Yeah, that's another thing he's famous for.
His nickname is the Crying Nazi.
If he's known for anything outside of the kind of circles that are going to be listening to this, he is known as the Crying Nazi.
He is one of the guys who was at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville Attacking people, pepper spraying, and of course, let's not forget, you know, they're in the context of marching up and down being a Nazi, who after that, he realizes that, you know, the police want to talk to him for, you know, attacking people, etc.
And he releases a video of himself sobbing about how, what a sad, poor, persecuted little soldier he is.
Well, and the the narrative, I mean, the real story there to that like crying Nazi video was he was terrified that the police were going to harm him or going to kill him in apprehending him.
And that must be awful, you know, living in fear of the police killing you while apprehending you.
I mean, God, wouldn't it be terrible if there was like a large group of people who hadn't done anything wrong, who had to think about that all the time?
Then, you know, he has been in and out of the prison system, the various parts of our prison industrial complex, off and on for most of the last four years.
And another kind of recurring thing that we're going to be talking about in this episode is his sort of whining about the very real indignities that he has suffered and the very real civil rights violations that he has suffered in that.
Of course, He never uses this as a way of like reflecting on the general condition of the prison industrial complex and like the way that that is like deeply racially coded in the way that it is a form of white supremacy.
And that all of the things that we're going to say in terms of the indignities that he has, you know, suffered.
Are very real and are the absolutely ordinary working state of that system.
Like he is not being treated like especially badly by anyone here.
But he, you know, he gets leave, right?
He gets no insight from any, you know, empathy.
What's that?
I don't know.
I mean, it's worth saying just briefly, you know, I have empathy for people who have substance abuse problems, addiction problems.
I have empathy for people who have Personality problem, you know, personality disorders.
And I intensely dislike the prison industrial complex and that entire system.
I am ready to be empathic and empathetic to anybody who has those problems.
The problem is that Christopher Cantwell is a vicious, vile, Nazi piece of shit who attacks people and endangers people and abuses people for no reason other than that he hates them because he's a loathsome little bigot.
So that kind of vitiates my sympathy, you know?
Exactly.
We can acknowledge the real issues that are in the system and also say, yeah, Chris Cantwell, you are not the most sympathetic person to be discussing this.
One of the other things that we might know about him, you know, kind of getting into this, is that he had a habit of podcasting from jail during his initial confinement after the Unite the Right rally, right after the Crying Nazi video was leaked.
He started calling into various other kind of far-right figures and some friends of his, and they would record his phone calls.
And he did a thing called Live from Seg.
That's segregation.
That's live, you know, live from jail, essentially.
And he was doing his radio show, you know, a shorter version of, you know, 30 minute phone calls, you know, as often as he possibly could, because he felt like this incarceration was a political torment to silence him, you see.
And so he absolutely destroyed a lot of any kind of goodwill.
Any kind of goodwill or leniency that the that the attorneys in those cases were going to grant him or the judges were going to grant him because he was like actively violating court orders on live on his podcast, you know?
Yeah.
Constantly.
One of the one of the orders was that he was not allowed to mention Emily Gorsinsky at all and any of his kind of communications, like not even reference vaguely.
Because he had harassed her so thoroughly.
And then he would, of course, Emily is a is a trans woman, and he made it made a habit of misgendering her and just the most like juvenile stupid of ways.
So and he's doing all that and many, many other things live on his from from jail.
He's just he's just podcasting from jail.
Did not continue that procedure to such a degree after his arrest for in January 2020.
Um, for, uh, the, uh, the criminal charges of, uh, threatening, uh, his fellow Nazi's wife, but, uh, did occasionally call into his friend, Jared Howell's show and have, uh, conversations about, um, various kinds of issues with, with, uh, being in jail.
And his current cases, etc, etc.
We've done a Jared Howe episode as well.
We haven't done a full Jared Howe episode.
We've talked about him a lot.
Just because every time you mentioned Cantwell for the last two years, you're talking about Jared Howe to some degree.
We have not done a full Jared Howe episode.
Wow, I felt sure.
I'm now hallucinating our back catalogue.
Never mind, never mind.
We're nearing 100 episodes.
I think it's like, I can't remember all of them either.
Sometimes I look back and go, all right, we did that.
That's awesome.
Yeah, that's cool.
Yeah, can't believe it.
Well, one of the phone calls, one of the podcast products that he was trying to release in this way was originally just called Untitled Projects that eventually got called Unlikely Allies, in which he was chatting with a man named Joe the Jew.
And in case we haven't made this clear so far, Christopher Cantwell is a deeply, deeply anti-Semitic human being.
Rabidly, obsessively anti-Semitic.
Yes.
Yes.
This is not the kind of like subtle form of, you know, blaming George Soros kind of anti-Semitic.
This is like really, really overt.
Hitler did nothing wrong.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Entertains Holocaust deniers.
He literally recommended that the jurors in his current trial read Mein Kampf if they are intellectually honest with themselves in the third sentence of his opening statements.
So, This is, you know, when we call him a Nazi, he is an actual Nazi.
It's fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, there is a there is a well-known axiom, isn't there?
In legal circles, you know, the the the person who defends himself.
Comfy, comfy purring.
I hear his opening statement.
Has a fool for a client.
That's a well known.
Yes, you can.
I don't know.
You might not be able to because weirdly it didn't come out on the last recording.
But yes, you might possibly be able to hear very loud purring.
Sorry, I did get I did get a bit of that comfy purring just very loudly in one of my ears.
Just that.
So hopefully the audience got it too.
That'll be nice.
I hope so.
It didn't come out last time, but I hope.
Say hello Pocket.
Say hello.
Anyway, so two episodes of that podcast were eventually produced, but after the first episode was released, very shortly thereafter, Cantwell was moved from what was then his current incarceration to a hardcore unit, to a communications unit.
This is Communications Management Unit at USP Marion, one of only three CMUs in the country.
This was on June 8th is when this kind of news came out.
I've got a link to a tweet that Molly did at the time, which includes handwritten legal filings from Mr. Cantwell, explaining where they can contact him now that he has been moved to this unit.
Now, Usually, the people who end up in these kinds of, you know, high security, like low communication units is because they are, you know, you end up with like mafia figures and kind of gang leaders who are thought to be able to, you know, kind of communicate with their criminal activities outside the prison, you know.
Big fish.
Cannibal, cannibal.
Yeah.
Those kinds of figures.
You also end up having...
But it turns out that a lot of the kind of very prominent Nazis kind of end up in these units as well.
And the immediate thought that kind of everybody had, you know, in my circles when this happened was either he was threatening somebody, which entirely possible, or somebody decided, no, you don't get to podcast from jail anymore.
And that's kind of the upshot of it.
