The face of hate: ‘Alt-right’ leader Richard Spencer seizes his moment in wake of Trump’s election

Anyone who fears the alarming rise of fascist movements in the United States and abroad should know the name Richard Spencer.

He’s the president of the National Policy Institute, which Wikipedia describes as an “alt-right, white supremacist think tank based in Arlington, Virginia. It presents a lobby for white nationalism and seeks to provide an alt-right ‘intellectual vanguard.’” On its own website, NPI says it is “an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.”

Here’s a fun video describing their work on behalf of oppressed white people of European heritage:

Spencer has been in the news this week, thanks to the white power conference he organized in D.C. to celebrate Trump’s victory, the one that opened with him proclaiming “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” and people responding with Nazi salutes. They then followed that up with a celebratory dinner at a local Italian restaurant that was so embarrassed afterwards it offered to donate $10,000 to the Anti-Defamation League.

To learn more about Spencer, here are two important reads. The first is a story by The Intercept that includes video of one of their reporters confronting Spencer with questions about his statements. The second is a longer Rolling Stone profile from October that seems more prescient:

The Alt-Right, Spencer says, “opposes the basic ideas behind the Civil Rights Act.” He’s called Martin Luther King Jr. “the god of white dispossession,” the latter being one of the Alt-Right’s major obsessions. True “shitlords” are gripped by the fear that white people in America are being “dispossessed” by immigration and multi-culturalism, to the point that they face an imminent “white genocide.” Spencer has called anti-discrimination laws “the enemy of all tradition, not just the Anglo-Saxon American society it has helped destroy.”

Finally, hear the man in his own, chilling words: