Richard B. Spencer: The founder of alt-right presents racism in a chic new outfit

Kenes, Bulent (2021). “Richard B. Spencer: The founder of alt-right presents racism in a chic new outfit.” ECPS Leader Profiles. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). June 28, 2021. https://doi.org/10.55271/lp0010

 

Richard Bertrand Spencer is a well-groomed, well-educated advocate for the creation of a “white ethno-state” in North America for a “dispossessed white race.” He has also called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to halt the “deconstruction” of what he describes as “white culture” and to achieve a “white homeland.” Spencer has become the most recognizable public face of the white supremacist and nationalist movements. As an ardent white supremacist and ethnonationalist, Spencer says America belongs to white people, who he claims have higher average IQs than Hispanics and African Americans, and that the latter are genetically predisposed to crime. In Spencer’s “America,” Asians, Muslims, and Jews don’t qualify as “white” either.

By Bulent Kenes

White supremacy and white nationalism are real threats to democratic societies across the globe, as evidenced by the presidency of Donald Trump and the massacre of 50 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. As more people embrace a xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and anti-multiculturalist worldview, this has fuelled hostility and violence toward those deemed “others” or “outsiders” because of their religion, skin colour, or national origin (Jipson & Becker, 2019).

Driven by fear over the loss of white primacy and white privilege, white nationalists believe that white identity should be the organizing principle of Western society (Jipson & Becker, 2019). The United States is a hub of white supremacy, whose adherents fear that demographic changes will lead to the extermination of the white race and white culture—even though the US remains 77 percent white (Jipson & Becker, 2019). Eight years of Republican demagoguery against the US’ first black president, Barack Obama, made it easier for some whites to be persuaded that the system is rigged against them (Harkinson, 2016).

As a natural result of this process, hate crimes against Muslims, immigrants, and people of colour have been on the rise in the US since 2014. In 2015, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) documented 892 hate crimes. The next year, it counted 917 hate crimes. In 2017—the year Trump took office, stoking nationalist sentiments with promises to build walls, deport Mexicans, and ban Muslims—the US saw 954 white supremacist attacks. In 2018, white nationalists killed at least 50 people in the US. Every perpetrator of deadly extremist violence in the US in 2018 had links to white nationalist groups (Jipson & Becker, 2019).

Richard Bertrand Spence is a well-groomed, well-educated advocate for the creation of a “white ethno-state” in North America (Beckett, 2017) for a “dispossessed white race.” Spencer has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to halt the “deconstruction” of what he describes as “white culture” (Lombroso & Appelbaum, 2016; SPLC, n.d.; Graham, 2016 & Kirchick, 2014) and to “reconstitute the Roman Empire” (Scott, 2014). Spencer has become the most recognizable public face of the white supremacist white nationalist movements. In 2008, in an article in Taki’s Magazine, a far-right publication, Spencer coined the term “alternative right,” from which “alt right” is derived as a sanitised word for the extreme right (Younge, 2017) (ADL, 2018). (Paul Gottfried, a Jewish paleo-conservative also employed the term “alternative right” when he gave a speech entitled, “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right,” at the H.L. Mencken Club’s Annual Meeting in November 2008. For this reason, some sources credit Gottfried with birthing the term.) Spencer further popularized the term when he chose “Alternative Right” as the name for an online publication that debuted in 2010 (ADL, n.d.).

Spencer rejects the label “white supremacist” in favour of the more opaque “alt-right” and prefers to describe himself as an “identitarian” (Cox, 2016); however, the SPLC has described him as a leading “academic racist,” who “takes a quasi-intellectual approach to white separatism” and as “a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old, a kind of professional racist in khakis.” The ADL says Spencer us a “leader in white supremacist circles that envision a ‘new’ right that will openly embrace ‘white racial consciousness’” (Cox, 2016).

As an umbrella term “alt-right” is used to describe a movement that is a mix of populism and white nationalism and was birthed predominantly online (Helsel, 2016). The alt-right portrays refugees, Muslims, and progressives as a threat to white culture (Jipson & Becker, 2019). As a loose network of people who promote white identity and reject mainstream conservatism (Beckett, 2017, alt-right has been used by Spencer to refer to people who oppose, among other things, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and open immigration (ADL, 2018).

Spencer has beguiled the American media. Profiles of Spencer have been accompanied by brooding portraits: the racist, looking serious in a blazer; the racist, slouching picturesquely against a wall. Spencer, who has basked in the media attention, was not shy about telling reporters that image is everything; that he and other young racists are the hipster whisperers, ready to bring a new generation into the white nationalist fold (Beckett, 2017). “We have to look good,” he said, because no one is going to want to join a movement that is “crazed or ugly or vicious or just stupid” (Fox, 2013).

Growing up in a wealthy part of Dallas in the 1990s, Spencer attended St. Mark’s School of Texas, an elite, all-boys prep school long associated with blue-blooded conservatism. Spencer’s father, an ophthalmologist, did not care much about politics but voted Republican out of habit. Spencer was friend with the only African American student in his class, John Lewis. Lewis says he never thought of Spencer as racist, but another classmate who asked not to be identified recalls Spencer making “a bunch of conservative, racially laced comments” that were objectionable even in high school. However, Spencer says he did not think much about race back then. After graduating high school in 1997, Spencer went to the University of Virginia, where he double majored in music and English and became deeply involved in avant-garde theatre, trying out and discarding various radical ideologies like costume changes (Harkinson, 2016). Eventually, Spencer came to embrace his ideology—and then continued further out on the ideological spectrum (Fox, 2013). 

Red Pilled: Waking Up to Reality

After entering the humanities master’s program at the University of Chicago, Spencer discovered Jared Taylor, a self-proclaimed “race realist” who argues that blacks and Hispanics are a genetic drag on Western society. By the time Spencer entered Duke as a Ph.D. student in European intellectual history, in 2005, his views were on his sleeve. Fellow students recall Spencer openly sharing his opinions on biological differences between races and endorsing books such as Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, which argues that Hispanic immigrants are less suited than Europeans for assimilation. Yet Spencer was charming enough to maintain collegial relations with his peers. “Not many of us had ever come across an out-and-out fascist,” says a college professor who studied in the same history Ph.D. program as Spencer. “We didn’t know how serious he was” (Harkinson, 2016). 

Spencer uses a metaphor to explain the jarring experience of waking up to a different worldview. In the 1999 movie “The Matrix,” the character of Morpheus offers Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, a choice between taking a blue pill—“the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe”—or a red pill, which shows “how deep the rabbit hole goes.” In the alt-right’s telling, the so-called “normies” swallow the blue pill, digesting the fiction of racial equality, while those who get “red pilled” are stripped of the virtual-reality cloak that blinds them, waking up to the shattering realization that liberalism is just a mirage designed to obscure the hard, ugly truths of a world programmed by genetics. “You’re destroyed by it,” Spencer says, “and put back together again.” After getting red pilled, Spencer began quietly pursuing related ideas through his academic work (Harkinson, 2016).

After dropping out of Duke, Spencer remained preoccupied with race while at The American Conservative, where he became an editor in 2007. Spencer was fired, because he was “a bit extreme for us,” recalls TAC editor Scott McConnell. Then, Spencer moved to a new job as the sole editor of Taki’s Magazine, the online vanity publication of Taki Theodoracopulos, who was notorious for his racist remarks. Spencer steadily evolved Taki’s into a magazine aimed at white nationalists. By 2009, he’d published essays by Jared Taylor and was regularly using the term “alternative right” to describe his youthful brand of anti-war, anti-immigration, pro-white conservatism (Harkinson, 2016). In December 2009, Spencer left Taki’s Magazine. 

