Wikipedia: Richard B. Spencer

Spencer has stated that he rejects the label of white supremacist, and prefers to describe himself as an identitarian.

.. He has advocated for a white homeland for a “dispossessed white race” and called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to halt the “deconstruction” of European culture

.. In response to his cry “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”, a number of his supporters gave the Nazi salute and chanted in a similar fashion to the Sieg heil chant used at the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies. Spencer has also refused to denounce Adolf Hitler.[11]

.. Spencer was born in Boston, Massachusetts,[12] the son of ophthalmologist Rand Spencer and Sherry Spencer (née Dickenhorst),[13][14] an heiress to cotton farms in Louisiana

.. From March to December 2007, Spencer was assistant editor at The American Conservative magazine. According to founding editor Scott McConnell, Spencer was fired from The American Conservative because his views were considered too extreme.

.. In 2014, Spencer was deported from Budapest, Hungary (and because of the Schengen Agreement, is banned from 26 countries in Europe for three years), after trying to organize the National Policy Institute Conference, a conference for white nationalists.

.. A CPAC spokesman said he was removed from the event because other members found him “repugnant”.

..  Michael Signer, the mayor of Charlottesville, called the protest “horrific” and stated that it was either “profoundly ignorant” or intended to instill fear among minorities “in a way that hearkens back to the days of the KKK

.. During a speech Spencer gave in mid-November 2016 at an alt-right conference attended by approximately 200 people in Washington, D.C., Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German and denounced Jews.[9]. Audience members cheered and made the Nazi salute when he said, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”[9][5] Spencer later defended their conduct, stating that the Nazi salute was given in a spirit of “irony and exuberance”.[37]

..  he has supported what he has called “the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent“, an “ideal” that he has regarded as a “reconstitution of the Roman Empire.

.. after leaving The American Conservative he rejected conservatism, because he believed its adherents “can’t or won’t represent explicitly white interests.

.. Spencer supports legal access to abortion, in part because he believes it would reduce the number of black and Hispanic people, which he says would be a “great boon” to white people.[15]

.. Despite his opposition to same-sex marriage, Spencer barred people with anti-gay views from the NPI’s annual conference in 2015

.. He was separated from his Russian American wife, Nina Kouprianova, a political analyst on modern and contemporary Russia, culture, and U.S. foreign policy.[65] The couple separated in October 2016[13]; however in April 2017 Spencer said he and his wife were not separated and are still together.

‘Alt-Right’ Leaders Won’t Condemn Ramming Suspect

Richard Spencer and Nathan Damigo, two leading figures of the white nationalist alt-right movement who had participated in Saturday’s “Unite the Right” rally , spoke to reporters at Spencer’s office and apartment in Alexandria.

.. Spencer blamed the authorities for what happened in Charlottesville, saying the city’s mayor and governor of Virginia have “blood on their hands” for not policing the situation properly. The alt-right, he said, is “nonviolent;” he waxed nostalgic while speaking about the hundreds of white nationalists marching through Charlottesville with torches on Friday night, calling the event “really beautiful.”

Some fighting between them and counter-protesters reportedly took place during the Friday event;

Saturday’s rally attracted militia members with guns, and descended into all-out street violence.

.. But one person who didn’t come in for unequivocal criticism was Charlottesville suspect James Alex Fields, who has been charged with second-degree murder in the death of Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old woman who had come to protest the Unite the Right event. Fields was photographed earlier in the day at the rally with Vanguard America, a self-identified white supremacist and fascist group that attended the rally.

.. General Jeff Sessions has called the incident an act of terrorism.

.. “I am not going to condemn this young man at this point,” Spencer said. When he first saw the video, he said, he saw it as a “malicious act of violence”; but he’s now less sure that it was a purposeful act and won’t come down on one side or another until an investigation is complete.

.. Spencer dismissed Trump’s statement as “kumbaya nonsense” and said he didn’t view it as a repudiation of his movement, which he defended as “non-violent.”

“He sounded like a Sunday school teacher,” he said. “I just don’t take it seriously.”

.. “I don’t know exactly what he meant by that statement,” Damigo said. “People in his position, they’re not stupid, they make these very ambiguous statements with words that are very loaded and hard to interpret.”

.. we don’t know the facts yet.

.. “We were connected with Donald Trump on a kind of psychic level,” he said of the alt-right. Trump is the “first true authentic nationalist in my lifetime.”

.. Asked who in the White House he views as a fellow traveler of the alt-right, Spencer named top policy advisor Stephen Miller and chief strategist Steve Bannon

“They at least are connected with identitarian ideas in a way that the rest of them are not,” Spencer said.

