Richard Bertrand Spencer (born May 11, 1978) is an American white supremacist.[1] He is president of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank, as well as Washington Summit Publishers. Spencer has stated that he rejects the label of white supremacist, and prefers to describe himself as an identitarian.[2][3][4] He has advocated for a white homeland for a "dispossessed white race" and called for "peaceful ethnic cleansing" to halt the "deconstruction" of European culture.[5]
Spencer and others have said that he created the term "alt-right",[6] which he considers a movement about white identity.[7][8][9]Breitbart News described Spencer's website AlternativeRight.com as "a center of alt-right thought."[10]
Spencer has repeatedly quoted from Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews, and has on several occasions refused to denounce Adolf Hitler.
Spencer and his organization drew considerable media attention in the weeks following the 2016 presidential election, where, at a National Policy Institute conference, in response to his cry "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!", a number of his supporters gave the Nazi salute and chanted in a similar fashion to the Sieg heil chant used at the Nazis' Nuremberg rallies. Spencer has defended their conduct, stating that the Nazi salute was given in a spirit of "irony and exuberance".[11]
Spencer was born in Boston, Massachusetts,[12] the son of ophthalmologist Rand Spencer and Sherry Spencer (ne Dickenhorst),[13][14] an heiress to cotton farms in Louisiana.[15] He grew up in Dallas, Texas. In 1997, he graduated from St. Mark's School of Texas.[15] In 2001, Spencer received a B.A. with High Distinction in English Literature and Music from the University of Virginia and, in 2003, an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago.[15] He spent the summer of 2005 and 2006 at the Vienna International Summer University.[16] From 2005 to 2007, he was a doctoral student at Duke University studying modern European intellectual history, where he was a member of the Duke Conservative Union.[15][13] His website says he left Duke "to pursue a life of thought-crime."[17]
From March to December 2007, Spencer was assistant editor at The American Conservative magazine. According to founding editor Scott McConnell, Spencer was fired from The American Conservative because his views were considered too extreme.[13] From January 2008 to December 2009, he was executive editor of Taki's Magazine.[18]
In March 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, a website he edited until 2012. He has stated that he created the term alt-right.[9]
In January 2011, Spencer became Executive Director of Washington Summit Publishers.[19] In 2012, Spencer founded Radix Journal as a biannual publication of Washington Summit Publishers.[18] Contributors have included Kevin B. MacDonald, Alex Kurtagi, Samuel T. Francis, and Derek Turner.[20] He also hosts a weekly podcast, Vanguard Radio.
In January 2011, Spencer also became President and Director of The National Policy Institute (NPI), a think tank previously based in Virginia and Montana.[21]
In 2014, Spencer was deported from Budapest, Hungary (and because of the Schengen Agreement, is banned from 26 countries in Europe for three years), after trying to organize the National Policy Institute Conference, a conference for white nationalists.[22][23]
On January 15, 2017 (Martin Luther King. Jr.'s birthday), Spencer launched AltRight.com, another commentary website for alt-right members.[24] According to Spencer, the site is a populist and big tent site for members of the alt-right.[25] The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the common thread among contributors as antisemitism, rather than white nationalism or white supremacism in general.[26][27] Notable contributors on AltRight.com includes Henrik Palmgren, Brittany Pettibone, and Jared Taylor.[28][29][30]
On February 23, 2017, Spencer was removed from the Conservative Political Action Conference where he was giving statements to the press. A CPAC spokesman said he was removed from the event because other members found him "repugnant".[31]
On May 13th, 2017, Spencer led a torch-lit protest in Charlottesville, Virginia against the vote of the city council to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War.[32] The crowd was chanting "You will not replace us."[33]Michael Signer, the mayor of Charlottesville, called the protest "horrific" and stated that it was either "profoundly ignorant" or intended to instill fear among minorities "in a way that hearkens back to the days of the KKK."[34][35][36]
During a speech Spencer gave in mid-November 2016 at an alt-right conference attended by approximately 200 people in Washington, D.C., audience members cheered and made the Nazi salute when he said, "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!"[9][5]