In 2010, he founded AlternativeRight.com, a white supremacy-themed webzine aimed at the “intellectual right-wing,” (SPLC, n.d.). The site caught the attention of the conservative publisher William Regnery II, who had tried to start a whites-only online dating service and funded the white nationalist National Policy Institute (NPI). With Regnery’s backing (Harkinson, 2016), Spencer became president of NPI in 2011, following the death of its chairman. Concurrently, he also oversaw NPI’s publishing division, Washington Summit Publishers, home of such scientifically bogus works as a 2015 reissue of Richard Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence and screeds by other white nationalists, including Jared Taylor, editor of the racist American Renaissance journal, and Sam Francis, the late editor of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens’ newsletter (SPLC, n.d.).

According to NPI’s mission statement, it aims “to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights. The institute…will study the consequences of the ongoing influx that non-Western populations pose to our national identity” (SPLC, n.d.). Under the auspices of NPI, Spencer has worked to create an intellectual class of white separatists. The group rejects the calls for violence which appear in Internet chat rooms and public campaigns of hate. Spencer prefers a more professorial approach of publishing books and organizing conferences. 

“Our goal is to form an intellectual community around European nationalism,” he said (Mangan, 2016). The “lesbians” and “Latinos” have advocates working for them, so why shouldn’t whites, Spencer asks in a video (Fox, 2013). 

NPI seeks to preserve the “heritage, identity and future of European people in the US and around the world” (Mangan, 2016). In 2012, Spencer launched an offshoot of Washington Summit Publishers that he called Radix Journal, a website and biannual publication (SPLC, n.d.), and he also started to host a weekly podcast, “Vanguard Radio” (Bar-On, 2019).No longer confined to the dark corners of social media, Spencer tried to bring a scholarly air of respectability to a movement commonly associated with Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan (Mangan, 2016), and he managed to seize on an extraordinary presidential election to give overt racism a new veneer of radical chic (Harkinson, 2016). He envisions a world in which his ideals are embraced by the mainstream, and he has vowed to keep pushing until that happens (Cox, 2016). 

However, Spencer has failed to conceal his movement’s darker side. While being interviewed by David Pakman, he was asked if he would condemn the Ku Klux Klan and Adolf Hitler; he refused, saying, “I’m not going to play this game,” while stating that Hitler had “done things that I think are despicable,” without elaborating on which things he was referencing (Pakman, n.d.). In early 2016, Spencer was filmed giving the Nazi salute in a karaoke bar, and leaked footage also depicts Spencer giving the Sieg Heil salute to his supporters during the August 2017 Charlottesville rally (Bernstein, 2017). After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Spencer urged his supporters to “party like it’s 1933,” the year Hitler came to power in Germany (Cox, 2016).  In the weeks following, Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews (Goldstein, 2016). At a conference Spencer held celebrating the election, he cried, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” (Bradner, 2016). In early-to-mid 2017, when Spencer’s following was at its height, his supporters would reportedly give him the Sieg Heil salute when he entered a room (Marantz, 2019).

Spencer emerged as one of the most visible white separatist agitators during the Trump campaign (Mangan, 2016). After Trump’s election, Spencer was the focus of a lot of media attention. He never denied that his objective is white supremacy. “I’m trying to normalize ‘racism,’ as you call it,” he told ABC (Ali, 2016). His far-right ideas had travelled quite rapidly from the margins to the mainstream and were infecting the US body politic at the highest level (Younge, 2017a).

In some ways, Spencer resembles an older generation of “academic racists”—or “racialists,” as he prefers to put it (Harkinson, 2016). In his writing, speeches, and interviews, he has given an intellectualized explanation for how he came to advocate for a whites-only “ethno state.” While in graduate school, he has said, he was compelled by critiques of multiculturalism and political correctness and by demographic data indicating that whites are en route to minority status in the US (Williams, 2017).

One of Spencer’s first acts after taking over NPI was to move its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Whitefish, Montana, where his family has a home (SPLC, n.d.). Whitefish, where Spencer lived after 2014, was not particularly thrilled with his presence. Several local restaurants have refused to serve him. He was compelled to resign his membership from the exclusive Big Mountain Ski Club after he got into a chairlift argument about the Iraq War with the neocon Randy Scheunemann, a former adviser to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and to John McCain during the 2008 election. In 2014, a local human rights group known as Love Lives Here urged the city to bar Spencer from conducting NPI business in town but settled for a resolution condemning hate groups (Harkinson, 2016). 

It’s possible to connect the Spencer family’s business interests and geographic history with Richard Spencer’s racist politics. The family’s farm holdings are a legacy of its ties to the Jim Crow South, passed down by Spencer’s grandfather, who built the business during the turbulent civil rights era. Generations of Spencer’s family lived in the South (Williams, 2017). There is a long history of white supremacy in the American South, which has also contributed to the attitudes and, especially, symbolism used by the modern alt-right (Bezio, 2018). Records Show Spencer’s mother attended segregated schools as a girl in the small north-eastern Louisiana city of Monroe. Later, she other inherited farms in northeast Louisiana from her late father. The region has a history of slavery and racism. Throughout the civil rights era, the Ku Klux Klan targeted black residents in northeast Louisiana (and elsewhere) with lynchings, cross burnings, and other violence. In Tensas Parish, where the Spencers own 3,000 acres of farmland, blacks didn’t win the right to vote until 1964. However, in an open letter sent to their local newspaper, Spencer’s parents, Sherry and Rand, said that while they love their son, “we are not racists. We have never been racists. We do not endorse the idea of white nationalism” (Williams, 2017). 

“You Will Not Replace Us!”

Spencer abdicated his position as editor of Radix Journal in January 2017 to serve as the American editor of his new site, AltRight.com. Launched on January 16, 2017, AltRight.com brings together several well-known white nationalist personalities (SPLC, n.d.). According to Spencer, however, the site is populist and a big tent for members of the alt-right (Wilson, 2017). Swedish publisher Daniel Friberg of Arktos Media is co-founder and European editor of the site (Porter, 2017). The SPLC describes the common thread among contributors as antisemitism, rather than white nationalism or white supremacy in general (Solomon, 2017). In the same year, Spencer rented space in Alexandria, Virginia, to serve as a hub for the alt-right movement. Some local residents were—and are—not pleased. The city has received at least 25 complaints about Spencer’s rental (Anand, 2017).

On May 13, 2017, he led a torch-lit protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, against a vote by the city council to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the commanding general of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (CBS News, 2017). Spencer led the crowd in chants of “You will not replace us!”; “Blood and soil”; and “Russia is our friend” (Hayden, 2017; Laughland, 2017). 

“You will not replace us” refers to the idea that white Americans are being “replaced” by non-white people through “demographic replacement,” while “blood and soil” is perhaps better known in its original German, “Blut und boden.” The concepts “blood” (meaning racial identity) and “soil” (referencing the land) are inextricably linked in the expression, which meant that peasants and farmers were the most racially “German,” while urban dwellers were racially suspicious. In 1933, “blood and soil” even became an official Nazi policy, requiring that farmers were certifiably “Aryan” in order to receive certain benefits from the state (Coaston, 2019). Local police reported minor verbal confrontations between two opposing groups but confirmed no arrests had been made(Laughland, 2017). 

