We revisit the subject of our very first episode, Richard Spencer, catching up with his more recent exploits, all in an attempt to emphasize that a) he's still around, b) he's still dangerous, and c) he means what he says. Content Warnings. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Show Notes: Our previous episode on Richard Spencer, Episode 1 The New York Times, How a Small Town Silenced a Neo-Nazi Hate Campaign Rafi Schwartz, Discourse Blog, America’s Top Nazi Is a Broke Little Booger Who Can’t Get a Table The punch, which prompted plenty of handwringing and pearl-clutching over whether or not it’s okay to ever punch a Nazi (it sure is!), occurred during what should have been the height of Spencer’s career as a full-time racist — the inauguration of Donald Trump. Instead, it forever branded him as “that Nazi who got his clock thoroughly cleaned” and helped define him as the ur-bigot of the Trump era. This, I think, is crucial to the arc of Spencer’s seeming cancelation by the people of Whitefish. It’s much easier to identify a Nazi — and identify what should be done to them — when that Nazi has already become an internet joke for both being a Nazi, and facing the consequences thereof. Were Spencer not memed into oblivion as “the Nazi who got smacked,” my guess is that it wouldn’t have been quite so easy to rally an entire community to oppose him. Yes, it would likely still have happened in some form, thanks to the sincerely hard work of both activists, and ordinary citizens on the ground in Whitefish and elsewhere, but I can’t help but think that the moment Spencer got blasted in the jaw, his cancelation, or silencing, or whatever doofy substitute for “getting what he deserves” became inevitable. Tablet Mag, No, White Supremacist Richard Spencer Didn’t Seriously Endorse Joe Biden And yet, countless credulous accounts—many on the pro-Trump right, but also some on the anti-Biden left—uncritically shared Spencer’s posting as though it was on the level. That a disingenuous racist like Spencer would pretend to support Biden in order to get attention and undercut the former vice president is not surprising. What is surprising is how many people still fall for Spencer’s transparent trolling. In reality, Spencer and other white supremacists have a long history of purposely adopting their opponents’ causes and pretending to back them in order to undermine them. That’s exactly what Spencer did in 2018 by pretending to support “Zionism,” when he actually has a long history of hate towards both Israel and Jews, and claims that the Jewish state and its supporters control America. Daily Progress, RIchard Spencer-led organization ordered to pay $2.4 million in Unite the RIght lawsuit The biggest sum was awarded last week by an Ohio judge who ordered the National Policy Institute to pay Burke $2,444,461.15 for the harm he suffered as a result of the rally. The white supremacist think tank, which is led by UTR participant and University of Virginia graduate Spencer, was found to be in default approximately a year ago. Integrity First For America, Sines v. Kessler Eat the Rich Episode 91 on William Regnery II Paul Gottfried coins the term "alternative right." Richard Spencer introduces Ron Paul at the Robert Taft Club, October 11, 2007. Richard Spencer full NPI speech 2016, the origin of "Heilgate". Full text of that speech We need to remind ourselves of these things. None of this is natural. None of this is “normal.” This is a sick, disgusting, society, run by the corrupt, defended by hysterics, drunk on self-hatred and degeneracy. We invade the world and frantically invite entire populations who despise us. We subsidize people and institutions who make our lives worse just by the sheer fact of their existence. We run up deficits and pretend the laws of history simply don’t apply to us because of “American Exceptionalism.” This cannot go on any longer. And it won’t. At some level, we demand the impossible. Even those half-joking memes about Donald Trump as God-Emperor or as the progenitor of some glorious Imperium testify to the yearning for something more. Yes, we should insist on our dreams – on the conquest of space, on the development of revolutionary technology, for a humanity that is greater than we are today, for a race that travels forever on the upward path. But at another level, what we want is something normal, something almost prosaic maybe even boring. Why is something as simple as starting a family, owning a house, and leaving a legacy to your children seen as an almost impossible dream for so many Americans? Why must there be two incomes for a family simply to break even? Why is it impossible to build a real civic society because the whim of a federal bureaucrat or a Social Justice Warrior can impose Section 8 housing, refugee resettlement, or some other population transfer scheme deliberately designed to break apart functional white communities? Buzzfeed, Spencer's Wife Says in Divorce Filings that He Physically and Emotionally Abused Her The wife of Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader, has accused him of being “physically, emotionally, verbally and financially abusive” throughout their marriage, according to divorce filings in Flathead County District Court in Montana. Nina Koupriianova, who married Spencer in August 2010 and has two young children with him, alleges that Spencer physically abused her, including instances where she was “being hit, being grabbed, being dragged around by her hair, being held down in a manner causing bruising, and being prevented from calling for help.” Koupriianova — who went by Kouprianova in some public interviews and N.K. in the documents — “has been reluctant to call police or seek an order of protection for fear of further reprisal by” Spencer, her lawyers said in court documents. “Much of the abuse has occurred in the presence of the parties’ children.”
But I think it is imperative that we maintain the legality of abortion.
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Okay, and welcome to episode 93, and welcome to episode 93, an episode entitled, 93, an episode entitled, provisionally entitled, Oh Dear God, It's 2021 and Apparently I Still Have to Think About Richard Spencer,
Why are you doing this to me, Daniel?
Why couldn't I be torn to pieces by a pack of rabid hounds instead?
Actually, we might simplify that for the release.
So Daniel, That's what this is about.
It's old school IDSG, isn't it?
Very old school.
We're going back.
I have a link.
The very first link in the show notes is to our previous episode about Richard Spencer, at least our first episode about Richard Spencer, which was, if you can recall that far back, January 2019, episode one.
Our very first episode.
And now 92 episodes later, having kind of bounced along the Richard Spencer from time to time and having discussed him and even played clips of him when he was being slightly more rational than his Nazi compatriots.
We are now covering him again.
Um, and you might ask why.
And in fact, I think, uh, I think, I think everyone is asking why.
Um, and the answer being, uh, many fold.
Uh, one, uh, he, a lot has happened since January, 2019, and it's worth getting into some of that, uh, two, um, Coming out of kind of several months of doing kind of IDW stuff, I thought it was worth kind of easing back into the Nazi content and giving the new listeners a little bit of a primer of the stuff that we used to do.
And three, he, well, not even he, but I've been kind of notoriously, I don't want to say pissed off, but I'm discomfited by the way Richard Spencer is still talked about in the mainstream media.
And don't worry, we're going to be getting into that very shortly.
And particularly some recent news articles that seem to still not understand things that they should have known in late January of 2017.
So we're going to get into that.
I'm really, I'm really, I don't know how to quite begin because like I could tell people to just go back and listen to episode one.
I feel like I want to kind of re-summarize kind of the the basics of who Richard Spencer is here.
The term alternative right, which got later shortened to alt-right, was Not quite coined by Richard Spencer, but it was certainly sort of popularized by Richard Spencer.
It came about by a speech by this guy named Paul Gottfried, who gave a speech in November of 2008, which, if you will recall, is several days after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.
And Gottfried gave a speech in which he kind of uses the term alternative right and kind of discusses what the right wing in the United States needs to be doing in the future based on the failures of the George W. Bush administration and then sort of like against the neocon wing.
And So the history is that the term alternative right or alt-right, it first gets used by Spencer.
Then it kind of comes out of favor after a couple of years.
Gets picked up by this kind of manosphere online community.
And then he kind of comes back to it in a big way and starts embracing some of the memes.
He starts embracing Pepe.
He starts embracing some of the internet subculture.
But Richard Spencer himself is not of that subculture.
He doesn't come from this world, right?
He comes from this world of his family owned a plantation in slaveholder era in Louisiana.
They have a very nice house at Whitefish, Montana.
Reality is sometimes distressingly on the nose.
Absolutely.
He was pursuing a PhD, I believe, at Duke University.
He was friends with Stephen Miller, formerly of the Trump White House, while he was at school at Duke.
They knew each other.
They were friends.
He had a multi-year career as a Columnist, he was an editor at the American Conservative.
He was an editor at Tacky Mag.
This is a guy who comes from this sort of like, I don't want to say alternative right, but like a, he comes from this storied world of like public far-right intellectuals who had a place at the table, although it was not in the kind of inner confines of the kind of neoconservative think tank world.
He wasn't getting the big money from That instead, he was getting the smaller money from a guy named William Regnery, who recently died.
We were going to do an episode on William Regnery.
I was starting to prep it.
And then the excellent podcast, Eat the Rich, did it for me.
There's a link in the show notes.
So go learn all about William Regnery.
He founds this kind of Regnery publishing imprint.
He's a complete piece of shit.
He called late in his life the hiring of Richard Spencer to run the National Policy Institute.
The, uh, kind of the, the, the crown of his career.
He called it like the, one of the best things he had ever done for, um, his, his kind of political scene and yeah, for the world.
Like, you know, it was his thing that he thought he had done best in his career basically was finding this brilliant, bright diamond shard person, Richard Spencer.
So, um, And this guy has a long, long history of being a complete piece of shit, by the way.
Regnery Imprint, by the way, one of the things I learned recently as I was researching another episode is that Abigail Schreier's book, Irreversible Damage, the horrifyingly anti-trans book that, yeah, it was published by Regnery Press, which should tell you everything you need to know about the TERF Nazi continuum.
Right, right, yeah.
Caceres on YouTube, go and watch those videos.
Oh yes, definitely, definitely.
I look forward to every one.
I've seen them all at least twice.
It's great stuff.
I was listening to a Megyn Kelly episode with Abigail Schreier just before we started recording today because, like, I am a glutton for fucking punishment apparently.
Yeah, and then to make self feel better you went and repeatedly slammed your hand in the desk drawer.
Right, exactly.
That's basically what my Sundays are like before we start recording, you know.
Abigail Schreier and then, you know, self-abuse.
That's the two, you know, and then we start recording.
Not the fun kind.
Not the fun kind, no.
So, he founds the term alt-right, he kind of builds this, this movement around him.
He's this sort of leading light and he gets, because he's well-dressed and he's the dapper young Nazi, he gets a lot of press.
And, you know, aligns himself with the Trump movement really much more of in a In it like riding the coattails way than actually like really 100% supporting Trump and yeah, we're gonna what I think and this is the thing that I kind of run into is that so there was this piece in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago as we're recording this how a small town silenced a neo-nazi hate campaign.
There's a link to this in the show notes.
This is the story of a woman named Tanya Gersh, who was a Jewish woman, wealthy Jewish woman in the town of Whitefish, Montana, where Richard Spencer and I believe parts of his family also lived there.
There's a long story involving Andrew Anglin and Christopher Cantwell was a part of that, which is a part of the New York Times story.
But essentially, the Gersh family and the Spencer family had a bit of a fight over a property dispute.
And essentially, Andrew Anglin tried to send a hate mob after Tanya Gersh on his Daily Stormer website.
And then the Channel Whitefish organized against organized against the far right.
And so this piece in the New York Times is very much kind of a profile of that and kind of gets quotes from Spencer and kind of Spencer's involvement with it.
And The Twitterverse rediscovers Richard Spencer all that often, you know?
Like the liberal Twitterverse and even sort of the left of center Twitterverse.
Discovers Richard Spencer, and they discover things like, oh yeah, look at that loser.
Remember the punch video?
That's all anybody remembers about the punch, about Richard Spencer.
He got punched that one time in 2016, 2017 actually, on Inauguration Day.
He got punched.
That's, that was the meme.
That's the funny thing.
That's all.
And then once he was punched, he went away.
There was no longer any Richard Spencer for anybody to worry about.
That's what happened.
Problem solved.
And I have here, I have here a, I mean, don't get me wrong, you know, the punch is fine.
Oh, no, the punch is fine.
The punch is fine.
I mean, you know, we're not saying Richard Spencer shouldn't have been punished that day.
Believe me, we are very much pro Richard Spencer shouldn't have been punished that day.
I'm just saying it wasn't a, well, what phrase could you use?
A final solution.
This is a piece by Rafi Schwartz, a Discourse blog.
America's top Nazi is a broke little booger who can't get a table.
And it goes through all the kind of like the New York Times piece is kind of about kind of the Spencer can't hang out in his hometown of Whitefish and like restaurants won't serve him and he's broke because his lawyers fired him because he's getting sued and all this other stuff.
And I'm not trying to pick on this particular piece, but this is kind of endemic of how people discuss this issue.
And so I'm just going to quote this briefly.
And I, in fair disclosure, I think I saw this at the time and I tweeted about how happy it made me.
So maybe I'm falling into the same trap that you're about to have a go at other people.
Well, I'm not, I don't want to, I don't want to be, I'm not trying to be critical of this impulse.
So what I want to do is I want to explore this impulse a little bit.
Okay.
So, so this is what we're doing.
So let's just read this, this, this bit here and then we'll unpack it slightly.
Yep.
The punch, which prompted plenty of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching of whether or not it's ever okay to ever punch a Nazi, it sure is, occurred during what should have been the height of Spencer's career as a full-time racist, the inauguration of Donald Trump.
Instead, it forever brighted him as that Nazi who got his clock thoroughly cleaned and helped define him as the er-bigot of the Trump era.
This, I think, is crucial to the arc of Spencer's seeming cancellation by the people of Whitefish.
It's much easier to identify a Nazi and identify what should be done to them when that Nazi has already become an internet joke for both being a Nazi and facing the consequences thereof.
Were Spencer not memed into oblivion as the Nazi who got smacked, my guess is that it wouldn't have been quite so easy to rally an entire community to oppose him.
Yes, it would likely still have happened in some form, thanks to the sincerely hard work of both activists and the ordinary citizens on the ground in Whitefish and elsewhere, but I can't help but think that the moment Spencer got blasted in the jaw, his cancellation or silencing, or whatever doofy substitute for getting what he deserves, became inevitable.
Now, what are your thoughts on that?
Just sorry, I'm kind of confronting you with this a little bit blind, but what are your thoughts on that?
Because there's a lot I would agree with there.
Yeah, there's a lot I agree with there as well, actually, to be completely irrelevant.
I once wrote a thing about how in England, kind of the official list of our bad kings all turns out to be the ones that got overthrown or usurped.
And like our official list of good kings include kings like Edward III, who started the Thirty Years' War.
Or was it?
No, it was the Hundred Years' War.
I beg your pardon.
I did you a disservice there, Edward.
He's one of our good ones.
Whereas the bad ones are the kind of, you know, weren't very efficient and got themselves overthrown by a Duke or something.
So yeah, I think that's probably quite acute, actually, that observation.
Well, I think that there's this, what this elides for me, and the quote, even the bit that I quoted, and I'm trying to be very fair to this, does talk about like, The sincerely hard work of activists and ordinary citizens on the ground, etc, etc.
But the meme, the punch, there is this kind of feeling that like, well, he got punched in the face and then he became irrelevant thereafter, when really what happened was, well, after the punch, the people in Whitefish Including, like, local law enforcement and chamber of commerce types who, like, he, you know, just didn't like him because he was bad PR for them.
Not because he was a Nazi, because he was a too high profile Nazi, because he'd always been a Nazi.
Yeah, made them look bad.
He made them look bad, right?
So the citizens had to actually do things other than just the one guy who punched Richard Spencer.
And then he was still eight months away from co-headlining and co-organizing the Unite the Right rally in August of 2017.
And then he got confronted in the streets again.
And at the same time, he was still getting, you know, fairly sympathetic press, even from, quote unquote, liberal media all over the place.
And even after that, it wasn't until He had several lawsuits filed against him and many other confrontations by incredibly brave activists who did not become part of a meme on the internet because of, you know, happenstance, who actually got him to stop doing what he was doing and kind of forced him underground.
Yeah, he was broken by finances.
Effectively, he could not afford to keep going in the way that he was going.
He met too much resistance.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what harder, lower profile, less glamorous, you know, long, hard slog stuff, right?
The punch is, I mean, I, I could, I could kind of take the, like the meme is worth something in the meme, like told people who he was or galvanized people.
But the punch itself, like Spitzer himself, and unfortunately I don't have this audio because I wasn't archiving everything back in early 2017.
And you know, in fact, this is part of why I learned to archive fucking everything.
But like he also, he gets de-platformed on a regular basis from his like kind of audio and video feeds.
And so he says a whole lot of different stuff that just kind of popped up over the years.
He loves the sound of his own voice and spends much time talking into microphones to anyone who will listen.
Anyway, but a whole bunch of stuff has been deleted.
But I remember listening in early 2017 to him talking about like, well, yeah, I got punched.
I mean, it hurt my face for a couple of hours, but like, ultimately, you know, usually they just bring silly string.
And so who the fuck cares?
It's kind of his opinion.
Whenever and whenever he's asked about this stuff, Richard Spencer did not stop doing Activism because he got punched in the face that one time like that's just not like he doesn't he doesn't care about that And you say to me, it's like, you know, it has to be a long campaign of punches everywhere.
He goes every time, you know, punches of, you know, metaphorical as well as literal one, right?
It's not just physically punching people in the face.
It's very much.
It's it's it's a it's a whole campaign.
It's a boxing campaign.
It's ideological warfare.
It's, you know, physical confrontation.
It's putting like one of the things that people will do is just like kind of make it inconvenient for him to talk.
