I Don't Speak German, Episode 1: Richard Spencer (REUP)
More than two years ago, concerned about the newly resurgent fascist fringe in America and elsewhere, Daniel Harper, a lefty podcaster and online writer, started investigating the so-called 'alt-right'. He's gone where few other researchers have gone, and actually subjected himself to hours and hours of the many podcasts and Youtube shows produced by the multifarious people and groups who make up this pernicious and dangerous subculture. He's listened, at length, to what they say to each other in their own spaces. And, having done the listening so you don't have to, he's back with his reports. This new podcast series features Daniel in conversation with his friend and fellow podcaster Jack Graham. Here's the first episode, on perhaps the best-known representative of the 'alt-right', Richard Spencer, his career, style, and ideology. The episode also touches on the origins of the term 'alt-right', the infamous 'heilgate' occurance after Trump's election, etc. We're discussing fascism and racism, so this podcast comes with big warnings. (This is a re-edit and a re-up.) The next episode will be on a more old-school fascist, David Duke, former Klan 'Grand Wizard' who spoke at Charlottesville. Future episodes will continue to cover one 'topic' per show. We plan to keep the episodes as short as possible, and crank them out regularly. TRANSCRIPT: https://idtg.net/1 FULL TRANSCRIPT LIST: https://idtg.net/ * Links pertaining to the discussion: Der Ewige Juden (The Eternal Jew) The Richard Spencer Show on Heel Turn Report on Spencer's 2010 'anti-diversity' speech to Vanderbilt students Gottfried's 2008 article apparently coining the term 'alternative right' Spencer taking part in the 'Ron Paul Revolution'
Greetings fellow Cucks, Snowflakes, Soyboys and Antifa Super Soldiers and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the podcast in which I get Daniel Harper, internet lefty person, and my friend and colleague to tell me what he learned and heard during more than two years of listening to and reading what the alt-right, which is really the far-right, say to each other in their safe spaces, their podcasts, their YouTube videos, etc.
We're going to be tackling a single subject per episode, and this first episode is about Richard Spencer.
We're going to be discussing racists and racism and fascism generally, so trigger warnings definitely apply.
Okay, first question.
How would you define what you've been researching, Daniel?
To casual listeners, normies, I would say broadly the alt-right, although alt-right is not a term that I like to use very much.
Why not?
Because it's really nebulous.
It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
It's kind of intentionally that.
It's kind of always served that purpose.
In fact, I mean, I think we'll kind of get into sort of the origins of the term here in a second.
There's no really clear definition that's sort of universally applicable as to, like, who is and is not alt-right.
And most of the figures who even kind of work within that kind of broad movement will sort of, like, define themselves relative to this term, or they will kind of, like, Oh, I'm not alt-right because they're meaning it to mean, you know, kind of one particular, you know, definition of it.
Well, you know, it's just really...
It's not a clear term and so I try not to use it and there are other kind of like subgroups within what is kind of broadly called the alt-right who, you know, I try to more use sort of their, you know, terms and kind of like how they define themselves as being slightly more clear or at least, you know, not as prone to misuse as alt-right.
I mean, a dissident right, or a nationalist right, or just far right, hard right, all kinds of various terms that kind of work for different sort of factions within that.
One thing that I do want to make clear is that there's one distinction that I will make, and that is the alt-right versus alt-right distinction.
And I really spend very little time with sort of the alt-right figures.
These are your kind of Emperor Wars, Paul Joseph Watson's, Milo, like those kinds of figures.
Sargon.
Sargon, who I don't think even, you know, we could talk about whether Sargon is even alt-light, you know, by that standard.
He would probably not refer to himself as such, but Yeah, a lot of those figures.
I mean, Alt-Light is also kind of a... Alt-Light is more of a style that it's sort of like, you know, we're gonna push these sort of right-wing anti-SJW quote-unquote talking points and, you know, kind of
To put this fairly straightforward kind of like right-wing conservatism, at least in the U.S., you know, it's basically Republican talking points, but we're gonna do it in kind of a snarky, in-your-face way, and we call ourselves, you know, and we're the alt-right, you know, and therefore we're not your dad's conservatism because, you know, we, you know, we'll use the swear words that they won't, you know, etc.
The people that I spend my time with, that I've really spent my time studying and kind of learning, are the explicitly sort of race-realist, ethno-nationalist, white-nationalist right, who kind of gird their arguments and kind of… pseudoscience and sociobiology and you know evolutionary psychology um and who use those those kinds of explicitly um racial arguments
um because that's uh really come to the forefront it's really come to a popularity and it infects the the whole discourse i think online and it has for the last uh you know four or five years now and um that side of it i think a just sort of interested me more than sort of the alt light than sort of the milo figures um just in terms of like it feels like there's a little bit more of sort of an intellectual or pseudo intellectual i put everything in quotes here
but there is a little bit more of a sort of like an argument that you can push against there um but But also the fact that, you know, we are sort of seeing people embrace more and more of this sort of really, really far racist rhetoric and it's infecting more and more just sort of traditional politics and sort of our traditional, you know, just sort of...
Stuff that's just in the air, and the way that that works, the way that sort of online culture and meme culture and social media have enabled this to just sort of spread like wildfire until, you know, the President of the United States can spread white genocide conspiracy theories and, you know, it's sort of a thing that happens, you know?
That's the stuff that really interests me, that's the stuff that scares me, and that's where I've really put most of my focus.
So, again, I spend very little time with someone like Milo, he's more just kind of a figure of fun for me.
The people I follow are mostly people who are, again, that kind of explicitly ethno-nationalist, white nationalist right.
Right.
I don't want to get sidetracked into the alt-light because, as you say, it's not your focus.
But that is kind of the vector, or one of the vectors, whereby this more hard-right fringe that you've been investigating has had that kind of influence, isn't it?
Particularly, I'm thinking of, you know, Bannon and Breitbart and so on.
And that's Milo as well, of course, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
And this again kind of gets into the You know kind of the question of you know where's the dividing line here and to me I have a pretty clear like kind of thing in my head of like there are these people who are spreading kind of the explicitly race realist stuff.
And then there are people sort of hiding that, you know, but who clearly are kind of working on the same assumptions, and then there are people who are not, and who are kind of pushing more kind of like Trumpist, you know, more straightforwardly just kind of Republican, you know, right-wing kind of stuff, even though they may be very far right on like, for instance, anti-transphobia.
And let me be clear, I don't approve of any of these people.
Um, but, uh, you know, I do see there being a difference between this sort of like, um, coded implicit racism of some of, you know, talking about states' rights versus, um, you know, actually, uh, wanting to, you know, push all the black people into their own, like, ghetto, uh, into their own country or something.
You know, it's, it's, it's a very, um, different kind of thing if you've been looking at sort of the history of American politics in the last, You know, 80 years or so.
The fact that this is now just sort of fairly mainstream rhetoric in a lot of places and particularly online and in – that people are being radicalized to this.
You see teenagers who are just – who just don't believe the Holocaust because it's been mocked so many times.
In their presence, it's just sort of like, oh, that's just like nobody believes in the Holocaust because like that's just the way they that's just where they've come in, you know, and that's that's really scary.
You know, yeah, well, maybe we'll maybe another time we'll get into we'll definitely have to talk about the Holocaust.
I am not prepared today to spend too much time talking about where that comes from.
But it's a very prominent example, you know, for instance.
No, I do want to get on to that.
And I, as I say, maybe at some point we'll get on to the way in which this hard right fringe that you've been looking at sort of reaches out through these more disguised versions into the mainstream.
But as you say, I mean, you're I mean, I'm sort of emphasizing the fuzzy spectrum.
You're emphasizing the hard distinction.
And I think that's just as valuable, if not at a certain point, politically more valuable.
So let's let's focus in on that.
One figure who's been very much a sort of a nexus figure between the two or has tried to position himself that way and who's very well known is, of course, Richard Spencer.
So tell me about Richard Spencer.
Sure, well Richard Spencer is definitely alt-right.
He is actually, to the degree that this thing has a definite origin point, it is actually not technically with Spencer himself.
was a speech given by a guy named Paul Gottfried.
Now, Paul Gottfried is still alive.
He does not claim the term Alternative Right, but at a speech at the H.L.
Mencken Club during, I think, Thanksgiving weekend of 2008, he gave a speech called The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.
This was sort of reproduced in Tacky's Mag, which was Edited by Richard Spencer at the time and Richard Spencer was also editing at the American Conservative.
And these are kind of paleo-conservative, paleo-libertarian magazines.
And if you read the actual thing, I can send you the link.
You can put it in the show notes.
It's actually kind of a tough read unless you sort of like understand the context in which it's given because he's very – Gottfried is very much this sort of old man of the paleocons.
Some people actually say he coined the term paleoconservative back in the 80s.
Although I haven't seen kind of a really concrete reference for that, but he is widely credited with coining both the term paleoconservative and alternative right.
Now, the reason it becomes associated with Richard Spencer is that Spencer A. is both kind of editing at Tacky's Mag and American Conservative, but he kind of like takes it and kind of makes it his own.
He founds alternative right.com, just a website, like basically a blogspot blog, you know, a few months later and then eventually kind of shortens it to alt right and makes it, you know, does alt right.com and starts like actually kind of doing does alt right.com and starts like actually kind of doing events, giving speeches with that with that kind of banner and kind of made that term into a kind of defined political thing.
But if you read the speech that Gottfried gave,
It's very much kind of about a reaction, a rejection of movement conservatism of the kind of like last basically of the kind of the Reagan and Bush years from from say if you want to say like kind of the mid 70s to you know at what was at the time current you know 2008 basically kind of the failures of this kind of neoconservative style of politics and
You know, really, if you kind of read between the lines, it's very clear that like the war in Iraq went really badly.
And the kind of conservative movement was kind of scrambling to see what they were going to do next.
And I really kind of gave, you know, this kind of vacuum, this power vacuum, or this sort of ideological vacuum, this really kind of gave power to this kind of like rising movement of that the paleocons could kind of like take back over just because Bush was so hated even within the Republican Party.
And again, largely not – I mean, you know, it's amazing that, you know, 60 million people voted for George W. Bush, and I can't find a single one of them anywhere.
It's amazing.
But yeah, no, you see in this piece – and again, you can link to it if you want.
I can give you the link.
But it is very much about kind of a rejection of this particular kind of conservatism and this particular kind of, you know, the endless wars, the kind of like spreading democracy around the world and kind of fighting communism abroad and that sort of thing.
And in that sense, you know, what's interesting about Spencer then, Is that, you know, he was very much kind of in this, uh, paleo conservative, but, you know, sort of not in sort of the core of the conservative, like, Republican Party.
He wasn't being groomed for, like, kind of high positions, but certainly within this sort of, like, Yeah.
this smaller world.
They're kind of outside of the warm fires of sort of the neoconservative think tank money.
So, but there was definitely some, you know, he was definitely one of those blue bloods.
He was definitely one of those people being groomed for this kind of position.
And it's interesting that he's, you know, I have a video, it was actually on C-SPAM, of, you know, a Ron Paul event at what was called the Robert Taft Club, which was a founder, - I read my research as well.
Yeah, no, and again, I can give you this link.
I've got it in front of me.
I kind of rewatched, but Richard Spencer actually introduces Ron Paul on, let's see, it's October 11th, 2007.
So this is when Ron Paul is sort of doing the, you know, his Ron Paul 08 run for president, which… Ron Paul Revolution.
The Ron Paul Revolution, right.
And Richard Spencer's right there.
And look at him here.
I mean, he's, he's, you know, I guess he's like 28 or so.
I mean, you can tell the difference that the kind of 13 years or so or 12 years or so has made in terms of the lines on his face.
He definitely looks like kind of a more callow youth at this point.
But it's amazing how much he still kind of sounds exactly like he sounds today.
He's definitely sort of hiding certain views.
He's not going out nearly as far as he would in sort of like a sort of a right wing podcast, not right podcast today, you know, but he's kind of toeing the line out of respect, I think, for Ron Paul and out of respect for, you know, trying to kind of, you know, keep Keep access to those institutions.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And, you know, and ironically, you know, Spencer, I mean, again, if I just rewatched this a few minutes ago, just his little introduction.
And I mean, it's entirely about sort of the failures of foreign policy.
And he's kind of making jokes.
About the other sort of Republicans that were running in that in that primary campaign at the time and stuff that it probably I'd have to go look up some of the references some of the jokes I'm like I don't even remember that incident, but like apparently it was current at the time, but It's fascinating to look at him then and see just how Just how completely he's he's just kind of one of these kind of up-and-coming people and within within two years he's kind of founding this alternative right movement, and he's kind of going off and and
He starts up a campus speaking tour in like 2009, 2010.
He's doing a ton of speaking at events.
He did a big event at Vanderbilt with like 200-300 people in attendance, just kind of talking against affirmative action and kind of doing that, spreading this kind of idea that affirmative action is quote-unquote anti-white, which was this kind of He's using the terminology that was kind of on that far right wing of the paleoconservatives.
He's still kind of in that headspace, but, you know, he's still kind of part of that movement, but he's kind of pushing at the further right fringes of that because the paleocons, there are some sort of quote-unquote white nationalist thinkers who are kind of included within that sort of paleocon label.
But the movement itself, even the payday accounts, really didn't want anything to do with sort of open white nationalism.
And if you went too far from them, then you kind of ended up being in kind of like the third party hellhole, this hellscape, and you couldn't get any kind of money or any kind of institutional support.
And so at this point, certainly when he's introducing Ron Paul, he's still thoroughly ensconced within this blue blood world of You know, blazers and ties and you know, we're going to talk about conservatism and you know, foreign policy, etc.
So he's he's still at that point thinking of a maybe not entirely fully ensconced inside the mainstream, but a basically mainstream adjacent, you know, respectable political career, do you think?
Yeah, I mean, he's basically kind of looking to be, you know, some kind of... I don't know, maybe he's trying... I... It's funny that Richard Spencer is someone that I really go back and forth a lot on, you know, exactly how I feel about, like, what he's done, and who he is, and what he's really been, like, what's really going on behind his eyes, you know?
What's in Richard Spencer's head and what's his meaning?
Because, you know, when I first started approaching these topics and, um...
Late 2016 and I first started really kind of like listening to these guys and kind of following the movement.
I kind of thought Richard Spencer was just more the PR guy, you know, at that point he really I never really felt like he was kind of pushing the means and pushing the ideology and kind of pushing, you know, that the movement was really his.
It always struck me as he was just kind of the guy that cleaned up real nice that you could put in front of an NPR microphone and give him five minutes and he'll do a pretty good job of trying to turn the tables on the liberal media or whatever.
in between getting punched obviously well and this was i mean and i started following him even before that i mean ironically um you know the funny thing is that uh i mean i wish i had been archiving some of these podcasts and stuff like way earlier that i ended up archiving them um because a whole like i i mean there are podcasts that were recorded there's one recorded right after that incident where he talks about you know like oh they've been i've been silly stringed many times before but i've never actually been punched and he's like talking about oh this
It wasn't that bad, etc.
But I wasn't archiving the podcast at that point, and I deleted it when I was finished listening to it, and now all that's been down in memory.
Because as these guys lose their hosting providers, they tend to not put up their old material again, and so unless somebody just has it, it's gone.
One of the real negative things about deplatforming these guys is that it's harder for me to track them.
It really makes it easier if you could just put them on iTunes.
It would be really easy for me to follow them, but I'd rather that not be the case.
I would sort of put out an appeal to our listeners, if any of you have all this stuff backed up, get in touch with Daniel, but I'm pretty sure you're the only person from the left doing this.
I'm pretty sure I have a larger archive of this stuff than almost anyone out there.