And he, He has argued at some length in various places where he does, where he is able to kind of argue this, that, you know, I am speaking to the media.
I mean, the media is his friend with the podcast, but I am speaking to the media.
I am, I have the right, according to, you know, this set of guidelines and that I was given to me as a, as a prisoner, I have a certain prisoner bill of rights.
I am allowed to communicate to the media, which in this case is this guy with a podcast.
If anyone who remembers, you know, one of the biggest podcasts of all time, Serial, back in 2014, that first season, the problems that Sarah Koenig had communicating with Adnan Syed.
The problems of incarcerated people not being able to communicate with the outside world and not being able to talk about their conditions, the horrible conditions inside the prison, are completely legitimate.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
But most prisoners are not trying to record a Nazi podcast from inside their incarceration unit.
So he gets moved.
That's atypical.
So he gets moved to Marion, Illinois.
He had, I think there's one phone call which he managed to make, which Jared Howe released during the period that he was in Marion, Illinois.
I mean, you know, he described the conditions of like, there's literally someone with a finger on a button that will end this call immediately.
If I go outside like certain guidelines and you know, you know, it was very, very, you know, circumscribed circumscribed the ability that he had to communicate.
with the outside world.
The other thing that this means is because he has been transferred back and forth to various prisons over the course of his incarceration, which is coming up on two years, it'll be two years in January, is that he has all this legal documentation, he has all of his all the depositions, all the things for this civil trial, which has gone on to 1350 documents or so as of the time we're recording.
150 documents or so as of the time we're recording.
It is over a thousand documents, 1300 and something documents.
He had a bunch of that, you know, paper copies of it or thumb drives or some kind of digital stuff that he was able to access and kind of use this to prepare his legal defense.
Well, every time he gets moved, all that stuff has to be shipped to him.
And that takes, Who the fuck knows how long that's going to take because as we know in the prison system, you get moved, you get your stuff when they decide to give you your stuff.
Again, completely ordinary torture given to absolutely every person in the U.S.
prison industrial complex.
Chris Catwell is not being unfairly singled out in this case, and he shows no empathy towards anyone else in this process.
It is all personally, it is a conspiracy by the U.S.
government to come after him personally because of the strength of his political ideals.
That's Chris Campbell's perspective on this matter.
Yeah, no empathy, dawning, not even the faintest glimmer of a systemic analysis, just it's a conspiracy to get me.
Right.
Basically, you know, Christmas Eve, the three spirits, they could talk to this guy for a thousand years, he'd never get it, you know.
He would absolutely adore getting the chance to talk for a thousand years.
Few people are more in love with the sound of their own voice.
The spirits of Christmas wouldn't get a word in edgeways.
It's Catwoman's.
Now, one of the things that happened while he was in Marion, because as I said, a whole lot of various Nazi figures are incarcerated a whole lot of various Nazi figures are incarcerated there, and the prison system has this, it's
It is a general strategy to kind of take all of the kind of people of a certain, like all the Nazis just kind of get housed together so that they don't infect other inmates with their Nazi bullshit, you know?
This is kind of routine.
This happens a lot.
And he met a couple of fairly prominent figures while he was incarcerated in Marion.
One of those people was Nathan Hale.
Who, in the 90s, was convicted of various crimes.
We will probably do an Nathan Hale episode.
He is the head of the World Church of the Creator, and the creativity movement is essentially a Nazi, it's not even Christianity, it is a really kind of bizarre offshoot religion, but it is an explicitly white supremacist, white nationalist religious faith.
Nathan Hale, fun fact, was previously defended by a certain Glenn Greenwald, who was a young lawyer in the 90s.
One of his first big cases that kind of gave him a name was defending Matt Hale.
Yeah, life goes in strange places, doesn't it?
So he meets Nathan Hale and also one of Nathan Hale's kind of like the second in command guy, a guy named William White, Bill White.
And I have a link to a story at Raw Story by Jordan Green.
And I'm going to read a little bit of that.
I'm going to read you a little bit of that now to kind of give you some some background, because it turns out Nathan Hale and Bill White are men with a certain set of skills.
While serving his sentence, Cantwell met Hale along with another man named William A. White, who has played an even more significant role in helping to prepare for his upcoming trial in Charlottesville.
White, in turn, is in prison for soliciting violence against the foreman of the federal jury that convicted Hale.
According to the U.S.
Justice Department, White created the now-defunct overthrow.com website in the late 2000s as a platform for the American National Socialist Workers Party.
He used the website to post derogatory comments and personal information about the jury foreman, including their home address and phone numbers.
Anyway, so I run into these guys, Cantwell told a white supremacist podcaster during an interview last week from an Oklahoma prison where he is awaiting transfer to Charlottesville to stand trial, and allegations against him notwithstanding, they're good to me.
So.
What's actually happening here is that White and Hale, Hale is a lawyer, White is, Hale actually has a law degree, White does not, but has sort of trained himself.
He's spent a lot of time in prison reading, you know, legal library.
They're giving him legal advice.
They're helping him in his civil defense, right?
Now, I feel like it's worth it at this point.
I deeply apologize for this, but I do feel like it is now worth it to let you actually hear the voice of Christopher Cantwell, because Raw Story can run the actual text of what he said.
We have the ability to play you the audio, because it turned out I know exactly which podcast he called into.
So let's hear this from the horse's mouth.
Yeah, Matt Hale is somebody you might have heard of.
I recognized the name, and I didn't recognize his face at first, and I saw a picture of him from when he was younger, and I was like, oh shit, I do recognize you.
Matt Hale is serving a 40-year sentence for allegedly soliciting the murder of a federal judge.
Okay?
Um, and then there's another fella in there by the name of Bill White.
And Bill White is in there serving a 390 month sentence, uh, in part for allegedly, um, uh, threatening, um, or soliciting violence against, uh, one of Matt's jurors.
Okay?
So...
Anyway, so I run into these guys, and allegations against them notwithstanding, they're good to me.
Matt actually made an attorney out of himself before he got arrested.
Bill White, I don't think he ever became a member of the bar, but has made very good use of his time reading the law library.
Mr. White has been very helpful to me filing motions at the court.
And that has the plaintiffs absolutely furious.
And they decided to write this letter to the judge, like, complaining about this and saying that, oh, Mr. White is terrible.
He's defending himself.
Make this stop.
He's obviously ghostwriting for Mr. Campbell is what they said, you know.
And, you know, I don't know.
I've gotten opinions from several people that say there's actually nothing against, there's no rule against ghostwriting in a legal process.
Even at that, it's a collaborative process.
Could I do this without him?
No.
You're filing motions and their complaint is that you didn't write them yourself.
All right.
So that was Chris Cantwell and his best friend in the world, Jared Howe.