You know, blowing kazoos whenever he's trying to give an interview, symbols and like, you know, just, just noisemakers and stuff like, like that's, it's amazing how effective like just that kind of stuff is, you know, outmanning whenever he brings 30 people along, bring 3000 people to counter protest, you know, even, you know, that stuff is much, much more effective than, You know, debating him in rational logic, certainly.
Or, you know, a single incredibly meme-worthy punch.
Like, however much we might appreciate the punch, the punch is not actually the thing, you know?
It's a brick in the wall, yeah.
Now, you may be asking me, Daniel, Maybe he was just lying on that podcast.
You know Richard Spencer.
He is someone who is just, he's deeply ironic.
He does not say what he means.
He endorsed Biden for Christ's sake.
Look, I got this piece from Tablet Magazine here.
I'm going to quote very slightly.
No, white supremacist Richard Spencer didn't seriously endorse Joe Biden, this person from Tablet Mag says, puts in his article.
Quoting from this, and yet countless credulous accounts, many on the pro-Trump right, but also some on the anti-Biden left, uncritically shared Spencer's posting as though it was on the level.
That a disingenuous racist like Spencer would pretend to support Biden in order to get attention and undercut the former vice president is not surprising.
What is surprising is how many people still fall for Spencer's transparent trolling.
In reality, Spencer and the other white supremacists have a long history of purposely adopting their opponents' causes and pretending to back them in order to undermine them.
That's exactly what Spencer did in 2018 by pretending to support Zionism when he actually has a long history of hate towards both Israel and the Jews and claims that the Jewish state and its supporters control America.
Now, there's a lot to unpack there as well.
I would like to just note, and we can discuss this if you like, but just note that like supporting quote unquote Zionism of some form and believing that the Jews and the Jewish state are controlling America are actually not mutually inconsistent positions.
No, not necessarily.
No.
And I'm not saying I obviously I'm not supporting either one of those things, but we're just saying they're not the same thing.
It's not the same thing.
They're not they're not mutually mutually opposed.
Right.
But this, like, piety that, like, Richard Spencer, of course, is just trolling by pretending to support Biden.
He's just one of those weird, alt-right weirdos.
He has nothing to do with, like, politics.
He doesn't say anything that he actually believes.
He is not like us and our normal, you know, people that we can have conversations with who are within the mainstream of political discourse.
The people like Richard Spencer, they just lie all the time.
And I know that because he said something that I kind of agree with.
He said something that I kind of agree with, and therefore, he has to just be trolling.
If he supports Biden, what am I supposed to do?
Support Trump?
I'm not trying to oversimplify this, like, particular article, right?
Although I think the article is very bad, I think that you should not be able to write pieces about Richard Spencer, if that's your take on Richard Spencer, because it means that you don't know anything about Richard Spencer.
Guess what I know something about?
Richard Spencer.
So, let's walk through some clips.
What I want to get across here is that Richard Spencer just says what he believes.
He tells jokes.
He uses an ironic tone from time to time, but we're going to walk through from 2007 to like last week, and I want to paint a picture of Richard Spencer as someone who is not lying.
He is not trolling.
When he says things, he says things that he actually believes in, and he is in some ways thoroughly ensconced in a far-right kind of ideological tradition.
Like that's how he sees himself and that's how he is.
And if we are going to reject Spencer and the people surrounding Richard Spencer, we not only have to reject these sort of like the trashy far-right Pepe types and the Daily Shoah and the people who use the n-word a bunch, but the entire ideological edifice that surrounds them.
This is the earliest thing I can find of him speaking on YouTube.
This is from 2007.
He was a speaker.
He was introducing Ron Paul, who was at the time running for president.
Yes, I've come across this one in my own researches.
At the Robert Taft Club.
Now, there's a long history here about the Robert Taft Club.
Believe me, I don't have the complete Richard Spencer timeline in front of me and every position he ever held and that sort of thing.
I was putting notes together and decided if there is some professional podcast production company that wants to do a six-episode miniseries about the history of Richard Spencer, I would be happy to write and present that for you.
You just have to pay me because that's work.
That's significant work.
He's trying to get away from me, folks.
I'm not going to let him.
This is from this is from October of 2007.
And this is his this is kind of the this is the bulk of his introduction.
And this is, again, I want to be clear.
I want you to listen to this.
And I want you to listen to all the other clips and there is a progression.
in terms of who he's speaking to, but ultimately the Spencer that you see in 2007 is the same Spencer that you see in 2021.
And he is not trolling, right?
So let's just start here.
This is his introduction to Ron Paul.
A year away from the presidential election, conservatives stand at a crossroads, especially when it comes to the issue of foreign policy.
This is certainly not always the case.
For 60 years, conservatives of a variety of stripes, traditionalists, libertarians, Wall Street conservatives, neocons, were able to look over some differences.
For 60 years this happened.
Okay.
They were able to look over some very obvious differences and able to rally around opposition to the Soviet Union.
Indeed, I think one could say that the post-war conservative movement would be impossible without that foreign policy consensus.
The end of the Cold War brought a host of new opportunities, but it also brought about some serious, very difficult questions that in many ways the conservative movement has been unwilling, perhaps incapable of answering.
Such as, should the U.S.
sustain the fighting force abroad, or should we withdraw and kind of bring the troops home and invest a peace dividend at home?
Should we actually make considerations for the spread of democracy abroad, or the spread of human rights abroad, or something like this, or to take part in humanitarian interventions?
Also, what could be the role of international bodies that arose during the Cold War, such as the U.N.
or NATO?
Should these have a role to play afterward?
Again, the conservative movement never answered these questions.
Sometimes they would support interventions, sometimes not.
Sometimes they would favor democratization, sometimes not.
Certainly after 9-11, President George W. Bush has forcefully reinvented the foreign policy of the Republican Party, and by extension, much of the conservative movement, to be one of active interventionary attacks.
And to this, he's married a visionary faith that America represents a universal system that we can export abroad.
In the President's words, we are led by events and common sense to one conclusion.
The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.
The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in the whole world, or Baghdad is going to be a democracy by next Tuesday.
While such sentiments might be appealing, the reality of the U.S.
occupation has led a substantial majority of Americans to disapprove of the President's conduct of foreign policy and to seriously question democratization as a foreign policy rationale.
In this way, conservatives have an opportunity to chart a new course.
If we're going to really rethink everything, then there's no one better to turn to than Representative Ron Paul of Texas.
Lots of things to pull out of that.
First, that's literally a clip from C-SPAN.
It's pretty boring, and I played it at length in part to demonstrate that.
But he also... Yeah, Richard Spencer on C-SPAN, yeah.
This isn't a man breathing fire.
This isn't a man, you know, screaming ethnic slurs.
He's... Thoroughly respectable young conservative.
Thoroughly respectable young conservative.
He is, let's see, 2007.
He would have been, you know, 30s, mid 30s at this point, early 30s maybe.
He is, you notice that there's a, the crowd is definitely aware of some of the kind of like internal dynamics and some of the unstated jokes there.
There's a chuckle when he refers to, you know, certain, you know, kind of ideological differences among the wings of the Republican Party.
It's not hard to imagine.
There were liberals in 2007 or so, or at least in 2005-2006.
There was a strand of mainstream progressive liberalism who looked at Ron Paul and kind of saw him as this kind of like, yeah, we can kind of get on board with this.
This is Prior to, you know, kind of Obama coming on the scene and kind of charming everybody's pants off.
But, you know, there was this there was this sense of, you know, we hate the war, even a, you know, kind of a libertarian or a Republican type who is against the war.
You know, you can almost imagine these is like the never Bush Democrats or the never Bush Republicans.
Right.
That's the kind of frame that we kind of see from that.
And it's built on this, you know, they're not, you know, it's kind of a flowery language, but it is this kind of non-interventionist, we don't believe in this, you know, bringing democracy to the Middle East, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, this is not a liberal, you know, this is not something you would have seen from like a liberal politician, a democratic politician in 2007.
But it's something that a lot of people could kind of have gotten along with, you know, this is not a hundred miles away from stuff that was being said at that time, right?
Yeah, I mean, I remember like right about this time, Jon Stewart was kind of puffing Ron Paul, you know, it was kind of in a, you know, the conservative media won't talk about him and won't talk about his, his candidacy for president, etc.
But it was, yeah, he got a respectful hearing.
No, definitely.
And I believe Ron Paul actually showed up on the Daily Show at some point.
I'm sure he did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is, this is boring policy agenda type stuff, right?
You know, this is about a year prior to the kind of founding of the alt-right.
This is before he gets into explicitly kind of white nationalist politics, but he was You know, working at the American Conservative at this point, he was, you know, writing essays, writing papers, he was editing pieces.
And the issue was that, you know, down the line, he was kind of that harder edge, he was just slightly too White nationalist for the paleoconservatives.
