Richard Spencer"s Full Speech at Auburn University
AUBURN, Ala. Alt-right spokesman Richard Spencer brought his version of white supremacist thought to the Auburn University campus Tuesday, despite efforts by university officials to shut him down.
We won a victory that is going to have echoes around the world, Spencer said to loud applause, largely from the front of the hall where a group almost exclusively of white men sat.
When the event ended, around 9 p.m. central time, hundreds of students surrounded the alt-right activists leaving the hall, eventually chasing them off campus at a full sprint.
"Alt Right" Richard Spencer debates Daryl the Socialist
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington"s preeminent institution dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jews and millions of others the German Nazis murdered during World War II, issued a statement condemning a gathering of white nationalists in the city over the weekend.
Quoting media reports that Richard Bertrand Spencer leader of the white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute, which sponsored the conference made several disparaging referencesto the Jewish people, "spoke in German to quote n**i propaganda" and said the U.S. belongs to white people, the museum asked the nation to repudiate the conference and its rhetoric.
"The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words," the USHMM wrote. "The Museum calls on all American citizens, our religious and civic leaders and the leadership of all branches of the government to confront racist thinking and divisive speech."
At the conference, Spencer led the crowd in a chant of "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" in reference to the recent victory of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, the Atlanticreported. He referred to the U.S. as "until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity ...It is our creation, it is our inheritance and it belongs to us."
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Spencer coined the term "alt-right" in 2008 as a euphemism for and the construction of a racially hierarchical white ethno-state.
Trump"s racially inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail garnered him significant support from the far right. The president-elect"spick for White House chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, until recently ran self-declared alt-right hub Breitbart, which under his tenure struck an openly hostile tone on racial, gender and identity issues.
Ever since alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous sent actress Leslie Jones a string of deeply offensive tweets, insulting the comedian"s race and intelligence, Twitter has made banning abusive accounts a priority.
At the time, the company offered a statement, which read in part:
"Our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others .... We"ve seen an uptick in the number of accounts violating these policies and have taken enforcement actions against these accounts, ranging from warnings that also require the deletion of Tweets violating our policies to permanent suspension.
"We know many people believe we have not done enough to curb this type of behavior on Twitter. We agree. We are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to better allow us to identify and take faster action on abuse as it"s happening and prevent repeat offenders."
Recently Twitter suspended many more accounts associated with the alt-right, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as "a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that "white identity" is under attack by multicultural forces using "political correctness" and "social justice" to undermine white people and "their" civilization."
Included among them was the verified account of Richard Spencer, who the Washington Post described as a leader of the alt-right and "one of the most media-savvy thinkers in the movement."
Twitter also suspended the accounts of the Virginia-based National Policy Institute, an alt-right, white nationalist think tank of which Spencer is president, and of the Radix Journal, a magazine run by Spencer.
Paul Town, Pax Dickinson, Ricky Vaughn and John Rivers also had their accounts suspended.
In response, Spencer posted a video to YouTube, in which he said, "I am alive, physically, but digitally speaking, there has been execution squads across the alt-right."
"It"s corporate Stalinism, in the sense that there is a great purge going on, and they"re purging people on the basis of their views," Spencer said.
He said these suspensions are unlike Yiannopoulous".
"I supported people like Milo when they were banned from Twitter, but Milo was engaging in something that could be called harassment," Spencer said of the man who used the platform to call Jones "barely literate," "fat and ugly, ugly, ugly, fat" and "a hot black dude."
Added Spencer, "Again, I totally think he should have stayed."
Spencer, though, drew a sharp distinction between the way Yiannopoulous used the platform and the way he did.
"I and a number of other people who just got banned were not even trolling," he said. "I was using Twitter just like I always used Twitter: to give people some updates and maybe comment on a news story here and there."
Instead, Spencer said he thinks this was a "coordinated effort to just wipe out alt-right Twitter" in response to arguments that social media helped electDonald Trump as president.
"Twitter and probably Facebook too.I think they are deeply triggered by Trump"s election," Spencer said. "I think they"re triggered by this narrative that social media helped elect Trump and they think that they have to do something about it. Well, the fact is social media did help elect Trump."
Heidi Beirich, spokeswoman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told USA Today that the organization had previously asked Twitter to remove more than 100 accounts of white supremacists but said Monday (before the suspensions), "They have done nothing."
Spencer compared the suspensions to the Night of Long Knives, also known as Operation Hummingbird, in 1934 in which Hitlerordered "a b****y purge of his own political party, assassinating hundreds of Nazis whom he believed had the potential to become political enemies in the future," according to History.com.
The video"s title is "The Knight of Long Knives," obviously a play on the n**i operation"s name.
Many on Twitter expressed confusion and outrage about Spencer"s suspension.
"Richard Spencer advocates for my people, doesn"t hate anyone, is a gentleman, and a friend, and Twitter suspended him," one user tweeted.
"Pax Dickinson and Richard Spencer have been banned from Twitter. The left knows social media helped Trump and is cracking down," tweeted another.
Spencer said that this could be seen as a victory for the alt-right movement.
"This is a clear sign that we have power," he said. "Even if it"s in our own little small way ... we have power, and we"re changing the world."
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment from USA Today, stating, "We don"t comment on individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons."
Finally, Spencer mentioned that he might transition to GAB, a social media platform used by many who identify with the alt-right. It prides itself on free speech. On its landing page, the platform included a quote from writer and poet Charles Bukowski:"Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others."
Andrewswrites for the Washington Post.
ALSO
Facebook bans fake news from its ad network but not its News Feed
Pomona hospital employees say patients are at risk of superbug infections
Estee Lauder eyes younger customers with $1.45-billion purchase of Too Faced
Richard Spencer is the chairman of the vaguely-named National Policy Institute, a white supremacist think tank, and the founder of Radix Journal, one of the movements primary publications. Hes one of the alt-rights most visible leaders, and relative to others, has tried to give it a more moderate, intellectually refined image.
He has, for example, included a gay speaker at a past conference, and instead of indulging in rabidly anti-Semitic rhetoric like his fellow traveler, the neo-n**i Andrew Anglin, he has described Jews as an out-group ally who can help legitimize the idea of white identity.
Nonetheless, a November 19 conference hosted by Spencers group, featured n**i salutes and anti-Jewish rhetoric amid excitement over Donald Trumps victory.
Spencer makes his pitch in this slickly produced video, posted on YouTube last December. In it, he urges white people to rediscover what he believes is their lost identity, evoked by images such as blinking blue eyes, a cowboy and a portrait of Napoleon. In the videos final minutes, Spencer flashes an image of an Israeli flag to identify an ethnic group the Jews that he argues whites should emulate in asserting their own identities.
Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at nathankazis@forward.com or follow him on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.