Things didn’t go as quietly at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville on August 12 of the same year. Spencer was one of the promoters and scheduled speakers at Unite the Right, which was ostensibly organized to oppose the removal of Confederate monuments. The rally attracted more than 500 white supremacists and many hundreds of counter-protesters, and confrontations between the two groups sparked violent clashes. A white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and wounding 30 (ADL, 2018). James Alex Fields Jr., a 22-year-old neo-Nazi from Ohio, would later plead guilty to killing 32-year-old Heyer. Fields and eight other people who attended the rally are in state or federal prison after being convicted of a variety of crimes. Spencer wasn’t accused of any criminal wrongdoing related to Charlottesville. But he and more than two dozen others are defendants in a civil lawsuit brought by people injured during the rally (Barrouquere, 2020). This lawsuit has accused 25 far-right individuals and groups of conspiring to commit violence. At a federal courthouse in Charlottesville, attorney Karen Dunn told the court that, following the march, Spencer declared to a crowd: “We own these streets. We occupy these grounds” (Smith, 2018).

The repercussions for the alt-right and the larger white supremacist community were immediate. Scores of them were “doxxed”—their real identities exposed—and as a result, some were fired from their jobs, had to leave their universities, or were rejected by their families or romantic partners. Many white supremacists’ social media accounts and websites were taken offline, and some were kicked off popular crowdfunding websites, eliminating a key income source. Meanwhile, Spencer, who helped spearhead the events in Charlottesville, has become increasingly unpopular in the alt-right due in part to the perception that he failed to capitalize on the energy generated by Unite the Right (ADL, n.d.). 

Since that weekend in Charlottesville, dissension and infighting has overtaken the alt-right movement. On one side are the American Nationalists who believe white supremacists should appeal to whites by using innocuous symbols like the American flag and avoid openly white supremacist symbols like swastikas. On the other side are the National Socialists and other hard-right groups whose members display white supremacist symbols at rallies and don’t care about “optics” or appealing to the white middle class. Spencer, who walks the line between the two groups, appears to be testing out new ways of attracting attention (ADL, 2018). 

In October 2017, two months after the rally, he returned to Charlottesville to lead 35-40 people in an unannounced “flash mob.” Afterwards, Spencer called it a “great success” and a “model” for future events. This kind of small event with no advance warning hugely diminishes inherently risky interactions with law enforcement or counter-protesters. Spencer only employed the “flash mob” model a couple of times before turning his attention to scheduled public events like campus speeches (ADL, 2018 & Hawley, 2017). 

In December 2017, Spencer announced that he had formed a new organization with other alt-right leaders. “Operation Homeland” was unveiled as a core group of alt-right leaders and activists poised to lead the movement as a whole. The group held a demonstration in December 2017 in Washington DC, to protest the acquittal of an undocumented immigrant in the 2015 murder of a young woman in San Francisco (ADL, 2018).

If You Aren’t a White American, That’s Fine—But You Should Leave

Spencer’s clean-cut appearance aims at concealing his radical white separatism and his goal of establishing a white ethno-state in North America. His writings and speeches portray this as a reasonable defence of Caucasians and Eurocentric culture. In Spencer’s worldview, white people have been “dispossessed” by a combination of rising minority birth rates, immigration, and establishment politics and policies (SPLC, n.d.). “We are undergoing a sad process of degeneration,” he said about minority births in the US. “We will need to reverse it using the state and the government. You incentivize people with higher intelligence, you incentivize people who are healthy to have children. And it sounds terrible and nasty, but there would be a great use of contraception.” He didn’t mean the government should encourage people to use birth control pills and condoms (Fox, 2013); he was advocating for eugenicist forced sterilisation (Stokes, 2017).

As an ardent white supremacist and ethnonationalist, Spencer also openly advocates for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to achieve a “white homeland.” He says America belongs to white people, who he claims have higher average IQs than Hispanics and African Americans and that the latter are genetically predisposed to crime (Stokes, 2017). Asians, Muslims, and Jews do not qualify as “white” either. Spencer knows that a white ethno-state is at most a distant dream, but he hopes America’s non-whites can be made to agree that returning to the lands of their ancestors would be best for everyone: “It’s like presenting to an African that this hasn’t worked out…We haven’t made each other happier. We are going to have to take part in this paradigmatic shift together” (Harkinson, 2016). 

Despite often saying, “you have to look at culture and not just race,” lighter skin colour apparently matters more to Spencer than acculturation when it comes to Hispanics. When pressed about what really sets whites apart, he waxes decidedly unscientific: “I think there is something within the European soul that we haven’t been able to measure yet and maybe we never will… and that is a Faustian drive or spirit—a drive to explore, a drive to dominate, a drive to live one’s life dangerously…a drive to explore outer space and the universe. I think there is something within us that we possess and that only we possess” (Harkinson, 2016). In line with Spencer, NPI is “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the US, and around the world” (Ramasubramanian & Miles, 2018). Spencer claims, among other things, that Africans have benefited from white supremacy and that Europe would always be more his home than it would be for Blacks (Younge, 2017).

Moreover, he said in an interview that, “The American nation is defined by the fact that it is derived from Europe…white Americans, European-Americans, in particular Anglo-Saxon Americans, Anglo-Saxon Protestants…defined it in a way that no other people did. So, of course, African Americans have influenced American culture and American identity. Of course, Asians have and so on. But it really was Anglo-Saxons who truly defined it. Who made America what it is. Who were indispensable…” (Letson, 2016).

Spencer is also known for his public advocacy of violence against non-whites. He has advocated for the enslavement of Haitians by whites, the ethnic cleansing of racial minorities from the US, and even the ethnic cleansing of Turks from Anatolia (Holt, 2018). He claimed, “Today, in the public imagination, ‘ethnic-cleansing’ has been associated with civil war and mass murder. But this need not be the case. 1919 is a real example of successful ethnic redistribution—done by fiat, we should remember, but done peacefully” (Fox, 2013 & SPLC, n.d.). 

On the subject of neo-Nazism, Spencer has expressed admiration for the political tactics of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell for using “shock as a positive means to an end” (Miller, 2018). Therefore, the SPLC has classified Spencer as a leading academic racist, but he rejects the notion that he is driven by hatred and considers “racist” a “slur word” (Fox, 2013). Spencer believes that if you aren’t a white American, that’s fine—but you should leave (Harkinson, 2016). 

Despite having no visible tattoos advertising white pride or hate against non-whites, Spencer is a racist (Wertheimer, 2017). His stances conflict with common mores in American society (Wertheimer, 2017. Spencer supports nations segregated by race and called the idea that America is based on rights “silliness” (Helsel, 2016). SPLC (2016) underlines Spencer’s alt-right claims depart from traditional, establishment conservatism and embrace more identity-based politics, such as American Identitarianism. The alt-right proclaims to have move passed the right–left divide, towards a politics that promotes racial homogeneity and to challenge and dismantle mainstream conservatism (Gray, 2015).

“Even if all immigration was stopped tomorrow, there is still going to be a massive minority population,” argues Spencer. “All I know is that in order for white people to survive, we’ll need consciousness of ourselves, or we really will reach a state of humiliation, if not extinction. White people are going to enter a new world where we are a hated minority, where it is seen as a good thing that we have less power. We must fight against that” (Mangan, 2016). He even claims that “The alt-right would not exist if it weren’t for terrible immigration policies and social justice warriors and liberalism and maybe the Barack Obama presidency.” He says, “they made us” (Harkinson, 2016). According to Spencer, immigration “is a kind of proxy war—and maybe a last stand—for White Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile” (NPI, February 2014).

In a promo for NPI’s 2013 Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., Spencer opined that both Europe and America are experiencing economic, moral, and cultural bankruptcy under the pressure of “mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the natural expression of religious and ethnic identities by non-Europeans” (SPLC, n.d.). He said on another occasion that, “I believe that selective deportations could set a new tone and that millions would self-deport. It does not matter to me whose ‘fault’ it was that they are here, or if that’s even the right way to look at it. The survival of my people takes precedence” (Mangan, 2016). However, Spencer has said he would gladly accept Germans, Latins, and Slavic immigrants in his proposed ethno-state — ironically, groups that faced severe discrimination in late 19th-century America (SPLC, n.d.).

