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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]

See the article here:
Richard B. Spencer - Wikipedia

From the outside, Americas alt right is a nebulous movement based on racism, nationalism, and white supremacy. In contrast, the tech elites in Silicon Valley look like a relatively worldly bunch, despite the calls from some quarters of the valley to break away from the plebeian masses of the US.

But despite their differences, strands of the two groups share strong links to Dark Enlightenment, an obscure neo-fascist philosophy started by a British academic in the 1990s.

The primary figure behind Dark Enlightenment is Nick Land, who was a philosophy professor at Warwick University until he quit academia in 1998. His work is a form of accelerationism (broadly speaking, a belief that the tools of capitalism and technology should be sped up and dramatically enhanced) and he was, for a time, something of a cult figure for his work on internet and cyber culture.

While at Warwick, Land was part of Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which explored drugs, raves, and science fiction, and was affiliated with such notable figures as the philosopher Sadie Plant and the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. Land has never been a typical academic, and that shows in his writing. His Dark Enlightenment manifesto, published online in 2012, is florid, contradictory, and opaque.

Lands writings on in his blog and twitter can read like an alt-right rant, and comment sections on the far-right outlet Breitbart are apt to mention his work. Academic writers and former students of Lands have expressed ideas that are vaguely influenced by Dark Enlightenment. Others are more outspoken: One philosopher with clearly Landian ideas, Jason Reza Jorjani, who lectures at New Jersey Institute of Technology, is co-founder of altright.com and spoke at a white nationalist meeting led by Richard Spencer.

What are the tenets of Dark Enlightenment theory? There are a few consistent themes, circling around technology, warfare, feudalism, corporate power, and racism. Its an acceleration of capitalism to a fascist point, says Benjamin Noys, a critical theory professor at the University of Chichester and author of Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism.

Those who have studied Dark Enlightenment describe an almost cult-like vision of a dystopian future. It is a worship of corporate power to the extent that corporate power becomes the only power in the world, says David Golumbia, a new media professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. It becomes militarized, and states break down. For some reason thats difficult to understand, they seem to think these highly weaponized feudal enclaves would be more free than the society we currently have.

Land believes that advances in computing will enable dominant humans to merge with machines and become cybernetic super beings. He advocates for racial separation under the belief that elites will enhance their IQs by associating only with each other.

Capitalism has not yet been fully unleashed, he argues, and corporate power should become the organizing force in society. Land is vehemently against democracy, believing it restricts accountability and freedom. The world should do away with political power, according to Dark Enlightenment, and instead, society should break into tiny states, each effectively governed by a CEO.

Earlier this year, Politico reported that White House strategist Steve Bannon is a fan of Dark Enlightenment. Meanwhile, the major proponent of the movement other than Land is software engineer Curtis Yarvin, who blogs as Mencius Moldbug.

And while most Silicon Valley techies are unaware of and uninterested in Dark Enlightenment, there are notable figures and ideas that seem to share intellectual heritage and connections with the movement.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is a major backer of Yarvins start-ups and, as The Baffler reports, in 2012, Thiel gave a lecture at Stanford with distinct Dark Enlightenment themes. A startup is basically structured as a monarchy, he said at the time. We dont call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything thats not democracy makes people uncomfortable.

Growing Silicon Valley interest in creating a small, separate state is straight out of Lands writing. Meanwhile there are growing numbers of techies who identify with Yarvin and neoreactionary ideas.

And, of course, both Silicon Valley and Dark Enlightenment are products of and devotees to internet culture. Noys notes that certain values in Silicon Valley are vaguely sympathetic to Lands thinking. Theres this entrepreneurial belief that youre the master of the universe, he says. They believe theyre the exception that proves the rule, that anyone can be successful.

Land says that, though he expects Dark Enlightenment micro-states to first form on islands, Silicon Valley is bound to be involved in the process as these societies form.

The alt right and Silicon Valley are not the only two cliques with ties to Dark Enlightenment thinking. Avant-garde art artists have also dabbled in Dark Enlightenment. A London gallery, LD50, was shut down amid protests after Land was invited to talk at the gallery, providing a platform for Dark Enlightenment ideas.

You could arguethough I wouldntthat the alt right and Dark Enlightenment are artistic works, says Noys. Twenty-first century art has been interested in transgression and shock, so theres an interest in how these people have used their memes to achieve their goals.

US president Donald Trump, Land says, is a symptom of crisis and sign that the West is broken. But Land views White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as, an unusually interesting politician.