.. But he seemed less than cowed, promising to return to Charlottesville.

“There’s no way in hell I’m not going back to Charlottesville,” he said.

White millennials are just as racist as their grandparents

David Duke is still around, but as a charismatic figurehead he has mostly been displaced by the likes of 39-year-old Richard Spencer, 26-year-old Matthew Heimbach and 29-year-old Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet.

.. Some seem to be reactionaries, essentially trolls who may or may not truly believe the anti-Semitic and racist bile that they meme and share to get a rise out of the politically correct left. If youthful rebellion in the 1960s meant embracing free love, peace and equality, then today — at least for anti-anti-Trumpers — it is about promoting hatred and structural inequity.

.. It is a flawed system, after all, one whose recent financial crisis irreparably scarred millennials’ economic prospects. Most anti-establishment millennials have drifted toward leftist populist alternatives, but some have sorted into the opposite (and more violent) extreme. For right-wing populists, the key flaw with the system is not that it allows the rich to hoard all the money, but that it privileges undeserving minorities at innocent whites’ expense.

.. Just as “socialism” is not a toxic word to people who came of age after the Cold War, perhaps aligning with Nazis no longer seems as inherently, reflexively evil for those so far removed from World War II.

.. Millennials overall are more racially tolerant than earlier generations — but that’s because young people today are less likely to be white. White millennials exhibit about as much racial prejudice, as measured by explicit bias, as white Gen Xers and boomers.

 

His Kampf

Richard Spencer is a troll and an icon for white supremacists. He was also my high-school classmate.

.. Was Hitchens’s critique of Christianity, he said, not as wan and naive as Christianity itself? Christianity had bound together the civilizations of Europe, and now Hitchens wanted to replace it with—well, what exactly? American neoliberal internationalism? Why should anyone care if Christianity was irrational and illiberal, when rationality and liberalism had never been its purpose? Hitchens had missed the point.

Spencer wasn’t exactly defending Christianity; he said that he, like Hitchens, was an atheist. But he longed for something as robust and binding as Christianity had once been in the West, before churches surrendered their power to folk-singing liberals and televangelists.

I think Spencer knew he had me at a loss, because he curled out a smile and let his point hang in the air. I was flummoxed by his argument, a more thoughtful Nietzschean critique than I was prepared to take on

.. Spencer passed his classes but didn’t excel. He played baseball and football, but you wouldn’t have gone to games to see him play. I remember little to admire and little to despise—other than, perhaps, the featureless mediocrity he represented to my ambitious teenage self.

.. Alternative Right showed signs of erudition. It was not the product of the same Spencer I had known in high school, who’d managed to misquote Shakespeare

.. The magazine’s racism and sexism were expressed with good grammar and a coherent view of the world. That view, now well known as the platform of the alt-right, can be summarized as white European cultural and racial supremacy, with a deep contempt for democracy.

.. By December, after videographers from The Atlantic filmed Spencer receiving Nazi salutes and saying “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!,”

.. He scoffed at our having chosen refugees—nonwhite and non-Christian—as the recipients of our largesse. We had reacted, he wrote, by deciding “to commit civilizational suicide even harder than before … If this episode doesn’t express the end stage of wasp decline, I don’t know what does.”

.. His fans concurred. “I suppose from a Darwinian point of view we have to accept that most Whites are no longer fit for survival,” reads the post’s second-most-popular comment. “We need a Western Purge, a Noah’s Ark moment where the traitors came [sic] be thrown to the niggers to be raped and murdered.”

We don’t exploit other groups.  They need us, and not the other way around.  youtube link (9:33)

.. Because so many of his critics liken him to a Nazi, Spencer often gets this sort of compliment, for the simple courtesy of not mauling Jews or screaming in German in public

.. isis is an identity movement. Because they have ideas, and because you wrote about their ideas. Also, they are a grassroots movement. They’ve built themselves up fast, from nothing.”

.. A bookshelf in Spencer’s office. He counts the German scholars Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt—both skeptics of democracy—among his most important intellectual influences.

.. what really matters—namely, a consciousness of their identity as whites with a shared Christian heritage.

..  “If the alt-right triumphs, we’re going to probably throw you in jail. We’ll hold you guys accountable.”

.. Eichenwald suffers from epilepsy, and in December, a Twitter user calling himself @jew_goldstein tweeted a strobe-light gif to him that triggered a series of seizures, leading to temporary partial paralysis on his left side. Spencer blanked on Eichenwald’s name, and both he and the minion laughed as they tried to recall it.

“What is that guy’s name? The one whom we almost killed?”

“No, no,” the minion corrected him, with the precision of in-house counsel. “We did not send that.”