Rolling Stone: Just two weeks after Hillary Clinton delivered her August speech decrying Donald Trump’s ties to “an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right,'” the Alt-Right movement’s leaders host a press conference – a coming-out party of sorts – at Washington, D.C.’s tony Willard Hotel. Sponsored by the National Policy Institute, a small non-profit “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States,” the conference prominently features the institute’s president, Richard Spencer, a trim and tidily dressed 38-year-old with grandiose ambitions to usher in a white “ethno-state.” Spencer is joined by two older compatriots: Jared Taylor, the founder of the website American Renaissance, which promotes faux science claiming that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, and Peter Brimelow, who once wrote for Forbes and National Review before founding VDare, an anti-immigrant site named after Virginia Dare, who is said to be the first British child born in the American colonies. The trio spends two hours holding forth on the Alt-Right’s core beliefs and its growing notoriety in the age of Donald Trump.
“We want something heroic. We want something that is not defined by liberalism, or individual rights, or bourgeois norms. We want something that is truly European and truly heroic,” Spencer says at the podium. “That is fundamentally what the Alt-Right is about.” Race, he says, “is real. Race matters, and race is the foundation of identity.”
The Alt-Right prides itself on its leaderless ethos, using social media to spread its ideology through viral memes and anonymous attacks on its enemies, real and imagined. But Spencer coined the term Alt-Right, back in 2010, and has since positioned himself as the movement’s leading intellectual and most visible spokesman.
Post-conference, Spencer invites a cluster of journalists and Alt-Right fans for drinks at the staid hotel, where he relishes being the center of attention.
Spencer says he guesses women comprise only about a fifth of the Alt-Right – an imbalance that’s obvious at the gathering, where there appears to be only one female follower amid the dozen or so men who cycle in and out.
No matter. Spencer tends to see women as manipulative figures who are best when submitting to Alt-Right virility. Women, he tweeted during the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Trump, “should never be allowed to make foreign policy. It’s not that they’re ‘weak.’ To the contrary, their vindictiveness knows no bounds.” Over drinks, he suggests that most women secretly crave Alt-Right boyfriends because they want “alpha genes” and “alpha sperm.” When a man by the bar suggests someone should write a novel about “a liberal feminist studies major falling in love with a Richard Spencer type,” Spencer suggests I write it.
More recently, in a podcast recorded after the exposure of the so-called Trump tape, Spencer scoffed at the “puritanical” criticism of Trump, saying it’s “ridiculous” to call what Trump was talking about sexual assault. “At some part of every woman’s soul,” he said, “they want to be taken by a strong man.” Pointing to how Trump said he had taken Nancy O’Dell furniture shopping, Spencer added, “Is this really the worst thing you’ve ever heard? In a way, he’s like the most gentlemanly, kindly philanderer of all time.”
Spencer has become more enthused as Trump has ramped up his claims about how his campaign represents an “existential threat” to “global special interests.” After Trump’s widely criticized speech in West Palm Beach last week, during which the GOP nominee alleged a “conspiracy” against the American people led by a “global power structure,” Spencer tweeted, “The shackles are off, and Trump is getting radical. We’ve never seen a major postwar politician talk like this.” He later amplified his appreciation of what he characterized as Trump “demystifying ‘racism’ and the financial power structure,” concluding, “No matter what happens, I will be profoundly grateful to Donald Trump for the rest of my life.”
At the Willard in September, over a Mint Julep followed by Manhattans, Spencer, whose free-wheeling style with journalists has made him the Alt-Right’s “it boy,” gabs about white nationalism and his disdain for electoral democracy. He also discusses why he supports Trump, and their shared respect for Vladimir Putin. “I admire Putin too,” he says. “Who wouldn’t?”
“I love empire, I love power, I love achievement,” he goes on, growing animated. Spencer loves imperialism so much, he says, that he’ll sometimes “get a boner” reading about Napoleon.