He was slightly on that kind of like edgy side.
In fact, in the, I believe in that piece, he thanks VDR as being one of the funding organizations for the Robert Taft Club, which I didn't want to play the entire thing, but like there's a lot of that going on.
So these groups exist in order to kind of launder the reputations of these people.
And that's who Richard Spencer was in 2007.
It's just completely bog standard, boring, You know, vaguely white nationalist, but like very respectable person, you would sit and have a glass of mediocre bourbon with if you were so inclined.
The point being that there's a hell of a lot of these people, you know, thoroughly respectable mainstream to, you know, external appearances people.
In the Republican Party.
And, you know, you scratch the top layer off and you've got white nationalists underneath.
Right.
I mean, not even really the stuff, the top layer anymore.
Yeah.
And the explicit thing once, and this is something where I call Donald Trump a catalyst for this kind of white nationalist movement, as opposed to a cause of it, because it already existed.
It was already there.
It was in the like, it was in the like, The halls of power, just in this kind of very hidden kind of cultivated way, and not being given what kind of the full reins of power, as opposed to sort of the more neocon, you know, stride the world with a big dick and, you know, a big army kind of kind of kind of strategy towards towards politics.
The decline of the Republican Party after, in the last couple of years, the Bush administration, in some ways, created a power vacuum for people like this to kind of start to get a little bit more attention, to get a little bit more time for themselves.
The Tea Party happens, the alt-right happens, Manosphere, Gamergate, yada, yada, yada, we could do whole episodes about all of these things, and we have done about some of these things.
I was going to say, we have, yeah.
We have, yeah.
Go back in the archives.
But the next thing that, the next clip I have anyway, is from 2016.
And this is from the NPI, that's the National Policy Institute, of which Richard Spencer was the, I forget what exactly his title was, but he was the, he was the head, he was running it, he was the CEO or whatever.
of the National Policy Institute.
They ran an annual conference for at least several years and gave time for open white nationalists for this kind of online subculture, the alt-right.
They were bringing some of those people and some of their ideas into some of this kind of like off-center annals of power thing.
And so they were the first group or among the first groups to really support Trump.
Although some of these guys did not support him, you know, too openly too early, but there was definitely a sense of Trump had their style and this is partly through the kind of the Bannon influence who is also kind of feeding on this kind of like online alt-right energy.
I mean, there's a real mixture.
There's a real kind of complex thing kind of happening in that 2014 to mid 2017 era.
And this clip that I'm about to play you is from the MPI Conference 2016, mere days after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, before he had taken office.
And this was the Howgate incident.
Do you remember the Howgate incident?
Oh, yes, yes.
Yeah, this bits of this were captured by the Atlantic, and there was a big viral video of like at the end of this speech, Richard Spencer calls out hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory.
And a whole bunch of people give the quote unquote Roman salute, which is the Nazi, the Nazi arm salute thing for people who don't know what the Roman salute is.
They put together a sizzle reel of this of this thing, which, you know, in which Richard Spencer says the words like Lugan Presa.
And, you know, he uses the he says the word cock and he uses a lot of the kind of the alt right language, because in this crowd, these are mainly young white men who are very invested in this kind of online subculture.
And the idea was that they were going to use the online subculture and write it into kind of the halls of power through Meme magic, right?
So he's opportunistically using a certain kind of language.
Right.
He's using a certain kind of language, and he continued to do so, not just in this kind of place, but in various other fora.
He would definitely went on the Daily Shoah and used the language and said all the same things.
It was part of the language that they were just using at that time.
This is where the action was.
But the movement, the white nationalist movement and what Richard Spencer's project is, is much larger than just an online subculture.
And I think that's something that because he comes to the public consciousness in this way, I think there was maybe that's where some of this sense of like, oh, he's just a troll because he's using the Pepe meme or because he was wearing a Pepe pin.
When he got punched in the face.
In fact, he was being asked by the reporter what the Pepe pen meant at that time.
I was going to say, at the moment he was punched, he was talking about how it was a great symbol.
Right, right.
And that's all it ever was, was a symbol.
It was a way to rally people around it.
The other thing that I wanted to highlight in that original clip that will play through the rest of this is that Richard Spitzer is also a very, he has an idealist conception of politics, by which I mean, you know, he believes that, you know, He's a very much a great man of history kind of guy.
And he believes that the ideas of great men, the actions of great men who have great ideas that can inspire a public and kind of like that's how history is driven.
And he does not view history through a kind of materialistic lens.
He doesn't view history through a realist kind of like angle of like what's actually going on, what actually causes like the war in Afghanistan.
We have a clip about the end of the wire in Afghanistan coming up, but this is why I use that example, but it's always through this, you know, that through this kind of will to power kind of language through this, this language of, you know, we have to have a vision of our future and we have to establish that vision.
And that's the way that like white people are going to, you know, sustain through this kind of dark time in our history in which we are not masters of our destiny, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
We'll come back to that.
But this is, again, Richard Spencer, from that same speech, from that speech at the MPI conference.
This is the more quiet thing that he was saying.
And I want to, again, kind of highlight how much this is So this is from earlier in the speech.
This is before he says, hail Trump, hail victory, hail our people.
What gets played is kind of the beginning where he's kind of like introing and kind of doing the jokes about Pepe and Lugan President and all that sort of thing.
And then the end where people are throwing Roman salutes.
This is the message that he's ultimately trying to send.
And this is the message that gives people The desire to throw the Roman salute, because this is the real thing that they want, and Trump is seen as a vessel towards that end, right?
So this is kind of the matter of the spit, I mean, to the extent that it has any matter.
A lot of people won't have heard.
They'll have heard the controversial showy bit at the end, but not this bit.
And again, this is on the longer side of a clip I would normally play, but I think it's important to give this context.
If we're going to do Richard Spencer again, this is what I want people to take away from it, right?
This is what he's actually saying.
Yeah.
I mean, he does say a lot of bigoted shit as well, and we'll get into that here shortly, but this is the side, this is the thing that makes people, that sort of brought people to his side, maybe, is kind of what I'm trying to get at here.
We need to remind ourselves of these things.
None of this is natural.
None of this is normal.
This is sick.
Disgusting.
This is a sick, disgusting society run by the corrupt, defended by hysterics, drunk on self-hatred and degeneracy.
We invade the world and fanatically invite entire populations who despise us.
We subsidize people and institutions who make our lives worse just by the sheer fact of their existence.
We run up deficits and pretend the laws of history simply don't apply to us because of American exceptionalism.
This cannot go on any longer.
And it won't.
At some level, we demand the impossible.
Even those half-joking memes about Donald Trump as God Emperor or as the progenitor of some glorious imperium testify to that yearning for something more.
Yes, we should insist on our dreams.
On the conquest of space.
On the development of revolutionary technology.
For a humanity that is greater than we are today.
for a race that travels forever on an upward path.
But on another level, what we want is something normal, Something almost prosaic, maybe even boring.
Why is something as simple as starting a family, owning a home, and leaving a legacy to your children seen as an almost impossible dream for so many Americans?
Why must there be two incomes for a family to simply break even?
Why is it impossible to build a real civic society because the whim of a federal bureaucrat or a social justice warrior can impose Section 8 housing, refugee resettlement, or some other population transfer scheme deliberately designed to break apart functional white communities?
I think I really kind of come back to just listen to that again is Tucker Carlson sounds like that every night these days.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's literally what I was about to say.
You can hear that every night on the Tucker Carlson Show now.
Right.
Tucker is a little bit, he's a little bit punchier in his delivery, and he will shy away from the more overt, he probably would not say white communities there at the end.
He would say, you know, middle class communities or your community.
He would just say your community.
Yeah, he knows who he's talking to.
He would cut out the, you know, kind of the harder edges, some of the more overt language.
And there is some more overt language throughout the rest of the speech, don't get me wrong, through Spencer's speech.
But again, When we say that Tucker Carlson is playing by the, you know, the alt-right playbook, he's, you know, like, that's exactly what he's doing.
Now, the thing is that the white nationalists have moved beyond the alt-right, but you could play bits of Tucker Carlson any night and listen to, and that's what, that's what this is, right?
Yeah, the point being that what Richard Spencer was saying at the dawn of the Trump presidency is now mainstream.
He has, amongst others, successfully injected that into the mainstream.
Right.
In part, because he got he got a lot of credulous, overly credulous press coverage in the 2016 2017 era.
Right.
You know, yeah, sure.
Sorry, it's just I just listened to that again.
It just it drives me.
It's sorry.
Yeah, it's hard to it's hard to know what to do with childish drivel like that.
But yeah, I feel you.
But again, There are no jokes here.
I mean, he references, you know, God, Emperor Trump as a meme.
He references the, you know, the glorious imperium kind of stuff.
