Richard Spencer: The Attacks on My Mother

Posted on December 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

Sherry Spencer writes:

My name is Sherry Spencer, and I am Richard Spencer’s mom. I’m a resident of Whitefish, Montana, and am the proud owner of a beautiful mixed-use facility in town.
It was years ago now that I first broke ground on the building, which features vacation-rental apartments and office spaces. I hired a local architect and builder to bring my ideas to life — and both exceeded my expectations.
I am the sole owner of the facility. It was built, not just with my capital, but with my ideas and sensibility. The apartments even include my original artwork, and the rooftop garden features my ceramic mural, which celebrates the Whitefish Winter Carnival.
In other words, I poured my heart and soul into this project.
The building opened in late 2015, and received wide acclaim from the local press. And the vacation apartments have been enjoyed by people from around the world.
Richard does not own the building, nor has he ever used it for his writing or publishing. Put simply, the building has nothing to do with politics — and it has everything to do with tourism and local businesses.
I had no intention of selling . . . until I started receiving terrible threats in the last couple of weeks.
These threats came from Tanya Gersh, a local realtor with links to “human rights” organizations Love Lives Here and the Montana Human Rights Network.
On November 22, Gersh and I spoke on the phone. She relayed to me that if I did not sell my building, 200 protesters and national media would show up outside — which would drive down the property value — until I complied. Gersh’s other conditions included that I make a public denunciation of my son in a statement written by the Montana Human Rights Network and that I make a donation to this organization from the sale of the property. As Gersh announced on Facebook, she was “spear heading” the campaign.
Gersh followed up on her conditions in a number of emails, which I’ve just made public. She even shamelessly suggested that she act as my realtor! In other words, she and the local “human rights” organizations appeared to seek financial benefit from threats of protests and reputation damage. The same day Gersh first contacted me, I received a sales offer, even though I had not expressed any intention to sell, nor had anything been publicized.
One renter reported to me that Gersh threatened her business with boycotts unless she moved. This renter also alleged that Gersh called her “collateral damage.” As the manager of the property, I employ a number of local maids and other maintenance personnel, who would lose their jobs if I were to sell. More “collateral damage,” I guess.
I never wanted to go public with this story. However, the fact that so many news outlets have reported on it forces my hand.
Whatever you think about my son’s ideas — they are, after all, ideas — in what moral universe is it right for the “sins” of the son to be visited upon the mother?
All I wanted to do with the building was help Whitefish.
The people attacking me claim that “loves lives here.” Now it’s time for them to show it.

According to her official bio: “For 18 years, Tanya Gersh, our PureWest Resort & Second Home Property Specialist, ran a luxury wedding and event planning company. She gained national attention for magazine publications, as a presenter at leading National Conventions, and for consulting with architects, builders and design teams on event venue design. In this time Tanya built her own real estate portfolio, investing in dozens of local commercial and residential properties. Working as a team with her husband Judah Gersh (local Real Estate attorney), Tanya has made the professional switch to Real Estate full time and is proud to be on the PureWest team. Tanya is a past Whitefish Chamber of Commerce VP and is currently active in the Glacier Jewish Community, CASA for Kids, Whitefish PTA and Stumptown Ice Den.”

Here is some news coverage:

Slate: Neo-Nazi Website Calls for “Action” Against Jews in Richard Spencer’s Hometown

Washington Post: Jewish leaders in Richard Spencer’s home town targeted in posting on neo-Nazi website

IBT: Anti-Semitism In The US 2016: White Supremacists Urge ‘Action’ Against Jews Over ‘Alt-Right’ Leader Richard Spencer

NYDN: Richard Spencer’s parents selling Montana property

Forward: Is Richard Spencer’s Mom Paying Price for Sins of Her Racist Son?

Forward: Neo-Nazis Target Jews in White Supremacist Richard Spencer’s Montana Town

The Verge: Neo-Nazis are targeting Jewish people in small-town Montana

Daily Inter Lake: Alt-right shadow hangs over Whitefish

Yahoo: ‘Troll storm’ goes after Jewish residents of Richard Spencer’s Montana hometown

The Inquisitr: Richard Spencer: White Supremacists Threaten Jewish Residents Of Alt-Right Leader’s Hometown

Jewish Business News: Montana Jews Threatened Again — This Time By Richard Spencer Supporters

The Daily Dot: Neo-Nazis target Jews in town of leading alt-right figure

Haaretz: Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists Launch Online Attack Against Montana Jews

Snopes: Hate Screech: A call to action by the anti-Semitic ‘The Daily Stormer’ revealed the names and personal contact information of Jewish people they claimed had ‘harassed and extorted’ the parents of white supremacist Richard Spencer.

