Dem
51
GOP
49
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Proud Boys are a**holes. They are also thugs who perpetrate violence and criminal acts in service of... whatever the hell it is they are trying to accomplish. And this week, they learned that while hate crime doesn't pay, hate criminals most certainly do.
At issue is an attack, by members of the group, against the nearly 200-year-old Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church of Washington, DC. The Boys insist on their right to fly Nazi flags and similar garbage (which is most certainly their privilege, per the First Amendment), but they don't feel others have the same right. So, they invaded the grounds of the Church and destroyed a Black Lives Matter sign.
Before the members participated in the assault, they neglected to review certain relevant statutes. Maybe the problem is that they do not know how to read. Whatever the case may be, it turns out that attacking a church like that and destroying a sign like that is a violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, as well as the rather more recent D.C. Bias-Related Crime Act of 1989. Unfortunately for the Proud Boys, the members of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law most certainly have read those laws. So has D.C. Superior Court Judge Neal E. Kravitz. And earlier this week, the Judge ordered that the Proud Boys pay a little over $1 million to the church. "The record is replete with evidence that all of the defendants acted with an evil, discriminatory motive based on race and with deliberate violence and a willful disregard for the rights of the church and its congregants," observed the Judge in his ruling.
Truth be told, it doesn't even matter that Kravitz knows the relevant laws, since the Proud Boys did not bother to show up and defend themselves in court. So, that means they lost by default. It also means they won't be able to appeal. It's not terribly likely that the judgment will be paid, but it also means that the organization won't be able to take in donations without risk of having those funds seized. Also, if any of the individual members who participated in the raid have any assets (not likely), they could lose them. And even if the plaintiffs never get a dime, they've now got it in the legal record (and in countless newspapers) that the Proud Boys are nothing more than a bunch of hateful bigots. There's certainly some schadenfreude in that. (Z)