Richard Bertrand Spencer | |
|---|---|
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| Born | May 11, 1978 |
| Home Base | Whitefish, MT |
| AKA | “Dick” Spencer |
| @RichardBSpencer | |
Boy have things progressed with this guy since we began following him, and it was only within the course of a few months. One minute he was a little Nazi screaming into the void, the next minute he is one of the internet’s most popular meme, thanks to the punch heard around the world with varying background music and visuals on Jan 20, 2017:
And ever since this video, he has pretty much has been learning what it means to be a high-profile Nazi. So far the tally goes as follows:
- He had been kicked out of a Libertarian conference and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the space of a week.
- The new Alexandria, VA headquarters for Altright, the group he and Jason Reza Jorjani are running gets regular protests because for some reason they felt the need to make the place publicly known.
- His group, the White Supremacist National Policy Institute (NPI) has lost its tax-exempt status.
- A video game where you can punch him in the face along with fellow boneheads Milo Yiannopoulos and Adolf Hitler is available.
- Digging into his family’s finances yielded information that the Spencers own a Louisiana cotton farm and takes subsidies for the federal government he hates so much.
- He has been dissed by the band Depeche Mode after he voiced his love for them, with frontman David Gahan calling him a “very educated cunt”.
- He managed to even get the show tune “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”, which has been for decades a kind of anthem for neo-Nazis for tainted for them when after he invokes the song in a Twitter spat, the nephew of the song’s author tells him that his Jewish, gay uncle (along with another Jewish, gay man) wrote it for the musical Cabaret.
But there’s a lot to know about this character, and when people learn it, they really don’t have sympathy for what happened to him and has been happening to him since his boy Trump became president.
When the late, right-wing, Council of Conservative Citizens-loving actor Charleton Heston went after Ice-T’s band Body Count for their song “Cop Killer” there wasn’t any discussion about how Heston was violating Ice-T’s First Amendment rights, and when Ice-T severed ties with his record label, there wasn’t any discussion about how Heston deprived Ice-T of his right to speak. So it is especially curious how Spencer’s National Policy Institute posted the story, highlighting a particular quote from Heston from an interview: “And I shamed Time Warner, the largest entertainment conglomerate in the world, into firing Ice T and dropping the album.”
It is especially curious because Spencer had been particularly vocal against anyone who was similarly critical of those were able to similarly shut down the White supremacist American Renaissance Conference (AmRen) in 2010 and 2011, posting updates regularly on the NPI website as well as his then-blog Alternative Right and another blog that updated people on what was happening to AmRen as it was getting shut down. It was after the conference’s fate was sealed that the article about Ice-T was posted on NPI – with the organization praising Charlton Heston as “a great American who always stood up for what he thought was right, no matter what the personal cost to himself.” We can say the same even moreso about the people who stood up to AmRen and the people it attracts. Among those losers is Spencer, who is one of this cluster of young idiots in recent years who come out of the crowd that Pat and Bay Buchanan built around them. You may know them as the “alt-right” crowd, a term that comes from Spencer’s old blog. Before Donald Trump announced his run for president, it was they were were the biggest cheerleaders for that campaign, and Spencer is trying to milk the notoriety of it for all that it is worth.
After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2001, doing grad studies at the University of Chicago and Duke University, and working as an English teacher at the private, all boys college prepatory Blue Ridge School in Charlottesville, VA, Spencer found himself in 2005 working as an associate editor for Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine. In 2006, Dick Spencer along with his friends, the ever-so-comedic fascist Marcus Epstein, Kevin DeAnna, the founder of Youth for Western Civilization, and current senior editor of the American Conservative Daniel McCarthy founded a group called the Robert Taft Club to bring together like-minded people to discuss ways to undermine our nation’s freedoms by calling it preserving our nation’s freedoms. Like-mindedness took on some rather dubious traits as this was an organization that catered to white supremacists regularly like American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor, National Review’s John Derbyshire and the fascist clowns of the Flemish separatist party Vlaams Belang. This however has not kept your more mainstream conservatives from staying away from the group, particularly the more questionable ones. Among those who have either spoke at or attended a Robert Taft Club event have been Rep. Ron Paul, longtime conservative propagandist Richard Vigurie, Human Events editor Terry Jeffries and James O’Keefe, who attended and reportedly helped out at a Taft Club forum in 2006, and is best known for dressing up like a pimp and entering the offices of the group ACORN to secretly videotape them suggesting illegal activities. After it was determined the videos were doctored ACORN was vindicated from such charges, but the damage had already been done and the group had to fold.