These are jokes that we tell online.
These are memes that we put forward in order to push our actual political agenda.
Our actual political agenda is we need to have a, you know, higher purpose for white people.
And what we want is both kind of a soaring civilization that's going to the stars and Ordinary, you know, family.
We want the ability to, you know, have our families and have our, you know, kind of prosaic, comfortable lives.
We want our little house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and we want space travel and internet.
And we're using the presidency.
White people should be able to live in the mythical 1950s forever.
Right.
Like the future 1950s, you know, that kind of Robert Heinlein-verse, you know?
Yeah.
But without the group sex and without all the fun stuff, you know?
Yeah.
Well, as I say, not the real 1950s, the mythological 1950s, you know, the 1950s that is deconstructed in David Lynch movies, that completely blank and on the square, white, all white people should be able to live in that world, you know?
And the fact that they can't, it's all the fault of elites and people of color and, you know, people in three parentheses.
Yeah, we know what you're saying.
Well, and you know, why is it impossible?
Sorry, I put it, I put the link to the full text of that speech, you just want to read the speech, you can also do that.
So I do have it right here.
But he does have the line, you know, why is it impossible to build a real civic society because the whim of a federal bureaucrat, and you can see the three parentheses there, or a social justice warrior, look at the three parentheses there.
can impose Section 8 housing, black people coming into your community, refugee resettlement, brown people coming into your community, or some other population transfer scheme deliberately designed to break apart functional white communities.
This is great replacement shit.
Like, but he's not saying it as great replacement.
He's, everybody knows what he's saying.
Everybody agrees with what he's saying.
But he's not even there.
He's not quite saying it.
But again, not a joke.
There are no jokes here.
There's no there's no there's nothing.
This isn't some bit that he's putting on.
Listen to what he's saying, and he's saying what he actually believes.
Absolutely, yeah.
And it's actually, you know, not to give the man any credit, but it's actually quite well calibrated to span that gap between the actual fascist ideology, which forms the basis of what loads of people in
The basis of the Republican Party, to be blunt about it, loads of people in that party actually believe, which comes down to stuff when you actually state it outright, it comes down to the white genocide conspiracy theory and shit like that, biological racism, to span the gap between that as a sort of overt statement and just the normal functioning of the Republican Party and the conservative movement as a mainstream movement.
He's consciously calibrating it so that he's kind of bridging that gap.
He's couching the overt Nazi shit, which is secretly and always has been secretly at the base of it, in something that's a little bit further towards honesty than the normal mainstream rhetoric.
And in the process is making the Nazism both more overt and kind of trying to make it sound more respectable.
Well, and the whole, I mean, this is something that, you know, we've said before on many and many episodes and doesn't necessarily apply so much to Richard Spencer.
Although I think, I think it does, but it's less overt when it comes to Spencer, because Spencer doesn't really believe in like people's opinions mattering in Spencer's world.
There are elites and he is one of them.
And then there are peons and we played that clip on this show about him.
You know, people should look up and see a face like he's looking down at them.
We're going to play it again here in a minute.
I thought we might.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, no.
So, so when I tell you that Richard Spencer is not joking, that when he says, when, when he says something 99% of the time, you can take him at his word.
I mean that literally.
We're going to fast forward through a little bit of history here.
You run through Spencer's, kind of his peak as a political figure.
He gets on a bunch of news programs, he gets interviewed, he does a ton of magazine puff pieces.
Late 2016, early 2017, up through August 2017, are this kind of increasing series of victories for Richard Spencer and the alt-right.
They go out and terrorize communities, they give Marches and speeches almost every week.
There are, you know, beatings in the street of leftists, Antifa, people of color, trans people, etc, etc, etc.
Not all of which is directly connected to Spencer, of course, but Spencer is the founder of this movement.
He is the undisputed leader at this point of white nationalism in America.
Until August 12th, 2017, in which, because there was enough prior notice, and people actually were able to get organized, and because the media covered it so extensively, go back and listen to Episode 3 about the Unite the Right rally, and Episode 4 about the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally, if you are so inclined.
We've already done two, I think, very good episodes on this topic, you know, so I don't want to have to revisit the whole thing, but Yeah, very proud of those early episodes.
He is riding the wave of victory until he is confronted in a very real way in a very public way on the streets by on August 11th, 2017, and on August 12th, 2017, who it is those on the ground activists, much more so than the guy who punched Richard Spencer on Donald Trump's inauguration day, who are
If you're going to count somebody confronting Spencer in the street, those are the people that really, that's the turning point.
Because then the violent intentions of what white nationalism is, it's not quote-unquote peaceful ethnic cleansing, it's ethnic cleansing.
Which, there's no difference between the two, but like suddenly it's kind of masked off.
And not only on that day, but he continues to try to do a college tour up through like middle of 2018, in which I believe the final kind of straw was in Lansing.
He is confronted kind of for the last time.
He can no longer afford the insurance premiums for the security that he's going to need in order to continue to do the rallies because he has been bankrupted both By his continuing college tour and by the fact that, like, after Unite the Right, the movement itself was torn apart because so many people got doxxed that day.
And, you know, there's this siloing effect in which, like, Richard Spencer lost all his friends.
Nobody wanted to Nobody wanted to hang out with him anymore.
But he also got sued by a number of people, including the, he is now subject to the Science v. Kessler lawsuit, which will finally, COVID delayed it by over a year at this point, but will finally go into courts next month, which I think is the reinvigoration of the interest in Richard Spencer and why some of this like kind of old shit kind of got dredged up again, because there are, you know, there are articles and I put a couple in the show notes about like, Richard Spencer is broke now.
Like, man, Who knew that happened?
It's like everybody who was following Richard Spencer for the last two years knows.
He lost his lawyer.
He is completely broke.
He is defending himself pro se.
He is, uh, MPI just had a, like a $2.6 million judgment against it.
Like that organization that they will never be able to pay that money.
In that civil lawsuit.
And it's all related to the violence of the Unite the Right rally.
That's the thing.
And yeah, that's the issue.
So, this is the other kind of big gif maybe that people know about Richard Spencer, is the Richard Spencer Antifa is winning clip.
Um, and this is the one I want, I'm gonna, this is about a minute long, and I just want you to listen to the context of this with the, what I've said, the knowledge that Richard Spencer is not lying.
Like Richard Spencer does not, does not, he is not, he is not, Trying to spin this.
He doesn't play the spin game in this way.
Richard Spencer was speaking on a live stream on a YouTube video, which has now been deleted.
And this is before I was archiving video, so I don't have it, but somebody grabbed it and this clip is still up there.
This is Richard Spencer speaking to his fans, to his remaining fans, about why he's having to cancel his college tour.
You know, I really hate to say this, and I definitely hesitate to say this, but Antifa is winning to the extent that they are willing to go further than anyone else in the sense that they will do things in terms of just violence, intimidation, general nastiness.
They are willing to do things that no one else is willing to do.
There is not another political grouping that just in contemporary America or, you know, Western Central Europe that chants about violently attacking people, me or anyone else they deem a Nazi, which is, you know, 95% of the population, I think, just engage in just heinous behavior to do things that
That man is too clearly terrified of being in a rational debate.
That's the... What he really feared was getting on a live stream of somebody really owning him one day.
And, you know, just again to put this into context, Richard Spencer's whole political program is built on an explicit ethnic cleansing of the North American continent.
It's built on an explicit desire for, you know, racialized violence.
If not by individuals, by the state.
And then he claims that the people opposing him who are willing to oppose that with fists or with noisemakers and silly putty or whatever, like those people are the ones who are just vicious and cruel to him.
Because how dare he have to answer to the rabble?
He's clearly better than the rest of us, right?
He's clearly superior.
Should I just move into the clip now?
Should I just move in?
Yeah.
Yeah, go ahead.
I don't think it requires any further comment, does it?
This was a later leaked clip.
Milo Yiannopoulos leaked this, and I would love to listen to the full clip.
However long this rant lasted, this could last for three hours, I would listen to every glorious second of it.
This is great.
So there is some explicit language here.
Jack is going to cut some of that out, I think.
I'm going to put some bleeps over it, as I did with some of the stuff in the Tom Metzger episode.
We're coming back here like a fucking hundred times!
I am so mad!
I am so fucking mad at these people!
They don't do this to fucking me!
We're going to fucking ritualistically I am coming back here every fucking weekend if I have to!
Like this is never over!
I win!
They fucking lose!
That's how the world fucking works!
Little fucking cunts!
They get ruled by people like me!
Little fucking Alex Jones!
I fucking, my ancestors, fucking enslaved those pieces of fucking shit!
I rule the fucking world!
Those pieces of shit get ruled by people like me!
They look up and see a face like mine looking down at them!