I would say his only friend in the world, but I think he has two or three friends left.
We're going to hear from another one of them here at the end of the episode.
but that's a lot more than I was expecting.
So what are we getting from this?
So Cantwell meets this guy Bill White and Nathan Hale.
White in particular appears to be essentially writing the legal filings, or at least kind of dictating them, and then Cantwell files them under his own name.
Now, I did a little bit of looking into this to see what the actual sort of legal standard is.
And again, I am not a lawyer, do not like, this is not anything like legal advice.
I have no fucking clue about this stuff.
What I gathered is that there are differences of opinion about how this can be done and what kinds of legal work you can, what the legal guidelines, what the ethical guidelines for lawyers will allow one to do in this process.
The idea is, the issue of it is that within the legal system, there is this fiction that we are all rational actors We are all like seeking the truth and, you know, putting things on paper that are, you know, held to the highest scrutiny of honesty, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which is, of course, nonsense.
But that is sort of the fiction, the fiction that they abide by in their in their kind of bylaws and such.
The other issue is that Cantwell in this legal proceeding is given an enormous amount of leeway because he is a pro se defendant, because he is defending himself without the ability to use a lawyer.
The reason he no longer has a lawyer is because he stopped paying people.
And because he is an absolutely toxic human being and no lawyer wants to defend him.
But he is given a large amount of leeway, arguably more than he should be given as a pro se defendant.
That's just kind of how it works.
The legal system does sort of allow, look, we know you're not a lawyer.
We don't know all this stuff the way we do.
You're given some leniency on it.
And by actually retaining the services of a lawyer, he is essentially taking advantage of that leniency while at the same time having legal support which is not declared in the paperwork, right?
So, I have linked to the ScienceVKessler.
There are, like, so, If you want to go through and read all this for yourself, most of the documents in the Signs v. Kessler lawsuit have been made public.
There is a website called CourtListener where you can go in and buy individual documents, and there's a browser extension called Recap that you can install, and after you've paid for it, it becomes free for anyone to go down and look at those PDFs.
So guess who has been paying for almost all of these documents?
It's our friend, Molly, almost certainly has personally downloaded.
Friends of this podcast, let's put it that way.
There's no guarantee that all of these are a handful of people, but it is almost certainly true.
I know for a fact that Molly has spent A great deal, like thousands of dollars over the years to make these documents available to people.
So just be aware of that.
There is a reason you can actually go and like read most of these documents.
It is because again, dedicated anti-fascists want to make this information available to the public.
And so anyway, you can go, I've linked to this before, and I'm going to kind of give you document numbers, which you can then go kind of find the individual documents.
It's fairly straightforward to take some time to kind of learn how to kind of read the system and everything.
But Once you do kind of have that ability, you can you can kind of go find the documents pretty easily.
So I'd like to read the initial complaint from the plaintiffs in which they are alleging this kind of what they call ghostwriting from from Bill White to Cantwell.
And this is quite, it's quite Halloween appropriate ghostwriting.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
So this is from document 1108 and I've linked to it in the show notes.
In addition, it has now become apparent that Cantwell, who has been proceeding pro se and has been afforded its corresponding protections and leniency, may be using another inmate, William White, to participate in this litigation and ghostwrite his recent filings.
I'm going to eliminate all the kind of legalese and the references, etc.
But that provides yet another basis to deny these motions.
Ghostwriting plainly violates legal rules and only reinforces the inappropriate and harassing nature of Cantwell's numerous recent filings.
So part of their argument is that Cantwell, not just he was having somebody was like kind of ghostwriting for him, but he was Suddenly posting in some cases, dozens of filings on a single day, which are clearly to kind of waste the plaintiff's time responding to all of them, right?
Because they are like kind of clearly frivolous and nonsense.
And your time to, you know, kind of make that claim was two years ago when you weren't fucking paying attention to this case, Chris, which he admitted he didn't, he thought that he thought this case was so frivolous and he would never have to.
really respond to it that it would just get dismissed on a single look.
So, you know, anyway, he spent years just not giving a shit about this case.
Yeah, I think, I mean, I put, there's more, there's more kind of legalese in the, in the show notes, but I think that's, you know, it's really just, I've kind of given you the, the basis of it, right.
They come back in documents 1134 and 1185, essentially alleging the same thing.
This is kind of a continuing argument.
So yeah, go ahead.
What were you?
So far from it being, you know, how dare he merely defend himself?
He's not allowed to do that.
We're supposed to win by default.
The evil Chris Cantwell is supposed to be told you're not allowed to even fight back.
What's actually being said is he's getting all the benefits of being a pro se defendant and he's cheating because he's got Legal advice.
He's got legal help from from somebody who is actually qualified.
Yeah, right.
And William White is apparently not actually a lawyer from what I understand.
But someone who is able to someone who is not putting his name to these legal documents as well.
Right.
Okay.
And so with some training.
Probably qualified in the sense of, you know, doesn't have the, doesn't have the, the, the, like the official education, but someone who knows his way around a legal filing, you know, someone who's been on a, you know, you know, the, the, an amateur, you know, but hasn't been to law school effectively, but you know, yeah.
Even so, this is not pro se, is it?
Right, right.
And look, the argument, again, this gets into some messy questions, right, about, you know, what are the guidelines for this and how, you know, I think a pro se defendant should be, I mean, you know, what's the line between, you know, asking your buddy down in the jail cell next door what they think about a certain robbery case or whatever, and You know, soliciting, you know, the help of a professional lawyer and going as a pro se defender.
I mean, these are messy issues, right?
Sure, but if this guy's actually writing his motions for him... Right, and I think there's an open question as to, like, how much of this is actually written by Bill White.
Like, one of the things that kind of comes across is that For a long time, Cantwell was hand-writing everything, and then suddenly he's doing these dozens of motions that are all with a typewriter.
And so is Chris Cantwell typing this, or is this being typed by someone else?
Is it in his voice?
Again, there's a lot of messiness here, and I'm not trying to bend over backwards to defend Cantwell in the sense of I want to play devil's advocate.
Believe me, I have absolutely no respect for Cantwell whatsoever.
There's no question there.
But I am acknowledging the complexity of the larger question.
Right.
And saying, like, I'm not going to be like kind of 100% on the heat.
Yeah, fuck Cantwell because fuck Cantwell.
I'm just I'm just acknowledging that there is some gray area here.
And ultimately, the judge kind of ruled against Cantwell in this.
And, you know, he said, you're not allowed to do this anymore.
He's on his own.
How that overall issue kind of gets decided in 10 or 20 years, no clue.
But apparently there is a debate on it.
So that's that.
He's on his own.
There was some kind of legal question about whether he was going to be able to be transported to Charlottesville to actually stand trial in person.
He pushed for that.
