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Conservatives are quite capable of lawfare and they have a 6-3 Conservative Supreme Court majority. If 'intent to intimidate' rulings were shutting down conservative political rallies around the country they're quite capable of funding legal challenges and appealing their way to a court where they have a sympathetic majority.
The cynical view is that Conservative legal elites are completely fine with having their embarrassing white nationalist fringe suppressed and don't expect the statute in question to be applied broadly. The less cynical view is that this guy was charged because he was part of a group that surrounded some counter protestors and is alleged to have menaced them with the torch, which means he's being punished constitutionally for interpersonal intimidation and not political speech.
It's specifically a statute against intimidating people with burning objects written for the KKK and now applied to this Tiki Torch guy. I'm not sure how broadly that will apply given most political speech doesn't involve burning objects.
The civil rights takeaway is bizarre. Pro-segregationist southern states set the laws MLK and others were tried under not a vague, establishment. The whole point of the protests was to be arrested in order to produce news footage of well dressed non-violent black people being dragged away from lunch counters. If you look at cases like the 'Friendship Nine' they had the option to pay a fine and get out or do hard labor in prison and they did the hard labor and stayed in prison. King's most famous piece of writing was produced in prison. Jailing civil rights protestors for the six months this guy is set to serve doesn't look like a silver bullet that would kill the movement.
If the powers that be had made it a felony with long jail time to sit in the wrong seat in the bus or patronize the wrong lunch counter, and the Feds had backed them up or at least just stood by, we'd still have Jim Crow.
Southern State Legislatures were the ones making Jim Crow laws, why didn't they increase the sentences?
The idea of making the penalties high enough to deter test cases hadn't occurred to them, I suppose.
Yeah. I think that the writing was on the wall after WWII, when the Army (and by extension the American people) realized that Black soldiers and officers could fight well and effectively. Then, they ditched racial apartheid in the military. And went to Korea, and found that these new integrated units didn't suck.
I wonder if in 1950 Jim Crow was kind of a money pit.
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