The Taft Club has not done much in years, and a lot of info concerning them started to disappear from the web after Epstein started catching hell when it was revealed he went on a drunken rampage in 2007, attacking a black woman while calling her racial slurs. In 2008, Dick Spencer left the American Conservative to take the editor’s position at Taki’s Magazine, which is run by Taki Theodoracopulos, who – keeping with the Pat Buchanan lineage – helped found the American Conservative along with Buchanan and Scott McConnell, and who is so much a paleoconservative, Spencer once said of him that he was a fascist – as a compliment! Spencer stayed there until late the following year, and it was while he was there that he let his more racist leanings out of the bag. “By 2009, I was much more willing to express heretical views on race and egalitarianism, as well as write more forthrightly on culture,” he said in a interview. In 2010 he left Takimag to start up AlternativeRight.com with writer Colin Liddell to expand the hatemongering just a tad more.
To be more nuanced about it, Spencer considered his blog AlternativeRight.com, which he started in 2010 to be part of the blogosphere that gets its drive from the discredited journalist and fake scientist Steve Sailer and his “human biodiversity” BS. Basically, this is eugenics rebranded, Sailer himself coining the term in 1996. His “Human Biodiversity Institute” is simply an opportunity for white supremacists to get together and discuss selective breeding of the human race, and if you get involved with it, your credibility takes the express route to the crapper. That’s the case with Spencer. “This (Alternative Right) is white nationalism, folks, dressed up in faux-intellectualism,” blogger E.D. Kain wrote on the True/Slant blog. “Indeed, they are so ‘alternative’ that Spencer has disavowed paleo-conservatism altogether, claiming that ‘Sadly, a lot of paleo[-conservatives] now… have actually denounced human biological diversity. Paleo-conservatism is now irrelevant.’” Kain goes on to note that when you are talking about human biological diversity in this context, it means “essentially that some races are superior to others”, but we don’t know any other context it can be put in. And Spencer’s heart is broken because a lot of folks within his circles would much rather keep their distance from this crap. And if you are publishing articles attempting to make a case for the mass genocide of black people, which Liddell wrote in 2012, people should be staying far, far away.
By this point, Spencer’s racism had everyone’s attention. For starters there was the pissing contest he had with David Frum and the folks at FrumForum. First, an article by Tim Mak ripped AlternativeRight.com apart, then Alex Knepper wrote about his own experience with Spencer during the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference:
“I happen to intermittently know Richard Spencer, the site’s director. Through a couple of mutual contacts, I met him in the midst of CPAC 2009 and received a ride from him from Washington DC’s Dupont Circle, where we were each protesting the censorship imposed upon Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, to the Marriott Hotel where the convention was being held. “Along the way, things got a little testy. We somehow got into discussing biological differences between the races. Our ideological differences soon emerged, though, because, simply put, I am an individualist and he is a collectivist. “‘Show me one black nation that’s ever been run competently,’ he challenged me. “‘That’s a ridiculous methodology. I’ll accept that claim for argument’s sake and still say that it’s bogus: African nations have not failed because the skin color of the people is black. The skin color is just a coincidence. It’s the culture that’s the problem.’ “‘Not true,’ he said. ‘You look at Liberia, where ex-slaves went back to Africa, tried to bring American ideals to the country, and failed, because the blacks wouldn’t accept them.’ “‘This is not Western,’ I said. ‘How can you possibly claim to stand for Western civilization? What’s brilliant about our values is that they stand for the individual, not the supremacy of the group. You come to America, you’re judged by your merits — not by what you look like.’ After a few more back-and-forths, we arrived at our destination, and as our car-mates went ahead, he told me to stay with him for a minute so he could talk to me. As the others faded into the background, he moved just inches away from my face, gave me a menacing look and yelled: ‘You little child. How dare you talk to me — me! — about the West! You don’t know the first thing about the West! You’re a little twelve-year-old who thinks he knows shit. Don’t you ever talk to me like that again or I will beat your face into the fucking ground!’”