Christopher Cantwell

In July 2018, Cantwell was convicted after pleading guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault and battery for pepper spraying two people at the rally. His mother is a homemaker. His maternal grandmother was opera singer Lillian Trotta, née Ventimiglia, who sang under the stage name Lillian Raymondi. Cantwell has claimed his mother suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her father during her childhood. He has a younger brother as well as a half-brother and a half-sister, the latter two stemming from a previous relationship of his father. His younger brother has been involved in gang violence and was serving a prison sentence in 2019. Cantwell attended Ward Melville High School in East Setauket, New York, but left school and did not graduate. He received his GED while serving his first jail sentence in 2000.

Cantwell has worked as a landscaper,

Broadcasting and writing Cantwell writes essays on his personal blog about topics including white supremacy, alt-right politics, libertarianism, and the men's rights movement. He has written for and republished essays about the men's rights movement to A Voice for Men, a men's rights and antifeminist website. In 2013 and 2014, he wrote and republished his anti-police essays as a volunteer for Cop Block, a police accountability organization. He was later removed from the position permanently. By calling compatriots who recorded the conversations and posted them on his blog, Cantwell continued to broadcast from jail while he was incarcerated in August–December 2017 on charges related to the Unite the Right rally. In January 2019, Cantwell created a more toned-down version of Radical Agenda called Outlaw Conservative. Cantwell told the Southern Poverty Law Center that he had decided to step away from broadcasting because "Jews" had taken an "emotional toll" on him and that he needed to "[step] away from the microphone to avoid another 'Crying Nazi' moment".

After he was released from prison in December 2022, Cantwell created an online fundraiser on the GiveSendGo Christian crowdfunding website, where he wrote that he was living in a halfway house and had been "left ...impoverished and exhausted" by his legal battles.

Both his personal website as well as the website of his podcast "Radical Agenda" went offline in January 2025, roughly a month and a half before his arrest for strangling a neighbor.

Social media suspensions On August 16, 2017, Facebook said it had shut down Cantwell's Facebook and Instagram profiles due to statements he made in connection with the Unite the Right rally. The following day it was reported that Cantwell had been banned from online dating service OkCupid after a woman reported receiving a message from him after seeing him in the Vice News Tonight segment. In a blog post published on August 17, 2017, Cantwell wrote, "I have been shut out of nearly every financial and communications system I once had available. PayPal, Venmo, Dwolla, and Stripe all disabled my accounts. I was shut out not only of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and MailChimp, but now even my online dating profiles at OkCupid, Match.com, and Tinder have all been disabled." On March 18, 2019, the far-right social network Gab tweeted a statement that they had indefinitely banned an unnamed "controversial user" for making two "inflammatory political posts". Cantwell posted on his blog that he believes he was the one who was banned, after he discovered his profile had been blanked and he was unable to log in, and it was later confirmed the banned user was Cantwell.

Cantwell wrote of the difficulties he was facing due to his suspensions in a private Telegram group in October 2018, saying, "My inability to grow [Radical Agenda] by being on other platforms, my inability to make money, is threatening to bankrupt me and end the show". The Anti-Defamation League includes Cantwell in its list of alt-right figures, Ian Freeman, a leader of "Free Keene", later stated that Cantwell's violent anti-police rhetoric had been excluded from Free Keene.

Over time, Cantwell has focused less on anti-police and anti-government positions, saying "I have become convinced that our problems are a lot more racial than anything... the police are not my biggest problem right now." The confirmation that he was working with law enforcement was met with anger from some members of the far-right.

Although Cantwell endorsed Donald Trump for president in January 2016, he has said that he hoped for a leader who was "a lot more racist than Donald Trump" and who "does not give his daughter to a Jew" (referring to Ivanka Trump's marriage to Jared Kushner).

Unite the Right rally

Cantwell participated in the Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11–12, 2017. He was featured prominently in "Charlottesville: Race and Terror", an episode of Vice News Tonight about the rally and the groups who were present. He is first pictured marching through the University of Virginia campus among a group of white supremacists carrying tiki torches and chanting "Jews will not replace us." He later is shown bragging about carrying guns, working out, and "trying to make [himself] more capable of violence," later saying "We're not nonviolent. We'll fucking kill these people if we have to." In the same interview, he called the murder of Heather Heyer "more than justified", claiming "the fact that none of our people killed anybody unjustly, I think, is a plus for us", and threatened that "a lot more people are gonna die before we're done here, frankly."