Dark Enlightenment proponents see themselves as the philosophical masters of the alt-right movement, says Noys. Land sees himself as above all that, as a Philosopher King of a movement thats too populist and grubby for this liking, says Noys. Hes part of this continuum, thats pretty clear. But hes fighting to distinguish himself from the more populist end of things.

Golumbia agrees that He probably thinks hes smarter than all of them [the alt right], or they havent gone far enough. But they are definitely fellow travellers.

Land himself is dismissive of the alt right, which he calls a predictable (and predicted) development of mass democracy, as it enters its collapse-phase in an email to Quartz. Still, he says, Insofar as it marks the end of global governance on the basis of evangelical egalitarian-universalism, it makes space for more realistic political conversations, which have notably begun to happen.

Land also rejects the idea that Dark Enlightenment has fascist elements, writing that Fascism is a mass anti-capitalist movement, when the word isnt (more usually) simply a childish insult. As for racial divides, he says the science is an empirical question but that human population groups are significantly distinct, however, is a matter so self-evident to ordinary people that it makes for a natural default.

Lands theories sound easily dismissible, and Nick Land is still largely unknown, but his neo-fascist ideas are finding niches where they flourish.. I think theres this emergent fringe, says Noys.

Golumbia notes that Lands work attracted plenty of impressionable graduate students decades ago. It undoubtedly helps that offensive ideas are masked with references to respected writers and philosophers: Land has his own idiosyncratic reading of the German philosopher Nietzsche, for example, and the French 2oth century thinkers Deleuze, Guattari, and Bataille. And as far as accelerationism goes, Noys traces its intellectual heritage to the Italian futurists (who had their own ties with fascism).

Despite their long lineage, the ideas fall apart under scrutiny. To those of us who were more skeptical, it looked like it had the seeds of a disturbing belief in a superman: This kind of digital hybrid cyber-being who was a lot better than the ordinary weak people, says Golumbia. His writing is more and more obsessed with race, Islam, echoing the things that people like Nigel Farage say. He sounds like a visionary but really hes nothing but these reactionary clichs about how minority people are to blame for all of our problems.

Land, who has long perceived himself as a visionary, firmly believes that society and government as we know it will break down and his vision for the future will come to pass. The crack-up is obvious to everyone, Land writes. (Thats why youre doing this story.)

Link:
The neo-fascist philosophy that underpins both the alt-right and Silicon Valley technophiles - Quartz

There are two types of clowns in Shakespeare: clever fools who speak truth to power (King Lear's court jester, Feste in Twelfth Night) and actual idiots, written to be laughed at, who spew malapropisms and wind up magically transformed into asses. The alt-right agitators who interrupted Friday's Shakespeare in the Park performance of Julius Caesar fell squarely into the latter category. While they may have failed in their primary goal of activist mischief I happened to be sitting in the audience and can attest that the brief disruption merely added a frisson of excitement to an excellent, already electric production, so, thanks for that, dudes they did manage one neat trick, turning one of Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedies, ever so briefly, into a comedy.

Certain segments of the Right have been stirred by news reports of this Caesar, in which the assassinated Roman emporer has been recast as a Trump figure. (There are also visual references throughout to Ferguson and Occupy Wall Street.) Charges of liberal hypocrisy were promiscuously levied "The Left doesn't like it when their tactics are used against their 'expression.' How many wd storm stage if 'Obama' was stabbed?" Laura Ingraham tweeted though, as many have pointed out, an Obama-like Caesar had been offed in a 2012 production of the play at Minneapolis' esteemed Guthrie Theater, with no attendant fuss. Beyond that, to interpret Julius Caesar as somehow pro-assassination is both illiterate and ahistorical. As the British critic and Shakespearean scholar Frank Kermode once wrote, "Shakespeare treats [Brutus] with delicate sympathy, but cannot have thought his act a right one."

Still, with news of the production breaking so soon after Kathy Griffin's gross, unfunny mock-beheading of Trump, a misreading willful or otherwise of director Oskar Eustis' intentions was inevitable. But any good-faith critic of the show who actually sat through it would have to admit there's zero celebration of violence in the staging. Indeed, quite the opposite: the gory stabbing of Caesar-Trump (subtly played by Gregg Henry) was horrific, eliciting audible gasps from the crowd; a woman sitting near me covered her face.

Seconds later, a woman dressed in black rushed onto the stage. It wasn't clear, at first, if she was part of the show throughout the performance, actors in street clothes portraying members of various mobs erupted from the audience but the deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes gave her game away. "Stop the normalization of political violence against the right!" she cried, ignoring what she'd presumably just seen, an opposite-of-normalizing staging of violence that had left the audience stunned. I'm guessing she'd assumed members of the liberal New York crowd would all be laughing and high-fiving and clinking champagne flutes at the fictional death of the fictional Trump, and that she'd timed her outburst for maximum buzzkill. The audience did cheer as she was escorted from the amphitheater by security. (She was subsequently revealed to be Laura Loomer, a blogger for a Canadian alt-right website.)

As the commotion unfolded onstage, a man sitting in the section to my left stood up, holding a camera phone, and began screaming, "You are all Goebbels!" He meant Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, but hilariously, he mispronounced the name so thoroughly, many people were simply puzzled. Turning to my friend, I whispered, "Why is this guy calling us gerbils?" His name turned out to be Jack Dogberry oh wait, I'm sorry, Posobiec an online conspiracy theorist who has promoted lies like PizzaGate. Charmingly, he would later post on Twitter, "I 100% pronounced Goebbels the correct American English way. Sorry, kraut-lovers."

He was escorted out, too, and the show went on. Later, he'd lie online about witnessing "a Manhattan crowd roar with applause as President Trump was stabbed again and again on stage" 100 percent false. (It's here I'll note that Posobiec has been granted White House press credentials.) We did roar with applause, however, after his ouster, when the disembodied voice of the stage manager came over the intercome with the perfect cue, pointing the cast to the line that comes right after the dying Caesar's "Et tu, Brute?": "Actors, please, let's start up at 'Liberty! Freedom!'"

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Original post:
Why Alt-Right Trump Activists Couldn't Disrupt Shakespeare in the Park - RollingStone.com

PHOENIX Southern Baptists on Wednesday formally condemned the political movement known as the alt-right in a national meeting that was thrown into turmoil after leaders initially refused to take up the issue.

The denominations annual convention in Phoenix voted to decry every form of racism, including alt-right white supremacy as antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and denounce and repudiate white supremacy and every form of racial and ethnic hatred as a scheme of the devil.

Tuesday night, Southern Baptist officials who oversaw the resolutions had refused to introduce a different repudiation of the alt-right, which emerged dramatically during the U.S. presidential election, mixing racism, white nationalism and populism.

Barrett Duke, who leads the resolutions committee, had said the original document contained inflammatory and broad language potentially implicating conservatives who do not support the alt-right movement.

Introducing the new statement Wednesday, Duke apologized for the pain and confusion that we created, but said the committee had been concerned about potentially giving the appearance of hating their enemies. Duke said the committee members share your abhorrence of racism and were grateful for the chance to speak on alt-right racism in particular and all racism in general.

The resolution was adopted after a short but emotional discussion.

We are saying that white supremacy and racist ideologies are dangerous because they oppress our brothers and sisters in Christ, said the Rev. Russell Moore, who leads the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist public policy arm. If were a Jesus people, lets stand where Jesus stands.

Charles Hedman of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, said far-right groups had been distributing racist material outside the convention hall Tuesday night. He said some pastors had told him they would have to leave the denomination if the convention failed to denounce white supremacy Wednesday.

We must stand strong, Hedman said. We must all issue an apology that we didnt act on this yesterday.

The initial proposal that Southern Baptists had rejected came from a prominent black Southern Baptist pastor, the Rev. William McKissic of Arlington, Texas. His resolution repudiated retrograde ideologies, xenophobic biases and racial bigotries of the alt-right that seek to subvert our government.

After McKissic made an unsuccessful plea for reconsideration from the floor of the Phoenix meeting late Tuesday, pressure began building online and at the convention for the Southern Baptists to say something.

Several Southern Baptists were panicked, contending that silence would be misinterpreted as support for white supremacy. The denomination was formed in the 19th century in defense of slaveholders and has been trying to overcome its racist history.

A late-night call went out for convention participants to return to the assembly hall, where Steve Gaines, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, won approval to consider a new resolution on the topic Wednesday.

Link:
Southern Baptists condemn 'alt-right' movement - LancasterOnline

Media Matters for America (blog)

An alt-right-affiliated candidate nearly won Virginia's GOP gubernatorial primary Media Matters for America (blog) A Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate who was backed by, and affiliated with, segments of the alt-right media nearly won the state's June 13 gubernatorial primary. Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, ... Confederate nostalgia nearly wins in Virginia's GOP gubernatorial primaryThinkProgress Virginia Primary Results: Northam Will Face Gillespie in Governor's RaceNew York Times all 112 news articles »

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An alt-right-affiliated candidate nearly won Virginia's GOP gubernatorial primary - Media Matters for America (blog)