In the weeks after Trump’s election, an up-and-comer on the far right named Richard Spencer appeared on NBC, NPR, and CNN. Profiles of him appeared in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. More were in the works. Showtime was putting out feelers for a documentary. Then, just before Thanksgiving, Spencer gave a speech at the annual conference of his think tank, the National Policy Institute. NPI was dedicated to the “preservation of the heritage, identity, and future of European people in the US and elsewhere.” Spencer might have ended his speech declaring that America belonged to Europeans. But he knew his moment. America belonged to white people.
“America was, until this past generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation; it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”
This was met with a roar of approval from the hundred or so men assembled, culminating in scattered, stiff-armed Nazi salutes, like a mini-Nuremberg rally. He acknowledged these with a sloppy salute, not bothering to put down his drink. A clip of this went viral. I watched it while tracing the arc of Spencer’s journey from obscurity to Charlottesville. And when I did, something about the world I had known abruptly shifted. Two 20th-century sources of national pride, providing decades of patriotic uplift, collapsed in a heap. That we had fought a “Good War” against the horrors of Nazism and fascism. That our country’s civil rights leaders had scored a moral triumph over racist Southerners and politics as usual. I knew these were national mythologies that historians did their best to complicate; by pointing out the Red Army’s role in breaking the back of the Wehrmacht, for example, or the communist and nationalist forces of China doing the same to Japan. Still, it hadn’t occurred to me that the American creed they embodied could be dispensed with altogether, replaced by something called the “alt-right.”
This was a term coined by Spencer in 2008, on the eve of Obama’s election and the collapse of the US economy. The alt-right was a reaction to mainstream Republican politics, to the Christian right, libertarianism, paleo-conservatism, and the “war on terror.” It was the online edge lord’s response to what was once called political correctness or multiculturalism and is now called woke. It was old-fashioned white nationalism and white supremacy, with its grab bag of bigotries, wrapped in contrarian, countercultural, and hypermasculine cool. Like the hip alt-weeklies of yore, it had its own outlets where an ironic sense of style and subversive humour had been shaped and fashioned in the company of those with like-minded dispositions.
Kicked off traditional social media, the figureheads of this new movement created a replacement “alt-tech” with their own browsers, plug-ins, payment processors, web hosting, domain registrations, and VPN services. “They are just building a copycat version of the internet playground,” data scientist Megan Squire has said, describing how the rise of these new platforms allowed men like Spencer to say the formerly unsayable in the name of edginess. In so doing, the “alt-right” stole the glamour of the rebel, the revolutionary, the outlaw, the punk, and the perennial stance of épater les bourgeois from the boomer left. They used it to skewer the moral pretensions and ideological conformity of progressives, and the square, self-serving Republicans in Name Only, War on Terror–supporting dads. For many, it had a dark, naughty allure. I got it.
With a knowing nod to Steve Bannon, with whom he keenly aspired to ally himself, Richard Spencer used the media attention to openly audition for the role of Trump’s brain. He offered a political language for the incoming administration. No more foreign wars, a proud embrace of white heritage, the cultivation of white grievance, a flirty fascism, and a renunciation of “globalism.”
The latter was a newish euphemism, replacing cosmopolitan, for Jews. But it was also an abstraction that needed a face. The Jewish financier and funder of democracy initiatives George Soros provided it. Similarly, the woke liberal elite driving the conversation in media, business, and culture, were either Jews or in the pay of Jews, and thus hostile to a political order in which Christian white men claimed ascendancy. In place of the founders’ notion of religious freedom, one that, on paper, protected not just Jews and Muslims, but also atheists and infidels, the alt- right proposed a Christian nation, if Christianity is understood to be an aspect of white heritage, stripped of long- standing ethical notions of right and wrong. Some foresaw an indivisible, sea-to-shining-sea, white nation; others, a confederacy of single-race, single-religion “ethnostates.”
