WASHINGTON — The gathering on the eighth-floor rotunda of the federal government’s Ronald Reagan Building looked, at first glance, like any other Saturday-evening D.C. cocktail party.
But this was no ordinary affair.
The 50 or so people in the room were there for the winter conference of the National Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Arlington, Virginia. On its website, NPI describes itself as a group “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States.”
In NPI’s telling, white Americans are increasingly under siege in their own country, doomed to be a hated minority as people of color grow ever more numerous and politically powerful.
And Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy has given the group’s members more hope than ever that help is on the way.
A solid majority of the formally dressed men at Saturday’s event were sporting a hairdo known as an “undercut,” which consists of a buzz cut on the bottom with longer hair on top, combed across to hang over one of the shaved sides of the head. It’s not a style you see often on the Beltway cocktail party circuit, and as it turned out, it’s a telling feature.
The conference’s ubiquitous undercut hairdo was of a piece with the well-coiffed, respectable face of today’s white nationalist movement. At the same time, it pointed up the communal, almost spiritual, role that the movement plays in the lives of its adherents. Huddled together with drinks in their hands, the attendees with matching undercuts had the appearance of religious cult members standing in formation — or maybe just an especially tight-knit college debate club from a bygone era.
And like any other quasi-spiritual movement, the young, overwhelmingly male white nationalists have their very own charismatic leader in Richard Spencer, NPI’s president.
Spencer was sporting the sharpest undercut in the room, a distinction that has prompted his comrades on the alt right to rename the haircut “the Richard Spencer” — at least, according to Spencer himself.
A tall and preppy graduate of the University of Virginia with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, Spencer manages to make even the most extreme white nationalist ideas sound like innocuous talking points. He is also a master of obfuscation and sophistry, evading questions about his real agenda by dismissing policy prescriptions as irrelevant (despite the name of his organization).
“Talking about policy is meaningless until you have a starting point,” Spencer said.
The starting point he has in mind is getting white people to openly embrace their “white” identity, and to organize as a group with common interests. Spencer and his peers maintain that creating an intellectual community of white activists is an essential step toward making America white again.
“I think it is important to dream, and you can look into the past for inspiration or you can think about the future,” Spencer said. “But I don’t know how history is going to unfold. All I know is, we need identity no matter what happens.”
Although Spencer claimed on Saturday that his ideal scenarios are so theoretical they’re hardly worth spelling out, he’s been more forthcoming in the past. Spencer told Vice in 2013 that his dream was “an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence.”
Spencer has also expressed an openness to the idea of some kind of nonviolent ethnic cleansing. “Today, in the public imagination, ‘ethnic-cleansing’ has been associated with civil war and mass murder (understandably so),” he said at the American Renaissance conference in April 2013, according to Salon. “But this need not be the case. 1919 is a real example of successful ethnic redistribution — done by fiat, we should remember, but done peacefully.”
Other interim policies that Spencer and many NPI members support resemble standard conservative positions, albeit with race more explicitly in the foreground. They want to deport all undocumented immigrants, for example, and eliminate affirmative action in university admission and hiring for black and Latino people.
They also advocate a non-interventionist foreign policy, something they believe Trump supports as well.
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The white nationalists share Trump’s penchant for trafficking in conspiracy theories, but they indulge in a brand of anti-Jewish prejudice that Trump himself has not exhibited.
One of the speakers scheduled at the NPI event was Kevin MacDonald, a former psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach, who’s notorious for his incendiary ideas about Jewish people. MacDonald has argued that Jews are “genetically driven to destroy Western societies” by promoting liberal immigration policies as part of their “group evolutionary strategy,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many of Saturday’s attendees made comments about Jewish people, and about their supposed role in efforts to undermine white nationalism, that would have sounded familiar to anyone with knowledge of MacDonald’s work.
“Do [Jews] present a challenge to us?” Richard said. “I would say yes, because they overwhelmingly support liberal causes.”
It is something Jews have done throughout history, Richard argued, and it’s one reason they’ve so often clashed with the communities around them.