He wanted to be in the courtroom.
Many of the other defendants have chosen to do their work by Zoom, even those who are not actively incarcerated.
But Cantwell wanted to be there.
He wanted to be able to show up and Be his full self in court, and oh, we're going to get to that.
We're going to get to that.
Because that'll help.
That's going to really help, you know.
But I can also kind of understand being a pro se litigant and then having to do the entire trial by Zoom.
Legitimate, again, another legitimate hardship there, you know, is a kind of a legal matter and a fairness matter, for sure.
As the last days before the beginning of the trial move forward, and as we get closer to the trial, he starts filing ever more Plaintiff requests for how unfair this process has been to him all along.
And he is fully believed that, you know, this is this is something that he has maintained from the beginning.
But I have included.
Look, this man's, you know, absolute belief that he is the ultimate victim, that he's always the victim.
That is the cornerstone of his psyche.
You know, any situation he is he is being unfairly treated.
Exactly.
Um, but I have included a link to a few documents here which sort of, you know, give you the sense of like the way he's and this is this is what I find interesting because what you get the closer he gets to trial and the more sort of unprepared he is to even understand the legal issues involved here.
The more these legal filings start to read like they're not really written for the judge.
They're not really written for trial.
They're not making legal arguments.
They sound like Chris Cantwell.
Prepping the radical agenda, prepping his podcast.
They sound like him talking to like, it's like he imagines this kind of future in which he is like vindicated as being this kind of like, you know, destroyed political figure writing from prison, communicating in any way he can through these legal filings in the hopes that someone will see, you know, how tortured he has been by this process the whole time.
This sounds oddly familiar to anybody.
Yeah, there was another man who spent a little bit of time in prison for some petty stuff and went on.
Did a lot of speechifying in court about how, you know, history would vindicate him and he'd been unfairly treated, etc.
Talked about the struggles that he had, you know, his particular struggles.
A noted 20th century politician, as I believe.
A World War II hero, as I believe Tim Pool once referred to him.
Oh God, I don't remember.
Okay, we'll see.
Bookmark that.
Bookmark that.
All right.
So I spent a lot of time reading these handwritten notes, handwritten things over the course of the last week or so.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
I find it strangely fascinating, right?
Because again, one of the things that he runs into is that You know, he has to write this, he has to write this filing, right?
He has to, he has to file this paperwork.
And in order to, you can't use a typewriter because in order to use a typewriter, you have to have like a typewriter wheel or whatever.
And you have to be able to, and you can buy those from the commissary in the jail or in the prison, but you can't, They were out of stock.
And so they're just out of stock.
And so he can't type it.
So he has to write it, but he can't write it because he doesn't have a piece of paper.
He has to literally borrow individual pieces of paper.
And then he doesn't have, he doesn't even have a pencil.
So he's literally writing these in like the golf pencils they sell him and, you know, like scribbling them out on, you know, in some cases, unlined paper.
At one point, he's literally using the reverse side of the documents he is being served with.
that he has given in the trial.
He's just using the reverse side and like scribbling his responses on the backside.
And like at one point, he literally has to say, disregard reverse side.
This is, you know, this is the only paper I have.
I mean, you know, there is a real like, there's a real like bathos here, right?
But again, this is every single incarcerated defendant.
This is completely ordinary.
This is what the system does, right?
Yeah.
And to be clear, I have zero sympathy with this man, but I would be prepared for him to benefit from the system as a whole becoming fair to everybody.
If he became the case study in how terrible the system is to everyone, and suddenly that led to people realizing, hey, maybe we should actually improve this process somewhat.
Great.
I am 100% on board.
I agree with you completely on that.
This leads to, now one of the things that he's been kind of crying for for months in his legal filings is he wants to delay, he wants to continue the case.
He does not want to, he can't prepare while in prison because he's not given access to the materials that he needs to make his case.
Again, he has a completely legitimate claim on that.
He has argued, no, we just continue this until after I am out of prison, until after I'm at least in a halfway house.
I'm on probation, but I can live somewhere and I can have all my documents and I'm not actually, you know, in this situation where I just have no resources available to me to fight this.
The plaintiffs have, you know, batted that down, the judges batted that down over and over and over again.
He has made this, he has, again, I think there are like at least a dozen court documents that he has produced, like asking for this in various forms.
During the pre-trial conference with Cantwell sort of present and making objections and talking about this very loudly in front of the judge in person for the first time, suddenly the The plaintiffs put out a little document there, actually requesting for a continuance, just for Cantwell.
They want to sever the case and let Cantwell do the rest of the case with the other defendants, the other dozen or so defendants, and then have Cantwell's trial at a later date after he's gotten out of prison.
And they literally, Put off this document the Saturday before the case is supposed to begin on Monday.
Let me just let me read the reasoning to you.
This is this is part of the document.
This is document 1306.
While plaintiffs remain adamant that any further delay would be extremely prejudicial given the fact that this case was filed four years ago, jury questionnaires have already been sent out, and many parties, counsel, and witnesses are already in or on their way to Charlottesville, C-E-G, da-da-da-da.
Plaintiffs are also aware that Mr. Cantwell likely will continue to assert these arguments, which could complicate the issues on appeal.
As a result, plaintiffs have concluded that the best way to resolve this tension between the need to proceed to trial and Mr. Cantwell's due process arguments would be for the court to sever plaintiff's claims against Mr. Cantwell.
from their claims against the other defendants in this case for a separate trial pursuant to rule 42 of the federal rules of civil procedure.
In other words, Cantwell is actually going to damage our case by his You know, due process claims, legitimate or not, but by having these claims, he's actually going to make it more likely that everyone in this process is going to get to appeal and just complicate, just fuck up the whole situation for everybody.
Yeah.
That's what Cantwell is doing.
He is, he is, he is being, you know, and again, whatever you feel about his, whether his claims are legitimate or not, I have my own feelings about that, but.
He is basically trying to wreck this entire process.
The system itself is so broken that the claims that Cantwell is making actually have effects on the entire nature of this trial and whether the other defendants are going to get to appeal this, whatever the judgment is.
that the jury sets down.
So the plaintiffs at the last minute decide, let's just, let's sever Cantwell, let's do him later and do everyone else at the same time.
Now, guess how the other defendants responded to this?
I don't know.
If I was on trial and I was connected in any way to Christopher Cantwell, I would be very keen to be severed from him.
But who the fuck knows?
They were thoroughly against the idea of severing trial at this point.
Right.
And so this is from Kolenich, who is on behalf of Jason Kessler, Nathan D'Amico, and Identity Europa.
This is document 1307.
The court has been aware of Mr. Cantwell's objections since at least April 2021.
The plaintiffs have been opposing Cantwell and not caring about his allegations of procedural or substantive rights for at least that long.