That's how the fucking world works.
We are going to destroy this fucking town.
Nope.
And, you know, just to note that the Antifa is winning clip is several months after the I'm going to come back here every fucking weekend if I have to.
You should be staring up at me with the mud on my shoe, licking the mud off my shoe, etc.
Yeah, no, you got your shit kicked out of you, Richard Spencer, and your big Duke education and your sense of moral and ethnic superiority was no match for anarcho-kitties in streetwear who were willing to push back even slightly.
Delicious.
So we have now reached the point at which in early 2019, we have now reached early 2019, basically, when we recorded that first episode.
If you recall, we've caught up with ourselves.
We've done the full loop now.
So if you recall, in early 2019, where we left him was he had joined a new YouTube streaming thing because they couldn't stay on YouTube at this point because YouTube would Ban their channels and get them deleted.
And Richard Spencer was too famous to to really kind of kind of be able to to kind of stay on those platforms for very long.
And so they instead of recording videos and uploading them, they would do live streams and then, you know, just kind of share the channel and then delete it from the from the YouTube channel so they couldn't get the channel banned.
And then people just know to turn in a certain time to tune in at certain times So they could watch their favorite white nationalist content.
He was on a channel called Heelturn.
And Heelturn, there's a long sordid history here, but Heelturn ends up being the birthplace of Terrorgram and the Vanguard Streaming guys in Goitok.
Not necessarily Bolt Patrol, but like that group, all those people ended up Being part of that kind of initial investment.
Richard Spencer splits from those people very early, and he has continued to sort of bounce around doing various vague podcast-like things on the internet, and then eventually maybe uploading them to one of his many RSS feeds, which I track about six RSS feeds right now, which are occasionally updated with Richard Spencer's full history of content.
where he will just like re-upload like stuff from like as far back as 2012, some of this stuff where it's, you know, like whatever he still has, I guess he just kind of re-uploads every now and then.
Yeah.
So he hangs out.
He was doing D-Live for a while.
He was doing, you know, and he's always kind of hanging out with an ever, you know, kind of decreasing in popularity cast of people.
I wish I had.
I wish I had pulled out the, there was a clip a little while ago on the Daily Shoah in which they referenced, we will recover some of the Daily Shoah guys coming up in a few episodes, but one of the guys referenced like, oh back in those days when Richard Spencer was saying all those things like we have to respect Israel's right to exist and all that sort of thing, you know?
And how he didn't really like that, but felt the necessity to kind of go along with the project because Richard Spencer was, you know, there was a sense of like unity and solidarity that they were trying to uphold.
But, you know, many people on the on the far right, on the white nationalist right, never really accepted that shit when Richard Spencer said it.
Although I think Richard Spencer actually believes it.
He's fine with Israel existing so long as it's just for as long as all the Jews live there and they don't have any control over him.
Like he has no interest in Jewish people in general.
But so you get this kind of Continual process, this kind of grinding down of Richard Spencer through the series of lawsuits.
There is a ton of kind of back and forth of, you know, he lost his lawyer, then he got his lawyer again, and he's represented by this other guy.
And the one thing that was really kind of happening in early 2019 was he was hanging out with this guy, J.F.
Garayepi.
And I keep planning to do an episode on J.F.
Garayepi, One of these days we're going to get on to it.
One day, yeah.
If you saw my Twitter, which I've actually locked for now because I just am taking a break from Twitter and it's just easy to lock it and just not look at it, you know.
Is the word Brett coming towards the conversation?
The word Brett is coming!
JFKariepi did a full live stream Critiquing, quote-unquote, Brett and Heather's new book.
He has defended Brett from the attacks of David Foster of the Rebel Wisdom podcast on numerous occasions.
He is not an unalloyed fan of Brett, but he definitely knows who he is, and I would It would astonish me if these two don't eventually make some kind of contact at some point, because fans of Brett and Heather are asking them to respond to JF Gary Eppie's book, The Revolutionary Phenotype, right?
Yeah, I'm quite sure Gary Eppie will be on the Dark Horse podcast.
Well, and the thing that JF Gary Eppie did and something that was very bright of him is that he used to be a much more explicit white nationalist in the sense that it's not that he's not an explicit white nationalist now, but he Richard Spencer was on his show like eight or ten times that are even just like if you just search the titles, you can find a whole bunch of them that Richard Spencer was just like the named guest.
He was hanging out with like really overt white nationalists for a long time and talking about the Jewish question.
There is no question that JFK is a white nationalist.
He appeared on the Daily Show.
This is who this guy is, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
He is also in this other things.
He is also I don't have the facts in front of me, so I'm going to tread lightly here.
He is very strongly alleged in the sense that there are court filings to this effect to have essentially groomed a young woman with mental disabilities into being a sexual partner of his.
To the degree that her parents filed papers against him being able to have access to her.
And there are like judges orders to that effect and that sort of thing.
Now, this gets into complicated phenomena because, you know, ultimately, I don't think anybody's ever asked the young woman how she felt about all of this.
And I think there is a parent conservatorship of their adult children, particularly if they have disabilities.
It gets into like really, really complicated, you know, because we just don't know all the facts there.
Right.
But this is this is something that I believe is very likely to be true.
And whether I think there's some gray area in terms of like getting the legal system involved, et cetera, et cetera.
JFK is a fucking creep.
All right.
Just like leave it at that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And how do I know DF Gary Eppie is the tree?
How do I know?
Because now he deleted his old The Public Space YouTube channel and Bitshoot Archive and all the other like very little of that still exists on the Internet somewhere.
It would be a shame if someone did manage to start archiving the something like 800 episodes of The Public Space from two different channels.
If someone were to put that much work in, they might still have access to episode 196, where Richard Spencer comes on and defends himself from the allegations that he was beating his wife.
Oh my goodness.
Oh, look at that.
Because in his divorce filings that were going on during this entire period where he was losing to Antifa, he was also getting divorced from his wife.
Now, his first wife is absolutely a piece of shit.
She was fully invested in the white nationalist political project.
She helped.
She's a Russian national.
She helped do translations of Dugan's work and some other stuff of that nature.
They worked together for 10 years.
Like, this is there's no question.
You know, Spencer's ex-wife was a piece of shit.
That doesn't mean domestic violence is okay, right?
That's right.
We are allowed to believe both of those things.
I want to be clear about this.
She is a victim despite also being a horrifying human being.
I think it's worthwhile to note, now I could play a whole bunch of this episode 196, it is slow, it's boring, but this is Richard Spencer talking again to his friend J.F.
Gary Eppie, who is also super creepy thing about women, probably an abusive human being.
This is him talking about the troubles that he's had in early 2019, just after we recorded our original episode involving lawyers, etc, etc.
And let's just listen to a little bit of this.
Why don't we?
It was clear at the very least to me in 2017 that the marriage could not go on.
I was dealing with all sorts of things throughout 2017, including the civil lawsuit that has come out of the Charlottesville affair.
I've just been dealing with the deplatforming issue, which has been absolutely crippling.
And the whole thing was just dragging out.
I also had a very difficult time finding representation in Whitefish.
This is something, again, I haven't talked about.
I don't think I've talked about this on any other show.
Basically, lawyers have an ethical obligation to take on cases, even cases that might be controversial.
They don't have to take on every case, of course, no one's saying that, but they do have a professional obligation to at least give someone a fair shot.
It was very difficult to find representation within Whitefish itself, just because of the controversy and so on.
There seemed to be a kind of whisper campaign going on, perhaps.
I don't know.
But the fact is, I do have two lawyers that I'm very confident in, and I appreciate it.
They are not doing this for political motivations at all.
And I don't really want lawyers who are politically motivated, to be honest.
Spoiler alert, he lost both of those lawyers eventually because he could no longer pay them.
Yeah.
Which we already, we already kind of explored earlier on.
So we're a little bit out of order here, but you know, this is Spencer.
Maybe if they'd been a bit more politically motivated.
You know, maybe.
I was going to play some of J.F.
Garayepi's speech there, but I was listening to it without being able to see his face.
He has a very strong Quebecois accent, which I found almost impossible to understand.
So we're going to eventually have to play a bunch of J.F.
Garayepi for his own episode.
And I apologize in advance because he is very... I find that he has a very, very thick accent and he says very, very horrifying things.
We apologize in advance for the slime that will leak from your earbuds just from Gary Eppie being on the episode.
And so, again, our mainstream journalists who are now astonished that Richard Spencer is out of money and can't get a lawyer and is having problems in his hometown.
He was talking about this very openly In public, to thousands of people, in early 2019, in response to the allegations that he was assaulting his wife.
We may play an extended bit of that episode when we do the JFK Recipe episode, because JFK Recipe has a very considered approach.
As to how to approach that content and that he does not allow Spencer to actually defend himself.
