The defendants in the federal civil lawsuit over the lethal 2017 Unite the Right riots in Charlottesville and their neo-Nazi cohorts were hoping to turn the trial currently unfolding in court into a kind of circus where they could strut their propaganda chops—and indeed they clearly have been conducting themselves both in and out of the courtroom accordingly.

But to their dismay, the plaintiffs’ attorneys in the case have diligently, step by step, been peeling back the onion layers of the white nationalist movement’s planning and preparations for the event. Along the way, the defendants are also being exposed as the unrepentant hatemongers and violence-loving thugs they are. It hasn’t been a good couple of weeks for them.

One of the defendants, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell, had already dropped the N-word during opening arguments. Cantwell has been the obnoxiously obvious leader of the effort to exploit the trial for their own glorification, hijacking the court as a platform for his ideas.

“I consider this a spoken-word performance, and I take this kind of thing seriously, especially once I found out people were going to be able to listen in,” Cantwell said on a recent podcast. “I thought this was a tremendous opportunity both because of the cause at hand, and because I knew the world was listening.”

“I look like a star,” he added.

As Tess Owen of Vice reports, Cantwell tried last week to question codefendant Matthew Heimbach, erstwhile leader of the white-nationalist Traditionalist Worker Party, and tried to turn it into a circus by asking: “What’s your favorite Holocaust joke?” After a long pause, Heimbach laughed, and Cantwell withdrew the question.

Cantwell’s antics have earned applause on the far right. Codefendant Jason Kessler, posting on Telegram, touted the “epicness and boldness” of Cantwell’s opening statement, hailing it as a “free speech performance.” Meanwhile, on several far-right Telegram channels, their supporters have piled on to make vicious comments about both the plaintiffs and their attorneys—particularly those who are Jewish—and root for the defendants.

As Owen notes, a technical glitch allowed a flood of neofascists into the public access line for the proceedings:

When the court recessed for lunch on Monday, a glitch allowed trolls to swarm the public-access line, delaying proceedings by 30 minutes while the clerk worked to figure out what was going on. At first, listeners who realized the “mute-all” function had been removed began saying things like “Make America Great Again’’ and “Let’s Go Brandon” (an in-joke for conservatives who hate Joe Biden). One listener namechecked Cantwell’s podcast. Then came the racist slurs: one person said the N-word repeatedly, and another urged the rest of the people on the call to “read Siege,” a neo-Nazi manifesto that’s been associated with violent accelerationist groups like Atomwaffen.

In the meantime, the evidence continued to pile up demonstrating both the defendants’ culpability for specifically planning to create a violent event in Charlottesville, as well as their generally stupid and vicious nature. Even the “smart” white nationalists like Richard Spencer—the primary organizer of the infamous “Jews Will Not Replace Us” tiki-torch parade the night before the lethal riots—were exposed as being both not particularly bright, as well as deeply mendacious.

As BuzzFeed’s Christopher Miller reported, plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Bloch systematically demonstrated Spencer’s leading role in bringing an array of white-nationalist hate groups to Charlottesville through multiple communications and relentless hatemongering. On the stand, Spencer admitted that he and his fellow white supremacists frequently used hate speech in private.

Bloch played a recording of Spencer made the day after the Aug. 12, 2017, riots that left one person dead and multiple people injured after neo-Nazi James Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into a group of counterprotesters. Spencer can be heard on the recording speaking with some of his codefendants, including Nathan Damigo, Jason Kessler, and Elliott Kline, while shouting racist and antisemitic phrases.

“Little fucking kikes. They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octoroons… I fucking… My ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit. I rule the fucking world,” Spencer yells. “Those pieces of fucking shit get ruled by people like me. They look up and see a face like mine looking down at them. That’s how the fucking world works. We are going to destroy this fucking town [of Charlottesville].”

Spencer admitted those were his remarks, but says they were unrepresentative: “That is me at my absolute worst. I won’t dispute that that’s me, because at the end of the day I have to live with that,” he testified. “My animal brain. That’s me as a 7-year-old. It’s a 7-year-old that is probably still inside me. I’m ashamed of it. That is a childish, awful version of myself.”

Another video of Spencer, shot at the afterparty for the Aug. 11 tiki-torch parade he organized, show him telling his followers: “I was born too late for the Crusades. I was born too early for the conquest of Mars. But I was born at the right time for the race war.”

Bloch also demonstrated to jurors the reality that they couldn’t believe a word out of Spencer’s mouth by presenting evidence featuring dozens of text-message exchanges between himself and Cantwell. Spencer had told the court they had only communicated a handful of times and “ate lunch once.”.

“Between July and August you exchanged 88 text messages with Mr. Cantwell,” Bloch told him. “But you said, ‘We shared a few text messages, seven in total.’ Isn’t that what you told the jury?”

A long pause ensued. Finally Spencer muttered: “I think I was referring to instances.”

The plaintiffs’ attorneys also played a video for the jury of the deposition of Vasillios Pistolis, a neo-Nazi member of the terrorist action group Atomwaffen Division and a former Marine who was an avid participant in the violence. In online chats leading up to the rally, ProPublica reported, his fellow neo-Nazis had encouraged Pistolis to be vicious with any counterprotesters, maybe even sodomize someone with a knife. He’d responded by saying he was prepared to kill someone “if shit goes down.”

Pistolis was asked in the deposition why he referred to Heather Heyer, the woman killed by Fields’ car, as a “fat cunt.” “Because that’s what she is,” he says. He also called Fields a “hero.” Asked why he posted a meme showing a car running over a Communist protester, he answered: “I thought it was funny.”

In stark contrast, the victims of the violence who appeared on the stand this week were compelling and empathetic. Marissa Blair, who only survived Fields’ attack because her then-boyfriend, Marcus Martin, pushed her out of the way moments before he too was struck and hurled over the top of the vehicle, recounted her ordeal for the jury.

Voice cracking, she described how she got up immediately afterward and saw Martin’s hat, covered in blood, lying on the ground.

“I was confused. I was scared. I was worried about all the people that were there,” Blair told the court. “It was a complete terror scene. It was blood everywhere. I was terrified.”

Blair told the court she was there that day with Heyer, a close friend. “Nobody expects your friend to be killed for standing up for what you believe in, right in front of you,” she said.

Hate crimes expert Brian Levin of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, told Owen that the defendants’ antics are likely to backfire badly.

“While it may seem, and often is, that the defendants are using their appearances to platform bigotry and troll the court, they do so at their own legal risk,” said Levin. “Key to legal representation is client control, and while ideology is admissible in the case, an exposition of it in a particularly offensive way is going to leave a jury with a bad taste in their mouth as they attempt to digest a lot of information. No lawyer would advise them to discuss Holocaust jokes and other vile banter because it does nothing to help their defense.”