I'm in contact with other people who are kind of tracking it as well, and I, you know, kind of comparing notes, and yeah, I'm pretty sure, because I've been archiving pretty completely since, well, since around Charlottesville, actually a little bit before that, and you know, I try to just grab whatever archives I can, and I'm pretty sure I have stuff that literally no one else has at this point.
So, yeah, I don't want to get sidetracked, so on the subject of Spencer, I mean, What is his ideology? - The interesting thing for me is that if you look at the history of Spencer's sort of like after 2010, but before like 2015, in that kind of five year period, he kind of went nowhere.
In fact, even the sort of alternative right label, he kind of stopped using it.
He got this job at the MPI, the National Policy Institute, and, you know, he kind of moved away from doing those kind of campus events and went away from kind of using that label just because it just kind of wasn't very effective.
Um, a couple of buddies of his, um, you know, who were kind of involved from the beginning, I don't have their names in front of me right now, but, um, a couple of buddies kind of took over the website and they were just kind of kept publishing this little web zine that might as well have been, you know, I mean, there are plenty of, there are plenty of kind of right-leaning little web projects that, you know,
You know have a few thousand readers or whatever and you know They just kind of keep going by by luck and by plug and it was just kind of one of those and interestingly the term seems to have kind of like that fact that Richard Spencer was not sort of directly associated with it and that it wasn't Explicitly a kind of white nationalist term for a while seems to be the thing that allowed it to sort of be embraced by a Sort of edgy, right?
Um, and it seems to me they just sort of embraced it as a term.
And so that's where, you know, sort of Breitbart and Milo and a lot of those kind of figures started calling themselves alt-right around this kind of 2013 to 2015-ish period.
And in fact, um, in 2015 up to basically up until, um, the, uh, the 2016 election cycle, I mean, the, the term alt-right was very, uh, You know, it was this kind of catch-all term that kind of included everybody, and they all sort of like, you know, embraced it as something that they were just kind of all kind of moving under this one banner.
It just kind of meant edgy right-winger, and that could be anybody from sort of a, you know, center-right libertarian all the way to, you know, like, gas the Jews.
You know, it seemed to be kind of everybody kind of working together.
Um, and, uh, it was really only after the sort of election and only after, um, this event, uh, Heilgate, um, which is, um, uh, the, um, after Trump's election, but before his inauguration, um, Richard Spencer gave a speech at, um, one of the, uh, Washington DC, um, ballrooms, I forget the name of it.
Um, but, uh, the Atlantic had a, had a reporter there and they, Um, shots of video and Richard Spencer and this, this is a really fascinating speech.
I'm going to go through this like bit by bit as part of the pieces of writing I do.
I mean, it's a really fascinating in terms of like what it tells you about, you know, Spencer and about like kind of where this movement is.
Um, in a lot of ways it's as important, if not more so than the original Paul Gottfried piece.
But, um, what's really interesting there is or what, what kind of like bit them all in the ass was, You know, A, Richard Spencer is kind of lording it over that, like, suddenly we are the ones in charge, and he's using terms like Lugan Presa, and, you know, he's kind of really openly, you know, kind of rubbing it in that, you know, oh no, we're actually going to have this far-right, you know, racialist ideology that's going to be in charge now, and Trump is sort of the vehicle for that.
But also a bunch of people in the back, you know, after the speech were giving the Roman salute there, the Heil Hitler salute.
And, um, the Atlantic cut together this, like, two-minute, um, piece of video that's sort of like, you know, the highlights or the lowlights of Spencer's speech alongside, you know, this, um, kind of dark and toning music and then, you know, some people throwing those, um, Roman salutes.
And, uh, suddenly all of the alt-right figures who did not want to be associated with alt-right neo-Nazism, uh, really distanced themselves from the term.
And so after that, um, alt-right was very much more a, um, You know that that kind of openly racialist white nationalist term and really, in fact, the unite the right rally.
I mean, the original point of that was to sort of like combine everybody back into one thing again, which became a total, complete failure for a lot of reasons.
But Spencer is so you asked me what he believes and Spencer is.
An interesting figure in that sense, in that he is, he believes in sort of a racial, you know, that white people are genetically superior, at least different from other people, and that white people, because of sort of inherent genetic advantages, have built civilization around themselves, and like that we as white people, as he would say,
Made this and like all the other people in the world like like black people and you know East Asians, etc Are not have not been able to do that and they you know, the colonialism is good because then suddenly, you know Africans get access to this amazing thing that white people can make it because black people are not able to To build this for themselves and isn't it, you know beneficial for white people to just control them.
You know, Richard Spencer is an open colonialist.
I have I have some audio of him talking and not uncertain terms.
I was going to say go back even a hundred years and that's a completely standard mainstream set of ideas.
Exactly.
And I think that, you know, what one of the interesting things is that they are they do kind of openly embrace this idea that Yeah, you know, this is what our answer.
This is what our grandfathers believed was just natural and right.
And therefore, you know, and this has all been subverted sometime in the last 60 or 70 years by, you know, certain people who have parentheses around their names to convince us that this is not right and natural.
I mean, he believes that.
It's with him that really this this kind of idea that the ethnostate he didn't invent the the charm ethnostate that that derives back from the I think the 80s the 70s or 80s you kind of started seeing people kind of using that that terminology explicitly but certainly he's the one on sort of the the alt-right he's the one who's who's really kind of Thinking in terms of that big picture, in terms of saying what we need is to re-embrace a sense of our destiny as white people to
Make things for ourselves and to rule by will and to not feel guilty about the things that we might have done in the past to other people and that this is just sort of right and natural and good and that we need this, you know, sort of ethnic identity in order to move forward as a people and that that that ethnic identity being subverted is what's
The root cause of, you know, sort of the the weakness of kind of modernity, you know, it's very much a direct rejection of paternity in ways that feel very.
Similar to what sort of the neo-reactionaries are like, but, you know, with certain slightly different valences.
I mean, there is some kind of interesting overlap there.
But it is, you know, and Spencer, you know, and he has serious academic credentials.
I mean, one of the things, two of the things that really differentiates Spencer from a lot of the other figures in this movement Is that a he has serious academic credentials, he has a master's degree from Duke, he was working on a PhD until he kind of entered politics more directly.
And he is he is actually a son of like very, very wealthy family.
Most of the other kind of figures you end up being kind of like, you know, I hate using class this way, but sort of the upper middle class, you know, grew up in a in a suburb somewhere and dad was in the tech industry, basically.
Most of the other figures look a lot more like that.
Spencer is actually a, you know, blue blood.
But, you know, his family line, I mean, they own plantations in Louisiana, I believe.
And he still has, I think, some family down there.
I think he owns their core.
There's a bunch of sort of like where Richard Spencer's family comes from.
There's a lot of conspiracy mongering on the alt-right about like Richard Spencer's really Jewish, etc.
I mean, there's a lot of that going around as well.
But, um, it's, it's, it's the one interesting, again, the thing that kind of gets me about Spencer is that he does have this very big picture view.
I mean, he is not interested in sort of like local races.
He's not interested in things like, you know, who's controlling the house this, this cycle or, you know, I mean, he's interested in that in terms of, being able to sort of push ideas, but he's not interested in sort of the details of policy.
He's interested in sort of creating that vision and doing that, doing very, very big picture kind of viewpoint.
He's thinking in terms of centuries and not decades, if that makes sense.
Whereas a lot of the other figures, I mean, you know, if you do kind of follow this movement, a lot of them are doing sort of like the day by day, kind of looking at what Trump's doing, you know, here and now, and you know, a lot of the sort of day to day politicking And Richard Spencer, I mean, he does a bit of that, but even on his own, like, you know, when he's kind of hanging out with his buddies, he's kind of doing stuff that's sort of branded alt-right.
you know, as kind of his personal brand, it feels like he's definitely trying to not get caught up in sort of the minutiae of the day to day.
Like he finds it just kind of beneath him.
And that's another thing, just personality wise, I mean, he just bleeds this, you know, sense of like kind of natural superiority to other people.
He's really disgusting when you see behind the scenes footage of him, the way he talks to the people around him.
He sees himself as just inherently superior.
No he comes from wealth policy he looks good in a suit because he drinks he actually drinks very mediocre bourbon but.
I'm kind of amazed at some of his bourbon choices if i had his budget i would i would drink better than he does but anyway that's neither here nor there.
So i was going to ask about his uh his funding does uh you know does he fund himself or.
The funding of this stuff, like, honestly, if there was one question I would love to get, like, if I could get really concrete answers on where this money comes from, that would be the thing that I would... That's a really big open question, honestly.
It's sort of like... And this is movement-wide, because they are very reticent to sort of give out any information at all about, like, where their money comes from.
My understanding is that Spencer like a just kind of has personal family wealth that he's able to use that there are quite a few sort of millionaires not billionaires like they're not getting sort of like Koch brother money, but there there are people who are sort of like known as donors and Who will sort of make, uh, you know, small donations.
Small donations of, you know, only like $20,000 or so to sort of fund these projects.
And that's where a lot of the, um, just kind of the, the nationalist right, um, this kind of alt-right, this, this explicitly race realist right, um, gets a lot of their funding through those kinds of sources.
That there are people who have enough money to be able to drop it in, you know, And this is, again, a source of a lot of that resentment.
Like Richard Spencer thinks he should have some billionaire giving him all the money he wants, and he doesn't.
but conservatism is able to do.
And this is, again, a source of a lot of that resentment.
Richard Spencer thinks he should have some billionaire giving him all the money he wants, and he doesn't.
And that resentment is very, very clear in a lot of these guys that they can't, that Richard Spencer has to kind of balance Grape in a way that, say, Ben Shapiro doesn't.
Ben Shapiro has an actual institution behind him that will, you know, that will pay him and researchers and, you know, graphics and all that kind of, you know, whereas Spencer has to kind of do it, do it, do it by himself in his, you know, really nice apartment in Alexandria, Virginia.
You know, he's not missing meals here, but, you know, he doesn't have access to the kind of funding streams that he thinks he should.
And again this is this is all over this movement like they all think they should be making way way more money.
There's always a question of you know form following function all the other way around with this could you wonder if he you know partly why he's not getting more.
Money for more quote unquote respectable sources is going to be that he's got this this profile of somebody sort of beyond the pale.
But at the same time, if he was getting more money, he'd be able to set himself up to look respectable.
And he probably wouldn't be beyond the pale anymore.
Oh, no, absolutely.
And again, Richard Spencer has been, you know, really clear from the beginning, from the get go.
Again, if you look at sort of interviews he made to the Atlantic, that's the Atlantic, you know, right after the Hilegate, you know, in that same like package of interviews.
He has been very explicit about the whole point, the whole thing that we're trying to do is to move the Everton window in our direction.
We are trying to move the realm of acceptable discourse towards us into where we can say we just want to make a state for white people.
We just want to be working in favor of white people and white people only.
Very open about that, but the whole point is that because he's kind of on the edge of that, he's not able to sort of get that kind of institutional support.
But he's, I mean, he's actively trying to make it to where he can, you know, that's the whole point.
Also, I think that there are, and this is kind of where, you know, some of the, you know, Some of their own kind of conspiracy mongering comes from, like, kind of real places because, you know, one of the most powerful lobbies in, you know, in D.C.
is IPAC, the Israeli lobby.
And the Israeli lobby is obviously not going to give money to Richard fucking Spencer.
Many, many reasons.
And so, you know, the fact that AIPAC won't fund these guys, the fact that, like, the Jews control, you know, all these kind of neoconservative, you know, funding sources, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
Like, you know, they won't fund us because we want to throw them into ovens, or, you know, It's complicated exactly how they feel about what they want.
We want to ship them all back to Israel, essentially, sort of the mainstream opinion on the, you know, I think that would be Spencer's perspective is like, you know, they should, you know, they should go live in Israel instead of, you know, be here.
But, you know.
Well, it always is at the start.
I mean, that's what the Nazis said at the start.
Oh, no, no, absolutely.
I'm trying to be clear about what I mean and also not get us sued by one of these guys because I made a joke.
But clearly, yes, no.
They say, yes, we want to export the Jews to Israel.
We want to just get them.
They have their own country.
They should go live there and not subvert our society.
But from somebody like Spencer's point of view, whenever he tries to go and get real institutional money, there's always some Jew saying no.
And that definitely feeds into that same persecution complex, you know?
It's like, oh, the banks are all controlled, the credit card processes are all controlled by the Jews, you know?
It's not like, no, people find your views really repellent and, you know, they just kind of don't want to be associated with you for, you know, conflict.
No, it has to be this, like, group ethnic identity that the Jews are ganging up on me, you know?
It's completely absurd and it's, like, absolutely pervasive in this movement.
Yeah, because paranoia is one of the animating forces.
Yeah, on the subject of antisemitism, I mean, I think there's a book by George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right.
That is an excellent book.
Yeah, I haven't read it, but I read the review of it by Noah Balatsky, and he interviewed Hawley, I think, and he talks about how the big dividing line in American conservatism after World War II was anti-Semitism.
You know, anti-Semitism was kind of, well, I wouldn't say purged because I think that's giving them too much credit, but the line was that it had to be eliminated from American conservatism, you know, and you have William F. Buckley famously, you know, viewing that as the main task of the respectable right in America and anathematizing Pat Buchanan and stuff like that.
Anti-semitism became completely associated with the Nazis and the Holocaust.
Yeah.
And, I mean, this again, you know, this again comes right back to, you know, sort of the centrality of the Holocaust and sort of justifying some of this ideology.
It's like, well, you know, again, and I'm very cognizant of like, you could sort of like cut some of this out and make it sound like I'm saying this.
I obviously don't believe this.
But the sort of the animating myth of, you know, well, After World War II, the Jews used the stories of the Holocaust, whether it was real or not, to browbeat ordinary white people who, you know, ethnic Europeans, Anglo-Saxons or, you know, Germanic people, you know, whatever.
To act against their ethnic group cohesion by accepting more and more Jewish people into society.
And once the Jewish people were allowed to take positions of power and authority over white people, they...
Basically ran the country into a ditch by then allowing you know african-americans to to you know have expanded rights to vote and You know the the Hartzeller Immigration Act in 1965 which changed the sort of racial makeup of what was allowed to be like immigration into the country and You know sort of light, you know And on and on I mean it's it's like you know the Jews took over and suddenly we had all these like quote-unquote mud people in our country and
And it's all with the explicit goal of removing white people from quote-unquote white countries.
It's the white genocide myth, exactly.
And again, you can hear these guys, they will put it in almost exactly these terms.
It's interesting that I don't think I've ever heard Spencer himself really kind of like put it this explicitly um but i i think he believes it i don't think i don't have any doubt that he believes it i think he's just slightly cage here about you know he doesn't talk much about the jesus i was actually thinking about this as we were planning to record i'm not sure if richard spencer believes in the holocaust or not i'm legitimately i don't think i've heard him discuss it one way or the other well if but this is the animating myth
This is the central idea that they believe.
Just to be clear, there's some truth to the idea that after World War II, basically Americans and Western European countries, Western societies in general, recoiled at how terrible the Holocaust was.
And that became a rhetorical tool in terms of making life better for ethnic minorities within Western countries.
Like, for instance, a lot of lynching legislation kind of went into effect after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed.
And, you know, it was certainly used as a sort of like, this is the really bad version of this and we don't want this to happen, you know?
And, you know, returning American GIs, you know, saying like, no, we fought those Nazis and we're gonna be, you know, we're gonna be not racist by, you know, and we're gonna be better people.
