{"id":114360,"date":"2017-05-15T11:48:19","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T19:48:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=114360"},"modified":"2017-05-15T11:48:49","modified_gmt":"2017-05-15T19:48:49","slug":"his-kampf-richard-spencer-is-a-troll-and-an-icon-for-white-supremacists-he-was-also-my-high-school-classmate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=114360","title":{"rendered":"‘His Kampf: Richard Spencer is a troll and an icon for white supremacists. He was also my high-school classmate.’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Graeme Wood writes for The Atlantic<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cObviously, German national socialism is not something that has any direct relationship with what I\u2019m doing right now,\u201d Spencer told me. That was horseshit, but I let him continue. Nazis were violent, he said, and \u201cthat is not something that I would have anything to do with. I\u2019ve never advocated that or ever glorified that. I am a dissident intellectual. I am not in charge of the police force or the Army. I\u2019m not ordering the roundup of anyone and throwing them into camps.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is the small matter of his aesthetic, starting with the famous fashy haircut. One might, with exceptional charity, attribute the haircut to a trollish desire to get his enemies worked up. But hair aside, his appropriation of Nazi tropes is relentless. In his notorious speech that ended in a roomful of fascist salutes, for instance, he referred to the mainstream media as the \u201cL\u00fcgenpresse\u201d (\u201clying press\u201d), a Nazi-era smear against anti-Hitler media, even if Spencer flubbed the pronunciation.<\/p>\n

More to the point, Spencer\u2019s ideas themselves are Nazi to the core, and he knows it, even if many of his followers do not. Hitler, too, viewed politics as a struggle and disdained those who imagined it instead as cooperative. For his own race he envisioned a special destiny, like that of an apex predator, expanding its territory until it occupied the land nature intended for it. Here is Spencer, in that same \u201cHail Trump\u201d speech, on the destiny of whites:<\/p>\n

“To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror. We build, we produce, we go upward \u2026 For us, it is conquer or die. This is a unique burden for the white man, that our fate is entirely in our hands. And it is appropriate because within us, within the very blood in our veins as children of the sun, lies the potential for greatness.<\/p>\n

That is the great struggle we are called to. We are not meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace. We were not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most despicable creatures to ever populate the planet. We were meant to overcome\u2014overcome all of it. Because that is natural and normal for us. Because for us, as Europeans, it is only normal again when we are great again.”<\/p>\n

Thwarting the competition among races, Hitler proposed in Mein Kampf, was a cavalcade of abstractions: justice, human rights, democracy, communism, capitalism. Spencer mocks these same abstractions as shibboleths of the modern age. Members of the mainstream right, he said in a December 2016 speech, \u201ctalk about global capitalism, and free markets, and the Constitution, and vague Christian values of some sort. But they never ask that question of Who are we? They never ask that question of identity.\u201d His \u201cHail Trump\u201d speech describes<\/p>\n

“the concepts that are now designated \u201cproblematic\u201d and associated with whiteness\u2014power, strength, beauty, agency, accomplishment. Whites do and other groups don\u2019t \u2026 We don\u2019t exploit other groups. We don\u2019t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around.”<\/p>\n

These are among the most orthodox Nazi statements ever uttered by an American public figure…<\/p>\n

He sounded vulnerable, for the first time since he\u2019d said the St. Mark\u2019s campaign had wounded him. \u201cI have a right as a citizen to walk the streets and not be attacked, and I have the right to be protected,\u201d he complained.<\/p>\n

Spencer was obviously right when he said he should not be assaulted. But we both could taste the irony in the situation. If he hadn\u2019t caught himself, he might have started talking about his \u201chuman right\u201d not to be brutalized with impunity. Instead he recovered, and used the irony to his advantage. \u201cThe fact that they are excusing violence against Richard Spencer inherently means that they believe that there\u2019s a state of exception, where we can use violence,\u201d he said. \u201cI think they\u2019re actually kind of right.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWar is politics by other means and politics is war by other means,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t all want the same thing. And that\u2019s why I think there is a kind of state of war going on.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Graeme Wood writes for The Atlantic: \u201cObviously, German national socialism is not something that has any direct relationship with what I\u2019m doing right now,\u201d Spencer told me. That was horseshit, but I let him continue. Nazis were violent, he said, … 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":[42720,29673],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-right","category-richard-spencer"],"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