See, and then it's got a couple of notes here.
Defendants object to the court flip-flopping on its Cantwell rulings at the mere letter-based request of the plaintiffs less than 48 hours before trial.
The defendants have invested considerable time and expense into preparing a defense strategy that assumes the presence of Mr. Cantwell as a party defendant at trial.
One more.
This is from document 1309.
Hang on a minute.
Does their defense hinge upon blaming him for everything?
It is entirely possible.
We will find out.
Document 1309.
This is Smith.
This is actually the one like actual professional lawyer, like a not movement based lawyer.
This is someone they just hired.
And this is on behalf of Matt Parrott, Matthew Heimbach and the Traditionalist Workers Party.
Plaintiffs counsel want to take a mulligan here because prior to Friday's final pre-trial conference, they had their army of jury consultants analyze the jury questionnaires and concluded rightly that they have very little chance of winning their case in front of the eventual jury, even with adverse inferences.
That's another fascinating thing that's going on with this case.
We will cover it in the future.
In order to manufacture a basis for their mulligan, they've been intentionally not caring about Mr. Cantwell's situation, which they've known about for many months now.
That way, if they drew an unfavorable jury pool, they could fake a sudden onset of empathy and concern for Mr. Cantwell's predicament and bait the court into postponing the trial with their ridiculous two Charlottesville trials, i.e.
the regular one and then some kind of Cantwell-only mini-trial a couple of years from now proposal.
Now that the plaintiffs see the jury is going to find against them, they're now very concerned about Mr. Cantwell's issues that they've been ignoring for 14 months.
Yeah, I don't think that's what's going on here.
That doesn't seem likely to be.
But, you know, what do I know?
I'm not a liar.
But that's what the other defendants had to say.
And Cantwell, again, who has been asking for months to continue this trial so that it would not be delayed.
Once it was actually put to him, what does he prefer to happen?
It was actually sort of left up to him, do you want to continue this way or do you want to Do you want to continue this trial or do you want to do it now?
He decided to stick with the current case.
And so everybody flip-flopped at the last minute.
It's kind of fascinating, right?
My guess is that someone actually had a reasonable conversation with Chris Cantwell and said, If you do this now, you will have actual lawyers at least at the table.
You will have some kind of legal advice to rely on.
If you do this alone, you are going to be even more completely fucked than you already are.
That would be kind of my guess.
Although it may just be sheer cussedness that suddenly the plaintiffs wanted him to, you know, he may have just flip-flopped on that basis.
Like, no, if they want this now, I'm not listening to them.
No, we're going to do it now.
That's, you know, who knows?
It's a, it was a weird couple of days.
Let's put it that way.
It is.
It is entirely possible that the theory behind Mr. Cantwell's decisions is I find out what they want and I do the opposite because they're bad.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, it's just worth kind of giving you a little bit more of the flavor of some of these handwritten documents here.
In the process of this motion kind of proceeding, someone actually had to give Cantwell the information.
They had to either deliver a letter to him, which is difficult to do late at night in the prison system, or someone had to call him and read him the actual motion.
Okay.
So one of the plaintiff's attorneys, Nicene Block, got that unfortunate duty.
This is from Cantwell's filing.
This is from a document 1314.
So close to 1312.
Anyway.
A phone did not become available until after court cleared at 630 p.m., at which point I called Ms.
Carlson.
Michael Block answered the phone.
Mr. Block asked me if I had seen either of the letters he had filed with the court that day.
day.
This is all of these sentences are like numbered as a legal filing.
This is the whole of number seven.
Amused.
I replied in the negative eight, Mr. Block offered to read the amended letter out loud to me over the phone.
He did so, and paused to let me note the case number cited.
9.
Mr. Block then read to me Mr. Kolynich's response, again pausing as I could note citations.
10.
I thanked Mr. Block for providing me with this information, and we ended the call with a joke and a chuckle.
My trial preparations rendered impossible by the cognitive and emotional toll of this new information.
I put my papers already away.
It's handwritten, so sorry.
That's just bad handwriting.
I put my papers away and began pacing the floor.
Having so averred, I saith no more under oath.
And I did misspeak earlier.
I said Kalanich was a plaintiff's attorney.
He's a defense attorney.
So just to be clear on that.
That is the style in which Cantwell is now writing his legal documents.
It's a legal filing.
It's not a fucking novel.
He's writing it like he's writing it for publication.
Very, I mean, very clear.
Like that's, you know, it's, you know, amused.
I reply to the negative like that is not my favorite bit of Cantwell stuff we're going to go through today.
But that was definitely a high point.
You can find more Cantwell Pro Se Defendant Woes, which I've kind of discussed in detail here in the documents 1328 and 1329, which I've put in the in the show notes here.
And the one that I really want to kind of give you a give you a look at is... One, the heat was beating down like a truncheon on a suspect's neck.
Two, I put my feet up on the desk and turned on my fan with a little bit of string on it.
Three, she walked in, her legs went right down to the floor, etc.
And what's more, she was Jewish.
Seventeen, forget it, Chris, it's Jewtown.
Okay, so this is him complaining about how he's just not able to access the basic materials.
He's not able to have access like a pencil and paper to file these documents.
So, you know, this is from document 1330.
And these are not numbered.
I mean, I guess they're kind of like individual paragraphs, but he doesn't have numbered them.
From USP Marion in June, I restated these problems when I objected to the newly proposed trial schedule.
Since then, I have told the court and asked for its help in resolving issues with the CMU in my trial preparations.
And now, having borrowed my third and for now final sheet of paper, I again restate the obvious.
This is an all caps block text, single paragraph line.
This is not fair!
Exclamation point.
It's well known, of course, that things carry more legal weight if you put them in block caps. - Lots of exclamation marks.
At one point he apologizes because he never learned to write in cursive, so he has to write in plain text.
And as I previously observed, perhaps that is the whole point.
Much like the armed criminals who attacked us four years ago, these lawyers can't win a fair fight either.
For the court to justly adjudicate this matter, either the trial must be delayed and the 14 months of plaintiff misconduct must be accounted for, or I must be dismissed from this case.
Anything short of that will make this court an accomplice to a terrible crime.
This is like two weeks before the start of the trial.
He was begging for a continuance and yeah.
He's just stamping his foot and saying it's not fair, basically.
Exactly, exactly.
And again, completely on board.
I'm sure that he has a valid due process claim.
I am certain of that.
Again, not just you, Chris, it's not a, you know, deep crime against humanity that, you know, your civil case isn't going the way you want it to.
He is alleging like this kind of massive conspiracy of, you know, like Antifa journalists and like, you know, that everyone is just, you know, that Emily Gorsinsky and various other people are all working together to violate his civil rights to speak freely and to unite the right rally.
