Ahead of her special on the Charlottesville Nazis and white supremacists, CNN reporter Elle Reeve told Jim Acosta about the interviews she conducted with those who lost lawsuits after the march.
According to Reeve, the men have all explained that they weren't at fault for anything that happened in Charlottesville.
"I mean, you spoke with a number of them," Acosta said. "They were ultimately found liable for millions of dollars in damages. Are you picking up on any remorse? I mean, it sounds like Spencer there, for example, is still very defensive about what he did and what he has said."
"Yeah. I'd say the main message from most of them is 'it wasn't my fault, maybe it was someone else's but not mine,'" Reeve summed up. The crying Nazi, "Chris Cantwell, for example, played an excruciatingly slow-motion video of him punching someone over and over again from behind and tried to tell the jury he was acting in self-defense. But others in more private moments will say, 'Maybe I shouldn't have trusted these people on the internet, maybe I should've said something when they were talking about violence.'"
Reeve has been following the white supremacist movement since 2015, first for VICE News and now for CNN. She said that from the early days of the organizing, she explained that organizer Jason Kessler actually wanted violence.
"He always framed it as self-defense, but he was talking about provoking anti-fascists and attacking them going as far as telling people don't open carry guns because then counterprotesters will be scared and they won't attack us," said Reeve. "Further, he reached out to Matthew Heinbach, who is associated with the white power movement, and asked groups to come who were associated with street fights. He wanted, like, skinhead gangs from the '90s because they had the reputation for being capable of violence."
Spencer, by contrast, created a kind of upper-class version of that with pressed white shirts and khakis walking through the streets of Charlottesville with tiki torches. He too denied responsibility, saying that he just wanted to be famous and that anyone who followed him essentially did so because they wanted to be famous and were jealous of him.
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