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Dec. 12, 2016 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
10:05
Richard Spencer Extended Vice Interview (12/12/2016)
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I mean, if someone told me two years ago that we would be here, that we'd have these new words, I mean, I think alt-right was beat out as the word of the year by...
Post-truthiness.
Post-truthiness.
But it just...
Oh, thanks.
Do you think the alt-right is, uh, real?
What does that mean?
Well...
It's mostly an internet movement.
I looked at the 990s of your non-profit operating budget of less than $100,000.
Is it mostly a mirage out of a lot of Twitter bots?
A characteristic thing about the alt-right is that it is coming from the internet.
And there are a lot of reasons for that.
A, I think just any new movement is going to probably emerge from the internet in 2016 now anyway.
But we're going after big taboos.
People have something to lose.
So the anonymity has allowed many more people to write and interact than we would have otherwise if a similar movement were going on in the 1980s or 50s or whatever.
What we've been able to do is leverage ourselves because of the power of our ideas.
So everything you just said, I could flip around and say, yes, you're right.
We don't have a George Soros throwing money at us.
Yet we're the ones making a splash.
We're the ones people want to talk to.
We're the ones people fear.
And that shows our power.
It's like you're right in a way.
There's no single institution that has a building like the Heritage Foundation or that receives eight-figure donations from these big patrons.
We will get there.
But the fact that we make a huge splash, the fact that everyone wants to talk to us and learn about us, just shows our power.
Well, but maybe everyone wants to talk to you because you're flashy and you, like, tweet pictures of ovens at people and figured out how to manipulate journalists' fixation on Twitter.
That just seems to be...
Saying what I said, just, you're using your, like, little kind of snarky words, like tweet pictures with ovens or whatever.
Yeah.
But it's like, yeah, they want to see us because we're flashy.
That means, that's like, we understand PR.
We understand how to talk and manipulate journalists.
I guess I'm doing that to you right now, and you're, like, yes.
I mean, we have bold ideas that are out of the mainstream.
And they're just inherently exciting.
And this is going to keep going.
Even if Donald Trump lost, I think this interest would have kept going.
But now that he's won, I mean, it's going to be huge.
We're never going back.
If I were a liberal, maybe what would make me so disappointed is that my ideology is so just stale and lame that it's become a joke.
If you want to talk about something, you know, like, oh, you know, I think we're just all individuals and, like, everyone's great.
And we should have, like, more rights?
And, like, whatever?
That is the stupidest shit I've ever heard in my life.
That offends no one.
Effectively, you could say that to the President of the United States.
You could say that to anyone else.
You're not challenging anything.
You could say that to a financial bank.
You could say that to the federal government.
You could say that to the U.S. military.
And they are not going to disagree with you.
And that shows how utterly fucking lame it is.
Why?
It is a...
Because.
It is old.
At one point, that actually challenged the system.
At this point, that liberalism and just goofball rights while individuals talk, that is the system's ideology.
You're not speaking truth to power, right?
That is power speaking.
Do you ever feel like 10,000 neckbeards are living vicariously through you?
I've never thought about it that way.
Uh-huh.
Uh...
Uh, look.
Look, because this is a radical movement, not everyone can be open.
Not everyone's willing to do that, and I totally understand why.
So if they want to see me as a representative, great.
I don't see what's wrong with that.
You'll often, like, compliment the alt-right, but just use snarky language.
So I actually agree with a lot of the things you're saying, just not the tone and the snark.
Well, I like to troll the trolls.
It's probably not going to work on me.
Oh, okay.
Try harder.
Yeah, come on.
Troll.
You want more trolling?
Yeah.
Come on.
Start trolling.
I think you're a fraud.
Spit it out.
You think I'm a fraud?
You're a fraud.
How is that?
Let me tell you the moment I was like, "You're definitely a fraud." It was when you...
you fancy yourself as an intellectual, right?
But during that press conference, you mentioned the Daily Stormer, which has absolutely no pretense of intellectualism.
It's pure thuggishness from behind a computer, just swastikas and the most vile depictions of African-Americans possible.
I actually didn't mention the Daily Stormer.
And the crowd roared.
I actually didn't mention the Daily Stormer.
The crowd cheered more than one of the journalists did.
Okay.
And they cheered, right?
They're just as happy to hear about Andrea Anglin as they were to hear about Nietzsche or whatever it is you want to name drop.
Right?
Like, that's the driving force, is cruelty and hate.
Not some, like, highfalutin, like, philosophy.
Okay, so that makes me a fraud.
I don't even understand.
I mean, it's just like, people can have different interests.
People can also just support.
You know, some guys who are in the movement.
I don't see how that makes me a fraud in any way.
You are exploiting hatred that has always been around and will always be around.
And you've repackaged it and you've become the face of it.
Okay.
Look, I was doing this for a long time.
I mean, relatively speaking.
I'm under the age of 40. There are a lot of other people who we've been developing these ideas for a long time.
The idea that we got in this to exploit people or, I mean, for what?
Just for making money or something?
I mean, I don't...
And fame.
And fame?
Yeah.
See, I think what you're basically describing...
Something that I would agree with.
Again, you're just describing it in your snarky tone.
I would never say that Richard Spencer has, through rational argumentation, convinced millions of Americans to vote for Donald Trump or created the alt-right through rational...
I've convinced each and every person.
I am riding a wave, too.
We're all riding a wave, this social change that we're experiencing.
And it is collective.
And we feel it.
I want to get these ideas out in the world.
Do I have my own personal career ambitions?
Yeah, sure.
I bet you do too.
But it's about exploiting something.
It's about seeing that there's a big change and seeing how you can take advantage of it to further your goals, to further, sure, further your career.
Great.
But it's always done idealistically.
You can criticize me in all sorts of ways.
You can totally disagree with everything I think.
That's fine.
But the idea that I don't do this for idealistic reasons, I just think is totally off base.
And I think you know that too.
No!
You kind of like say vague things like you're a fraud.
What?
Who am I fraud defrauding?
Well, I mean, I think a core concept in the alt-right sort of defines how fake it is, which is the idea of meme magic.
Right.
You mean things into reality.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Do you really think that it's real?
Yes.
Do you have Steve Bannon's ear?
Can you call him on the phone?
No.
But in terms of meme magic, yeah, I think there is something about, I would call it like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We memed alt-right into existence, and it's now almost a household name.
We didn't meme Donald Trump into existence, but I think we have inflected...
Donald Trump's trajectory, and at the very least, we've inflected how he's perceived.
So that is meme magic.
So it's like, you can think of it as like, oh, this is crazy Keck and Pepe the Frog and whatever, and that's fine.
Or you can kind of look at what's happening and understand it on a little bit of a more rational level.
But you didn't create Pepe.
I didn't create Pepe, no.
No.
I didn't create everything, I'm sorry.
No, but the people who created, like, the...
The texts of the alt-right are teenagers on 4chan who've trolled themselves into believing anti-Semitic stuff.
I have actually met some kids from 4chan who started reading some identitarian or some of Kevin MacDonald's work or anything critical of race relations, immigration, Jewish influence, so on.
And they actually read this stuff so that they could troll people.
So they read it almost like...
It's like, oh, I want to get these arguments so that I can really piss people off.
That was their entrance to it, but after reading it, they were actually convinced by it.
That demonstrates, in a way, the truth quality to it.
Doesn't it just mean they're too committed to a joke?
It's not a joke at some point.
That's an expression of that it is true.
It started out as a joke, and then it became real.
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