Joan Walsh writes for The Nation:
An exhilarated Richard Spencer, a leading white nationalist who coined the term “alt-right,” introduced himself to me just as Milo began to speak. “This is the alt-right convention! We were really absent in 2012; we have a big presence here, in a way we never had before.” Spencer, 38, is witty and well-dressed and happy to politely spar with journalists of the left. He came to national attention last year when he pronounced Donald Trump as the candidate for white Americans in an interview with The Washington Post’s David Weigel. Almost exactly a year later, he’s even happier with the presumptive GOP nominee.
“I think with Trump, you shouldn’t look at his policies. His policies aren’t important. What’s most important about Trump is the emotion. He’s awakened a sense of ‘Us’ a sense of nationalism among white people. He’s done more to awaken that nationalism than anyone in my lifetime. I love the man.”
It was a very friendly crowd, many of whom seemed to recognize me as the author of a book that is not exactly the bible of the white-nationalist movement. One of the organizers, Chris Barron, the genial founder of GOProud, greeted me warmly, and several people went out of their way to say hello. “You blocked me on Twitter,” says a friendly Josh Smith, who used to run one of two Salon.com parody accounts. Smith has turned out to see his hero Milo, but he’s impressed by the luminaries in the room. He points out to me the urbane, white-haired Peter Brimelow, the long-time, pro-white, anti-immigration writer and agitator who runs the similarly themed site VDare.com. “Isn’t he kind of a white nationalist, or white supremacist?” I ask Smith. He smiles. “What is white supremacy, really?”
…Richard Spencer told me he doesn’t know what Trump will do either, but he seems to trust him more. I ask him what his larger political goals are, beyond electing Trump, and he draws me into a friendly, if surreal, conversation about the future of white people. At first, he sounds pragmatic. “We are going to be a minority. If we ceased all immigration tomorrow, we’d still become a minority. So we need a radical reorientation, and we need a new consciousness, to determine what we want.”
OK, I’ll bite, I decide, and I ask him what he thinks “we” should want.
“What I care about is not just about being comfortable. It’s not just about safety, or national security. White people are unique in the sense that, we are the ones who are going to explore the world. We’ll need our own state eventually, for our Faustian destiny to explore the outer universe. That is what we were put on this earth to do. We weren’t put on this earth to be nice to minorities, or to be a multiculti fun nation. Why are we not exploring Jupiter at this moment? Why are we trying to equalize black and white test scores? I think our destiny is in the stars. Why aren’t we trying for the stars?”
When I try to argue that equality and pluralism are central to the nation’s founding documents, he looks disgusted. “When I look at Thomas Jefferson’s writings, the Declaration of Independence, it makes me want to vomit. The idea that a ‘creator’ made all human beings equal? That’s ridiculous. The idea that all human beings are equal is such an appalling sentiment. We’re here on this earth for such a short period of time. The idea that we would dedicate ourselves to something as stupid as ‘equality’ or ‘democracy’ is morally insulting to me.” Nearby I notice a man carrying a sign: “Income Inequality = I.Q. Inequality.”