And ultimately, this is all just ways of suppressing his valid political beliefs, etc.
Yeah, no Chris, no.
This is the normal functioning of the system as it grew up over a very long period of time because its function is to impose capitalist ruling class rule and white supremacy.
This is not a conspiracy to get you to be the person.
And so then the trial started.
Yeah.
And I know you've been reading some of these Twitter threads as well.
I have.
I have linked to the first five days of Molly's trial coverage, and I will continue to collate those as we continue.
So in future episodes, you will find at the bottom, I will, you know, any day that Molly is doing a thread, I'll put those links in the show notes so that I think they should all be available somewhere.
So anyway, the first five days, the trial is gone for five days.
I've got all five of those here.
It is essential reading if you have any interest at all in this case, because even within those threads, it's links back to things that, you know, previous legal filings, like Molly knows his case backwards and forwards, like she is the source on this.
So they did three days of voir dire, picking the jury.
I'm pretty sure.
So the judge is doing something unusual in that during voir dire, everyone had their questions for the jurors.
They just, instead of asking them themselves, they would write them down and give them to the judge to ask.
There was at one point a bit of a kerfuffle where Cantwell complained that one of his questions wasn't asked.
And there was some kind of mention of like religion, something, something religion.
And it wasn't really just kind of, it was apparently just kind of heard, you know, nobody's sure what happened.
I am absolutely certain Chris Cantwell wanted to ask that juror, are you Jewish?
There's no doubt in my mind that that was what was written on that piece of paper.
And that's what Chris Cantwell was absolutely obsessed with finding out before he was willing to accept that juror is, are you Jewish?
So three days of voir dire, which are There is an excellent thing that Emily Gorsansky and Molly Conger wrote about this.
They published it in Slate.
It's called White Supremacists Have Returned to Charlottesville and Another Attempt to Unite the Right.
And it really gets into, I mean, this is, I'm not going to read from it.
Go read this piece.
It is absolutely amazing because they connect the problems with the jury selection process.
You know, A someone can say all lives matter and be accepted onto the jury, but someone who believes that black lives matter tend to get removed because what the jury selection process does is it selects for people who have sort of personal kind of fairness and personal kind of, like, lack of overt racism in their mind.
But it is not correct for, you know, 400 years of, you know, explicit and implicit white supremacy in the country.
You know, like, that's just what it does, right?
And so what is supposed to be a very impartial process actually removes people who have, you know, significant knowledge about The history of white supremacy, because if you know anything about the history of white supremacy, you are not going to be very inclined to believe these defendants.
Yeah, no.
Suspicion of movements like Black Lives Matter is just inherently taken as the neutral setting.
Exactly, exactly.
And, you know, Judge Moon, you know, he's a Clinton appointee.
He's the judge in this case.
You know, I obviously never met him.
I don't really know anything about him except for, you know, what we've kind of gleaned through this process.
He is 85 years old.
We have a gerontocracy among judges in this country.
It is a really, really overt problem.
Not because there's anything particularly wrong with old people, but, you know, it's very difficult to We have a legal system that relies on, you know, complex technical matters as you know, like discord leaks and, you know, signal and various things when the people who are supposed to be making these are really tough decisions are all in their 70s and 80s.
It's just a kind of coherent problem.
So, did you have any particular comments about what you had seen in the Twitter threads that Molly has produced, and kind of in other places?
Because we are going to talk a bit about Cantwell's opening statements.
That's kind of where I want to end this, is Cantwell's opening statement, and then the response to Cantwell's opening statements, which you heard a bit of from a podcast called The People's Square.
With Eric Stryker and a guy named Trey Garrison in the in the cold open here.
They were very happy with Cantwell's pro se.
Delighted.
Yeah.
Doing better than the professional lawyers.
The pro se defendants.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Look, I have to say I'm probably being a bit underwhelming this episode because I've actually been quite unwell the last few days.
Yes, yes.
I should have clarified that to begin with.
Jack has been not feeling well.
So we thank him every day for being involved in this process at all.
So, you know, I'm not quite at my usual full capacity at the moment.
So my memory is a little fuzzy.
I have been reading these tweet threads with rapt fascination and, you know, the usual sort of sick laughter into the echoing darkness.
I mean, we've already mentioned the fact that Cantwell sort of approvingly brings up Mein Kampf at the very start of his opening statement.
Yeah, the third sentence goes something like, if you've ever had the intellectual curiosity to read Mein Kampf, then you know this case is Mother Jones-level nonsense.
That is such a Cantwell sentence.
I mean, it is absolutely quintessential Cantwell.
I personally actually have had the intellectual curiosity to read Mein Kampf, and I can tell you from the perspective of somebody who has read that book that it has no bearing on this whatsoever.
Except for the obvious parallels to Cantwell himself, of course.
Yeah, I should have said maybe that it has no bearing on the legal issues at stake.
Right, exactly.
In this case, which ultimately, I mean, he can act like he's sort of in a playground psychodrama or at the same time in this sort of great moral, historical moment of injustice or whatever, like he's, you know, like he's the white Rosa Parks or whatever the fuck it is he thinks he is.
But ultimately, in the real world, these are legal issues that will be decided on that basis, you know?
That's how this will actually fall one way or the other.
So, you know, stamping your foot and insisting, it's not fair!
You know, that's really not going to get you anywhere.
You know, and this is like this is what strikes me about so much of what he's been saying, what he said in his opening statement, according to these tweets, which is that it's just irrelevant.
It is irrelevant to the issues at hand.
It's whining.
And the other thing it has been much commented on.
I'm not going to be original, but the absolute shit show of this guy I think they call it opening the door, don't they, from the TV courtroom dramas that I've seen?
Bringing into, through his own statement, issues that he had previously fought to get excluded from the proceedings.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
He had fought to exclude him.
Part of the transportation issue was that he wanted to be able to not wear a prison jumpsuit, so he didn't appear to be a prisoner.
He didn't want that made relevant in the trial, because it is irrelevant to whether he was part of this legal conspiracy.
It is completely irrelevant to that.
And it is prejudicial.
The judge ruled correctly that like, no, we are going to exclude that.
And you are, you can, if you can have someone bring you a suit, you are allowed to, you should wear a suit, et cetera, et cetera.
Two minutes into his opening statement, he's like, I'm currently incarcerated for another crime, which means it is now fair game.
If he gets on the stand, they can ask him any question they want to about the circumstances of that.
As I say, I've seen TV courtroom dramas.
He opened the door, Your Honor!
He did, yeah.
Jack McCoy is going to be on the case on this one, yeah.
You stand up and you say, he opened the door, Your Honor, and the judge is always black or a woman on American television.
I assume every judge in America is either black or a woman.
Or a namby-pamby liberal, you know, softy.