Spencer and his group claim that their history and identity as white people is being erased by “political correctness.” Specifically, they see the identity and history of whiteness in the US as antithetical to those of people of colour. They claim to be marginalised and oppressed by policies of inclusion and diversity; thus, they reject multiculturalism and diversity (Ramasubramanian & Miles, 2018). Spencer subscribes zealously to the idea that America’s white population is endangered, thanks to multiculturalism and lax immigration policies that have gone unchallenged by mainstream conservatives. He envisions a future for the US along the lines of “a renewed Roman Empire,” a dictatorship where the main criteria for citizenship would be whiteness (Harkinson, 2016).

According to Spencer, it falls to people like him to be engaged and savvy if America is going to combat the growing threat of diversity. In particular, he’s irritated by the rise of minority births, which outnumbered white births for the first time in 2011. “Even if we shut off all immigration, the country is going to demographically undergo a tremendous transformation,” Spencer said. White people “need to start thinking about a new ethno-state that we would want to be a part of. This is not going to happen in the next election or in the next 10 years probably, but something in the future that would be for our great grandchildren” (Fox, 2013). Spencer justifies his claim by saying that, “By 2042…white people will become a minority… In 2042 are we going to all decide oh well you know race doesn’t mean anything anymore. Identity is meaningless… No. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. I think whites are going to be, they’re going to have a[n] amplification of their consciousness of being white” (Letson, 2016).

During the American Renaissance conference, in April 2013, Spencer suggested his solution: “The ideal I advocate is the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent…so that our people can ‘come home again,’ can live amongst family and feel safe and secure.” 

How, he was asked, in a nation with more than 100 million blacks, Asians, and Latinos, could a whites-only territory be created without overwhelming violence? He offered an answer: “Look, maybe it will be horribly bloody and terrible” (Cox, 2016). 

During his speech, he quoted Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, and termed his mission a “sort of white Zionism” that would inspire whites with the dream of such a homeland just as Zionism helped spur the establishment of Israel. A white ethno-state would be an Altneuland—an old, new country—he said (SPLC, n.d.). “So that we would always have a safe space,” he said. “We would always have a homeland for us. Very similar to…how Jews conceive of Israel” (Letson, 2016). 

“We want our identity, too,” Spencer argues. “Blacks are quite good at identity politics. They know who they are. We want that, too…When they talk about ‘white privilege,’ they’re making us feel guilty about the fact that we are awesome. I’m not trying to justify slavery or say we weren’t terrible to other people. We definitely were. But I am proud of the fact that we changed the world and dominated the world. We should be trying to expand white privilege, not feel guilty about it” (Mangan, 2016). Stressing that they live in a world of a “white guilt complex,” Spencer said, “Yes, white people are generally better off than many other people…(But) all of these institutions are not acting on behalf of white people. They are acting on behalf of non-white people. And you can talk about this being fair” (Letson, 2016). Typically, white supremacist discourse includes notions of a “racist double standard” that affords Blacks preferential treatment from social institutions. They use metonymical concepts such as “black assault[s]” discussing the way Blacks “burden” the state to show that a zero-sum game exists wherein “black gains equate to white losses.” This discourse presupposes that Black survival and success has become the white person’s burden (Brown, 2009). 

According to Spencer, even Martin Luther King Jr. “is a fraud and degenerate in his life, has become the symbol and cynosure of White Dispossession and the deconstruction of Occidental civilization. We must overcome!” (NPI, column, January 2014). As Villet (2017) notes, white victimhood is a generic right-wing tactic that inverts the left’s narratives of minority discrimination and neo-colonialism. This tactic denies that there is such a thing as white privilege and attempts to camouflage white domination. Whites can surely be victims of crime or discrimination as individuals, but white victimhood goes much further. It implies that whites as a demographic group are victims of discrimination, oppression, or even persecution. The most extreme version of this victimhood is “white genocide” (Villet, 2017). The perceptions of “reverse” discrimination have a significant influence on whites’ decisions to join the alt-right (Adams & Roscigno, 2005).

Spencer claims that the alt-right seeks to “restore” the US as a white, European country, instead eliminating racial others.He denies that his organisation is dedicated to the eradication or marginalisation of minorities but rather seeks to promote white racial pride (Ramasubramanian & Miles, 2018). However, he was caught on tape using racist slurs against African Americans and Jewish people. The expletive-laden audio recording was released by former Breitbart writer, Milo Yiannopoulos. The 54-second long audio, supposedly recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, appears to feature an angry Spencer ranting against Charlottesville citizens. On the recording, Spencer says, “Little fucking kikes. They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octaroons. My ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit.” Later, he continued, “Those pieces of shit get ruled by people like me…That’s how the fucking world works…” (Coaston, 2019). He declined to deny that the voice in the video was his. Spencer also later tweeted a link to a right-wing video titled: “Never Apologise” (Wilson, 2019). His radical ideas have been cited as a source of concern by the SPLC and ADL (Los Angeles Times, 2017).

The Alt-right: An Ideology Around Identity

Spencer believes the alt-right is “deeply connected” with his work. “I would say that what I’m doing is we’re really trying to build a philosophy, an ideology around identity, European identity,” he said (Gray, 2015). Unlike old-school white supremacism, the “alt-right” incubated online, fed by memes and inside jokes and vicious battles over feminism and videogame culture. The Associated Press’ standards guide defines “alt-right” as “as a mix of racism, white nationalism and populism.” “In the past we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist,” the standards guide noted (Beckett, 2017).

Therefore, some have argued that the alt-right is simply the latest iteration of an old, racist strain of US politics. And indeed, the alt-right’s ultimate vision—a racially homogeneous white ethnostate—is similar to that of earlier groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance. Yet, according to Hawley (2017), the alt-right considers itself new and distinct, in terms of both style and intellectual substance. Stylistically, it has attempted to distance itself from the ineffectual violence and pageantry of what it derisively calls “white nationalism 1.0,” instead preferring a modern aesthetic that targets cynical millennials on social media and online message boards. Ideologically, the movement represents a break from American racist movements of the past, looking not to US history but to the European far-right for ideas and strategies. Spencer is often inspired by ideas that are alien to most Americans—especially those of the European New Right. The European far-right has in turn adopted tactics pioneered in the US, such as online trolling(Hawley, 2017).

Alt-righters reject mainstream conservative politics and espouse extremist beliefs and policies typically centred on ideas of white nationalism. The alt-right is a loosely connected far-right, white nationalist movement (ECPS, n.d.). Dylan Matthews defines Spencer’s alt-right as a label that blends together straight-up white supremacists, nationalists who think conservatives have sold out to globalization, and nativists who fear immigration will spur civil disarray. People who identify with the alt-right regard mainstream or traditional conservatives as weak and impotent, largely because they do not adequately support white racial interests or are not adequately racist or antisemitic. Some alt-right adherents prefer other labels, such as the “New Right” and the “Dissident Right.” They identify with a range of different ideologies, all of which centre on white identity (ADL, n.d.)

One body of adherents is the ostensibly “intellectual” racists who create many of the doctrines and principles of the white supremacist movement. They seek to attract young, educated whites to the movement by highlighting the achievements and alleged intellectual and cultural superiority of whites. Alt-righters use terms like “culture” as substitutes for more divisive terms such as “race,” and promote “Western Civilization” as a code word for white culture or identity (ADL, n.d.).  According to Bar-On, Spencer defends “racialist and antisemitic agendas” of the Old Right under a new metapolitical guise, acting as a cultural influencer rather than a direct political actor, and using various media outlets to “disseminate his views to ordinary people in an accessible manner” (Bar-On, 2019).