Jews “were basically advocating war against Germany before the war actually started,” he said.
Richard added that the Jews’ actions in Germany did not warrant genocide. But he’s not certain that a genocide actually occurred.
If the Holocaust “really happened, then of course it wasn’t justified,” he said. “If it happened differently than what the story we’ve been told [is], then I think that needs to be let out.”
A man who gave his name as Jake later elaborated on why Jews are not white, and why, in his view, they present a fundamental problem for the white nationalist cause.
“The main people who are stunting white interests are Jewish people,” Jake said. “Every time a white nationalist, or group that claims to represent the interests of white Americans, appears, it is destroyed by groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, and those are Jewish groups.” (The SPLC is an Alabama-based anti-racist nonprofit that does not identify as a Jewish organization in any way.)
Jews support multiculturalism, Jake said, because they are not racially white, and therefore feel threatened by white identity.
John, another attendee, argued that it was in Jews’ nature to be “subversive” as a survival strategy. As he and other attendees spoke, an African-American server would interrupt us at intervals to offer miniature seafood tacos, sliders and other appetizers.
“Basically Jews, as outsiders in society, in order to become any part of it, to exploit it in any way, had to work in subversive ways, which is why they have a high verbal IQ,” John said. “This is why you’ll find that Jews have this kind of behavior wherever they go.”
Mike, an attendee from Massachusetts, said that the willingness of Jewish neoconservatives to abandon the Republican Party if Trump is the nominee is more evidence that Jews put their own interests ahead of the country’s.
“It’s a good example of Jews basically backstabbing an entire portion of the political spectrum with their own perceived interests,” Mike said.
Neoconservatives’ support for foreign policy interventions, including the Iraq War, is driven by their loyalty to Israel, Mike and his friends argued.
I asked whether it was possible that Jewish neoconservatives, like non-Jewish neoconservatives, simply support those policies because they believe they’re what’s best for the country.
They chuckled at my suggestion.
“Are you Jewish?” Jake interjected.
“I actually happen to be,” I said, “but I’m here as a reporter.”
Jake then confronted me with what he said is the hypocrisy of Jews promoting multicultural acceptance in the United States and other Western countries, even as they insist on having an explicitly ethno-religious state of their own in Israel.
“The only reason it is not brought up is because people are scared and because the Jews own the mainstream media,” Jake said.
“They are opposed to us having our own Israel, a state that is for us exclusively,” Karl added.
Talk turned to Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News’ parent company and who argued last year that only “proven” Christian refugees should be allowed into the U.S.
“Rupert Murdoch pretends not to be Jewish,” Mike said.
“If he’s not, he’s a shabbos goy,” Karl said. “He’s just so Zionist. He’s part of the billionaire class.”
A shabbos goy is a gentile who does things for a Jewish person on Saturdays that are prohibited on the Sabbath. Karl appeared to be using the term to describe non-Jewish sellouts who are beholden to Jews.
Karl argued that Trump is the rare billionaire who is neither Jewish nor beholden to Jewish people.
Trump has indeed rankled some of Israel’s Republican supporters by saying he would pursue a role as a “neutral” broker between Israel and the Palestinians. He also told the Republican Jewish Coalition in December that he didn’t expect them to back him, “because I don’t want your money.”
Trump would likely bridle at the open anti-Semitism of these supporters, however. His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism in 2009 and raises her two children in an observant Jewish home.
A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign also did not respond to a request for comment on how Trump feels about supporters saying anti-Jewish things.
Spencer, for his part, concedes that Jews are not monolithic, though it’s not clear whether he thinks they are capable of being part of the white race.
“I agree there is a great deal of Jewish assimilation,” he said. “I don’t want to get into a [discussion of] ‘who is white.’”
Evan Thomas, a student from Michigan, offered his own perspective.
“Jews tend to be involved in all levels of society,” Thomas said. “There are Jews who are leftists, there are Jews who agree with us, there are Jews who are Zionist. There are Jews who are doctors and apolitical.”
