Among those guests was a figure from my past. I had not seen Richard Spencer in more than 10 years. He was not yet known as our generation’s most prominent white supremacist. I remembered him as my eighth-grade-chemistry lab partner and high-school classmate. We spotted each other and walked closer, circling uncertainly for a few seconds, before he spoke my name and confirmed that a wormhole had indeed opened from late-1990s North Dallas.
Spencer must have sensed my surprise (I would have sooner expected to see our gym teacher at a Washington magazine party). He told me he had blossomed intellectually since high school. Then he asked me what I thought of Hitchens’s fulminations against God. I had no interesting opinion on the subject. But Spencer did.
Was Hitchens’s critique of Christianity, he said, not as wan and naive as Christianity itself? Christianity had bound together the civilizations of Europe, and now Hitchens wanted to replace it with—well, what exactly? American neoliberal internationalism? Why should anyone care if Christianity was irrational and illiberal, when rationality and liberalism had never been its purpose? Hitchens had missed the point.
Spencer wasn’t exactly defending Christianity; he said that he, like Hitchens, was an atheist. But he longed for something as robust and binding as Christianity had once been in the West, before churches surrendered their power to folk-singing liberals and televangelists.
But after the Christmas party, my indifference slowly gave way to a surreal curiosity, on its way to loathing. I monitored his activities, distantly. Spencer’s writing kept appearing, advancing ever more extreme opinions in ever more obscure journals. In 2008, he began popularizing the term alt-right. On Facebook, he posted images of himself with John Derbyshire—a polymathic, often charming writer who was fired from National Review in 2012 for racism—and Richard Lynn, an English psychologist who has argued that East Asians are slightly smarter than whites, who are in turn much smarter than blacks. Spencer hosted Ron Paul, then not yet widely known to have published antiblack screeds in the 1980s and ’90s, at his discussion club.
In 2011, he moved from Washington to Whitefish, Montana, where his mother owns a vacation home and a commercial building. (She is the heiress to cotton farms in Louisiana, and his father is a respected Dallas ophthalmologist.) There he edited and published a new online magazine, Alternative Right, and soon took over the National Policy Institute. Founded in 2005 by William Regnery II, of the conservative Regnery publishing family, NPI is a white-identity think tank with little money and virtually no staff. During the next five years, Spencer merged its mission with his own. It remained essentially a one-man operation—the Whitefish house owned by Spencer’s mother is listed in official filings as NPI’s principal office, and its 2015 IRS filing shows that Spencer drew just $13,275 in salary and was the only paid employee. Still, under Spencer’s direction, NPI put on two conferences and published two books that year.
Alternative Right showed signs of erudition. It was not the product of the same Spencer I had known in high school, who’d managed to misquote Shakespeare (“A poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, then heard no more”) and misspell the name of a SportsCenter anchor (“Craige Killborne”) on his yearbook page. The magazine’s racism and sexism were expressed with good grammar and a coherent view of the world. That view, now well known as the platform of the alt-right, can be summarized as white European cultural and racial supremacy, with a deep contempt for democracy. An active comment section revealed the site’s id: Many of the commenters’ profile photos featured the double-rune insignia of the SS.
invite response
Spencer must have sensed my surprise (I would have sooner expected to see our gym teacher at a Washington magazine party). He told me he had blossomed intellectually since high school. Then he asked me what I thought of Hitchens’s fulminations against God. I had no interesting opinion on the subject. But Spencer did.
Was Hitchens’s critique of Christianity, he said, not as wan and naive as Christianity itself? Christianity had bound together the civilizations of Europe, and now Hitchens wanted to replace it with—well, what exactly? American neoliberal internationalism? Why should anyone care if Christianity was irrational and illiberal, when rationality and liberalism had never been its purpose? Hitchens had missed the point.
Spencer wasn’t exactly defending Christianity; he said that he, like Hitchens, was an atheist. But he longed for something as robust and binding as Christianity had once been in the West, before churches surrendered their power to folk-singing liberals and televangelists.
But after the Christmas party, my indifference slowly gave way to a surreal curiosity, on its way to loathing. I monitored his activities, distantly. Spencer’s writing kept appearing, advancing ever more extreme opinions in ever more obscure journals. In 2008, he began popularizing the term alt-right. On Facebook, he posted images of himself with John Derbyshire—a polymathic, often charming writer who was fired from National Review in 2012 for racism—and Richard Lynn, an English psychologist who has argued that East Asians are slightly smarter than whites, who are in turn much smarter than blacks. Spencer hosted Ron Paul, then not yet widely known to have published antiblack screeds in the 1980s and ’90s, at his discussion club.
In 2011, he moved from Washington to Whitefish, Montana, where his mother owns a vacation home and a commercial building. (She is the heiress to cotton farms in Louisiana, and his father is a respected Dallas ophthalmologist.) There he edited and published a new online magazine, Alternative Right, and soon took over the National Policy Institute. Founded in 2005 by William Regnery II, of the conservative Regnery publishing family, NPI is a white-identity think tank with little money and virtually no staff. During the next five years, Spencer merged its mission with his own. It remained essentially a one-man operation—the Whitefish house owned by Spencer’s mother is listed in official filings as NPI’s principal office, and its 2015 IRS filing shows that Spencer drew just $13,275 in salary and was the only paid employee. Still, under Spencer’s direction, NPI put on two conferences and published two books that year.
Alternative Right showed signs of erudition. It was not the product of the same Spencer I had known in high school, who’d managed to misquote Shakespeare (“A poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, then heard no more”) and misspell the name of a SportsCenter anchor (“Craige Killborne”) on his yearbook page. The magazine’s racism and sexism were expressed with good grammar and a coherent view of the world. That view, now well known as the platform of the alt-right, can be summarized as white European cultural and racial supremacy, with a deep contempt for democracy. An active comment section revealed the site’s id: Many of the commenters’ profile photos featured the double-rune insignia of the SS.
Much more, longer read: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/his-kampf/524505/
#WhiteNationalists #RichardSpencer #AltRight #Extremism