It's always one of those, right?
The judge says, that's right.
He he looks at the defense lawyer and he says, it's true.
You did.
And, you know, objection overruled, Mr. Slimy defense lawyer.
So, yeah, it's the other way around in this case, isn't it?
So, yeah, it's it's just incredible.
It's incredible.
He doesn't have a grasp on what he's actually doing.
As I say, for him, it's this great opportunity to stand up and whine and whinge and stamp his foot and moan about the fact that he's being unfairly treated and it's not fair and you're getting at me.
He cannot not bring up the fact that he's in prison.
Despite the fact that it's in his interest to not bring that in, because he wants to tell you all about the cosmic injustice of him being in prison, despite the fact that he absolutely deserves to have been found guilty on that charge.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I mean, and for another thing, I mean, you know, the reason that he was ultimately, like, the reason he was even prosecuted for that was Chris Cantwell himself gave the FBI the evidence of him committing that crime.
Yeah!
Like, just as a reminder there, like, Chris Cantwell was literally emailing the FBI and saying, like, look at what this guy did to me in the context of, like, Oh yeah, I threatened this guy, but like he was doing a bad thing.
And I'm like, wait, what did you say?
Tell us more about this, about this whole incident.
Yeah, we're very curious about this, Chris Cantwell.
deep surveillance they were watching him like the entire time like there was no question they literally just at one point they literally walked in and just like okay you're ours now like he was he was done being useful to them and so they cut him they cut him off you know it's hilarious so self-sabotaging we you know I've said he's a he's a he's a bully and an abuser and he persecutes people etc there is a sense without any sympathy for him because as I say he's a he's a fucking Nazi Fucking swine, this guy.
But without any sympathy for him, there is a sense in which he, you know, the person that he spends most of his time bullying and persecuting is himself because he just sabotages.
It's like it's pathological.
The man cannot stop self-sabotage.
It's like, you know, he sneaks around his own home, putting cellophane over his own toilet and tying his own shoelaces together and putting buckets of water, you know, above the door.
Doing the home alone treatment, but to himself.
Yeah.
Well, you know, he is he is a deep substance addict.
So, you know, he did he did a whole lot of heroin back in the day.
So, you know, yeah, he is obsessed like his central like thing that he's trying to prove here is we were the ones that we at the United the Nazis were essentially defending ourselves against the anti-fascist against this like mob.
of anti-fascists who were ultimately working to, you know, work against our own civil rights.
And so, he's going to, you know, the thing that got him, like, hopping mad was that there were experts.
So, you know, Dr. Blee and Dr. Simi are two, you know, experts in white nationalism and white supremacy who are being brought in to kind of talk about, like, how the alt-right at the time and, you know, white nationalists use coded language and use various words to mean certain things, and how These things work socially.
And for Cantwell, this is like, well no, you're not actually arguing the things we're saying.
You're not actually proving a conspiracy.
You're just making things up about us effectively.
And this is just the standard issue stuff.
I mean, I read this tweet thread that Molly put out, you know, and God, I mean, again, I cannot heap enough praise onto Molly for this because it is absolutely astonishing.
Like, if I were trying to track this trial over a phone call, over a Zoom call or whatever, and could not record it and just had to type as I was listening, I would get so much less of this material than she does.
She is like, you know, God-tier tweeter, basically.
She was literally assaulted at one point, like she was literally beaten and tweeted as she was going down.
She was being beaten.
I'm sorry, if Molly, if you listen to this, I'm not, that is, I'm not laughing at the, at that obviously.
This is, this is, you know, a hero.
It's just, it's awe.
A hero among, among humanity, Molly Conger there.
We played a little bit, a few seconds of the The People Square episode.
We'll probably play a little bit more of that in a future episode.
It's fascinating to watch these guys kind of go back and forth about this trial.
But instead, I just wanted to wrap this up as just the most perfect, just the most, the most perfect way that this episode can end is...
What if Chris Cantwell decided to call into a radio show from jail in the middle of his trial?
Imagine if that happened.
That couldn't possibly happen.
How silly a person would you have to be?
How fundamentally unserious a human being would you have to be to think that was a great idea?
I just don't, no, it's not possible.
Not even Chris Cantwell.
Sorry, what am I saying?
Of course he did!
He called in to his Libertarian buddies in New Hampshire's call-in show, Free Talk Live.
Uh-huh.
Which he has been a guest on in person back when he was, he was, he's a former libertarian.
He used to hang out with these guys all the time.
When he went Nazi, they definitely sort of distanced themselves from him, but also not so much that they won't take his calls and bring him onto the show occasion.
Well, yeah, you're a Nazi, but the problem, the problem with you is you're a statist now.
That's Yeah, exactly.
Libertarians, sort of formally distancing themselves from Nazis, but still taking their calls.
Whoever heard of such a thing?
Yeah, Hoppe himself, you know.
Pinochet.
Anyway.
Yeah, he called into the show.
He was on the show for about seven minutes.
I'm only going to play about 50 seconds of it or so.
But this is what he thinks he was doing in that opening statement.
This is what this clip is.
And yeah, it sounded like it sounded like you were doing your show in front of in front of these people.
Yeah, I, you know, I considered it a spoken word performance, you know, and I take that kind of thing seriously, especially once I found out that people were going to be able to listen, because it's like, Normally, the only record of these things is a transcript, and a transcript, as you know, is an audio entertainment professionally, and it does not convey what a person says.
It's a completely different thing.
And so, I saw this as a tremendous opportunity, both because of the cause at hand, and because I knew the world was listening.
So, I invested some emotional energy in this, and I think it came off well.
Well, you know, all my co-defendants are throwing each other under the bus, so let me just say this.
I think some of the lawyers involved in this case are absolutely terrible, and I look like a star next to them.
And something tells me I got the plaintiff shook up, too.
I don't think that these people saw me coming.
I'm sure the plaintiffs are deeply, deeply worried about that.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No, I mean, you know, you could tell from the reaction, you know, people as he was as he was doing his shtick, people like, oh, wow, he's oh, wow, he's really I wasn't expecting this.
Oh, I'm scared now.
This is this is incredible.
We didn't see this coming.
Everybody saw it coming.
Everybody knew.
I really thought he was going to go full radical agenda at some point.
Which he did not get to do in his previous trial, in his criminal trial.
He was a witness there, and so he really could not go full radical agenda, although he tried very, very hard.
But that's exactly what he did here.
My favorite, one of the favorite things that he says in that interview is, you know, he had wanted to God, at some point I got all this is in my brain now, but at some point he said recently that he had intended to like speak really quickly and do his announcement, do his like intro, the radical agenda intro, as he had, as he did it on a show, which was like this incredibly sped up voices showing like how good he is at being on the radio.