White Supremacy to Reinstate White Power and Domination

However, many newspapers have given instructions to their reporters to use the term “white supremacist” or “neo-Nazi” rather than “alt-righters” while referring to people like Spencer (Ramasubramanian & Miles, 2018). White supremacists drew on discontent rooted in political fundamentalism and the fear of abdication of power to non-Whites (Dobratz & Shanks-Meile, 1997). Early forms of white supremacy relied on anti-Black social rituals and actions such as burning a cross on a Black person’s property, spewing racial epithets such as “nigger,” denying Black people social opportunities, and committing to Jim Crow segregation. These violent and coercive actions defied US reconstruction efforts and alienated Blacks from mainstream society (Dobratz & Shanks-Meile, 1997)—an alienation that persisted until the civil rights movement began in the 1960s (and persists in some ways today) (Feagin & Vera, 1995). Thus, extremists had to search for new ways and strategies to spread their message of hate in the midst of an increasingly racially tolerant society (Brown, 2009).

White supremacists often combine derogatory notions based on physical appearance with cultural attributes such as language, geography, character traits, and customs. White supremacist metaphors not only highlight unwarranted physical inadequacies, but they also position Black people in an inferior social and cultural position. White supremacists use metaphors such as “lower evolutionary plane” and “jungle dweller,” and spatial concepts such as “pull it down” and “lowest scale,” and “total bastardization,” to support the racist notion that “Negroes” cannot live in a civilized environment among human beings. The positioning of whites (presumably men) as warriors and civilization builders reinforces a broad racist ideology that buttresses the belief that the nation is synonymous with “Whiteness” (Brown, 2009). 

Accordingly, “race is something between a breed and an actual species,” Spencer says, likening the differences between whites and people of colour to those between golden retrievers and basset hounds. “It’s that powerful” (Harkinson, 2016).The specific types of messages that are propagated by Spencer and other white supremacists are about reinstating white power and domination. Spencer said, “… I am proud of the fact that we changed the world and dominated the world. We should be trying to expand white privilege, not feel guilty about it,” (Mangan, 2016). Spencer has also said, “America was, until this past generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us” (Seipp, 2016: 1). In a speech at Texas A&M University, he repeatedly stated that the US “belonged to white men,” and that he is “European.” He conflates European identity with whiteness and presents race as a rigid notion (Ramasubramanian & Miles, 2018). Spencer also claimed that “We don’t gain anything from other racial groups’ presence. They need us and not the other way around,” (Jackson & Stelloh, 2016). 

Antisemitism & Islamophobia 

In Spencer’s “ethno-state,” whites should live separately not only from non-whites but also from Jews. While Spencer generally shies away from blatant displays of antisemitism, he began expressing antisemitic views more openly in 2014, when he wrote that Jews have an identity apart from Europeans. At a press conference two years later, he announced that he did not consider Jews to be European. 

Spencer has been influenced by a number of white supremacists, including the late Sam Francis, Jared Taylor, and retired professor Kevin MacDonald, who wrote a series of antisemitic books. At the 2016 conference, a number of people in the audience threw Nazi salutes after Spencer “hailed” Trump’s victory in the presidential election. Spencer, who refused to condemn the salutes, has aligned himself with groups and individuals who openly express virulent antisemitism, including TWP and Patriot Front. Spencer has also shown a willingness to work with antisemitic leaders such as Matthew Heimbach, the former head of TWP, and Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, who runs The Right Stuff website (ADL, 2018).

As an atheist (Spencer, 2017), Spencer believes that the Christian church held some pragmatic value, because it helped unify the white population of Europe. But he opposes traditional Christian values as a moral code, due to the fact that Christianity is a universalizing religion, rather than an ethnic religion. Spencer’s Radix Journal has promoted paganism, running articles such as “Why I am a pagan” (Beinart, 2017). He is also blatantly Islamophobic. According to Spencer, Islam, “at its full flourishing … isn’t some peaceful denomination like Methodism or religion like Buddhism; Islam is a black flag. It is an expansive, domineering ideology, and one that is directed against Europe. In this way, Islam give[s] non-Europeans a fighting spirit and integrates them into something much greater than themselves” (Interview with Europa Maxima, February 2017). Therefore, Spencer aggressively supported Trump’s “Muslim ban” (Buchanan, 2017). 

A “Psychic Connection” With Donald Trump

During the 2016 presidential race, the alt-right, which was a tiny, marginal, and almost exclusively Internet-based phenomenon, achieved mainstream attention (Wertheimer, 2017) thanks in part to its connection with the presidential campaign, and then administration of, Donald Trump. For years, Spencer’s “identitarian” movement barely flickered in the dark corners of the internet  (Cox, 2016) on sites such as Reddit and 4chan. But Trump’s ascendancy was like kerosene dumped on a brushfire (Harkinson, 2016). Then the term “alt-right” was often applied to a much broader group than it is today; at times, it seemed to refer to the entirety of Trump’s right-wing populist base (Hawley, 2017). Spencer argued that “If Trump wins we could really legitimately say that he was associated directly with us, with the ‘R(acist)’ word, all sorts of things. People will have to recognize us” (Harkinson, 2016).

Throughout the presidential campaign, Spencer was a vocal advocate for Trump due to his signature proposal to build a wall along the US border with Mexico and his racist statements referring to Mexicans as criminals and rapists (SPLC, n.d.; Barrouquere, 2020). Spencer believed the alt-right had a “psychic connection” with Trump in a way they did not with other Republicans. He said the alt-right had, before the election, been like a “head without a body…The Trump movement was a kind of body without a head…I think moving forward the alt-right as an intellectual vanguard can complete Trump” (Gray, 2016).

On election night, Spencer exulted in Trump’s victory. “The alt-right has been declared the winner. The alt-right is more deeply connected to Trumpian populism than the ‘conservative movement’,” Spencer tweeted. “We’re the establishment now” (ADL, 2018). An extremist website associated with Spencer also wrote: “It was a time when more people joined our movement than ever before and when our ideas began invading the mainstream” (Ali, 2016). For Spencer, Trump is not the logical outcome of a radicalized Republican Party, but an entirely new phenomenon born of the alt-right’s growing prominence and mainstream conservatism’s collapse (Posner & Neiwert, 2016).

Trump’s victory emboldened the bigots and channelled their thinking in a fashion not seen in modern times. A president who draws a moral equivalent between neo-Nazis and anti-fascist protesters, who baits black athletes and black journalists, and brands Mexicans rapists and Muslims terrorists. “Trump wouldn’t have run the campaign that he ran if he didn’t feel some sense of loss, that America has lost something,” Spencer argued (Younge, 2017). In an interview, Spencer also stated that he didn’t think it was just an unusual election with an unusual candidate: “I think this really was a paradigmatic shift. The new paradigm that Donald Trump brought into the world was identity politics and in particular white identity politics” (Letson, 2016). 

Only days after Trump’s surprising victory, the NPI held its fall conference on November 19, 2016, in Washington, D.C. Spencer, flush with victory, offered the toast, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” to the nearly 200 attendees. He was met with a handful of stiff-armed salutes from the crowd. At other points in his speech, like Trump’s assaults on the media, Spencer used a term employed by Nazis to attack the media—“Lügenpresse,” German for lying press. “It’s not just that many are genuinely stupid,” he said of reporters. “Indeed, one wonders if these people are people at all.” One tactic of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime was to declare enemies inhuman. Spencer speculated that the media may be “soulless golem,” a reference to magically animated beings from Jewish folklore (Lombroso & Appelbaum, 2016; Jackson & Stelloh, 2016; Mangan, 2016). The gesture electrified the more radical sectors of the white supremacy movement. He later stated that it was done in a spirit of “irony and exuberance” (Stokes, 2017, Jackson & Stelloh, 2016; Helsel, 2016).