And, you know, there's something, I mean, There's something kind of admirable in that, like yes, you saw how bad things can get and that's good, but like you, because there wasn't like a sort of real left material basis to a lot of it, it just kind of turned into, well yeah, we changed the laws, that's all we needed to do, right?
And that's, and this is where the kind of the complicated like Is this, you know, is, is, you know, to what degree is Richard Spencer kind of really speaking for this sort of mainstream belief that people just kind of hold underneath?
And what degree is he, is he actually is?
He would, he would describe himself as sort of a dissident within the, within American politics, you know?
Yeah.
And of course, that's, that's a whole other kind of complicated about like, what do we mean by white supremacy?
And, you know, kind of complicated issues there, you know, around the way the rhetoric works.
But, yeah.
No, I mean, the whole sort of founding myth you just outlined, that is, let's be in no doubt whatsoever, poisonous bullshit.
But like a lot of poisonous bullshit, you know, you can find bits and bobs in there that are based on truth distantly.
Like, you know, it happens to be, for contingent historical reasons, that happens to be the fact that Jews in America have tended to be politically liberal.
For pretty obvious reasons, really, because they've been a historically oppressed and persecuted minority, so they're going to identify with other oppressed and persecuted minorities, despite the fact that they're white, generally speaking.
And then you have the question of Israel becoming a major American ally in the Middle East after the 1967 war, I think it was.
And you have this, you have a group of people quite well off, you know, Jewish liberals and conservatives who realize in that atmosphere that they can do very well for themselves by aligning themselves with Israel because, you know, being loyal to Israel is now no longer something to be scared of in terms of the old dual loyalty charge.
It's now a kind of a good thing.
You can boast about how patriotic you are via being behind Israel.
So you have, I mean, they're not doing it because they're Jewish.
They're doing it because they're opportunistic chances.
But they're using this set of circumstances.
So you do.
And then politicians use sort of like rhetoric around Israel to justify things like Mideast, you know, interventionism, you know, which is ultimately about, you know, controlling like oil revenues and, you know, sort of
Stamping down, you know, populist movements, you know, left movements, and you know, I'm assuming you know far more about sort of the late 20th century history of Middle East, you know, wars than I do necessarily, but certainly, you know, Israel gets used as a sort of like intellectual justification.
Oh, it's the one democracy in the Middle East, and they're surrounded by, you know, Sand people.
I mean, I don't want to use the language.
But you know, like, essentially, that's what, you know, plenty of otherwise, you know, quite respectable people will essentially say that, you know, in private, although they may not say people there.
But you know, these like savages surrounding Israel, and Israel is this like, cosmopolitan modern state, it's a democracy, and therefore we have to defend it because And it becomes the intellectual justification for what's ultimately just a power play.
But people – and people like Richard Spencer don't – they see it as – they don't see that as just sort of the fig leaf covering a naked excuse for power.
They see it as, in some sense, a real – Um, a real expression of like an ideology that's that's causing these things to happen.
And therefore, you know, this that's where you get things like the Zionist occupied government.
You're like Zog.
And that that dates back to the 70s, actually.
Yeah, because the the the fascist viewpoint is intensely racial.
I mean, it conceives the world in racial terms.
So they look at this, you know, contingent, contested, messy history about Israel and America forging alliance with israel to have an ally in the middle east so they can contain arab nationalism to do with you know controlling oil and oil supplies and stuff like that they see that and you know a group of people who.
Who are quite well off who happen to be jewish you know rising in the establishment and then the fact that you have.
You know, APAC and all this messy contingent history, they see it in terms of races.
So all they see is a bunch of Jews controlling the world as they see it.
And again, it can't be said enough, this is toxic bullshit.
And you find that same rhetoric, I mean, if you watch, you know, my YouTube recommendations, most people would not like to see what my YouTube recommendations look like.
Just to make it clear, for a while I was getting... The algorithm's pretty bad anyway, but with you... I mean, I actively go and like search like other things just so it's not literally just, you know...
Ironically, it mostly gives me things that I'm interested in seeing, but not because I think this is good, but because it's worth knowing.
So you're the one guy that the algorithm works for, just for research purposes?
Just for research purposes, right, although it doesn't tend to push me further right, it tends to kind of push me to more of the same, meaning that I've pretty much found the right wall of what the YouTube, like, what is allowable on YouTube.
It's sort of like a... You found the edge.
I found the edge, yes, and it's a scary edge, but for a while YouTube was actually recommending actual 1930s, you know, like Nazi propaganda, 30s and 40s Nazi propaganda films.
And so if you watch some of those, I don't speak German, but if you watch them, you know, with subtitles and, you know, I have not like spent a whole lot of time on it, but I mean a lot of these things, You know, it's the same rhetoric.
I mean, there are films that were basically, you know, they'd look back to World War I and they'd say, oh, you know, there's this group of people that didn't really suffer the way that the rest of us did during World War I and during the kind of Weimar days and are not starving.
And look at these wealthy Jews.
They've got, you know, diamonds and they've got money and they're not hungry.
And they're subverting our society.
And again, it's the exact same logic.
It's the exact same rhetoric.
And that's the stuff when you do find those kinds of direct parallels.
It's something I'm used to at this point, but certainly when I first started running across some of that, that's the chill the blood kind of stuff for me.
When you can literally pull rhetoric, change the word Germany to America and a couple of other words around.
And you just plop it right back in and then see some 22-year-old chut on YouTube repeating that exact same thing to 100,000 views.
It's scary.
It's legitimately scary.
Getting back to Spencer, from the description you've given so far, he's a well-off, privileged young man who enters... I mean, although he's now 40, but you know, yes, young man.
At the time, yes.
I'm telling a story here.
He's a privileged young man from a wealthy background who finds his way entering politics as a career, the way a lot of these guys do.
And he seems to have entered that sphere with pre-existing extreme right views.
Would you say that's right?
Oh yeah, yeah.
No, I think he always kind of had this at least implicit white nationalist kind of ideology.
The earliest stuff I see from him, anything from anybody, Who kind of knew him back in the day I see no indication that this was something that just sort of like came to his mind in 2008 or whatever, like, it feels like it was kind of always a part of his ideology he was always in that but but in sconces and sort of that far right version of paleo conservatism as opposed to sort of an openly national socialist or, you know, kind of kind of openly genocidal, you know,
So he enters the sort of semi respectable political sphere with pre-existing hard right views, finds himself in essentially a sort of eccentric cul-de-sac, which is what paleoconservatism is by that point, I would say.
Um, sort of experiments with breaking out into the, as I say, the mainstream adjacent by, you know, getting into the Ron Paul thing.
Um, because, you know, libertarianism, paleo libertarianism, it's so adjacent to paleoconservatism that ideologically it's almost identical as we've talked about in the past.
And then it sounds like he kind of gives up and then takes advantage of the fact that this phrase he picked up from this Gottfried guy, alt-right, gains traction in the result of events out in the world that he really doesn't have anything very much to do with.
It just sort of happens while he's not looking.
And from then on, it's a matter of, it looks to me like sort of escalating opportunism.
Would you say that's a fair enough summary?
Certainly, if you're kind of, and a lot of it is, it's kind of a lot of the sequence of events I'm still not clear on because some of it is kind of contested, and you get kind of sources that kind of go one way or the other.
Again, you mentioned Holly's book.
I have my issues with Holly's book.
Holly is sort of the guy who leans right, at least I believe so.
We are kind of mutual follows on Twitter.
I have not spoken to him privately or anything.
But I believe he probably would consider himself kind of a vaguely Republican-ish kind of guy.
So I have my issues with him, certainly politically.
But he is definitely able to articulate some of the inner divisions of these movements in ways that I've seen no one else do.
And for that reason alone, I highly, highly recommend that book.
A lot of the information That I've kind of got a lot of my kind of perspective on this has come from that But a lot of the details of like what was actually kind of going on between like 2010 and 2015 I'm kind of unsure of and I a lot of it I've kind of gotten just from sort of listening to and kind of reading other materials that were produced like kind of talking about Spencer like references to Spencer on other shows that were recorded in like 2014 or something like that so so you know There's a lot of, you know, kind of like, you know, kind of figuring out kind of exactly where he lands there.