Yeah.
He tried to do this in court.
In court on Thursday was to be part of his opening was to do that for the for the jury.
And then he got stopped by the judge because what the fuck are you doing here?
He said he wanted to do that on the stand for his original criminal trial in 2017.
He said on one of those live from SAG podcasts that he planned to do that.
He thought it was going to be a really good idea.
And his lawyer said, yeah, no, that's that's real dumb, Chris.
What about the fucking stenographer?
Apart from anything else, you know.
Right, right.
I mean, so my understanding is that there are no, like, we will never ever get access to any kind of audio that was produced here.
I would love to, I was not able to listen to this.
I had my day job and I just could not sit and listen to the case.
I would love to listen to that opening statement at some point.
Just out of sheer masochism at this point because I've listened to so many hours of this band and I want to see exactly how close you got to a radical agenda.
To a radical agenda performance, yeah.
This is why for everything You know, you can't feel sorry for this guy, because the truth is, he's having a great time.
He's enjoying this.
Absolutely, absolutely.
He's the center of attention, and he's getting to show off, and he's the victim, and yeah, he's happy as a pig and shit.
Which is where he's gonna, I mean, you know, like, I guess it's worth just kind of wrapping up here and saying, like, Chris Cantwell has nothing anymore.
He lost his car, he lost his apartment, he's incarcerated, he'll get out.
I can't, I assume he's going to try to go back and be on the radio, do another internet show, but like his support, his supporters are, you know, he's got some hardcore supporters that I suppose will still be interested in him, but like the movement left him behind a long time ago.
Now, you know, they're, they're showing respect to him now because they think he's, he's fighting like, but, but nobody likes him.
You know, they know how toxic he is.
They know how awful he is.
They know how much of a liability he is.
He's got, he's got nothing.
Like, look, suppose, you know, the trial goes through and they, you know, he's got to pay a million dollars or something, you know, like just, you know, just to put a number on it, like he'll, they'll garnish his wages for the rest of his life.
You know, like it's not like at a certain point, the actual consequences that he is facing from this are, Kind of theoretical, I think is what I'm saying, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
Like, it's just very, like, kind of, well, you know, who knows, you know?
Like, what's the problem with just sort of, like, fucking around with this at this point?
And I think a lot of the defendants are kind of in that same place.
It's like, look, you know, we don't have anything.
Like, I mean, you know, there is kind of an open question about, like, you know, What are they actually going to be able to do to these guys?
I mean, can they, can they, you know, presumably it would stop their political activism.
I mean, that would probably be a, you know, a condition of the, of the, of the end of the trial that they're not allowed to do certain things anymore.
But like, yeah, it's, it's just, you know, I don't know.
It's like such a, it's just such a moment that we're, that we're having here and just like observing this.
And I feel kind of, Going through all these documents again and kind of like remembering that stuff and re-watching some stuff from 2017.
I'm really just, I'm back in that 2017 headspace again.
I'm just sort of feeling what it was at that moment.
And I just, I have this like enormous empathy for Molly and for everyone else who is in Charlottesville at that time, everyone who stood up and fought against this, reliving it.
And we didn't even talk about, like, on the fifth day of the trial, on the day five, Campbell actually got to cross-examine a woman who was severely injured in the car attack.
Yeah, you see, for all the laughing I've been doing, that makes me furious.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, we try to keep this, we try to keep it fairly light here, you know, like as light as we can given the subject matter.
But the plaintiff's first witness was a young woman, a young Hispanic woman who was just trying to go to school.
She was 18 or 19 years old at this point, 19, you know, somewhere in there.
She was working hard.
She was going to school.
She was beaten both at the August 11th march, at the Torch March, and then was hit by the car the next day.
She suffered horrendous injuries, dropped out of school.
I mean, you know, had to relearn how to walk.
Yeah.
I mean, just absolutely horrendous, horrendous stuff.
This is the thing, like, without wanting to downplay for a moment the fact of Heather Hyer's death.
Other people were hit by the car and suffered life-changing injuries and other people were assaulted in various life-changing ways throughout that day.
One of the witnesses described, you know, this is an African-American man, a young African-American man, on the August 11th, on the night of August 11th, that someone was splashing him with liquid and that liquid appeared to be lighter fluid.
Can you imagine how terrifying that was?
I mean, just watching that footage again, like I rewatched some of that original footage over this last week, just to, again, to kind of remind myself of what it was and just watching, just watching it, you know, with all the times that I've seen this stuff and all that it's kind of been put into, you know, kind of pop culture and it's used as this like political prop these days.
It's used in like Joe Biden's announcement that he was going to run for president included some of that Charlottesville footage and like, Fuck, Joe Biden does not get to stand on that.
That is absolutely vile, you know?
And people using this for, you know, kind of just blatant, you know, political maneuvering or whatever.
And like, these are people who are the plaintiffs here, the people who are actually on the stand who went through this whole process and then decided to put themselves through this trial so that they could hold these people accountable.
And put themselves at the, that Chris Cantwell gets to ask QB questions about what I was doing that day and what I remembered after I had a severe fucking brain injury and had to relearn to walk that person.
It's showing enormous, enormous courage.
And like, if anything, this podcast is made for people like that.
It's made to highlight those people and how brave and amazing they are at the hands of these absolutely atrocious human beings.
Yeah, absolutely.
The young woman you were talking about, the Hispanic young woman, is that the one where Cantwell was asking her about, you know, does she have bias against fascism?
Yes, yes.
And her answer was, I don't have it in front of me, but her answer was something to the effect of, Well, I'm a victim of fascism.
And he says, you know, Oh, because you're Hispanic.
I'm also I'm also a queer woman.
Like, yeah, yeah.
And we can I can I could pull up 1000 clips of Chris Campbell saying awful things about, you know, Latino women and queer people.
Queer people.
Yeah.
This, this is why just them being there was an assault, you know, regardless of anything else they did.
Absolutely.
I agree.
I mean, it's, it's, it's obviously morally reprehensible.
And yeah, that's, that's the end for now.
It's not the end for the, for the, for the people on the ground who are going to have to deal with this for, you know, hopefully, hopefully another three weeks and then we get a good outcome.
Are they going to get outcomes?
Not, I was not there.
I have no stake in this, but go follow Molly.
If you're not, go check, check her out and watch her live streams and all that, all that good stuff.
And we will undoubtedly kind of cover this.
We may just in the future, in the next episode or two, we may, you know, kind of just put in some, some, you know, kind of how the trial is going.
But we won't do a full, another real episode about this until after the trial is over.
We'll wait the others.
So yeah, so we'll, we'll see, we'll see where we go with that.
Yeah.
OK, so yeah, unamused, I replied in the negative.
Yes.
That's 96.
Thanks for listening.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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