Instead, JF will defend Spencer for Spencer and then not ask Spencer to respond.
So it's like, oh, well, you know, sometimes women Sometimes a man needs to be a man and stand up for himself.
And, you know, women, we know that they can say whatever they want to in a legal filing.
And certainly I'm not asking Richard Spencer, you Richard, to say anything like this or to respond in any way, but we certainly know that these things happen.
And so now I think we can just kind of move on with Another topic, like that's the that's the tone of the thing.
I'm paraphrasing, but that's definitely what he was saying at the time.
So that's amazing.
So it's not even, you know, Richard Spencer, come on and defend yourself.
It's Richard Spencer.
Come on and listen to me, defend you for you.
Right.
And of course, and of course, there was surely no like pre negotiation ahead of time.
In terms of what got discussed and what didn't in the moment.
Again, listen to how reasonable, how not joking around he is being completely honest with the things that he actually believes.
Fast forward, I don't have a whole lot more here because there's just not a whole lot more to say.
He's circling the drain at this point.
He does a whole bunch of little shows.
He does, again, his D-Live thing.
He does, you know, he's still got a YouTube channel.
He's still got a BitChute.
Now, Odyssey, he's now moved on to Odyssey, just like our friends Brent and Heather.
Everybody, they all moved from BitChute to Odyssey is sort of like the migration pattern because BitChute actually started enforcing community guidelines and actually started removing far-right content.
At least the worst of the worst.
The stuff that they actually consider kind of promoting violence.
They actually started deleting that stuff.
And so now we can't have that.
We got to move on to greener pastures.
The next place where we can store our vile content.
Odyssey.
Those are the people Brett and Heather are relying on for their video hosting these days, although they are now posting back on YouTube.
They just forgot that they weren't allowed to be on YouTube and didn't want to, you know, support them anymore because people wouldn't want to go to Odyssey.
Anyway, not trying to talk about Brett and Heather here.
But instead he's hanging out.
He's kind of got two friends these days.
I haven't seen him on JF's show in a while.
I haven't really looked that deeply into JF's new show, but he basically hangs out with these two guys.
Keith Woods, who probably not worth a full episode.
He is a very young guy.
He is a I don't even want to get into Keith Woods.
He's he's he's a little fucking dipshit.
He's a traditionalist, like I think he's a Tradcath kind of like he's he's a grouper.
He's a grouper who like attached onto Richard Spencer instead of Nick Fuentes like that.
And we could talk, we could do a whole episode about the Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer feud, because that's hilarious.
But like, aside from the content here, they have hated each other since like, late 2017.
The two men despise each other with a fucking passion.
It is amazing.
I think I've made this joke before, but you know, what do you know?
I agree with both Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes about something.
So instead, what I want to do is I want to play you.
This is, if you were going to tune into Richard Spencer right now, and let me get, let me, let me be straight with this.
Richard Spencer lost his blue check on Twitter, but he's still on Twitter with his original account.
He has 72,000 followers.
He does like, he, he hangs out in like the Twitter spaces, which is like the new thing where you just like where it's, it's like clubhouse, but it's a Twitter space.
So you just, you People can just tune in.
I tuned in one day just to see what Richard Spencer sounded like live.
I listen to Richard Spencer at 2x speed most of the time.
I apologize for playing him at 1x here.
He is interminable at 1x speed.
There are a few people who love the sound of their own voice more than Richard Spencer does.
So I thought we'd just, because the other guy that Richard Spencer is hanging out with, and this guy's probably worth an episode at one point, is this guy, Edward Dutton.
And Edward Dutton, He currently lives in Finland.
But he is from the UK.
He is the former editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is a racist pseudoscience journal.
He is currently on the board of Mankind Quarterly.
He has some academic credentials.
He is an academic.
He writes books, and no one loves the smell of their own farts more than Edward Dutton does.
And so, I'm going to play you a little bit of first Spencer Dutton talking about Afghanistan and all these women who were at think tanks who like believed in the war in Afghanistan and some of the effects of that.
And this is mostly just to get a flavor of what it is to just kind of tune into a random Richard Spencer thing.
Cause this is from like two weeks ago or something.
This is from, this is from very recently.
So let's just play a little bit of this.
And the other thing here is like, I try not to knock on like audio quality when it comes to independently made podcasts in particular, because you know, one knows we've had our ups and downs and not every episode sounds great.
And you know, there is a talent to this.
We, Lesson one, if you're going to try to do these things is get into a room that has some kind of padding in it and not too much of an echo and wear headphones, so that your microphone doesn't pick up what you're hearing from the other side, so you don't get a feedback loop.
Richard Spencer is quite good at this.
Edward Dutton, not so much.
For someone who cares so much about IQ and superiority of certain people with certain genes, maybe you could learn the basics of how to talk to an audience.
Some episodes are worse than others.
This one is very bad.
So enjoy.
Enjoy.
Feast for the ears here.
Just damage to human life of Americans.
It's much, much higher than that.
I think I actually heard an estimate that it's half a trillion or even a trillion of kind of liabilities that they're going to have to pay for in terms of injured Americans.
And then you've got that fascinating woman, Jennifer Caporelli.
saying please don't, on Twitter, saying please, she works for the Institute of War Studies or something in DC.
And she said, "Please don't share tweets with Saigon-like images in case it causes us to get post-traumatic stress." - Oh, I think I tweeted that out, yeah. - The men that fought there got their legs blown off.
Not their post-traumatic stress, but post-traumatic stress of seeing an image that isn't very nice.
Right.
For a think tank, a chick with a master's degree working at a think tank who wants to believe that we can build democracy in Afghanistan.
We don't want to trigger this war.
We can build a better world.
We can build a better world.
And it's all just about democracy and kindness.
And it's so awful that Kabul's not going to be having a pride march this year.
Well, they might be having a pride march, just of a different kind of pride.
Pride in religion and love.
And please don't do that, because it won't help us if we have PST.
It might cause us self-harm.
I thought that was absolutely wonderful.
It was just such an embolliment of the reason why the Taliban have won.
Because they don't have values like that, and they don't have anybody in their society or tolerate anybody in their society that has views like that.
Also, when we think about government systems, you have to take into account Things like terrain.
You certainly have to take into account things like climate.
You have to take into account things like race, obviously, and not to mention history.
But I think, again, those girls with master's degrees, they don't take any of those things into account.
They have a kind of platonic ideal of democracy.
which basically, yes, means gays and parades and women getting undergraduate degrees and working in academia are becoming like themselves, maybe a female becoming think tank.
Starts off with the same kind of anti-war, anti-interventionist, the neocons were wrong, in which case is now like the 20 years of the Afghan war, which started under George W. Bush.
starts with that same basic rhetoric Hey, you know what?
On some level, the war in Afghanistan was terrible.
It was awful.
I agree.
The pro-Taliban stance that they then venture into because all these feminists, all these like blue haired women, At the think tanks, which ultimately lost this war because we can't fight a big manly war, which is the subtext here, right?
We can't fight a real war because, you know, there are all these women involved and they believe in things like democracy instead of power and, you know, empire over peoples and, you know, making the world under your will.
Like, that's essentially what's being argued here, in case that wasn't kind of clear from the context, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Listening to those two dreary, venomous pricks talk, it's kind of perfect because, yes, war in Afghanistan, invasion of Afghanistan, occupation of Afghanistan, bad.
Imperialism, neoconservatism, etc., bad.
Yes, true.
And yeah, plenty of scope to criticize, like, You know, neoliberal and neoconservative think tanks and commentators and people like that.
Yeah, absolutely.
But the problem isn't that, you know, our culture is too feminine and feminized and degenerate and too tolerant of gays and people like that, you know.
You know, America invades these countries because it sort of has this messianic female idea of spreading peace and love and democracy.
You know, that is so, you know, it's such drively, childish, immaterial bollocks.
It's kind of perfect.
It's a perfect illustration of where these people start with something that could become a genuine and valid critique and just fly off into fashy what the fuck land.
And again, he's still caught up in this, like, idealist vision of this, right?
It's still, like, the criticism is that we went out and tried to, like, create democracy.
The thing is, like, the war in Afghanistan went exactly like the framers of the war in Afghanistan wanted it to.
The blob does the things the blob does.
Because it needs to do so in order to maintain the military industrial complex.
Like American foreign policy is built on profiteering.
It's built on, you know, all the, you know, the fact that like, oh, and then the Taliban came back in and like, what did we do all that for?
We did all that for burning a bunch of stuff in Bagram so that you could give Halliburton money.
Like that's what the Afghan war was about.
Yeah.
The war on terror.
Materially, it was about projecting American imperial power, American hegemony, and you get right down to it, it's about control of resources, primarily but not exclusively fossil fuels, which is about strengthening American capitalism.