But I think that you've basically got it right.
I think that's really certainly my perspective of him is that he was kind of just, you know, between 2010 and 2015, he was kind of looking for his place.
And the fact that Alt-Right kind of rose to prominence just in sort of these online spheres, pushed by kind of troll armies as much as anything, that this sort of like, basically this sort of like misogynist, gamer-gate, you know, mana-sphere-y and kind of movement, sort of using this term Alt-Right, mana-sphere-y and kind of movement, sort of using this term Alt-Right, and he kind of took advantage of And, you know, it's difficult to know exactly what's going on in his head and what his sort of long-term plan for himself is.
I mean, he very briefly planned to run for Senate, I believe Senate in Montana, right after the Trump victory, like when they were all riding high in that kind of two-month period between the Trump election and the inauguration.
There was certainly, I mean, you can find a couple of news articles from the Times that this is confirmed, He was going to run for, I believe, Senate in Montana and sort of like take over that seat and kind of become a politician.
Although in other places I've seen him kind of talk about how that's kind of beneath him.
He doesn't really care about sort of the mechanics of like state level politics.
He's interested in sort of the national and international perspective on things.
But yeah, no, I think that's a very accurate portrait of kind of who he is.
He's just kind of riding the – he just kind of got the bull by the tail a little bit.
There's a sense of he's just kind of bouncing around.
And in fact, right now he's – like he just recently kind of took over, like kind of running this YouTube channel called Heel Turn, which I kind of know about.
I mean it's this very kind of a run-of-the-mill nothing YouTube channel when I first kind of discovered it.
It's just sort of like these kind of guys on the internet just inviting these kind of white nationalist figures to come out and do live streams.
And now that's kind of where he's putting a lot of his focus is in – he's not even really focusing on sort of the alt-right brand.
Like he hasn't released in one of his podcasts in months at this point.
He's really doing these live streams on YouTube and kind of embracing that audience, which is definitely a way of – You know the fact that he's able to sort of like toe the line enough to not run afoul of the YouTube content moderation allows him to reach a much much larger audience and he could producing a you know just a podcast it's branded all right.
YouTube gets them get away with a hell of a lot but.
Oh, no, it does.
And one of the big stories is, you know, one of the big stories of really kind of the last year of 2018 into 2019 now.
One of the really big stories is that these guys have kind of figured out how to not get banned from YouTube.
And a lot of that is literally just like not using certain words, you know?
Yeah.
That, you know, to not, you know, and they'll change like in the N word, they'll change the Gs to Bs.
and say nibba, you know, and literally that's enough.
Like you can literally say, I think all the nibbas should hang from trees and that's perfectly acceptable apparently, according to YouTube.
It's pretty disgusting, but it really is this kind of legalistic approach and they've become very successful at doing that.
But, I mean, the irony being that, you know, Richard Spencer, who's, you know, hypothetically this, you know, kind of big, blue-blood, you know, wealthy, intellectual guy with serious academic credentials, is running a kind of, you know, what I would consider to be kind of a no-name YouTube livestream with just sort of guests jumping on and off, and yet he's decided to do that.
I think it's, I mean, it's...
Again, you know, Spencer himself is kind of a mess of contradictions.
I mean, he really... And this is kind of why I feel like I don't necessarily have, like, a really clear picture on, like, exactly what he's trying to do at any given time.
But I think that... I think maybe you're right.
I think maybe he is just sort of opportunistic and just kind of taking whatever's available to him at the time and just kind of using it for his own agenda until it doesn't work anymore and then he kind of leaves it behind.
That does sort of make sense.
That outline, you know, that I just sort of improvised, that's a fairly classic sort of, you know, fascist origin story.
If you like.
I mean, there's several fairly classic sort of variants on the fascist's origin story.
One of them, of course, is to start out being, you know, on the left, a socialist like Mussolini.
But the one I outlined, that's very definitely, you know, one of them.
So it's pretty standard.
In the irony, Spencer, I mean, if you look at sort of like, you know, Like to the degree that he has sort of policy presentations, like once you sort of take like race, you know, if you don't consider kind of the ethno nationalist stuff, I mean, he's, you know, said like, yeah, I'm in favor of universal health care.
Sure.
Like we should have like nuclear power and, you know, green energy and all, you know, I mean, he, you know, if you if you sort of look at him in that sense, I mean, he's very heterodox.
He's not he's not a straightforward Republican.
On a lot of these issues, he's a Trumpist more in terms of his, you know, Trump's attitude, Trump's, you know, kind of trollish behavior and the way that he pisses off the left, as opposed to, you know, sort of really embracing Trump as a kind of a real political figure.
I think Richard Spencer and I think most of the larger, you know, kind of what I'm just going to keep describing as the alt-right, but you understand what I mean by it, really are not, you know, they really do kind of look down on Trump.
They like him, they want him to do what they want him to do, and they think that he should, but you won't find them thinking of him as this intellectual giant or this amazing politician.
They see him more as a tool that they can use to push their own agenda, whereas the more overtly Trumpist online figures, the rah-rah Trump people, Richard Spencer is definitely not one of those.
No, he's not Ben Garrison.
Right.
He's not Ben Garrison or, you know, what's his name, Bill Mitchell.
You know, the kind of Trump can do no wrong thing.
And this also means that they really don't, like, none of this movement has any time for, like, the QAnon stuff, for instance.
Because all that's kind of based on that Trump is this kind of secret mastermind doing.
11 Dimensional Chess or whatever.
And I think this is another thing that I would, this is one reason why I find these guys more interesting to sort of follow and kind of try to understand, is that in many ways they have a much more realistic view of the world.
than sort of the mainstream Republican view of the world, which is sort of based on, you know, sort of lies about history, you know, like, oh, America was always this multicultural thing.
And, you know, like, no, Richard Spencer will tell you, no, America was built on, you know, this kind of like vision of white supremacy and, you know, on genocide.
And that was good.
You know, that's just what we that's just what we had to do to get things to happen.
And, you know, I don't think that, you know, I don't hold any animosity towards, you know, African-Americans, you know, in terms of I want them to go live somewhere else where they can be themselves and and build their own society.
You know, like that's that's how much of that is.
How much of that is flimflam for show and how much of that is real?
I mean, do they genuinely have this sort of disinterested view of ethnostates and racial segregation based on this ideology of race?
Or is it, you know, how much of it is that and how much of it is that they just hate black people?
I think.
I mean, it's it's it varies, I think, from person to person.
Yeah, I think that there are people and we can I mean, you know, it's hard to say whether Richard Spencer is one of these people.
I don't think I think he's too canny.
He's too canny.
And he's too.
I think he sees, you know, black people as I think he sees, you know, Africans as distinctly inferior to him, you know, for the reasons we kind of discussed.
I mean, let me clarify.
It's a distinction without a difference.
It's all hate.
But I'm not, you know, there's no sense in which one would be better than the other.
I'm just interested in it as an academic question.
Sure.
I mean, the hate.
I mean, I actually don't like framing these things as hate.
I find it to be sort of a not useful metric in terms of sort of understanding.
Um, I think that, you know, if you listen to them long, I mean, just on the level of emotions, it's more about fear anyway, isn't it?
Right, right.
And it's more kind of about material conditions.
And I mean, you know, it's kind of built around this sort of ideology of, you know, but, you know, what they see.
What I hear from them over and over again, if you just sort of listen to them talk to each other for hours and hours and hours, which I've done, and I'm not going to talk about sort of Spencer himself here because it's difficult to kind of know, but, you know, they are, you know, it's a very common story that, you know, Oh, I grew up in kind of a white suburb and, you know, where, you know, everything was clean and things were nice and, you know, you know, the streets were swept and, you know, and things just kind of looked nice.