Legal issues In 2000, at age 19, Cantwell pleaded guilty in Suffolk County, New York to driving while intoxicated (DWI), criminal possession of a weapon, and criminal possession of stolen property.

On August 16, 2017, Cantwell published a video of himself weeping while speaking about the warrant for his arrest, and his fears that he might be killed by police. The video went viral and earned him the nickname of "The Crying Nazi." He was indicted on the tear gas charges in December, and paid $25,000 bail with funds donated by supporters on the white supremacist and neo-Nazi crowdfunding websites Hatreon and GoyFundMe.

In March 2018, Cantwell was charged with public swearing and intoxication in Loudoun County, Virginia. He ultimately pleaded guilty to this misdemeanor and paid $116 in fees and court costs. Separately, prosecutors accused Cantwell of attempting to intimidate witnesses to the August assaults via his social media accounts, and the court imposed more stringent terms on Cantwell's bond.

In November 2017, at the preliminary hearing for the felony assault case, the unlawful bodily injury charge was dismissed, In July 2018, Cantwell entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors in which he pleaded guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault and battery for pepper spraying two people at the rally. He was sentenced to two concurrent jail sentences of one year with all but seven months suspended, and he was released from jail. He was also banned from publicly discussing the two people he attacked at the rally. Two days after the sentencing, Cantwell made a thinly veiled reference to the two victims in a social media post in which he boasted about "gassing" them. After the second request was granted, Cantwell proceeded to represent himself pro se. In January 2020, he wrote and filed a plea which included a long quote from Adolf Hitler, whom Cantwell described only as a "famous 20th-century statesman". Cantwell and all other defendants were found liable for civil conspiracy under Virginia state law, and ordered to pay $500,000 in punitive damages. Cantwell was also among the defendants found liable for racially motivated harassment or violence. The jury were deadlocked on the remaining two claims, which argued he and other defendants had engaged in a federal conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence.

Cantwell filed a pro se appeal on March 20, 2023, arguing that the jury held "improper passion and prejudice", and that he couldn't adequately prepare his defense as he was imprisoned on unrelated extortion charges.

Extortion and threats against a rival white supremacist Cantwell was involved in a feud with members of the Bowl Patrol, a loose group of white supremacists who name themselves after the bowl haircut of Dylann Roof, the perpetrator of the 2015 white supremacy-motivated Charleston church mass shooting. In April 2018, Cantwell had been the first guest on the Bowl Patrol's new podcast, but over the following months he fell out with the group and became a target of prank calls to his podcast, fake accounts pretending to be him, and music videos making fun of him. Cantwell made violent threats towards the group, and followed through on threats to contact law enforcement, including the FBI, about pranks perpetrated by its members. Prosecutors later alleged that Cantwell emailed law enforcement more than 50 times over a four-month period in 2019. In June 2019, Cantwell threatened a member of the Bowl Patrol who went by the pseudonym "CheddarMane", saying he would rape his wife in front of his children and contact child protective services (CPS) about CheddarMane's alleged drug use if he did not provide Cantwell with information on the identity of "Vic Mackey", another pseudonymous Bowl Patrol member. According to prosecutors, Cantwell followed through with the threat to contact CPS. In September 2019, Cantwell met with the FBI thinking he was helping form a case against the Bowl Patrol members. However, the FBI were actually forming a case to prosecute Cantwell for his June threats.

On January 23, 2020, Cantwell was arrested by the FBI and charged with extortion over interstate communications and making threatening interstate communications in relation to the threats made against CheddarMane.

During Cantwell's arrest, officers recovered seventeen firearms and other weapons from his residence and vehicle. He was set to go to trial in March 2020, but the trial date was postponed to September 15, 2020. On July 8, Cantwell was indicted on additional charges of cyberstalking and threatening to injure property or reputation. Cantwell appealed the conviction to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in October 2021, which upheld the convictions in April 2023.

Strangulation charge Cantwell was arrested on March 2, 2025, and charged with one count of felony strangulation as well as simple assault and criminal mischief.