Richard B. Spencer

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Bertrand Spencer was born on the 11th of May, 1978, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of an ophthalmologist and an heiress to Louisiana cotton farms. He grew up in the Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas, attended St. Mark's School of Texas, and eventually earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Music from the University of Virginia in 2001. Nothing in that conventional biography predicts what came next. Spencer would go on to claim credit for coining the term "alt-right," lead torch-lit marches through a Virginia college town, and stand before a cheering crowd while his supporters raised their arms in a Nazi salute. How does a person move from a University of Chicago humanities degree to the center of one of the most talked-about white supremacist movements in modern American history? And what happened when the movement collapsed around him?

• 2. From Conservative Media to the Fringe

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  Spencer's first professional foothold was at The American Conservative magazine, where he worked from March to December 2007 as assistant editor. Founding editor Scott McConnell later said Spencer was fired because his views were considered too extreme for the publication. That dismissal, far from chastening him, appears to have clarified his direction. He moved to Taki's Magazine, a libertarian online publication run by Taki Theodoracopulos, where he served as executive editor from January 2008 to December 2009. Spencer has said he coined the term "alt-right" in 2008 to set himself apart from what he called mainstream American conservatism, though Paul Gottfried has argued the term was a joint creation. Spencer credited the Duke lacrosse case with changing the course of his career. In March 2010, he founded AlternativeRight.com and edited it until 2012. That same January, he became president and director of the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist think tank in Virginia that had once been run from his mother's three-million-dollar summer house. Political scientist George Hawley of the University of Alabama described NPI as "rather obscure and marginalized" before Spencer took over.

• 3. Building a Platform

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  Spencer assembled a network of outlets that gave his ideology a semblance of institutional weight. In 2012, he launched Radix Journal as a biannual publication through Washington Summit Publishers, which he had owned since January 2011. The journal published articles by Kevin B. MacDonald, Alex Kurtagic, and Samuel T. Francis. He also ran a weekly podcast called "Vanguard Radio." On the 15th of January, 2017, the same day as Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, he launched AltRight Corporation and the website altright.com. Swedish publisher Daniel Friberg of Arktos Media co-founded the site and served as its European editor. The Southern Poverty Law Center identified antisemitism, rather than white nationalism broadly, as the common thread among its contributors. Henrik Palmgren and Jared Taylor were among those who wrote for the site. Spencer also invited speakers from his circles to events at universities, and outside groups like Youth for Western Civilization arranged speaking engagements for him at Vanderbilt University in 2010 and Providence College in 2011.

• 4. Nazi Rhetoric and Public Performance

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  At a mid-November 2016 conference in Washington, D.C., attended by approximately 200 people, Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German and denounced Jews. He referred to mainstream media using the term "Lügenpresse," a term meaning "lying press" that was frequently used by Joseph Goebbels in Nazi propaganda. He ended his speech with the words "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" Audience members cheered and performed the Nazi salute. Spencer later characterized those salutes as given in a spirit of "irony and exuberance." He called Donald Trump's 2016 election "the victory of will," a phrase evoking the title of Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Nazi-era propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Spencer also urged supporters to "party like it's 1933," the year Hitler came to power in Germany. He expressed admiration for George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, specifically for using "shock as a positive means to an end." In early 2016, he was filmed giving the Nazi salute in a karaoke bar. Leaked footage also shows him giving the Sieg Heil salute at the August 2017 Charlottesville rally. By 2017, sources indicated Spencer was pressuring followers to salute him when he entered a room. Those who refused, including Jason Kessler, were stigmatized within the movement.

