Richard Spencer
White nationalist; alt-right leader; coined (or popularized — he credits Paul Gottfried) term “alt-right”; BA University of Virginia 2001; MA University of Chicago Humanities 2003; dropped out of Duke history PhD 2007; founder of AlternativeRight.com (2009); president of National Policy Institute (NPI) 2011; organized Charlottesville “Unite the Right” 2017; “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” (2016 NPI speech)
Who He Is
Richard Spencer is the most prominent figure of the alt-right — and the figure who simultaneously represents its apogee (2016-2017) and its collapse (post-Charlottesville). He provides the clearest example in Field’s analysis of how Hard Right extremism was cultivated in elite academic environments and then mainstreamed through the New Right coalition.
Biography and Education
UVA: Studied music history and English at the University of Virginia; says he was “red-pilled by Nietzsche” there. At UVA he also discovered white supremacist thinker Jared Taylor.
University of Chicago: MA from the Humanities program in 2003. At Chicago he encountered the white supremacist thinker Jared Taylor, and also lists Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt among his influences.
Duke: Enrolled in the PhD program in history at Duke. At Duke in 2006-2007, during the Duke lacrosse rape allegations case, both Spencer and Stephen Miller were members of the Duke Conservative Union, a small student group led by Miller. Spencer: the lacrosse case “catalyzed me to be a pugilist for my views. I’m more combative and come out of the gate taking stands in a way that I wasn’t then.” Spencer describes Miller as having shaped him during this period. Left the Duke PhD program in 2007 without completing it.
Alt-Right Career
Taki’s magazine: Wrote for this extremist publication briefly after leaving Duke.
AlternativeRight.com (2009): Founded this website, which served as the hub for alt-right ideas. The site’s section on “human biodiversity” (HBD) featured “endless discussions about the heritability of IQ.”
2013 conference: Spencer articulated his vision clearly: “Our dream is a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence.”
“Alt-right”: Spencer is often credited with coining the term but attributes the idea to his friend Paul Gottfried. Graeme Wood’s summary: the alt-right is “white European cultural and racial supremacy, with a deep contempt for democracy.”
HL Mencken Club: Featured speaker at every Gottfried-organized conference from its inception in 2008 through 2014.
National Policy Institute (2011): Spencer was invited to lead this white nationalist group, funded by William Regnery II (heir to the Regnery publishing house, who since 2001 had bankrolled white nationalist initiatives including Jared Taylor’s New Century Foundation, Occidental Quarterly, and Occidental Observer; William Regnery II told Buzzfeed in 2017: “My support has produced a much greater bang for the buck than by the brothers Koch or Soros Inc.”).
Pre-Charlottesville rallies (May 2017): Spencer led rallies in Charlottesville to protest the planned removal of a Confederate statue of Robert E. Lee. Chants: “Russia is our friend!” and “You will not replace us.” Spencer to one crowd: “We will not be replaced from this park. We will not be replaced from this world. Whites have a future. We have a future of power, of beauty, of expression.”
The “Hail Trump” Moment (November 2016)
At the NPI annual conference in Washington DC immediately after Trump’s election win, Spencer gave an exuberant speech that included the words “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” This led to spontaneous “Hail Hitler!” salutes in the audience. The speech also contained pro-Nazi references, dehumanizing rhetoric, and calls for the renewal of white America under Trump.
Charlottesville (“Unite the Right,” August 2017)
Spencer organized in part the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, which featured him as a speaker and leader of the tiki-torch march. The event faced opposition and counterprotests, leading to violent clashes. James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio intentionally drove his car into a crowd of protesters on August 12, 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring nineteen others. Fields pleaded guilty in 2019 to twenty-nine federal hate crimes and received a life sentence.
Post-Charlottesville: Steve Bannon was ousted from the White House; Jason Jorjani (AltRight Corporation co-founder) was suspended from his job. The alt-right as a brand began its decline, but its ideas were simultaneously being mainstreamed through the Claremont Institute, NatCon, and other channels.
The Jorjani / AltRight Corporation Connection
In January 2017, Spencer began a new collaboration with Jason Jorjani (SUNY Stony Brook PhD, philosophy; aspiring to revive an “Indo-European world order” based on a de-Islamicized Iran) called the AltRight Corporation — a “one-stop-shop” for the alt-right per The Atlantic’s Rosie Gray. After Charlottesville, Jorjani was suspended from his academic position at NJIT following a New York Times exposé; he and Spencer had a falling out.
Labels and Self-Description
Spencer has rejected the labels “neo-Nazi” and “white nationalist” because he does not support extra-parliamentary violence or colonialism. He prefers “identitarian” (in the tradition of French New Right writer Alain de Benoist), “right-wing Gramscianism” (culture-warriorism), and has advocated for “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”
Cross-References
- Hard Right — his camp
- Paul Gottfried — credits him with coining “alt-right”; HL Mencken Club organizer
- Stephen Miller — connected through Duke Conservative Union, lacrosse case
- Darren Beattie — both appeared at 2016 pre-election Mencken Club conference
- Charlottesville 2017 — the event he organized that marked the alt-right’s apogee and turning point
- Carl Schmitt — intellectual influence
- Leo Strauss — intellectual influence
- Jared Taylor — white supremacist thinker he discovered at Chicago
- Curtis Yarvin — ideological fellow-traveler in the Hard Right
- National Conservatism — the mainstream movement that explicitly excluded him (Brimelow rejection at NatCon 1) but whose ideas often converged with his