When Richard B. Spencer announced plans to take his so-called alt-right movement to Texas A&M University this month, the pushback from College Station was immediate. The university said his message of white nationalism was antithetical to its core values, and thousands of students, employees, and alumni signed a petition denouncing his appearance, scheduled for December 6.
That kind of reaction, which he views as an attempt to suppress free speech, is exactly why he needs to spread his message to college campuses, Mr. Spencer says. He’s convinced that students are tired of political correctness, talk of diversity, and trigger warnings, and he hopes the election of Donald J. Trump will embolden many to join his cause: preserving the dominance of white Americans.
No longer confined to the dark corners of social media, the clean-cut 38-year-old is trying to bring a scholarly air of respectability to a movement commonly associated with Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. He graduated from the University of Virginia, earned a master’s degree in humanities from the University of Chicago, and started (but didn’t finish) a doctorate in modern European intellectual history at Duke University.
He was an editor at The American Conservative before being fired because his views were too extreme. Now he directs the National Policy Institute, which describes itself as “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States and around the world.”
Mr. Spencer sees college campuses as an important recruiting ground and hopes to visit “all the major ones,” perhaps beginning with Texas A&M and the University of Michigan. He spoke with The Chronicle in late November about his views and his plans to bring them to students.
The opposition to your speaking at Texas A&M has been intense, and already, people at Michigan are upset about the prospect of your speaking there. How, if at all, does that affect your plans?
That means that we really need to go. We’re not doing this to share cookie recipes or hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.” We’re doing this to create really great conversations, and I guess you would say to trigger them.
We need to talk about some of these really big taboos in contemporary society. Every political issue is about race at some level, and at universities, it’s talked about endlessly. European identity is the big taboo, and it needs to be recognized.
The Texas A&M invitation came from a white nationalist who briefly attended the university. You’re still trying to get an invitation to speak at Michigan. How does that differ from your visit to Berkeley in May?
We did this thing called a “safe space” in the center of Berkeley, where we had conversations with people. We got away with it there because we purposely announced it very late, and I don’t think the leftists on campus had enough time to get a protest together. I feel like I’d endanger myself and others if we tried to do that now. I’ve reached this level of notoriety, and the atmosphere is so intense that we need to do things with police protection.
What makes you think people will be receptive to your message?
It’s really important now to go in with guns blazing — figuratively speaking, of course — and be really radical.
The academic left has overplayed their hand to a degree. People who would otherwise be fairly apolitical are fed up with this kind of postmodern totalitarianism where everyone needs a trigger warning, and if you hear something that’s mildly offensive to your group, you can go retreat to a safe space to dip Oreos in milk and curl up with your teddy bear.
Even mainstream conservatives would agree that opposing viewpoints toward postmodern liberalism and multiculturalism are suppressed. This has become so obvious it needs to be confronted.
It’s really important now to go in with guns blazing — figuratively speaking, of course — and be really radical and say, I fundamentally disagree with you. The Donald Trump phenomenon was, and still is, about identity at some deep level. He’s not a mainstream conservative. He says, “I’m going to stick up for you.” Whether he’s going to disappoint us all, I don’t know, but his campaign was about identity, and this new form of politics is out there now. It’s important for young people to listen to a speaker articulate what this means on a metapolitical and philosophical level.
Even President-elect Trump took steps to distance himself from you after you ended a recent speech in Washington with “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” Several of your supporters gave you the Nazi salute. Do you really expect to gain mainstream acceptance with displays like that?
The media jumped on a few people in the crowd at my last conference who, in an exuberant, and I would say ironic, display, saluted. I totally understand that a politician would say he rejects that.
Earlier, you told the crowd “Let’s party like it’s 1933,” the year Hitler came to power, before adding, “Let’s party like it’s 2016.” How can you blame the media and a few supporters for making the Nazi connection?
Whenever one’s involved in a movement based on European identity, one gets called Nazi, KKK, or Confederate. At this point, the only thing to do is joke about it. Joking lessens the power of these charges.
We are a vanguard. Often the vanguard catches flak from all sides, even the people you’re trying to influence. It’s OK. I’m going to do what I’m going to do. These ideas matter. There wouldn’t be such interest or collective freakout if I were talking about how the world was flat. The reason people freak out is that these ideas have the power of truth in them.
How do you expect the white ethnostate you talk about to come about?
Even if all immigration was stopped tomorrow, there is still going to be a massive minority population. All I know is that in order for white people to survive, we’ll need consciousness of ourselves, or we really will reach a state of humiliation, if not extinction.
White people are going to enter a new world where we are a hated minority, where it is seen as a good thing that we have less power. We must fight against that.
What would you like to see happen on college campuses?
I definitely think that a European-American student association would be a wonderful thing. There are student groups for every other people, and there’s simply no reason for there not to be student groups for white Americans. White students need to be treated with the respect they deserve. This is not an evil thing.
What would you say to a minority student who attended one or your talks?
I would look him in the eye and say, We want our identity, too. Blacks are quite good at identity politics. They know who they are. We want that, too.
When they talk about “white privilege,” they’re making us feel guilty about the fact that we are awesome. I’m not trying to justify slavery or say we weren’t terrible to other people. We definitely were. But I am proud of the fact that we changed the world and dominated the world. We should be trying to expand white privilege, not feel guilty about it.
What is that kind of identity politics likely to produce on campuses, other than a lot of friction and ill will?
I am not creating the friction and ill will. That is a dramatic misunderstanding. The ill will is created by this fragmenting, multicultural society. The way out for European-Americans is identity politics. We are in a very different environment from the 1960s, and we can’t think about ourselves and the world in the same way, or we’re going to lose.
What do you think should happen to undocumented college students who were brought here as children, who currently have temporary protection from deportation? They’d argue that it isn’t their fault they were brought here and that the United States is the only country they’ve known.
They’ve got to go back. I believe that selective deportations could set a new tone and that millions would self-deport. It does not matter to me whose “fault” it was that they are here, or if that’s even the right way to look at it. The survival of my people takes precedence.
How many campuses are you hoping to visit?
I would love to hit all the big ones. I think the Richard Spencer Danger Tour could be a hit and a lot of fun.
A longer version of this article, which has been edited for clarity and length, appeared online last week.
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
