Richard B. Spencer
Richard Bertrand Spencer[] is an American neo-Nazi, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, and white supremacist. Spencer claimed to have coined the term "alt-right" and was the most prominent advocate of the alt-right movement from its earliest days. He has advocated for the reconstitution of the European Union into a white racial empire, which he believes will replace the diverse European ethnic identities with one homogeneous "White identity".
Spencer has advocated for the enslavement of Haitians by whites and for the ethnic cleansing of the racial minorities of the United States, additionally expressing admiration for the political tactics of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell. He was a featured speaker at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, among other neo-Nazi rallies that he has headlined.
Spencer has repeatedly used Nazi gestures and rhetoric in public. In early 2016, Spencer was filmed giving the Nazi salute in a karaoke bar, and leaked footage also depicts Spencer giving the Nazi salute#Nazi chants salute to his supporters during the August 2017 Charlottesville rally. After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Spencer urged his supporters to "party like it's 1933," the year Hitler came to power in Germany. In the weeks following, Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews. At a conference Spencer held celebrating the election, Spencer cried: "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!"; subsequently, Mike Enoch led a number of Spencer's supporters in performing a Nazi salute and a chant similar to the Sieg Heil chant. In early-to-mid-2017, when Spencer's following was at its height, his supporters would give him the Sieg Heil salute when he entered a room.
Following the Unite the Right rally, Spencer has been involved in several legal issues. After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, during which an alt-right supporter drove a car into a group of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring at least 19 others, Spencer was sued as part of Sines v. Kessler for allegedly acting as a "gang boss" and inciting the killing. On November 23, 2021, the jury found Spencer liable on two counts and were unable to reach verdicts for another two, awarding $25 million in total damages. Three supporters of Spencer were charged with attempted homicide following his October 2017 speech at the University of Florida. Following an appeal by the Polish government, he was banned from the Schengen Area in 2018, having been banned previously in 2014 after being deported from Hungary.
Spencer largely ceased to be an effective leader of the alt-right movement after March 2018, following violence outside a Michigan State University event where he was speaking.
Spencer has frequently contradicted his own previous statements about his beliefs and ideals; in one text exchange in 2022, he told a journalist that he "no longer identifies as a white nationalist."
Early life
Richard Bertrand Spencer was born in 1978 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of ophthalmologist Rand Spencer and Sherry Spencer, the heiress to cotton farms in Louisiana. He grew up in Preston Hollow, Dallas, Texas. Spencer attended St. Mark's School of Texas, then Colgate University for one year before transferring to the University of Virginia. In 2001, he received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Music from the University of Virginia and, in 2003, a Master of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. From the summer of 2005 into 2006, Spencer attended Vienna International Summer University. From 2005 to 2007, he was a PhD student in Modern European intellectual history at Duke University. He joined the Duke Conservative Union, where he met future President Donald Trump's senior policy advisor Stephen Miller. His former website says he did not complete his PhD at Duke in order "to pursue a life of thought-crime".Activities
Early activities
From March to December 2007, Spencer was the assistant editor at The American Conservative magazine. According to founding editor Scott McConnell, he was fired from The American Conservative because his views were considered too extreme. Spencer spoke about the Duke lacrosse case and credits it with changing the course of his career. From January 2008 to December 2009, he served as the executive editor of Taki's Magazine, a libertarian online magazine published by Taki Theodoracopulos. He has claimed credit for coining the term alt-right in 2008 in order to differentiate himself from "mainstream American conservatism", although Paul Gottfried argues that both he and Spencer created the term.In March 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, a website he edited until 2012. In January 2011, he became the owner and executive director of Washington Summit Publishers. In January 2011, Spencer became president and director of the National Policy Institute, a White supremacist think tank based in Virginia, which was once run from his mother's $3 million summer house. George Hawley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama, has described NPI as "rather obscure and marginalized" until Spencer became its president.
