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Richard Spencer

Richard Bertrand Spencer
SpencerRichard.jpg
BornMay 11, 1978
Home BaseWhitefish, MT
AKA“Dick” Spencer
Twitter@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:

Richard-spencer-punched-in-the-face-AP-1120.jpg

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:

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!’”

Spencer’s response was to fire off his own, rather petty blog entry titled “David Frum’s Satanic Girlymen” which didn’t address a single thing that Knepper wrote, instead resorting to just calling him, among other things, a “Satanic, anti-Catholic, eugenicist Mormon-basher”. Apparently Knepper didn’t lose any sleep over this (or maybe he did from too much laughing that Spencer called him a eugenicist!), as he responded with a reiteration that Spencer is an “intellectual coward”. In 2012, Spencer abandoned AlternativeRight.com, saying it was too much work, only to start up a similar website called Radix Journal.

Now in the interest of full disclosure, we should note that Spencer not surprisingly doesn’t care too much for One People’s Project. He is pretty tight with Jared Taylor and tried to assist when the American Renaissance conferences started suffering their cancellations, which as many people know we have been a party to. When the 2011 conference suffered that fate, he started a blog to keep people up to speed on developments, and when the conference was officially put down, he was promised to provide a live stream – that patrons paid $10 for – to see the AmRen speakers give their presentations in an “undisclosed location”. Well, that didn’t work out either. For some reason Spencer said the live stream could not happen and instead he will provide the recordings of those speeches after the fact.

The cute thing is how, as this crowd often does, Spencer effortlessly tried to make all this an example of some sort of tyranny that threatens to tear apart the very fabric of the globe or whatever. When the conference was canceled, he wrote, “This episode should alarm not only the movement for European identity but all decent people who want to live in a free society.” Is that so? Well, a free society would include Ice-T right to produce records that don’t get censored when Charlton Heston is mad at you, but that was okay with Spencer. Even more to the point, as we learned as we were writing this, a free society apparently should not be something a Libyan fighting for it should have either. A Mar 7, 2011 blog entry by Spencer titled – you are going to have to sit down for this one – “Save Gadaffi” is him freaking out because the Libyan Dictator Muammar Gaddafi and his son Seif warned that if he is deposed, hordes of African immigrants will sweep Italy and France. To quote Seif: “You will see the pirates in Sicily, in Crete, in Lampedusa. You will see millions of illegal immigrants. The terror will be next door.” Talk like that gets to Dick Spencer’s sweet spot and he went for it: 

“I recognize that this is a cry in the wilderness, but — for once! — could Western foreign-policy makers put aside their “democracy” fetish and actually pursue what is best for us Gadaffi and his sons are people we can deal with. The stability of his dictatorship is infinitely more attractive than the refugee crisis that would almost certainly ensue were the Libyan regime to disintegrate.

So a guy who’s lunacy is being compared to that of Charlie Sheen that’s saying his people are hopped up on instant coffee laced with drugs from Al Qaeda, who not only is killing his people just as he has in the past and has kept an iron grip on his country 42 years is preferable to his people enjoying the freedoms he demands for himself? The DEA should run tests on Spencer’s Nescafe.

Spencer has another outlet for all this crap as well. In 2008, Elizabethtown College professor Paul Gottfried founded the H.L. Mencken Club, which bears a logo similar to that of the Robert A. Taft Club: a drawing of H.L Mencken (as opposed to Robert Taft) to the left of the club’s name. Interestingly enough. Taft Club founder Dick Spencer is also a member of the Mencken club, and sure enough it holds the same politics and attracts the same people. They hold annual conferences in Mencken’s hometown of Baltimore that featured some well known white nationalists like VDARE’S Peter Brimelow and Steve Sailer. Spencer also worked closely with his friend Kevin DeAnna and his group Youth for Western Civilization until that group went belly up, and was invited to speak at Vanderbilt University in October 2010. Let’s just say he was treated as any neo-Nazi would have been treated if he came to speak on any campus.

And then the fun began. It was around this time that Spencer decided the NPI needed to hold conferences in DC, but they will hold them in publicly funded facilities that can’t kick them out as readily as private venues like hotels will. The first one was in Sept. 2011, held for two days at both the National Press Club and the Ronald Reagan Building, but it wasn’t until 2013, that he held a second one, this time solely at the Ronald Reagan Building. Then Spencer came up with the idea of holding two conferences per year, and one of them will take place during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual comic-con for right wingers held in the Washington DC area. Spencer’s plan was to hold a clandestine event within the National Harbor Resort were CPAC was being held, where only those who bought a ticket will have to go to a meeting place and then told where to go to attend. Now that might work for neo-Nazis who want to go to a Bound For Glory concert, but when you are trying to be political players and you are sneaking around to go to a publicly announced secret White Supremacist conference – one that the media writes about – you are putting your career at death’s door before it even begins. Being that only 40 or so people showed up at the 2014 outing Spencer must have realized just how futile that effort was, because his last two alternative CPAC confabs in 2015 and 2016 did not hide the fact that they were being held at the Press Club and Ronald Reagan Building respectively. The 2015 outing saw an increase in attendance, with a number of CPAC attendees going to this event as well, as did his event later that year on Halloween at the Press Club. Unfortunately for Spencer, this was when he started to meet an increase in antifa trying to make life hell for him and his supporters, who have come out to protest the Halloween and anti-CPAC 2016 event, which took place on March 5 of that year and had the largest number of demonstrators at that time against NPI.

That is of course, until November 19, 2016 when NPI had their fall conference. This took place after Donald Trump won the presidential election, and a lot of America was rightly pissed off about that, particularly given the fact that he did so with the help of white supremacists and neo-Fascists who

And if you think the increased protests are putting a cramp in his style, let’s talk about what happened to him in Budapest, Hungary. In Oct. 2015, Spencer decided that his second conference of that year was going to be there so he and his supporters can connect with like-minded foreign nationalists, something that has been a regular effort among the “alt-right”. Now Hungary is pretty right-wing and has some strong fascist political parties like Jobbik (pronounced “yo-buck”) whose leader is so bad he once stood up in their Parliament and demanded a list of Jews who posed security risks. But even that group kept their distance from what Spencer was doing, and even though they said it was because they didn’t agree with NPI’s stances, that in truth might be due to the fact that the Hungarian government made it quite clear that this conference was not welcome.

Just prior to the day the conference was to be held, the Hungarian Interior Minister ordered that none of the speakers were allowed to enter or stay in Hungary. One would think that Spencer would respect the sovereignty of a foreign land the way he demands people would here in America, but this piece of shit went full hypocrite and declared he was coming to Budapest and have his conference anyway. Not long after he and 25 of his fellow fascists began congregating in a bar, Hungarian police burst in, snatched up Spencer and shut down everything. The conference attendees later got together in a “secret location” with American Renaissance publisher Jared Taylor running the show, but Spencer was locked up for the rest of the weekend before he was thrown out of the country. He is currently under a 3-year ban from entering Hungary and all the other 25 countries living under the Schengen Agreement, which allows moving from one country to another without further formalities and includes most countries in Europe. That means he’s going to be stateside until at least 2018, unless he wants to travel to one of the more browner countries where he will really be pushing his luck!

When we first wrote this entry we said that Spencer more than likely had given up on trying to be in the mainstream of society, which he should. This brand of politics had its time, and it isn’t coming back. Period. Then came Donald Trump and his political campaign which ultimately ended with his White House win, and Spencer started feeling his oats. If, however he thinks the designs he keeps suggesting for this society are going to have any true success however, we opine that he has hit one of those trees while skiing just a little too hard. Sadly, not hard enough. He still lives.

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