[Lemon:] Today, a jury recommended a life sentence for the white nationalist convicted of killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Nearly 40 others were seriously injured after James Fields Jr. plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last year. Field's actions and the images of white nationalists marching with torches stunned and shocked the nation. Now, racial rhetoric and hate crimes are becoming all too common. CNN's Sara Sidner has this update on the state of hate in this country.
[Sara Sidner, Cnn International Correspondent:] It is as if Pandora's box has been opened and hate is spilling out. In Aventura, Florida, police say Nadim Siddiqui was caught on camera smashing a bottle of wine at the Kosher Kingdom store, and this wasn't his only offense.
[Laurence Einhorn, Store Owner:] This caused a lot of problem and people get scared. We're so happy that they finally got him.
[Sidner:] Police say Siddiqui is charged with a hate crime because has shown a pattern of targeting Jewish people, knocking down a menorah in another building, and making hateful comments when confronted.
[Unidentified Male:] He made comments of six million dead wasn't enough.
[Sidner:] What used to be held silently in the minds of some Americans is now being verbalized publicly, and statistics show being carried out with violent acts more frequently in the last couple of years.
[Unidentified Male:] No, your honor.
[Sidner:] Just in the past couple of weeks, the incidents are piling up. Perhaps the most violent, in Snohomish County, Washington. Seven men and one woman arrested. Police say they viciously attacked a black disk jockey while yelling racial slurs as he was simply trying to entertain folks at a bar. The sheriff said an Asian employee was also attacked when he tried to help the deejay. Police say it turns out the suspects are bald members of a violent Neo-Nazi group. Police say two of the suspects have criminal records.
[Unidentified Male:] Jews will not replace us.
[Sidner:] The Southern Poverty Law Center says one of the suspects took part in the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. That rally turned violent. Ending in murder and mayhem after James Alex Fields rammed his car into a group of people protesting hate. A jury convicted Fields just last week and today decided his sentence on 10 criminal charges against him including the murder of 32-year-old paralegal Heather Heyer. Heyer's mother sat through the entire trial.
[Susan Bro, Mother Of Heather Heyer:] Justice has him where he needs to be and my daughter is still not here and the other survivors still have their wounds to deal with.
[Sidner:] But the darkness of hate continues to sweep across the country. The plots in two separate cases in Ohio are chilling, federal investigators say. One month after the deadliest anti-semitic attack in America carried out in Pittsburgh, they say Damon Joseph planned a similar attack on a synagogue in Toledo.
[Justin Herdman, Attorney:] Mr. Joseph pursued a detailed and calculated plan to strike synagogues in the Toledo area.
[Sidner:] Investigators say a woman was behind a plot to blow up a pipeline. Elizabeth LeCron used social media to heap praise on the Columbine killers and racist murderer Dylann Roof. Even on college campuses, racist tirades are gaining more and more attention. This happened at Columbia University.
[Unidentified Male'unidentified Female:] We build modern civilizations. White people are the best thing that ever happened to the world.
[Sidner:] A student who in a statement says he's not a racist and does not hate anyone, but he goes off on a group of students because of his distaste for the overuse of the term white privilege and similar divisive rhetoric as a means of dismissing views of others. And yet
[Unidentified Male:] We're white men. We did everything.
[Lemon:] Sara Sidner joins me now. Sara, hello to you. There's been a major spike in hate crimes over the past two years, even on college campuses. Why are we seeing it more with young people?
[Sidner:] You know, it's a good question. One of the things that's happened on college campuses when you talk to the groups that study have been studying this for many decades is that there is serious recruitment going on on college campuses and through social media. There have been flyers that have been put up and actually just today at the State University of New York Purchase campus, a student has been charged with a hate crime for putting up Nazi posters, posters that have swastikas on them and putting up at a time when Jews are celebrating Hanukkah. That happened just today but there have been plenty of other flyering incidents across the country and certainly on social media. Some of these groups are trying to entice those who they think may start feeling threatened, if you will, by students of color. So it's interesting to note that there is a lot of recruitment going on. We should also mention another hate crime that has happened. The fifth attack on a Jehovah's Witness kingdom hall in Washington state. That particular attack was an arson, that police say has happened several times. There have been five different attacks on Jehovah's Witness kingdom halls and police are saying yes, these are hate crimes. They have not so far found a suspect, but in one of those attacks, a suspect shot up one of those halls 30 times. The violence is increasing if you look at the numbers from the FBI and anyone who looks at those numbers can easily say, look, these numbers are not the actual numbers of what's happening out there. There happen to be many more. Sometimes people don't report them and sometimes police departments don't report hate crimes to the FBI, which is how the FBI gets its numbers, Don.
[Lemon:] It's sad.
[Sidner:] It is.
[Lemon:] Sara, we appreciate your reporting. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. The search is on for a new chief of staff, but John Kelly is leaving a few things unresolved. Congresswoman Frederica Wilson joins me next on the lie he told about her, the threats she's gotten since, and why he never apologized.