Nevertheless, Spencer gained international notoriety after this speech (Helsel, 2016). Though the ties between Trump and him have not been officially recognised by the former president, the connections between Trump and white nationalist movements have been a lingering question in light of the alt-right’s support and Trump’s refusal to condemn the racially motivated violence in Charleston in August 2017 (Ramasubramanian & Miles, 2018). Furthermore, Spencer was among the most optimistic about Trump’s presidency. “With Donald Trump, we feel like we have a dog in the fight for the first time,” Spencer told the Guardian. “And with him there’s a real chance we could start influencing policy and culture.” His hope was that “alt-right” ideas could enter the mainstream (Gabbatt, 2016). According to him, the Trump phenomenon was about identity at some deep level: “He’s not a mainstream conservative…It’s important for young people to listen to a speaker articulate what this means on a metapolitical and philosophical level” (Mangan, 2016). Spencer expressed his hope, saying, “I don’t think Donald Trump is alt-right. I don’t think Donald Trump is an identitarian as I would use that term. I think Donald Trump is a kind of first step towards this. He’s the first time that we’ve seen a genuinely if, you could say incomplete, politician who’s fighting for European identity politics in North America…” (Letson, 2016).

The intense media coverage of the Nazi salutes, while further raising Spencer’s profile, also splintered the alt-right, with some leading right-wing figures denouncing Spencer and his antisemitic beliefs. The outrage over the Nazi salutes even led to Trump explicitly disavowing and condemning Spencer’s group. When Trump appointed Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s executive chairman, as his chief strategist, the move prompted widespread alarm and protest—and seemed to cement the “alt-right’s” rise. Bannon had once described Breitbart, a popular right-wing site, as “the platform for the alt-right.” At his inauguration, Trump, an unabashed populist, made a clear effort to separate the “white” from the “nationalism” (Beckett, 2017).

In November 2018, an openly frustrated Spencer declared, “The Trump moment is over, and it’s time for us to move on.” The SPLC reported that the white nationalist movement was dissatisfied with Trump’s presidency (SPLC, 2018). Spencer believed Trump was practicing a “con game” and not clearly developing a white nationalist agenda as Trump “gives us nothing outside of racist tweets, and by racist tweets, I mean tweets that are meaningless and cheap” (Yee, 2019). In 2020, following the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, Spencer even said that he regretted voting for Trump (Palmer, 2020). In August of that year, Spencer announced that he planned to vote for Joe Biden. “The MAGA/Alt-Right moment is over. I made mistakes; Trump is an obvious disaster, but mainly the paradigm contained flaws that we now are able to perceive. And it needs to end…It’s not based on ‘accelerationism’ or anything like that; the liberals are clearly more competent people.” Shortly after, Biden’s campaign forcefully disavowed Spencer’s endorsement. Andrew Bates, the rapid-response director for the Biden campaign tweeted that, “What you stand for is absolutely repugnant. Your support is 10,000 percent unwelcome here” (Sheth, 2020).

Conference Series and Abusing The First Amendment

Strong free speech protections in the US enable Spencer to hold conferences (SPLC, n.d.). Judicial interpretations of the First Amendment of the US Constitution follow such a logic: The right to free speech must be universal, with no exceptions. Thus, Nazis and white supremacists must be allowed to speak freely, even at a university campus where no one seems to want them, and even when their speech openly rejects other core values, such as the dignity of all persons. The US permits limits on free speech rights only in rare cases of “fighting words” that pose an imminent threat of violence. No one has yet used the “fighting words” argument against Spencer, despite Charlottesville (Peterson, 2017).

By exploiting the First Amendment, Spencer has focused on getting college students to attend his annual events, including the NPI conference, and he’s had some success (ADL, 2018). NPI’s first conference, held in DC in 2011, drew about 85 people. Its second, in 2013, attracted a little over 100 (Harkinson, 2016). In Spencer’s view, his resentments have cropped up among younger, college-educated whites for whom “enforced multiculturalism” on college campuses is giving shape to a new kind of white identity politics (Harkinson, 2016). Spencer has influenced a younger generation of college-age racists. In 2010 and 2011, leaders of the now defunct racist student group, Youth for Western Civilization, invited Spencer to speak at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and Providence College in Rhode Island. In both speeches, Spencer attacked affirmative action (ADL, 2013).

The white-nationalist groups seem to believe that teens and 20-somethings are particularly susceptible to their messaging, said Oren Segal, the director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism. Segal noted that the groups are aiming for a younger demographic by reaching out through social media and trying to set up talks on college campuses or disseminating fliers there. Spencer also made a highly publicized visit to Texas A&M University in December 2016, further fuelling concerns about the alt-right on campus (Wertheimer, 2017). Although over 10,000 people signed an online petition to ask university officials to ban Spencer from speaking on campus, the university and student representatives simultaneously condemned and supported Spencer’s presence on campus. They claimed that while they disagreed with his message and ideology, they supported his right to appear and speak, per the First Amendment (Ramasubramanian & Miles, 2018).

In 2016 and 2017, Spencer launched a college tour to bring his white nationalist message to campuses nationwide (Mangan, 2016). After Texas A&M University, he spoke at Auburn University in April 2017. In October 2017, he spoke to a small, mostly hostile audience at the University of Florida in Gainesville. In March 2018, he spoke to a small group of supporters at Michigan State University, while members of TWP fought with antifa activists outside, leading to a number of arrests. After the MSU speech, Spencer decided to cancel his college tour, saying he would try to find other methods of reaching the public (ADL, 2018).

Across the whole tour, Spencer’s visit to Texas A&M University was unique for several reasons. In addition to being his first visit and speaking engagement on a university campus, it is Texas A&M University’s military and racialised history that made Spencer’s presence so provoking. Spencer gave his speech at the Memorial Student Center (MSC), which is a student union dedicated to the memory of Texas A&M University students who lost their lives in war, specifically World War II. Though Texas A&M University officials and students lambasted the event as insulting to the legacy of the university students who fought Nazi Germany, as a historically white institution, the university has had a highly contentious and problematic history (Ramasubramanian & Miles, 2018). Its first president (and 19th governor of Texas), Lawrence Ross Sullivan, was an active member of the Ku Klux Klan (Slattery, 2006). At A&M, Spencer spoke to a ballroom of nearly 400 individuals. “America, at the end of the day,” Spencer told his audience, “belongs to white men. Our bones are in the ground. We own it. At the end of the day America can’t exist without us. We defined it. This country does belong to white people, culturally, politically, socially, everything” (SPLC, n.d.).

Spencer’s Efforts to Spread His Ideas Internationally

Spencer and his alt-right movement has exploited all possibilities to build bridges with their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. However, his efforts to reach out to European nationalists have not gone well. In October 2014, he attempted to hold an NPI conference in Budapest, Hungary, as part of an effort to reach out to “European traditionalists” all over the world (Gray, 2014). On paper, Budapest seemed the ideal venue for the NPI, which thinks rising discontent with EU migration policy has created an opening for it. Economic stagnation and political sclerosis in the European Union have given fodder to anti-immigrant parties across the continent, and Hungary is home to Jobbik, one of Europe’s largest far-right parties, which won 20 percent of the seats in parliament (Seddon, 2014a). Dubbed the 2014 European Congress, the conference featured an array of white nationalists from both Europe and America. Among the scheduled speakers were Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, Philippe Vardon from the far-right French Bloc Identitaire movement, Russian ultranationalist Alexander Dugin, and right-wing Hungarian extremist MP Márton Gyöngyösi (SPLC, n.d.), who once called on the government to draw up lists of Jews who pose a “national security risk” (Seddon, 2014). 

Hungary’s populist strongman Viktor Orbán ordered the country’s interior ministry to ban the conference after several parties and ministries complained about it. Interior Minister Sándor Pintér said in a statement that the conference was against Hungarian law protecting “the human dignity of others, of the Hungarian nation or of national, ethnic, racial of religious communities” and vowed to bar the conference speakers from entering the country (Seddon, 2014). Before the conference even started, the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade released a statement condemning “all xenophobic and exclusionary organizations that discriminate based on religion or ethnicity.” Planned reservations at the venue, the Larus Center, were cancelled. On Oct. 3, Spencer was arrested while meeting informally with other participants at a cafe that was to have been an alternate venue. He was jailed for three days, deported, and banned for three years from entering all 26 European countries (SPLC, n.d.). He was declared a “national security threat” (Harkinson, 2016). 

In 2016, the Home Office of the British government also banned Spencer from visiting Great Britain, citing his white supremacist views. In November 2017, Poland’s state-run news agency PAP reported that Polish authorities had extended Spencer’s ban from the Schengen area for another five years (ADL, 2018) citing Spencer’s Nazi rhetoric and the Nazis’ genocide of Slavic people during World War II (The Guardian, 2017). Spencer had to cancel his plans to travel to Poland fora far-right conference in Warsaw after seeing reports the government was threatening to keep him out of the country. Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski described Spencer as someone “who defames what happened during World War II, defames the Holocaust” (Haaretz, 2017). In July 2018, Spencer was detained at Keflavík Airport in Reykjavík, Iceland, en route to Sweden and was ordered by Polish officials to return to the US (Michel, 2018).

Despite these efforts to keep Spencer at bay, the idea of white victimhood has crossed international borders and the idea of white people falling victim to an “onslaught” of refugees and immigrants has become a major factor in elections across Europe (Villet, 2017). Spencer has partnered with two Swedish outfits to create a media company and keep race at the centre of the new right wing. Called the Alt-Right Corporation, it links Spencer with Arktos Media, a publishing house begun in Sweden to print English-language editions of esoteric nationalist books from many countries. The other Swedish partner is Red Ice, a video and podcast platform featuring white nationalists from around the globe. It was natural for Spencer to turn to Swedes as partners in the new enterprise, given the country’s history as an exporter of white nationalist ideas. But forging formal bonds between nationalists across the Atlantic makes even more sense as the politics of Northern Europe is heavily driving the politics of immigration and Islam in the US (Feder & Mannheimer, 2017). Spencer believes in white pride and the unification of a pan-European “white race” in a “potential racial empire” (Harkinson, 2016)

Spencer has also advocated for the US pulling out of NATO and called Russia the “sole white power in the world.” His former partner, Nina Koupriianova, under her penname Nina Byzantina, referred to herself as a “Kremlin troll leader” and regularly aligned with Kremlin talking points. She also had ties to Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right ultranationalist Russian leader in the Eurasianism movement (Bertrand, 2016).  Koupriianova has translated several books written by Dugin (Gessen, 2017; Porter, 2017a). The books were later published by Spencer’s publishing house, Washington Summit Publishers (Shekhovtsov, 2017). “I think the fact that we’re inviting Dugin is expressive of the fact that we want to have a real healthy dialogue with the major currents of Russian conservatism,” Spencer said (Gray, 2014). Spencer also explained the chants in support of Russia during the Charlottesville rally: “There is a common brotherhood that stretches from Portugal to Siberia and includes North America. Even though we’re very different, we obviously have common ancestry and there’s that tie of blood” (Laughland, 2017). 

His wife and Spencer have each appeared on Russia Today, the Kremlin’s English-language news and propaganda network. Spencer admires Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism, and he would gladly admit most Russians into his ideal ethnostate (Harkinson, 2016). His thoughts on the Ukraine crisis hew closely to Moscow’s: “…I am more sympathetic towards Russia as a major power entering the world stage. Russia has the opportunity, to put it bluntly, to make the world a better place.” He also said, “I’m sympathetic toward Putin in many ways” (Gray, 2014). 

Spencer and the alt-right have also lifted up Bashar al-Assad as a hero. Support for the Syrian president means they can further tangle internet conspiracy theories, tap into a deep vein of antisemitism, anti-interventionism, and anti-globalism, and wind up their biggest enemy: liberals. Spencer is able to aggressively support Trump’s “Muslim ban,” while also getting behind the Syrian dictator just because Assad was “educated in the West and offer[ed] a civilized variant of Islam.” Spencer said he’d been “aware” of Assad since the early 2000s. The core of it for Spencer was that Assad, in addition to being the “rightful, legitimate ruler of Syria,” was fighting ISIS (Buchanan, 2017). After the 2017 chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province, Trump’s decision to strike Syria caused a rift between the then-president and his alt-right supporters. Spencer led a protest against Trump’s decision, leading to a handful of skirmishes with counter-protesters in front of the White House. “We want walls, not war!” chanted some of the protesters accompanying Spencer (Hernandez, 2017). 

He also criticized the Trump administration following the targeted killing of Iranian General Soleimani for escalating tensions between the US and Iran. In January 2020, Spencer tweeted: “To the people of Iran, there are millions of Americans who do not want war, who do not hate you, and who respect your nation and its history. After our traitorous elite is brought to justice, we hope to achieve peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness” (Palmer, 2020).

Spencer and His Movements Are Hypermasculine, Misogynist and Anti-feminist

While the group led by Richard Spencer is typically defined by its racist views, sexism is also central to its ideology (Paquette, 2016). The alt-right is hypermasculine, misogynist, and anti-feminist. The alt-right women claim feminism has failed white women, robbing them of the opportunity to have a male provider, a happy family, and a nice home. According to this narrative, the #MeToo movement only confirms the dangerous world feminism has created for women, a world where men no longer respect them for their femininity and fertility and, hence, feel free to assault, harass, and rape them (Love, 2020). An aspect of their subculture is its connection to the online world of misogyny, known broadly as the “manosphere.” Men in this movement believe they are being stripped of power by women and pro-feminist social structures. They are hostile to women on a personal level, with some believing that women are objects to be possessed and used for sexual gratification, while others resent women for their own inability to attract them or to form meaningful relationships with them (ADL, n.d.).

The alt right opposes “women’s liberation” because it gives women choices that make it less likely that they will “get married, have children, and perpetuate the white race” (Center on Extremism Report, 2018: 7). Its members call liberated women “thots,” which means “that ho over there,” and celebrate the femininity and fertility of women who accept their traditional sex/gender roles, calling them as “tradhots” (Center on Extremism Report, 2018: 6–7). In short, the alt-right would return white women to their biological roles as wives and mothers for the white race (Love, 2020).

The predominant demographic of the alt-right is white men aged 18 to 35. Alt-right populism is the product of people for whom whiteness and masculinity have been their primary form of social capital. The suggestion that whiteness and maleness are no longer a form of political or social currency means that there is now room for forms of citizenship and leadership that do not belong to the proverbial “old white men” (Bezio, 2018). 

The Guardian reporter Adam Gabbat’s (2016) observations at one of Spencer’s meeting also confirmed these descriptions: 

“When the time came for questions, I pointed out that there were very few women at the event. It prompted a surreal discussion between six white men about the sexual preferences of women. The almost entirely male audience cheered when Spencer made his statement about women’s desire for a ‘strong man.’ ‘I’ve looked at a lot of romance novels that women read and I’ve noticed a distinct pattern,’ Spencer said. ‘Romance novels about cubicle-dwelling boring computer programmers don’t sell very well. Romance novels about cowboys and Vikings seem to be very popular. We might want to look at something like that and see if that tells us something about human nature” (Gabbatt, 2016).