That's the actual material basis of this.
The irony is that when he does this sort of nonsense, he's actually buying into the exact kind of delusion that is prevalent on the mainstream liberal media.
Spectrum, where they talk about, well, you know, the problem with Bush is that he has this messianic belief in democracy.
You know, that is childish nonsense.
That is not what's going on here.
But as you say, it's complete idealism.
But then fascism always is.
It's always complete idealism.
Even when they think they're being material, when they're talking about genes and race and stuff like that, that is pure idealism projected onto biology.
It's always idealism all the way down.
And the like, you know, human biodiversity, you know, kind of like race realist stuff that Edward Dutton spends a lot of his time on.
I know we haven't really, I haven't covered that yet, but he does spend a huge amount of his time talking about like, Islam is ascendant now because Islam is a protective of, you know, motherhood and a productive of women.
And, you know, therefore there's a greater, you know, they have lower IQs and therefore they have a higher fecundity and therefore they're producing more people.
I mean, this is a little argument that he's made on a couple of occasions.
Like, Islam is ascendant because they're having more babies, and there is no sense of any kind of material context to any of these things, right?
It's all just this kind of just-so-stories-level nonsense, you know?
Much like, now the U.S.
military is feminized, and that's why they had to pull out of the war, or whatever was going on in that in that pseudo babble there, but you're absolutely right to call it.
It is a very childish vision of the world.
It really lacks any kind of sophistication.
I mean, not to give them any credit, but even the ones who are building kind of the, there's a giant Jewish conspiracy belt on, you know, like Jewish, you know, racial dominance to, you know, like eradicate the white race, deeply stupid and anti-materialist, but at least like eradicate the white race, deeply stupid and anti-materialist, but at least there's like sort of At least there's kind of something there to push against this idea that like... There's an actual theory.
There's an actual theory there as opposed to... It's bollocks, but it's a material theory.
It's, well, I mean, it's kind of anti-material in its own way, but, you know, there is at least something there.
I mean, it's not complete puffery, you know.
They have an idea about something that they think is happening in the material world, whereas this is just, this is completely phantasmic.
It's just like, you know, there's some kind of, for some reason, somehow, in some sort of completely spectral way, you get from People having ideas about feminism to the invasion of Afghanistan.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
And Richard Switzer opposes the invasion of Afghanistan because we can't bring, you know, democracy to the Middle East because those people are not equipped to take it, to accept democracy.
They're not capable of it.
Horrifyingly racist idea, right?
But it completely accepts the idea that the reason that we went to Afghanistan was to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East.
Yeah, as opposed to to engage in war of empire, which is ideology for God's sake, man.
Like he agrees with the basic like he agrees with the ideas.
He agrees that that's why the United States did that.
Like he agrees with the paper thin patina over that the Bush administration put over the war.
He's still on that.
He still believes that despite the fact that Even a lot of liberals kind of saw through that back in the day.
This is the leading light of white nationalism, according to William Regnery.
All right.
So, one more clip here.
And this is the most recent clip.
Now, in the cold open, We played a little clip of Richard Spencer.
Yeah.
Pro, pro right to choose.
Look at that.
Yeah, gotta be, gotta be against the right to choose if you're gonna, if you're gonna be against Richard Spencer, apparently, you know, because... Blown the, blown the tops off the skulls of many a liberal commentator.
Wow, what's going on here?
I'm perplexed by this.
If any one of them, you know, would actually listen to this like drivel that he's producing these days.
Exactly.
They never bother.
But, you know, you know, much like he voted for Biden because he believed it because he believed that Joe Biden would be a more competent president and would be able to actually solve some of the problems with our society that Donald Trump was just completely incompetent to solve.
And also Donald Trump was clearly not going to engage in like open white nationalism.
And he probably believed that Joe Biden's history of, like, kind of siding up to segregationists, well, maybe you're going to get a repeat of that.
But ultimately, you know, he said vote for Joe Biden for, like, very comprehensible reasons if you're Richard Spencer, and largely based on just a pure, like, competence argument that, you know, you need to run the government and the Republicans need to just go away because they're completely out to lunch.
Richard Spencer does legitimately support a woman's right to choose in this society.
He absolutely supports it.
He thinks it must remain legal.
Let us now explore why he believes it must remain legal.
And this is our last clip.
Okay, that was a good start.
Sorry, let's just crystallize it.
Abortion, right or wrong?
It's right.
I mean, I have to say it, I have to be just brutally honest.
I think that there are many more less evil ways of engaging in eugenics than abortion, and that should be engaged in.
But I think it is imperative that we maintain the legality of abortion.
I say, yeah, imperative that we maintain the legality of abortion for woke people.
Right.
He's a funny guy, that Dutton, isn't he?
Yeah, twist at the end.
It's like an M. Night Shyamalan movie.
Hopefully it's a better twist than that.
But no, no, look, the point being, the point being, Richard Spencer is not lying to you.
He's saying what he believes.
I hate that we spent this much time on a very simple point of view, but I felt like it needed to be demonstrated because apparently it's not getting through people's skulls anymore.
I thought we went through this years ago, but apparently not.
Sometimes Richard Spencer will support policies that you do as well.
That is because he is a terrible person who believes in terrible things, and even when he's doing the right thing, he believes in it for horrifying reasons.
The logic, by the way, if I had played the earlier clip there, is that people who have abortions in the United States are overwhelmingly ethnic minorities or blue-haired feminists.
And those are the people who should be aborting their babies.
And whereas, you know, kind of nice white Christian Republican women tend to have their children.
So that's, that's, that's the logic there.
So yeah, because those are the people who are getting abortions, we should allow them to have it.
This is a very common point of view among the among the white nationalists.
You're out there.
You should be having babies.
That's all you're good for.
That's the thing.
is not universal.
There are some who believe abortion is so horrifying that it should be made illegal, but ultimately, and also women are not equipped to make these decisions for themselves.
And it should be, you know, the men in their lives who get to decide whether or not they have children.
That's just universal throughout all these things.
This, you know, complete disdain for the opinions and the, you know, experiences of women.
Though you're out there, you should be having babies.
That's all you're good for.
Yeah, that's the thing, yeah.
So it turns out fascism, a deeply opportunistic scavenger ideology based on profound misunderstanding of the world, not always consistent from a mainstream liberal point of view.
Oh, exactly.
Exactly.
And again, just because when Richard Spitzer says something, He's probably it's it's probably because he believes it, and you should stop pretending that he's some pepe troll.
And despite the fact that he's a complete loser who is about to lose very badly in the sign of the cancer court case he is going to millions of dollars of damages.
Don't count him out entirely because he still has something of an audience.
When I tuned in on that Twitter space that one night for about 25 minutes, he had a couple hundred people listening live on his Twitter feed.
Maybe he shouldn't have a Twitter feed anymore.
That would be nice.
That would be a thing that would be positive if we could do that.
It's a thought.
Yeah.
So no big ending, no big glorious ending here, but yeah, I don't know.
I think that was pretty good.
Do you feel like there's more to say?
Do I need to keep making this point over and over again?
I'm sorry.
Well, I get it.
I mean, I can't promise anybody else does, but I think our listeners are pretty smart people.
But yeah, we'll see you back here for Richard Spencer Redux 2 in a couple of years, I expect, where Daniel will attempt to convince everybody again that Richard Spencer actually does mean what he says.
What was the Apocalypse Now sequence?
It was like Apocalypse Now, Redux, and then Final Cut, I think was the sequence.
So yeah, in two more years, we'll come back and episode like 184 or something.
It will be Richard Spencer Final Cut.
All right, let's get out of here.
I'm done.
Next episode, we are going to delay our Daily Showa coverage just a little bit, just so I don't have to pick up so many fucking clips next time.
We're actually going to do the Grievance Studies Affair.
We're going to go ahead and do our James Lindsay part two, because I've got most of the notes for that one already.
So we will hopefully be able to get that one out before the end of September or very, very early October.
So that's the plan for the next episode.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
If you want to help us make the show and stay 100% editorially independent, we both have Patreons.
I Don't Speak German is hosted at idonspeakgerman.libsyn.com, and we're also on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and we show up in all podcast apps.
This show is associated with Eruditorum Press, where you can find more details about it.
The music was by Loon the Band.
And I hate that he says, and Borschen, but, you know, that's what he'd say.
So I was going to say it sounded like abortion.
I didn't notice that until I was pulling the clips that I'm like, man, I wish he, you know, I wish he actually did not.
You know, I mispronounce words all the time, but, you know, it's inconvenient for us from.
Yeah, it's inconvenient.
It's inconvenient.
Yeah.
Richard Spencer, the worst thing he ever did was to mispronounce the word abortion.