And then I went to the city for college or I went to the, you know, and then I had to be around black people for a while.
And, you know, look, the city is a dirty and nasty and, you know, there's crime everywhere and this and, you know, it's, it's, It's very easy to hear them basically, you know, and it's because of these people, these like human cockroaches, these, you know, monkeys, these, you know, so many slurs, so much language that I could like reproduce if I was trying to not keep this relatively clean.
But, you know, there is this sort of sense that, yeah, it's these people doing ooga booga, and they're just kind of dirty and disgusting, and I just don't want them around me.
And a whole lot of them.
I mean, there are definitely figures for whom it really is just a kind of visceral, like, dislike.
Like, almost on this sort of, like, genetic... I don't want to say genetic level, because that just feeds into the same, like, racialist, you know, sociobiological ideas that they would love.
So I don't even want to use that as a metaphor.
But you definitely get the sense that some of these figures, it really is just this sort of like almost intrinsic dislike of being around people who are not white.
And in particular, people, you know, dark-skinned people of African descent.
And the darker, the worse it is.
And Australian Aborigines, those are the other people that they really find just physically disgusting and off-putting.
And it does seem to be just this gut instinct level that they seem to respond to that.
Spencer doesn't strike me as that.
He just strikes me as someone who sees himself as being superior and anyone who looks more like him.
I mean, I find it interesting, he did a, the British journalist, Gary Young, I'm sure you know him, he did a documentary.
He interviewed Spencer and he shows up at one of the NPI conferences.
He had been driving and he shows up and he's wearing a t-shirt and he's a journalist, right?
But he had a little bit of sweat on him or whatever.
It's Washington, D.C.
I think it's July or something like that.
Spencer comes out and he's clearly had a couple of bourbons in him and if you listen to his voice, Clearly, you know, he's been and he just he just sees he just he just thinks this man is disgusting and you know because he's black because he's overweight because he's sweaty because he's not like dressed nicely and he really just dismisses him I mean he talks it down to this you know to Gary a man I mean I don't know young you know too well you know personally
But, you know, I follow him on Twitter and I find him to be a perfectly reasonable human being.
He's a nice guy.
He seems to be about, you know, as good as mainstream journalism gets, I would say.
Right, yeah.
And, I mean, he's certainly, you know, asking, you know, the kind of appropriate questions of Spencer and, you know, certainly at least as bright as Spencer is in that moment.
Oh, yeah.
Considerably more so.
Right.
And Spencer just, you know, he dismisses it completely.
You know, and it's based purely on this sort of like physicality, on this purely, well he's he's slovenly and fat and black and like quite black at that, like not the sort of like what they say, high yellow, like the sort of, you know, again I don't even want to kind of get into like even talking about like kind of the descriptors they use.
That's another old one.
I mean, that's what they used to say.
They will embrace very old terminology.
That's what they used to say about Jefferson.
The rumor mongers would say, you know, he had a taste for the yellow.
Right, right.
No, I mean, they embrace, I mean, you know, it's funny to hear people say, yes, and then we're going to talk about a, you know, sort of like this detailed modern genetic evidence, which indicates clearly Absolutely.
the human race is composed of the the Negroids, the Mongoloids and the Caucasians.
You know, just just embrace this like completely outmoded, you know, absolutely 20th century eugenic language and then say, oh, and this is completely justified by 20th century and 21st century, you know, genetics.
But, you know, those people in parentheses will not ever like share this with you honestly, etc., you know.
Completely discredited 19th century imperialist race science that they just insist is verified despite the fact that it's been, you know, by every reputable scientist it's been put in the same place as phrenology.
They just insist that it's all true and it's been proven.
And they'll take some, some like genetic map, like from some paper, like completely out of context and then, you know, kind of draw on it and go like, yeah, see the gap between like the African DNA and the rest of the world DNA.
And it's like, you don't understand the first, like you do not, you know.
But you know because they've got a graph and then they can manipulate it and I think a lot of them You know believe there's a lot of stuff on this kind of bottom feeder Kind of stuff to where they clearly believe it and I think some of the other figures are are lying and like seem to like kind of be able to communicate clearly enough about this stuff and that I think some of them are kind of openly misrepresenting stuff and then there's hoping it spreads and Well, it's one of the hardest... Interestingly, Spencer doesn't use a lot of, like, genetic, you know, arguments.
I mean, he uses more kind of cultural arguments and more, you know, sort of, well, obviously our history tells us that we're just better, you know?
I don't think he has... He's too canny.
You know, he's not a fool.
Talk about how he won't use... you very rarely see him make the explicit scientific or pseudoscientific arguments.
No, he doesn't nail himself down somewhere like that.
He's pretty canny.
He's good at debating people.
He's good at presenting himself as Mr. Reasonable.
And a lot of that is knowing what not to say outright.
So you mentioned that he's doing this YouTube channel now.
I mean, what else is he doing now?
Is he doing What is his actual place in the movement?
What is the structure of the movement and where is he in it?
What's funny is that I feel like, again, in late 2016 and 2017, you could point to a handful of people who were undisputed leaders, thought leaders at least, in the movement.
I don't think Spencer is.
It's much more fragmented.
A lot of that has to do with Charlottesville like Charlottesville and and sort of the repercussions of that Really had this this extreme fragmenting effect and you know to where I mean I think today I was again.
I was thinking about this earlier today like who you know who are the leaders right now And it's like there's there's not I mean they just sort of have their own little fiefdoms Spencer is certainly sort of like broadly respected within you know certain within certain kind of Threads of the movement I mean he certainly can't this big name and I think even people who don't like him kind of broadly respect him for sort of like what he's done for the white race or whatever.
But I don't get a sense of their sort of like one place where everybody goes for.
For their sort of like information and talking points and stuff no it's very it's very diffuse isn't it it's it's one of its weaknesses and its strengths.
Right.
I mean, and so, you know, what is Spencer's place?
I mean, he's respected by, you know, at least a good solid chunk of the movement still respects him.
Even if they don't kind of personally like him, they think he's, you know, kind of got his head up his ass or his kind of nose in the air.
They think he's hoity-toity.
Well, they they all hate each other personally.
Right.
No, I mean, and that's something that just comes up over and over and over again is that these people cannot get along for more than 15 minutes at a time.
It's it's astonishing to see some of the some of the fights that they have.
And again, you know, there's always any any person of any kind of prominence there is there are, you know.
Always the conspiracy that, oh, they're secretly Jewish.
You know, that's always the thing.
You know, and, like, they find some, like, some, you know, like, I've seen people kind of do family trees, and like, oh, this was his half-sister, and, like, she was a full Jew, and she could, you know, and he's got that awful DNA in him or something, but, yeah, no, I mean, I think he's, I mean, he still does heel turn, he still goes on them.
The J'ai Public Space, which is J.F.
Gariepi.
It's another YouTube channel.
It's one that's... It's interesting, like, the number of different kinds of people that J.F.
talks to in any given day.
Because he seems to really have been able to kind of carve out a space for himself as, you know, kind of one of the sort of like central gathering points.
You know, like, everybody seems to kind of like JF in the movement, and you really don't see a lot of negativity directed at him specifically.
And I think it's because he's just a really kind of canny operator.
I mean, he's in some ways kind of does the same thing you were talking about, Richard Spencer, of kind of knowing what to say and what not to say.
He's another guy with sort of real academic credentials, although he was a – I think he has a PhD in biology, in sort of neuroscience.
And so he kind of puts out all the pseudo-science talking points about genetics and all that kind of bullshit.
But Richard Spencer has been kind of regularly on his program as well.
Which I think I mentioned earlier and it's kind of like kind of a All but in name co-host or at least sort of he's there often enough to kind of to kind of do that and I think I think one of the things is that after the after the sort of a public speaking tour ended it with in Michigan we had the You know, you basically had kind of a big confrontation and then, you know, Spencer puts out a video like this isn't fun anymore.
I'm not, you know, Antifa is winning, etc.
