Amy Spitalnick: Anti-White Supremacist Crusader Who Sued the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ Organizers

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Amy Spitalnick: Anti-White Supremacist Crusader…

AMY SPITALNICK 4

Amy Spitalnick spearheaded a four-year-long legal battle against the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which one person was killed and many were injured. Spitalnick was executive director of the nonprofit Integrity First for America at the time. (Currently, she is the CEO of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action.) The white-supremacist rally included a torchlight parade of demonstrators shouting, “Jews will not replace us!” In 2021, the rally organizers were found liable for $25 million in damages.

Quote: “It wasn’t a ‘clash.’ It was a violent conspiracy, motivated by racial animus – and we have laws that are meant to protect against just that. But in 2017, with a DOJ then led by Jeff Sessions, it was especially clear that the federal government wouldn’t ensure the accountability and justice desperately needed after Unite the Right. Our team was on the ground within days, meeting with those injured, and in October 2017, just two months after the violence, our nine plaintiffs filed suit against the two dozen leaders and hate groups most directly responsible”
— Amy Spitalnick

To read an October 2021 PBS interview with Amy Spitalnick, click here.

Photo: Twitter

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Quotable

“[T]he foundations for extremism usually are held in check by various restraints. Societies are not liberal, moderate, progressive, and free because almost all their citizens – let alone their politicians — are liberal, moderate, progressive or committed to the freedoms of others.

“But societies consistently avoid extremism when the infrastructures of freedom are strong: when key institutions and norms encourage a more decent, rights-respective, lawful politics; when powerful social movements and independent media hold leaders to account, expose rather than reinforce political fantasies, and champion the rights of the vulnerable; and when information is produced and scrutinized by scholars, civil servants, and non-governmental organizations devoid of either government repression or vested interests.

“Yet no infrastructure is rigidly immovable, and once key components are eroded and weakened, once sections of the political and cultural elite attempt to mobilize the foundations of extremism, the system of restraints can swiftly collapse.

“While genocide on the scale of the Holocaust is historically exceptional, its central lesson is that the broader danger of extreme atrocities is not. In the words of the great historian Ian Kershaw, the Holocaust ‘lit a warning beacon that still burns brightly: it showed how a modern, advanced, cultured society can so rapidly sink into barbarity… It showed what we are capable of.’ Only by rejecting false narratives of conflict and polarization, and maintaining systems of rights and freedoms for all, can we hope to prevent that capability from once more becoming a reality.”

— Jonathan Leader Maynard in his incisive article “Could It Happen Here?: The Holocaust and Atrocities in the 21st Century” To read the entire article, click here.