IBT: White supremacist website urges ‘action’ against Jews for ‘harassing Richard Spencer’s mother’

Newser: Neo-Nazi Site: ‘Take Action’ Against Jews in Mont. Town

Couldn’t you just as easily have framed this story as Jewish activists take action against family of white nationalist?

A Jewish friend says: “Whitefish is a small touristy faux western town – not dissimilar from Jackson, Wyoming. It is north of Kalispell (which has an airport served by national airlines) and is the gateway to Glacier National Park. It has a large lake (Whitefish Lake) and attracts many wealthy millionaires (including Phil Jackson.) No one visiting the town would be aware that it has any Jewish presence at all. Of course what the Gersh’s don’t say is that they moved to Kalispell because it is a whiteopia, but that is most likely the reason. Spencer’s mother is right. Frankly I don’t see the residents of Whitefish getting all riled up by Gersh since Montana (although I don’t know about Whitefish) overwhelmingly supported Trump, and any number of militia type movements and Christian conservative movements have set up shop in the Flathead region (just south of Kalispell.)”

Posted in Jews, Richard Spencer | Comments Off on Richard Spencer: The Attacks on My Mother

Rogue One & The Alt Right

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comment: Saw “Rogue One” tonight. Capsule summary — second half was great; first half, not so much.

What I really thought was hilarious was the way a movie so obviously constructed by SJWs (the cast is painfully “diverse”) accidentally pushes a pro-Trump narrative. Nearly every element neatly lines up with the 2016 presidential election:

– A united Empire (the globalist Left) has just finished construction of its ultimate superweapon (militant identity politics) which they imagine will allow them to completely dominate the galaxy.

– A ragtag group of rebels (the establishment right) is in the middle of launching a desperate but mostly failing effort to resist. Many voices within the rebellion have given up hope and counsel surrender.

– There is also a crazy rebel faction (the Glenn Beck/Ted Cruz wing) that seems more interested in futile, suicidal symbolic gestures than actual victory. They are extraordinarily brave, and die extraordinarily brave deaths, but accomplish little.

– Into this mess steps a group of rebels (the alt-right) who tend to disagree violently on a lot of fundamental issues, but who are strongly united on the necessity of defeating the Empire, and are willing to take extreme risks in pursuit of victory.

– The iconoclastic rebel faction decides to launch a very high risk, very high reward operation in pursuit of victory. The rebel rank and file (average GOP voters), after some hesitation, elects to throw its lot in with the iconoclasts. If they are to die, they figure, best to die in service of something which at least hints at eventual victory, rather than a symbolic sacrifice which accomplishes nothing.

– The rebels receive fortuitous assistance from the fact that the Empire has stupidly gambled on the wisdom of a particular leader (Hillary Clinton) who looks like a bull dyke lesbian and whose judgement is heavily clouded by hubris and ambition.

– The rebel iconoclasts secure a shocking victory, paving the way for a Savior with a bad haircut (Donald Trump) to use the Imperial superweapon’s power against itself to land a killing blow.

Do I have that about right?

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on Rogue One & The Alt Right

New York Times is now talking about the double standard between Zionism and White Nationalism.

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

Omri Boehm writes for the New York Times:

For weeks now, Jewish communities across America have been troubled by an awkward phenomenon. Donald J. Trump, a ruthless politician trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes, has been elected to become the next president, and he has appointed as his chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, a prominent figure of the “alt-right,” a movement that promotes white nationalism, anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny. Though Bannon himself has expressed “zero tolerance” for such views, his past actions suggest otherwise; as the executive chairman of Breitbart News for the past four years, he provided the country’s most powerful media platform for the movement and its ideologies.

Still, neither the United States’ most powerful Jewish organizations nor Israeli leaders have taken a clear stance against the appointment. In fact, they have embraced it.

Immediately after Trump appointed Bannon, the Zionist Organization of America prepared to welcome him at its annual gala dinner, where he was to meet Naftali Bennett, Israel’s minister of education, and Danny Danon, the country’s ambassador to the United Nations. (Bannon didn’t show up.) Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, publicly announced that he was looking forward to working with the entire Trump administration, including Bannon. And Alan Dershowitz, the outspoken Harvard emeritus professor of law who regularly denounces non-Zionists as anti-Semitic, preferred in this case to turn not against Bannon, but against his critics. “It is not legitimate to call somebody an anti-Semite because you might disagree with their politics,” he pointed out.