Groups and events Spencer has spoken to include the Property and Freedom Society,[37] the American Renaissance conference,[38] and the HL Mencken Club.[39] In November 2016, an online petition to prevent Spencer from speaking at Texas A&M University on December 6, 2016 was signed by thousands of students, employees, and alumni.[40] A protest and a university-organized counter-event were held to coincide with Spencer's event.[41]
On January 20, 2017, Spencer attended the inauguration of Donald Trump. As he was giving an impromptu interview on a nearby street afterwards, a man with his face covered came up, punched Spencer in the face, then ran off.[42][43] A video of the incident was posted online and prompted much comment, with some commentators welcoming the attack and others deploring it.[44] Spencer tweeted in response to the incident that white nationalists should provide themselves with physical protection if police will not.[45]
In 2013, a dispute at a ski club in his hometown of Whitefish, Montana, drew public attention to Spencer and his political views.[46]
The National Policy Institute think tank, AlternativeRight.com, and Radix Journal all use the same mailing address in Whitefish, Montana.[47]
In 2014, local residents in Missoula, Montana, through the Whitefish City Council, initiated upon a non-discrimination resolution, and an organization called Love Lives Here, which is part of the Montana Human Rights Network, rallied against Richard Spencer's residency there.[48]
In December 2016, Republican Representative Ryan Zinke, Republican Senator Steve Daines, Democratic Senator Jon Tester, Democratic Governor Steve Bullock and Republican Attorney General Tim Fox condemned a neo-Nazi march planned for January 2017. The march is in support of Spencer's mother, who is being pressured by community members for not disavowing her son's beliefs.[49]
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Spencer has advocated for a white homeland for a "dispossessed white race" and called for "peaceful ethnic cleansing" to halt the "deconstruction" of European culture.[18][19][50] To this end he has supported what he has called "the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent", an "ideal" that he has regarded as a "reconstitution of the Roman Empire."[51][52] Prior to Britain's vote to leave the EU, Spencer expressed support for the multi-national bloc "as a potential racial empire" and an alternative to "American hegemony", stating that he has "always been highly skeptical of so-called 'Euro-Skeptics.'"[53]
In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League recognized Spencer as a leader in white supremacist circles, saying that since his time at The American Conservative, he has rejected conservatism, because according to Spencer, its adherents "can't or won't represent explicitly white interests."[54]
Spencer has repeatedly quoted from Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews,[9][55] and has on several occasions refused to denounce Adolf Hitler. In one interview in which he was asked if he would condemn the KKK and Hitler, he refused, saying "Im 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 referring to.[56]
In a 2016 interview for Time magazine, Spencer said he rejected white supremacy and the slavery of nonwhites, preferring to establish America as a white ethnostate.[57]
Spencer supports legal access to abortion, in part because he believes it would reduce the number of black and Hispanic people, which he says would be a "great boon" to white people.[15]
Spencer opposes same-sex marriage,[58] which he has described as "unnatural" and a "non-issue," commenting that "very few gay men will find the idea of monogamy to their liking".[59]
Despite his opposition to same-sex marriage, Spencer barred people with anti-gay views from the NPI's annual conference in 2015.[60]
Spencer supported Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and called Trump's victory "the victory of will", a phrase echoing the title of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, a Nazi-era propaganda film.[9] Upon Trump's appointment of Steve Bannon as chief White House strategist and senior counselor, Spencer said Bannon would be in "the best possible position" to influence policy.[61]
In 2010, Spencer moved to Whitefish, Montana. He says he splits his time between Whitefish and Arlington, Virginia,[51][62] although he has said he has lived in Whitefish for over 10 years, and considers it home.[63]
He was separated from his Russian American wife, Nina Kouprianova, a political analyst on modern and contemporary Russia, culture, and U.S. foreign policy.[64] The couple separated in October 2016,[13] however in April 2017 Spencer claimed he and his wife were not separated and still together.[65]
Spencer is an atheist.[66] He has also described himself as a "cultural Christian".[67]
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Richard B. Spencer - Wikipedia