{"id":102044,"date":"2016-07-24T07:06:16","date_gmt":"2016-07-24T15:06:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=102044"},"modified":"2016-07-24T07:06:16","modified_gmt":"2016-07-24T15:06:16","slug":"power-is-what-matters-alt-right-leader-richard-spencer-explains-his-admiration-for-trump-and-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=102044","title":{"rendered":"‘Power is what matters\u2019: Alt Right leader Richard Spencer explains his admiration for Trump and Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Mondoweiss<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A specter is haunting Cleveland, the specter of the Alt Right.<\/p>\n

The Alt Right in the United States is a small but growing intellectual movement that seeks to resist the dilution of \u201cWhite\u201d people, both as a matter of biology and an imagined culture pale people share. They see the United States and Europe as the natural realm of white people. Unlike the Nazis, who argued for the extermination of other races, the Alt Right denies White Supremacy by saying they just want their culture for themselves. It\u2019s predicated upon the notion of separating people based on appearance and ancestry.<\/p>\n

Richard Spencer, an author and activist associated with the Alt Right movement, is one of the people lending intellectual legitimacy to the Donald Trump campaign. Spencer and his ilk envision a world where Europeans have control over their own geographic region, somewhere, and other colors of human beings are kept out by force to maintain a \u201cmonoculture\u201d for light skinned people.<\/p>\n

Articulate and casually dressed, they don\u2019t look like Nazis. They look just like anybody else.<\/p>\n

Spencer also has a complex conceptual relationship with Israel. He admires Israel as striving for a \u201cmonoculture\u201d and its aims at racial purity but he disdains the Israel lobby. He\u2019s much less ambivalent about the Official Republican Party Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, nominated officially Wednesday. \u201cTrump is a peace candidate,\u201d Spencer proclaims.<\/p>\n

On the day the RNC began, Spencer made no bones about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump\u2019s convention has been about Being and Death,\u201d Spencer tweeted, a cryptic nod to 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger. \u201cHe is the greatest man in my lifetime #RNCinCLE.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spencer\u2019s is one of the brighter stars in the philosophical firmament above Trump\u2019s teeming audience, to whom Trump promises to win big. The left laughs at Trump, and perhaps imagines humor will defeat him in November. Or something. But Spencer\u2019s bio boasts a masters from the University of Chicago. They aren\u2019t just giving those out to anybody. Spencer is smart, sure, why not, but being smart doesn\u2019t produce good ideas. Isaac Newton was smart but he spent half of his career tinkering around with alchemy which is total bullshit. The Alt Right is political alchemy. Huffing a brown paper bag of mercury or lead would achieve the same effect.<\/p>\n

There is a reason you should fear men like Spencer: They lend an intellectual element to the Trump campaign, which has distinguished itself with a number of boneheaded typos. Spencer is well spoken, and a great propagandist when speaking to someone he can distract with meaningless historical analogies to Rome, which he imagines as the perfect White Empire.<\/p>\n

Of course, he\u2019s completely wrong about that. Romans came in all kinds of colors and languages, but the social construct that mattered back then wasn\u2019t race, it was religion. Race only started to matter in something resembling modern way after the Transatlantic slave trade began. Many slaves in the Roman world were fair skinned. Ausonius has a whole poem about a German servant girl he really dug. The Romans had captured her in conquering a slice of Europe. Gross and creepy on Ausonius\u2019s part, but those were gross and creepy times Spencer romanticizes.<\/p>\n

When I mentioned Augustine of Hippo, a Christian Roman sage and one of the pillars of what\u2019s called Western philosophy, hailed Carthage, a place in North Africa where people are sometimes tan, Spencer rejected the assertion.<\/p>\n

\u201cCarthage is a White area,\u201d he said, despite its being in Africa, in modern day Libya.<\/p>\n

The Alt Right tries hard to sound smart, but its ideas are based on shockingly little real information, no matter how intricate and highfalutin they appear to be.<\/p>\n

Richard Spencer, and friend Nathan Damigo at right, debate with an Abraham Lincoln impersonator outside the RNC. (Photo: Wilson Dizard)
\nRichard Spencer, and friend Nathan Damigo at right, debate with an Abraham Lincoln impersonator outside the RNC. (Photo: Wilson Dizard)<\/p>\n

Spencer is a confident and fairly friendly activist who has been hanging out at the RNC giving interviews to reporters who came for mass arrests and mayhem that never materialized. He also has credentials to enter the inner sanctum. He is so confident that he even told a fellow Trump supporter who disagreed with him that he was smarter than him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m smarter than you, go away,\u201d Spencer said. The man shuffled off. I continued the interview.<\/p>\n

Spencer and others in the Alt Right ponder intelligence from the perspective of \u201crace\u201d as the most important signature of human identity. Indeed, the reason I started talking to Spencer, unknown to me but very Internet famous in some circles, were just a few words that caught my ear.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026they generally have lower average IQs, but that\u2019s not the point\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

So then we started talking. As I do in most of these interviews I brought up Israel eventually, but before we got there, Spencer made several points that echo the Israeli right-wing worldview. Another reporter asked him about the constitutionality of some Trump proposals, like banning Muslims from the country or ending birthright citizenship.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho cares? The whole point is that we\u2019ve got to survive. Whether something is constitutionally legal I could give a shit to be honest. Survival is more important than law. You can always find a lawyer that will agree with your interpretation,\u201d he said, admitting that Trump couldn\u2019t say the same thing. \u201cIt\u2019s not that big of a deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPower is what matters,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

He also takes the same tact as Israel does when it comes to prohibiting Arab and Muslim immigration to the United States. He says that the government could pay them to leave, or that \u201cwe could create the conditions to make them want to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat if they have to go back to countries where they could be killed?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cTough shit,\u201d he replied, without hesitation.<\/p>\n

I asked him what he thought about Islam and Muslims, and if he had any Muslim friends.\u201dNo, but I know enough from reading about Islam to know that it\u2019s at war with the West,\u201d he said. He considers Islam a militant religion bent on global domination.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou mean like white people,\u201d said an African American woman passing by, whom Spencer had engaged in conversation by noting her \u201csassy black lady look.\u201d<\/p>\n

He chuckled at her quip.<\/p>\n

In the name of defeating militant Islam, Israel is no stranger to wanting to kick out even non-Arab visitors, penning Sundanese migrant laborers in in cages in the Sinai, awaiting deportation. When it comes to Palestinians, it\u2019s rather obvious that making life unbearable for Palestinian people is an attempt to make them want to leave on their own accord.<\/p>\n

\u201cI respect Israel as a homogenous ethno-state, but I hate the meddling of the Israel lobby in American politics,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Many Alt-Right types feel that the United States\u2019 system of expensive foreign entanglements are the source of our problems abroad. Israel is one of them.<\/p>\n

As Israel is supposed to be for the Jews, so too are the United States and Europe, ideally in Spencer\u2019s view, supposed to be for White people. I tried to argue that Europe has lots of distinct ethnic and religious and local loyalties, and Spencer acknowledged that as a hurdle.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhite people have to come together,\u201d he said. \u201cRace is the most important aspect of identity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Mondoweiss: A specter is haunting Cleveland, the specter of the Alt Right. The Alt Right in the United States is a small but growing intellectual movement that seeks to resist the dilution of \u201cWhite\u201d people, both as a matter … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42720,21791,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-right","category-america","category-israel"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t