White supremacist Christopher Cantwell, dubbed the “Crying Nazi” after recording a tearful video about his violent participating in the 2017 Unite the Right march, cried in court on Wednesday as he was sentenced to 41 months in prison.
Cantwell, who was convicted last fall of threatening and attempting to extort another neo-Nazi, had already spent 13 months in jail since his arrest. “The First Amendment does not protect those who choose to engage in criminal activity based on hateful beliefs, but a jury of Christopher Cantwell’s peers found he did exactly that, and with today’s sentence he has now been held accountable for his violent threats,” Joseph R. Bonavolonta, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Boston Division, said in a statement.
Cantwell was a key figure in the neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. He was later convicted of battery and assault for his actions at the rally. Since then, he’s been embroiled in legal trouble, including allegedly threatening a lawyer who sued him for his actions in Charlottesville.