• 5. Charlottesville and Its Aftermath

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  On the 13th of May, 2017, Spencer led a torch-lit protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, against the city council's vote to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the commanding general of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Spencer and David Duke led the crowd in chants including "You will not replace us" and "Blood and soil." Michael Signer, the mayor of Charlottesville, called the protest "horrific" and said it evoked the KKK. Spencer was then listed as an organizer on materials promoting the August 2017 Unite the Right rally, where violence broke out. A single driver plowed a car into counter-protesters, killing one woman and wounding 30 so severely they required hospital treatment. In audio leaked by Milo Yiannopoulos in November 2019, recorded shortly after the rally, Spencer reacted to the death of Heather Heyer and used violent, racist language. Spencer did not deny the voice in the recording was his. Civil rights lawsuit Sines v. Kessler followed, stemming from the rally's violence. On the 23rd of November, 2021, a jury found Spencer liable on two counts, including civil conspiracy under Virginia state law and race-based harassment or violence. Jurors awarded more than $25 million in total damages, with Spencer personally responsible for $700,000 in punitive damages. Spencer said he would appeal, calling the verdict's "entire theory" fundamentally flawed.

• 6. University Appearances and Public Safety Costs

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  Spencer's attempt to speak at the University of Florida in the fall of 2017 became a case study in the security costs his appearances generated. After the university denied his August 2017 request, citing public safety concerns and opposition from students and locals in Gainesville, Floridian lawyer Gary Edinger threatened to sue. The university reached an agreement allowing Spencer to speak on the 19th of October, 2017. Florida Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency for Alachua County three days before, saying the threat of a potential emergency was imminent. The event, held at the Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, drew about 2,500 protesters, vastly outnumbering Spencer's supporters. Security costs for the event were estimated at $600,000. Spencer was joined on the program by Elliott Kline, using the pseudonym "Eli Mosley" of the California-based white supremacist group Identity Evropa, and by white nationalist blogger Mike Enoch. Later that same day, three of Spencer's supporters were arrested on felony charges after allegedly discharging a firearm at protesters leaving the event. The three men were Texas residents who had attended the August 2017 Unite the Right rally. All three were charged with attempted homicide. Spencer had already been denied speaking opportunities at Louisiana State University and Michigan State University in August 2017 on safety grounds.

• 7. European Bans and International Pushback

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  Spencer's international ambitions ran into sustained legal and political resistance. In 2014, he was deported from Budapest, Hungary, after attempting to organize a National Policy Institute conference for white nationalists. Under the terms of the Schengen Agreement, that deportation triggered a three-year ban covering 26 European countries. The Hungarian newspaper Népszabadság mocked his call for "a white Imperium" through a revival of the Roman Empire, describing those ideas as contrived and without basis in European history. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán subsequently pushed through legislative measures banning Spencer's entry. Poland's government also banned him, citing his Nazi rhetoric and the Nazis' genocide of Slavic peoples during World War II. In July 2018, Polish officials had Spencer detained at Keflavík Airport in Reykjavík, Iceland, while he was en route to Sweden, and ordered him to return to the United States. The Southern Poverty Law Center, along with other white nationalist outlets including David Duke, Stefan Molyneux, and American Renaissance magazine, saw Spencer's National Policy Institute banned from YouTube in late June 2020 for violations of the platform's hate speech policies.

• 8. Decline and Shifting Positions

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  Spencer's standing as a movement leader collapsed with notable speed. A 2022 Southern Poverty Law Center publication dated the collapse to March 2018, following violence outside a Michigan State University event where he was speaking. By that point, he had already begun distancing himself publicly from Donald Trump, writing on Twitter in 2018 that "the Trump moment is over, and it's time for us to move on." In August 2020, Spencer announced he would vote for Joe Biden and the straight Democratic ticket. In 2022, he told a journalist for Jezebel that he "no longer identifies as a white nationalist." That same June, he described himself on the dating app Bumble as "politically moderate." By 2024, he had endorsed Kamala Harris for president, saying Trump and the MAGA movement "bring nothing but stupidity and chaos." The Biden campaign had renounced his support in 2020, and the Harris campaign's response to his 2024 endorsement went unaddressed in the source. Domestic pressures compounded his political decline; in October 2018, his estranged wife Nina Kouprianova, whom he had married in 2010, accused him in divorce documents of emotional, financial, and violent physical abuse, including incidents when she was four months pregnant and incidents witnessed by their children. Spencer denied all allegations and was not charged with any crime.