Spencer even called himself a Christian Zionist; Israel, which quarantined and policed Christian and Muslim Palestinians in the townships of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, exemplified his idea of an ethnostate. The two movements had a shared history. In 1941, a right-wing Zionist proposed to a German diplomat the solution to the Jewish “problem” lay in Jewish resettlement in Palestine. By then of course Nazi Germany had other plans. And when, in a debate with Spencer, a rabbi at Texas A&M Hillel insisted that the Torah taught “radical inclusion and love,” Spencer pointed out that, on the contrary, blood and soil white nationalists shared not only the Zionists’ vision of a single-race ethnostate but a virulent hostility to assimilation. The rabbi had no answer to that.
Spencer was far happier debating who would or wouldn’t be admitted to his Klan than getting to the nitty-gritty of how to make one hundred million Americans disappear. In a bold step beyond Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation,” Spencer called for “a peaceful ethnic cleansing.” He was joking. There would be nothing peaceful about it. In 2012, Spencer had published a piece on the AltRight.com website titled “Is Black Genocide Right?”
“Instead of asking how we can make reparations for slavery … we should instead be asking questions like ‘Does human civilisation actually need the black race?’ [and] ‘What would be the best and easiest way to dispose of them?’” This went overboard and was taken down, like a product release before the market was ready. Spencer’s cavalier pose over the prospect of genocide was calculated to throw a normal person off, stuck in “he can’t be serious” mode. One journalist wrote that Spencer’s ideas didn’t arise from deep conviction. It was an intellectual exercise, “performed for his own amusement.” The ferocity of his vendettas argued otherwise. Spencer isn’t amused. That’s an affectation. He is enraged.
Amid the media furor he’d stoked by summoning Adolf Hitler, Richard Spencer decided just then to appear on the podcast of Andrew Anglin, the balding, squirrelly-eyed editor of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. Why, I wondered, with the mainstream media at his feet? Because he was embarked on a vendetta. Spencer divided his time between a loft above a chocolate shop in Alexandria, Virginia, and the picturesque mountain ski resort of Whitefish, Montana (pop. 8000), where his Dallas-based parents had a vacation home. In the latest chapter of a long-running feud, the Whitefish city council had recently declared Spencer persona non grata. This was where Andrew Anglin came in.
“Never back down” was Spencer’s personal credo. He had started with the local paper. His wife wrote a letter accusing the city council of orchestrating a Stalinist witch hunt against her husband. A social death sentence, perhaps, but a henchman’s bullet at the back of the head? A midnight transport to the gulag? Overstating the harm, then playing the victim, was part of the white nationalist toolbox. Rand and Sherry Spencer, Richard’s parents, wrote another letter. A downtown commercial property his mother had developed was being unfairly targeted by protesters. Her Realtor made the mild suggestion: sell it. For Spencer, this amounted to backing down. Time for the big guns.
Andrew Anglin and Richard Spencer scarcely knew each other, but they understood each other. Learning of Spencer’s feud with the Whitefish city council, Anglin activated his cyber mob. When Sherry Spencer’s Jewish Realtor picked up her phone, she heard gunshots. Then slurs: “You fucking wicked kike whore.” She was doxed. One of Anglin’s boys made a meme featuring a photo of her 12- year-old son at the Auschwitz gate. The campaign spread to local rabbis, and then anyone with a vaguely Jewish name. Local businesses that exhibited “Love Lives Here” window signs had their phone lines tied up. The governor met with the mayor, but there was little anyone could do.
Though the practice of choreographed mega harassment has since become ubiquitous, the experience felt unprecedented to Whitefish residents hoping to spend their retirement in vigorous exercise. Two people involved in preparing Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally told me the saga known as Gamergate was an important inflexion point in the development of the weapon Andrew Anglin unleashed on Whitefish after Richard Spencer’s appearance on his podcast. Even gaming journalists struggled to describe what was underway when, between August and October 2014, over two million posts attached to the Gamergate hashtag went out on various social media, but largely on Twitter and Reddit.
Excerpted with permission from Charlottesville: A Story of Rage and Resistance, Deborah Baker, Penguin Random House.
