Richard B. Spencer

• 1. Early Life And Education

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  Richard Bertrand Spencer was born on the 11th of May 1978 in Boston, Massachusetts. He grew up in Preston Hollow, Dallas, Texas, as the son of ophthalmologist Rand Spencer and Sherry Spencer, an heiress to cotton farms in Louisiana. Spencer attended St. Mark's School of Texas before transferring from Colgate University to the University of Virginia. In 2001, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and Music from that university. He later received a Master of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Chicago in 2003. From the summer of 2005 into 2006, Spencer studied at Vienna International Summer University. Between 2005 and 2007, he pursued doctoral studies in Modern European intellectual history at Duke University. While at Duke, he joined the Conservative Union where he met Stephen Miller, who would become a senior policy advisor to Donald Trump. Spencer eventually left his PhD program without completing it, stating on his former website that he did so to pursue what he called a life of thought-crime.

• 2. Rise Of The Alt-Right Movement

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  From March to December 2007, Spencer worked as assistant editor at The American Conservative magazine. Founding editor Scott McConnell fired him because his views were considered too extreme. Spencer spoke about the Duke lacrosse case and credited it with changing the course of his career. From January 2008 to December 2009, he served as executive editor of Taki's Magazine, a libertarian online publication. In March 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which he edited until 2012. He became president and director of the National Policy Institute in January 2011, a white supremacist think tank based in Virginia. This organization was once run from his mother's three million dollar summer house. On the 15th of January 2017, Spencer launched the AltRight Corporation and its website altright.com. Swedish publisher Daniel Friberg of Arktos Media co-founded the site as European editor. The Southern Poverty Law Center described the common thread among contributors as antisemitism rather than white nationalism or white supremacy in general. Contributors included Henrik Palmgren and Jared Taylor. By the 23rd of February 2017, Spencer had been removed from the Conservative Political Action Conference after other members found his statements repugnant.

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• 3. Charlottesville Rally And Legal Consequences

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  On the 13th of May 2017, Spencer led a torch-lit protest in Charlottesville, Virginia against removing a statue of Robert E. Lee. He chanted alongside David Duke with slogans like You will not replace us and Blood and soil. Mayor Michael Signer called the protest horrific and either profoundly ignorant or intended to instill fear among minorities. In August 2017, Spencer appeared as an organizer on posters for the Unite the Right rally. Violence broke out when one rightist drove a car into counter-protesters, killing one woman and wounding thirty others severely enough to require hospital treatment. Following the event, Twitter removed the blue checkmark from Spencer's account. He later joined the social network Gab. On the 23rd of November 2021, a jury found Spencer liable on two counts in the civil lawsuit Sines v. Kessler. The court awarded twenty-five million dollars in total damages, with Spencer personally responsible for seven hundred thousand dollars in punitive damages. Three supporters were charged with attempted homicide following a speech at the University of Florida in October 2017. Spencer largely ceased being an effective leader after March 2018 following violence outside a Michigan State University event.

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• 4. Nazi Rhetoric And Public Gestures

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  In early 2016, footage showed Spencer giving the Nazi salute inside a karaoke bar. Leaked video also depicted him giving the salute to supporters during the August 2017 Charlottesville rally. After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, Spencer urged his followers to party like it was 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany. At a conference celebrating that election, he cried Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory! while extending his right arm with a glass to toast the victory. Mike Enoch led many of Spencer's supporters in performing a Nazi salute and chanting similar to the Sieg Heil chant. In early-to-mid-2017, when Spencer's following peaked, supporters gave him the Sieg Heil salute upon entering any room. Leaked texts indicated those who refused to give the Nazi salute, such as Jason Kessler, faced stigmatization within the movement. During a November 2016 speech at an alt-right conference attended by approximately two hundred people in Washington, D.C., Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda in original German and denounced Jews. Audience members cheered and gave the Nazi salute when he spoke.

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• 5. Ideological Evolution And Contradictions

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  Spencer has frequently contradicted his own previous statements about beliefs and ideals. In a text exchange from 2022, he told a journalist for Jezebel that he no longer identified as a white nationalist. By June 2022, he described himself on Bumble as politically moderate. Initially supporting Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, Spencer distanced himself from the president by 2018. He stated on Twitter that the Trump moment was over and it was time to move on. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that around the same time, the white nationalist movement grew dissatisfied with Trump's presidency due to his failure to stop non-white immigration into the United States. In July 2019, Spencer called Trump's tweet about four congresswomen meaningless because he believed Trump practiced a con game without clearly developing a white nationalist agenda. In August 2020, Spencer said he would vote for Joe Biden and the straight Democratic ticket after criticizing Trump as an obvious disaster. He endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, claiming the MAGA movement brought nothing but stupidity and chaos. Spencer also reversed his stance on Russia, strongly supporting Ukraine and NATO since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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• 6. International Bans And Deportations

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  In 2014, Spencer was deported from Budapest, Hungary. Under terms of the Schengen Agreement, he received a three-year ban from twenty-six countries in Europe after trying to organize the National Policy Institute Conference. During his speaking tour in Hungary in 2014, Hungarian newspapers mocked his call for a white Imperium through revival of the Roman Empire. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán pressed through legislative measures banning his entry and condemning him. The government of Poland also banned him from entering the country citing Nazi rhetoric and anti-Slavic racism. In July 2018, Spencer was detained at Keflavík Airport in Reykjavík, Iceland en route to Sweden. Polish officials ordered him to return to the United States. European governments and media responded to his visits with condemnation. A pro-tolerance group affiliated with the Montana Human Rights Network rallied against Spencer's residency in Whitefish in 2014. The city council approved a non-discrimination resolution in response. Republican Representative Ryan Zinke, Republican Senator Steve Daines, Democratic Senator Jon Tester, Democratic Governor Steve Bullock, and Republican Attorney General Tim Fox condemned a neo-Nazi march planned for January 2017.

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