Spencer was invited to speak at Vanderbilt University in 2010 and Providence College in 2011 by Youth for Western Civilization. In 2012, he founded Radix Journal as a biannual publication of Washington Summit Publishers. Contributions have included articles by Kevin B. MacDonald, Alex Kurtagić, and Samuel T. Francis. He also hosts a weekly podcast, "Vanguard Radio".
In 2014, Spencer was deported from Budapest, Hungary. Under terms of the Schengen Agreement, he was banned for three years from 26 countries in Europe after trying to organize the National Policy Institute Conference, a conference for White nationalists.
Alt-right leader
On January 15, 2017, the day of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, Spencer launched the AltRight Corporation and its website altright.com, another commentary website for alt-right members. According to Spencer, the site is a populist and big tent site for members of the alt-right. Swedish publisher Daniel Friberg of Arktos Media is co-founder and European editor of the site. The Southern Poverty Law Center of the United States describes the common thread among contributors as antisemitism, rather than White nationalism or White supremacy in general. Contributors to AltRight.com have included Henrik Palmgren and Jared Taylor. 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".On May 13, 2017, he led a torch-lit protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, against the vote of the city council to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the commanding general of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War. Spencer and David Duke were among those who led the crowd in chants of "You will not replace us," and "Blood and soil". 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".
In August 2017, Spencer was listed as an organizer on posters promoting the Charlottesville, Virginia, Unite the Right rally. It attracted counter-protesters, and violence broke out. One rightist drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing one woman and wounding 30 so severely they needed hospital treatment. In November 2017, Twitter removed from Spencer's account the blue checkmark that, reported The Washington Post, "the company gives to prominent accounts to help readers ensure they are authentic". Spencer told The Post he was worried this would lead to Twitter banning people like him. He later joined the social network Gab.
In November 2019, Milo Yiannopoulos released an audio recording of Spencer using racist slurs immediately after the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Spencer said he did not recall making the remarks, but did not deny the voice on the recording was his.
A 2022 publication by the Southern Poverty Law Center stated "Spencer's efforts to stage events, and the alt-right movement around him, crumbled in March 2018" following violence outside a Michigan State University event where Spencer was speaking. Following this, Spencer largely ceased to be an effective leader of the movement.
Public speaking
During a speech Spencer delivered in mid-November 2016 at an alt-right conference attended by approximately 200 people in Washington, D.C., Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German and denounced Jews. Audience members cheered and gave the Nazi salute when he said, "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" and extended his right arm with a glass to toast that victory. Spencer later defended their conduct, stating that the Nazi salute was given in a spirit of "irony and exuberance". It was later reported that Spencer had given the Nazi salute at a karaoke bar in April 2016. Additionally, in 2017, sources indicate Spencer pressured followers to give him the Sieg Heil salute when he entered a room. Leaked texts indicate that those who refused to give the Nazi salute to Spencer, such as Jason Kessler, were stigmatized within the movement.Groups and events which Spencer has spoken to include the Property and Freedom Society, the American Renaissance conference, and the HL Mencken Club. 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. A protest and a university-organized counter-event were held to coincide with Spencer's event. On January 20, 2017, Spencer attended the inauguration of Donald Trump. As he was giving an impromptu interview on a nearby street afterwards, a masked man punched Spencer in the face, then fled. A video of the incident was posted online, leading to divergent views on whether the attack was appropriate.
Shortly after the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, the University of Florida denied Spencer's request for a September 2017 speaking opportunity, citing public safety grounds after opposition from students and locals of Gainesville, Florida. Due to safety reasons, he was also denied speaking requests at Louisiana State University and Michigan State University in August 2017. In September 2017, Cameron Padgett, who tried to book Spencer, sued MSU; he was represented by Kyle Bristow, an MSU alumnus.
On August 16, during a television interview with Israeli Channel 2 anchor Danny Kushmaro, Spencer claimed that "Jews are vastly over-represented in... 'the establishment', that is, Ivy League educated people who really determine policy".
Spencer's National Policy Institute, David Duke, Stefan Molyneux, and American Renaissance magazine were among the white nationalist outlets banned by YouTube from their platform in late June 2020 for not following the platform's policies on hate speech.