And, you know, kind of everybody clapped and cheered.
And my perspective was like, he's coming back, guys.
He's been doing this for 10 years already.
This is not going to end just because, you know, somebody punched him in the face.
It's just not going to happen.
It turns out he was going through kind of a nasty divorce as well, and that only came out after it was kind of over with.
He's got a new girlfriend, who apparently is a liberal quote-unquote.
There's been some kind of doxing going on around her and some commentary about who she is and all that sort of thing.
I don't know which which strikes me as like kind of slightly unproductive but he's got a new girlfriend now and um she's kind of appeared on his on his channel a couple of times and just kind of like said hi or whatever and uh he's just kind of he's just he's just kind of a person producing content but um and again i think it's interesting not explicitly under the alt-right banner you know he does seem to have distanced himself from his old You know, from the people that seem to be kind of his crew from the old days like Greg Conti and some of those other guys.
It's not that he's not still associated with them, but it does feel like this sort of like the alt-right brand.
He's moving away from that slightly and he's kind of just pushing the ideas through other channels.
But does he?
Again, he's in kind of a nebulous place.
I just don't know exactly what he's going out right now, but I'm still tracking him.
So yeah, go ahead.
What were you going to say?
No, I was just going to say, I mean, he doesn't have an organization, you know, like the Richard Spencer Party or something like that.
No, no.
I mean, I'm pretty sure altright.com still exists, and I believe he's still working for the NPI, the National Policy Institute.
I think he's still kind of like drawing income from that and kind of working on that level.
He still writes sometimes, but certainly in terms of like his kind of face out there, I mean, he did kind of step away for several months.
probably um like eight months or so where i mean you barely heard a peep out of him i think he put out two or three podcasts um just to sort of like sort of keep up appearances a little bit but um you know he he really stepped away to where he you just you just didn't seem around much and um you know whereas in um 2017 kind of leading up to you know at the right i mean he was he was everywhere he would he would just kind of go and show up on on you know i follow a bunch of shows and he he would do appearances on pretty much anybody that would have him for a while
but the trouble of course with a high profile is that it uh it kind of uh paints you into a corner doesn't it It nails down what you mean to people and how people perceive you.
Right.
And I mean, a lot of these podcasts, I mean, a lot of these kind of like, you know, alt-right podcasts are a little.
I mean, it's like you and I recording in a basement, essentially.
Yeah.
You know, they don't really have any more, you know, of a Sort of an audience or any more of a kind of cultural push than than you and I do But there are you know like there are literally hundreds of these kind of guys doing it And you know every kind of little bit helps, but he would show up on a lot of those You know even even some of those little guys.
He would kind of show up and do a 20-minute interview or whatever so and and mostly kind of pushing the same kinds of ideas, but I think it was like Sort of having that, kind of having that omnipresence.
And again, that's something that's changed since United Rights in Charlottesville, is that you see a lot more sort of people kind of deciding who is and is not in their little in-group and who is, you know, kind of trustworthy and not.
And I think Spencer is still navigating that space.
I'm actually interested to see kind of where this heel turn thing is going, because it does seem like kind of a really weird kind of left turn for him.
A heel turn in a way, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it works.
It does seem to be this kind of weird thing, and I'm not sure quite what it means, but I'm still following him, so I'll let you know if I figure it out.
Watch this space.
Yeah, no, I mean, I feel like it's, you know, the death of the alt-right was pronounced far too early, and they're clearly in a period of Fragmentation and but, you know, it's also a period of retrenchment and they're waiting for the next, you know, like he sees the opportunity when Alt-Right took off, you know, they're waiting for the next opportunity.
I think I think I'm going to and again, I am not looking forward to the 2020 election, but I also am.
I think that they're going to use a sort of a Trump reelection or I mean, I can I can only imagine if like a Trump impeachment happened, that they would they would really kind of rally together again.
What the whole thing lacks, and this is something that Richard Spencer just has not really expressed interest in being, although I think a lot of people wanted to kind of thrust it on him, was that Richard Spencer was going to be the leader of white nationalism.
He was going to be that face, and he was going to be that charismatic figure who could Really push it forward and Spencer himself said he always he didn't want to be Hitler He wanted to be Goebbels, you know, he wanted to be the cultural attache in the in the ethno state But he didn't want the job.
He didn't want the top job.
I'm I'm fine with him shooting himself.
So yeah, I Would I you know, I really try not to wish death on anyone, but I I would like him to just go away I was really happy when he wasn't producing when I just didn't have to think about him for a while It was really nice for me I wish they'd all just do that.
Just go and live your life and just stop.
Oh yeah, I'm happy for them to live if they just go and be quiet.
Just go and be quiet and happy and don't say things or talk to anybody.
That's fine.
Just turn your microphones off.
That's all.
That's what I'm asking.
There was this thought that he was going to be the one big leader that everybody was going to rally behind.
But I think he just doesn't, I think he's just not good enough at it.
Like he just doesn't kind of inspire that kind of, you know, that kind of passion in enough of the movement.
Like he's just, he's too smarmy and he's too kind of put together but not, and he's kind of too, again, kind of a mess of contradictions.
He's not really one of them in the way.
He doesn't have enough mainstream foothold to really become that.
He is what he is, because he's not quite the standard issue among his type.
he is what he is, you know, because he's not quite, you know, the standard issue among his type.
You know, if he was, he'd now have Ben Shapiro's job or whatever.
You know, he's ended up in this cul-de-sac because he's, for whatever reason, he's decided to become a fascist.
And that goes with certain things, you know, and you can smell it on them.
You know, he's the slickest and the most respectable and the most plausible of them.
And he's still, you know, he's a bit odd.
I mean, he just is.
I don't like to psychopathologize this stuff, but these people, they're all a bit odd.
And you can see it on.
On him too, you know, the waistcoats and the tank tops and the weird hairdo and shit, you know.
He wears the, like, you know, immaculately, you know, constructed suit, the, you know, $3,000 suit.
He wears the $3,000 suit, but the suit jacket is a size too small.
So whenever he buttons it and he's like marching, then it looks like he's, you know, like, it looks like he's wearing somebody else's.
Suit jacket, you know, and then we all make fun of him for that.
It's, it's, you know, it's, it's, again, I mean, I keep, I've said massive contradictions a few times, and I don't know that I've quite kind of explored that, but I, he, he is just said he is just kind of like that.
He sees there are a lot of different kind of competing impulses.
I think that he has this kind of idea of being the next David Duke.
Right.
But I don't think that he really has the ability to do so.
I think maybe if Unite the Right had not gone the way it went, I think that he might have been able to build that.
But I don't think he has that same kind of mainstreamist charm.
David Duke is someone we should probably talk about at some point.
David Duke is somebody we should talk about.
We should probably do an entire episode on just Charlottesville, you know, Unite the Right.
But I think we're done for this episode.
I think we can wrap this one up.
Any other details on Richard Spencer?
I'm sure we can talk about them in the future.
OK, that's great.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
And Daniel, do you know now what you'd like to do for the next one?
Or if not, I can edit this out.
Well, I mean, it's tempting to just kind of do another figure, and I think David Duke would be an interesting one to kind of talk about that history a little bit and sort of like who he is now.
Um, and also, um, he's much funnier to talk about than Richard Spencer.
Like, this got a little bit dry a little bit.
Okay, so.
David Duke, David Duke, there are lots of, like, fun little details about David Duke, um, and in particular David Duke in Charlottesville.
And, uh, so I think, I think that might be, um, it's hard to say, like, oh yeah, let's do a fun one.
Let's talk about David Duke.
But I think, I think he is, Legitimately sort of an interesting figure, and it gets into some of the history a little bit, sort of before it was alt-right, and the way that some of these old figures have embraced the term alt-right, and sort of embraced the terminology in some fascinating ways.
So yeah, let's just do David Duke next time.
Okay, sold.
You heard it here, listeners.
Come back next week for us having a fun, amusing chat about David Duke.
