When Richard B. Spencer announced plans to take his “alt right” movement to Texas A&M University next month, the pushback from College Station was immediate. The university announced that 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.
In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Spencer said 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. He’s convinced students are tired of political correctness, diversity pressures, and trigger warnings, and hopes the election of Donald J. Trump will embolden many to join his cause — preserving the future and dominance of white Americans.
So how did someone who directs the National Policy Institute, which is based in Arlington, Va., and Whitefish, Mont., and describes itself as being “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States and around the world” emerge from the dark corners of social media to appear on the front pages of mainstream newspapers?
It’s due in part to the alt-right’s enthusiastic support for Mr. Trump, who named as his chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon. Mr. Bannon ran Breitbart News, the website that embraced the alt-right movement.
Then there’s Mr. Spencer himself, the clean-cut 38-year-old, who attempts to bring an air of respectability to a movement commonly associated with Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
Mr. Spencer, who takes pains to make his arguments sound legitimate, even reasonable, grew up in Dallas, graduated from the University of Virginia, and earned a master’s degree in humanities from the University of Chicago. He started, but didn’t finish, a doctoral program 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.
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Mr. Spencer, who sees college campuses as an important recruiting ground and hopes to visit “all the major ones,” coined the term “alt right” and is widely viewed as its primary front man.
Following are excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Spencer, which has been trimmed and edited for clarity.
Q. The opposition to your speaking at Texas A&M has been intense, and already, people at the University of Michigan are upset about the prospect of your speaking there. How, if at all, does that affect your plans?
A. 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.
Q. The Texas A&M invitation came from a white nationalist who briefly attended the university, and you mentioned that you’re still working on getting an invitation to speak at Michigan. How does this differ from the approach you took when you visited Berkeley in May?
A. 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.
Q. Why go to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor?
A. I feel we need to go there. There have been a couple of recent incidents one was a little over a month ago — in which they were chanting something like “alt-right, KKK, go away.”
It’s very similar to civil-rights protesters. They didn’t make their point sitting in the Harvard sociology lounge. They did it in sit-ins in Alabama, at the place of the greatest power of segregation.
Q. What makes you think people on college campuses will be receptive to your message today?
A. 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 safe space and trigger warnings, 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 all 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.
Q. Even President-elect Trump took steps to distance himself from you during your recent conference in Washington after you ended your speech with “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” And several of your supporters gave you the Nazi salute. Do you really expect to gain mainstream acceptance with displays like that?
A. 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.
Q. 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?
A. 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.
I don’t think Donald Trump really understands how I think. I would hope this controversy would lead him to try to understand.
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.
Q. How do you expect the white ethnostate you talk about to come about?
A. 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.
It’s really important now to go in with all guns blazing — figuratively speaking, of course — and be really radical and say I fundamentally disagree with you.
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.
Q. What kinds of changes would you like to see happen on college campuses?
A. 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. There are plenty of colleges — especially elite colleges — where whites are underrepresented as a percentage of the population. These white student groups need to be treated with the respect that they deserve. This is not an evil thing.
Q. What would you say to a minority student who attended one or your talks?
A. 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.
Q. What is this kind of identity politics likely to produce on college campuses, other than a lot of friction and ill will?
A. 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.
Q. 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.
A. They’ve got to go back. I believe that selective deportations could set a new tone and that millions would self-deport on their own. 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.
Q. What do you think about the attention campuses are paying to sexual assaults, and do women have reason to be offended by Mr. Trump’s admission that he groped women without their permission?
A. There seem to be a lot of greatly exaggerated rape claims, whether it’s a hoax or two people hooking up and a woman regretting it and calling it rape.
What Trump was saying is that when you have power they’ll let you do anything. He was getting at a truth about human nature that when you are a star, women want to allow you certain indulgences that they won’t allow in other contexts. It’s neither good nor bad. There aren’t many romance novels written about chubby cubicle dwellers awkwardly asking girls out on a date. There are a lot more romance novels about rough cowboys.
Q. Do you believe that women should enjoy the same career opportunities as men?
A. I don’t think we can return to some idealized past where every woman is a subservient homemaker. We’re going to have to find an arrangement moving forward that women want to be part of. The years from ages 18 to 40 are a window for women to become mothers. If we don’t grasp that fundamental reality and see that as a great triumph — the most important thing they can do — infinitely more important than pursuing your career — if we don’t do that, we’re going to commit racial and civilizational suicide.
Q. How many college campuses are you hoping to visit?
A. 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.
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.