The alliance that’s beginning to form between Zionist leadership and politicians with anti-Semitic tendencies has the power to transform Jewish-American consciousness for years to come. In the last few decades, many of America’s Jewish communities have grown accustomed to living in a political contradiction. On one hand, a large majority of these communities could rightly take pride in a powerful liberal tradition, stretching back to such models as Louis Brandeis — a defender of social justice and the first Jew to become a Supreme Court justice — or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched in Selma alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On the other hand, the same communities have often identified themselves with Zionism, a political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics.

To appreciate this inherent tension, consider Hillary Clinton’s words from the second presidential debate: “It is important for us as a policy not to say, as Donald has said, we’re going to ban people based on a religion. How do you do that? We are a country founded on religious freedom and liberty.” Here Clinton establishes a minimum standard of liberal decency that few American Jews would be inclined to deny. But she is not the incoming president. Trump’s willingness to reject this standard is now a cause for alarm among Jewish communities, along with those of other American minorities.

Yet insofar as Israel is concerned, every liberal Zionist has not just tolerated the denial of this minimum liberal standard, but avowed this denial as core to their innermost convictions. Whereas liberalism depends on the idea that states must remain neutral on matters of religion and race, Zionism consists in the idea that the State of Israel is not Israeli, but Jewish. As such, the country belongs first and foremost not to its citizens, but to the Jewish people — a group that’s defined by ethnic affiliation or religious conversion.

As long as liberalism was secure back in America and the rejection of liberalism confined to the Israeli scene, this tension could be mitigated. But as it spills out into the open in the rapidly changing landscape of American politics, the double standard is becoming difficult to defend.

That difficulty was apparent earlier this month at an event at Texas A&M University when Richard Spencer, one of the ideological leaders of the alt-right’s white nationalist agenda — which he has called “a sort of white Zionism” — was publicly challenged by the university’s Hillel Rabbi Matt Rosenberg, to study with him the Jewish religion’s “radical inclusion” and love. “Do you really want radical inclusion into the state of Israel?” Spencer replied. “Maybe all of the Middle East can go move into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?” Spencer went on to argue that Israel’s ethnic-based politics was the reason Jews had a strong, cohesive identity, and that Spencer himself admired them for it.

The rabbi could not find words to answer, and his silence reverberates still. It made clear that an argument that does not embrace a double standard is difficult to come by.

Posted in Israel, Nationalism | Comments Off on New York Times is now talking about the double standard between Zionism and White Nationalism.

Forward: Anti-Semitic ‘Alt-Right’ and Misogynist Pick-Up Artists Join Forces

Posted on December 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Forward: On Jezebel, classics scholar Donna Zuckerberg (who happens to be Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister) raises an important question:

“[W]hy have so many white, male leaders of communities and websites that used to focus on sex and gender shifted in recent months to anti-Semitism, white nationalism, and complaining about “(((the media)))”? In part, of course, because these men were always grossly bigoted and racist. The outspokenness of the alt-right empowered other men to share anti-Semitic views that they might otherwise have been quiet about. But in addition, the alt-right was getting a lot of attention. And attention, more than anything else, is what these men crave.”

And in a New York magazine piece, Claire Landsbaum further unpacks the relationship between the major players and ideas of, on the one hand, men’s-rights activists and pick-up artists, and on the other, the “alt-right” (that is, the rebranded white supremacists one hears so much about these days). The longtime anti-feminists are embracing anti-Semitism, the newly mainstream anti-Semites, anti-feminism:

“When Trump won, RooshV saw it as a victory for the PUA movement. ‘I’m in a state of exuberance that we now have a President who rates women on a 1-10 scale in the same way that we do and evaluates women by their appearance and feminine attitude,’ he wrote. [….] In the same way that RooshV began to adopt alt-right ideology, the alt-right began to publish stories grounded in the principles of pickup artists and the men’s-rights movement.”

Posted in Alt Right, Anti-Semitism | Comments Off on Forward: Anti-Semitic ‘Alt-Right’ and Misogynist Pick-Up Artists Join Forces

The Alt-Right & The Classics

Posted on December 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I’d argue that the more traditionalist sect of the alt-Right stems from the works of the Catholic French Counter-Enlightenment philosophers like Maistre and Bonald, and more recently, G.K. Chesterton while the atheist and neo-Paganist sects stem from the philosophy of Nietzsche (specifically, the idea that “God is dead” and it is up to man to create morality). Both are united in an honesty and clarity of purpose as well as a common enemy. Furthermore, both views are far more consistent than the Enlightenment doctrines asserting certain “truths to be self-evident” which are clearly not self-evident; the alt-Right rejects Rationalism (though not rationality nor science) and utilitarianism.

The greatest difference between the alt-Right and the Enlightenment philosophies is in the idea of “self-evident truths.” The traditionalist sect asserts morality derives only from God. The atheist/neo-Paganist view is that morality is man’s power over man. The philosophies stemming from the Enlightenment state that morality is “self-evident.” The alt-Right is concrete, the Enlightenment is not.

* Another possibility is that Dr. Zuckerberg finds herself unaccountably attracted to Aryan Richard Spencer-type men, just as her brother is attracted to feminine East Asian girls.

* The basic substance of her missive is that only scholars like her can interpret the classics for the masses. Because she was taught the “sophisticated” way to understand and apply the writings of our ancients, she retains the sole ability to accurately assess their historical significance. She may even be of the school that feels one should only read the classics in their original language.

Essentially she is arguing from a pre-Reformation clergy position on interpreting the Bible. The bible should be printed in Latin only and taught only by priests. It is only those men, the clergy, who can be a portal to God because they were taught by the sophisticated academics of their time.

I imagine she is incapable of this type of self-reflection.

* The alt-right is not a tightly led organization, it’s rather a loose conglomeration of several different strains of thought. Something like the Dark Enlightenment, which usually includes cultural absolutism (i.e. some cultures are worth more than others), Darwinism and HBD (the sexes are innately different for biological reasons, same thing for races, ethnic groups, social classes), some corrections of liberal retconning of history (e.g. how far to the right people like Lincoln or Churchill would be, were they still alive), discoveries or rediscoveries of some more esoteric earlier authors as well as some more esoteric or rightist contemporary authors (like Evola or Ezra Pound or Alain de Benoist), and only some of these reject the Enlightenment.

It’s also possible to reject some parts of the Enlightenment without rejecting the whole thing (the Enlightenment itself was just a loose conglomeration of several different strains of thought, some of whom were at each others’ throats all the time), and that’s precisely what many people are doing, so I’m not sure what your complaint is here.

Besides, of course race was seen by people before Darwin – racism is certainly possible without Darwinism or IQ studies. You can simply acknowledge that different races exist (based on your lying eyes), and then start from there. And some people are loosely sympathetic to the alt-right without much thinking about genetics research or modern science.

* Methinks Dr. Zuckerberg doth protest too much.

It seems to me that liberal academics have a guilty conscience. They are intellectual elitists par excellence who nevertheless increasingly find themselves leading a coalition of relatively downscale constituent blocs. Indeed, they don’t just lead those downscale constituencies; they ostentatiously venerate them. People with IQs well into the triple-digit range will hold up a Michael Brown as a victim-hero of our age.

There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance to this kind of faculty lounge elitism, and this psychic tension is resolved by attacking the Middlebrow Menace of generic white guys. As always, it’s about the Blue Tribe defending its cultural hegemony against the Red Tribe, with the minorities Dr. Z celebrates being essentially beside the point. They’re props to be used for bashing uppity young white men with higher-than-normal agency and intellect who are curious about their people’s heritage.

In the case of Dr. Zuckerberg, there may also be the old ethnic angle at play here. I recall Steve writing before about the awkward relationship Jewish intellectuals have to European (and particularly German) traditions. Jewish success in the arts and sciences is an outgrowth of the European Enlightenment. It’s not something that arose spontaneously on the shtetl or in the Holy Land.

So a Jewish classicist like Dr. Z obviously loves European civilization and its cultural patrimony, but at the same time has at least a vestigial sense of being victimized by that civilization. Again, there is psychic tension, and, again, it is taken out on middle-class Middle America.

* I’ve moved past the argument stage with these people. I want a divorce. We simply have incompatible views of the world. No amount of discussion will solve that.

Americans are stuck in a horrible marriage because we can’t get out of the mortgage and move to separate homes, so we grumble through the days with the occasional full-on screaming match. It can’t last. At some point, one side would rather burn the house down than spend another hour in this nightmare, especially if they feel as though they’re going to lose the house anyway.

* At first I bristled at the usual anti-white-male stuff, but by the end of the article I actually came to like this Zuckerburg sister. I sort of feel bad for her, I feel like at some level she gets it. She has moments of being fair to her enemies and sees merit in some of their arguments.

She’s cute too, and apparently a good cook.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on The Alt-Right & The Classics