During the 2016 US presidential election, Spencer tweeted that women should not be allowed to make foreign policy (Bowman, 2017, Hayden, 2017a). His views about women—that their role in politics minimal—would be unrecognizable to almost anyone in modern America. “I don’t necessarily think that that’s a great thing,” Spencer said of women voting in US elections. Spencer has also suggested that the US should be protected from what he views to be the danger of having a female commander-in-chief (Hayden, 2017a). He also stated in an interview that his vision of America as a white ethnostate includes women returning to traditional roles as child bearers and homemakers (Cox, 2016; Paquette, 2016).

Although the alt-right movement appears to be composed primarily of white men in their “manosphere,” similar to other far-right movements that emphasize hypermasculinity and patriarchy (Kimmel, 2017; Lyons, 2017; Tien, 2017), white women continue to participate actively in white supremacist movements. The presence of women as “shield maidens,” “fashy femmes,” and “trad wives” serves to soften and normalize white supremacy. Women in the alt-right serve as auxiliaries rather than leaders. This partly explains why women’s participation receives less media and scholarly attention. However, white women shield white supremacy in less subtle and more traditional ways, representing their roles as community service and social welfare. Women in white supremacist groups have organized church socials, Klan picnics, charity fundraisers, and white nationalist online dating sites (Love, 2020). These white men and women provide fertile ground for an anti-modern populist mobilization (Kelly, 2018). The internalization of traditional patriarchal gender normative beliefs influence affiliation with the alt-right movement (Boehme, & Isom Scott, 2020).

According to some sources, in late 2007, Spencer dated a woman who is Asian American. The two met when she was working for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. “I am not the only Asian girl he has dated,” says Spencer’s ex (Harkinson, 2016). Spencer acknowledged that some of his comrades would probably find that “terrible.” Later, he said that he would not date a non-white woman again and that he still wants interracial relationships barred. That belief is core to the alt-right’s most radical goal: an all-white country (Cox, 2016). Spencer also opposes same-sex marriage, which he has described as “unnatural” and a “non-issue.” Despite his opposition to same-sex marriage, Spencer barred people with anti-gay views from the NPI’s annual conference in 2015 (Falvey, 2016).

In October 2018, Koupriianova accused Spencer, in divorce documents, of multiple forms of abuse. She provided hours of recordings and text messages to the press in order to substantiate her allegations. Court documents detailed emotional abuse, financial abuse, and violent physical abuse, frequently in front of their children. She has accused him of choking her, dragging her by her hair, and attempting to punch her while she was pregnant, according to divorce filings. “One of [Spencer’s] favourite statements to me is, ‘The only language women understand is violence,’” Spencer’s wife alleged. She claimed he called her “genetically defective” and a “parasite”, and that he verbally abused her in front of their young daughter. “I’m famous and you are not! I’m important and you are not!” Spencer would sometimes tell her when he was angry, she claimed (Beckett, 2018). A caregiver to the children testified in court about Spencer’s abuses towards both her and Koupriianova. She also suggested that Spencer had sometimes failed to provide for his family and care for her and their children (Beckett, 2018). Spencer denied all allegations made against him and was not charged with a crime. 

Moreover, the documents said that Spencer’s “controversial public life” led “his entire family to be targets of violence.” “Despite the risk to his family,” Koupriianova argued in the court, “[Spencer] continues to engage in extremely polarizing public speech advocating ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’ and a white-only ‘ethno-state’ which tends to invite passions and violence.” “Most, if not all, of his public speaking events result in violence,” the affidavit stated. The documents also claimed that Spencer was verbally abusive to their children’s babysitter, including in front of their children, where he allegedly called the babysitter a “fucking sub-mediocre human being” and a “fucking moron” (Ansari, 2018). 

Spencer, the Alt-Right, and Social Media

The alt-right has flourished online (Guynn, 2016) and its expansion can largely be attributed to the internet (Love, 2017)—and especially social media, thanks to the anonymity these platforms provide users of extreme ideologies (Lyons, 2017).Swastikas and Hitler references have long punctuated the irreverent banter on the message boards of Reddit and 4chan, but they are no longer just jokes as they’re swept up in a tide of the alt-right’s memes such as Pepe the Frog and Napoleon Trump (Harkinson, 2016). Cyber-bigots, including Spencer’s followers, who maintain First Amendment protection, anonymously and blatantly promote racism, and propagate a separatist ideology (Brown, 2009). 

The alt-right is generally hostile towards the conventional media, including by using the term “lügenpresse,” a term used by the Nazis and meaning “lying press. Alt-right Twitter trolls have aggressively attacked journalists (Gray, 2016).Spencer has also embraced the young internet activists who create the racist, antisemitic and misogynistic memes, symbols and slogans that characterize much of the alt-right’s online presence (ADL, 2018). Their rhetoric in cyberspace shows that right-wing images of Black identity haven’t much changed since the time of slavery. The key elements of White supremacy are reinforced by their representation of Black men as hypersexual, aggressive, and violent, which define their physical bodies as inferior to white men.These groups no longer have to communicate in isolation. The Internet provides them immediate access to their followers and makes it easier to spread messages of hate (Brown, 2009). 

Facebook banned two pages associated with Spencer, just days after Congress grilled the social network’s CEO about its influence on the public (Dalrymple, 2018). Spencer has also faced crackdowns from other tech companies. In 2016, Twitter suspended both the NPI’s account and the account of Spencer himself, though his personal page was eventually reinstated. A year later, after Charlottesville, Twitter yanked Spencer’s verification badge but allowed him to continue using the platform. Web-hosting company Squarespace has also booted the NPI (Dalrymple, 2018).

After Twitter suspended the NPI’s official account (@npiamerica) and its online magazine (@RadixJournal), in addition to a separate book publishing company run by Spencer called Washington Summit Publishers (@washsummit), Spencer told The Daily Caller, “This is corporate Stalinism.” He said, “Twitter is trying to airbrush the alt-right out of existence. They’re clearly afraid. They will fail!” In a YouTube video, entitled “Knight of the Long Knives,” an apparent reference to the purge of Nazi leaders in 1934 to consolidate Adolf Hitler’s power, Spencer said Twitter had engaged in a coordinated effort to wipe out alt-right Twitter (Bennett, 2016). 

Spencer also said, “I am alive physically, but digitally speaking, there has been execution…across the alt-right.” He said, “This is a clear sign that we have power. Even if it’s in our own little small way…we have power, and we’re changing the world” (Andrews, 2016). In response to the purges, many alt-right users transferred to Gab, a Twitter substitute platform with a much more aggressive free speech policy (Bennett, 2016). However, Spencer’s ability to raise funds has been hampered since he was kicked off Facebook and other major fundraising sites (Barrouquere, 2020). 

Conclusion

Following the Charlottesville rally, as the alt-right’s views became better known, many people who had flirted with the movement broke ranks, leaving it smaller but more ideologically cohesive (Hawley, 2017). Spencer’s NPI has mysteriously gone quiet and appears to be in disarray (Barrouquere, 2020). The most recent article on the NPI website was posted Dec. 15, 2019, three months after Hatewatch began asking questions about the non-profit’s status. The previous post was from Nov. 6, 2018. The website still says Spencer is “President and Creative Director” but lists no other officers (Barrouquere, 2020). Despite its diminishing power, the members of Spencer’s alt-right movement still tend to demonstrate in-group love and outgroup hate of “others.” Therefore, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) listed white supremacy of the sort practiced by Spencer and the alt-right as America’s largest domestic terrorist threat.

 

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