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When the late, right-wing, Council of Conservative Citizens-loving actor Charleton Heston went after Ice-T's band Body Count for their song "Cop Killer" there wasn't any discussion about how Heston was violating Ice-T's First Amendment rights, and when Ice-T severed ties with his record label, there wasn't any discussion about how Heston deprived Ice-T of his right to speak. So it is especially curious how a white supremacist media organization called the National Policy Institute (NPI) posts the story recently, highlighting a particular quote from Heston from an interview: "And I shamed Time Warner, the largest entertainment conglomerate in the world, into firing Ice T and dropping the album."
It is especially curious because the National Policy Institute's new Executive Director is Richard B. "Dick" Spencer, who has been particularly vocal against anyone who was similarly critical of those who for the second time in a row was able to similarly shut down the white supremacist American Renaissance Conference (AmRen), posting updates regularly on the NPI website as well as his own, Alternative Right and a new blog that updated people on what was happening to AmRen as it was getting shut down. It was after the conference’s fate was sealed that the article about Ice-T was posted on NPI – with the organization praising Charlton Heston as "a great American who always stood up for what he thought was right, no matter what the personal cost to himself." We can say the same even moreso about the people who stood up to AmRen and the people it attracts. Among those losers is Spencer, who is one of this cluster of young idiots in recent years who come out of the crowd that Pat and Bay Buchanan built around them.
After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2001, doing grad studies at the University of Chicago and Duke University, and working as an English teacher at the private, all boys college prepatory Blue Ridge School in Charlottesville, VA, Spencer found himself in 2005 working as an associate editor for Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine. In 2006, Dick Spencer along with his friends, the ever-so-comedic fascist Marcus Epstein, Kevin DeAnna, the founder of Youth for Western Civilization, and current senior editor of the American Conservative Daniel McCarthy founded a group called the Robert Taft Club to bring together like-minded people to discuss ways to undermine our nation’s freedoms by calling it preserving our nation’s freedoms. Like-mindedness took on some rather dubious traits as this was an organization that catered to white supremacists regularly like American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor, National Review’s John Derbyshire and the fascist clowns of the Flemish separatist party Vlaams Belang. This however has not kept your more mainstream conservatives from staying away from the group, particularly the more questionable ones. Among those who have either spoke at or attended a Robert Taft Club event have been Rep. Ron Paul, longtime conservative propagandist Richard Vigurie, Human Events editor Terry Jeffries and James O’Keefe, who attended and reportedly helped out at a Taft Club forum in 2006, and is best known for dressing up like a pimp and entering the offices of the group ACORN to secretly videotape them suggesting illegal activities. After it was determined the videos were doctored ACORN was vindicated from such charges, but the damage had already been done and the group had to fold.
The Taft Club has not done much in years, and a lot of info concerning them started to disappear from the web after Epstein started catching hell when it was revealed he went on a drunken rampage in 2007, attacking a black woman while calling her racial slurs. He has not been doing much publicly since, but he still shows up at events in DC about immigration and paleoconservatism, particularly with his friend Spencer around.
In 2008, Dick Spencer left the American Conservative to take the editor's position at Taki’s Magazine, which is run by Taki Theodoracopulos, who - keeping with the Pat Buchanan lineage - helped found the American Conservative along with Buchanan and Scott McConnell, and who is so much a paleoconservative, Spencer once said of him that he was a fascist – as a compliment! Spencer stayed there until late the following year, and it was while he was there that he let his more racist leanings out of the bag. "By 2009, I was much more willing to express heretical views on race and egalitarianism, as well as write more forthrightly on culture," he said in a interview. In 2010 he left Takimag to start up AlternativeRight.com to expand the hatemongering just a tad more.
To be more nuanced about it, Spencer considers his blog AlternativeRight.com, which he started in 2010 to be part of the blogosphere that gets its drive from the discredited journalist and fake scientist Steve Sailer and his "human biodiversity" BS. Basically, this is eugenics rebranded, Sailer himself coining the term in 1996. His "Human Biodiversity Institute" is simply an opportunity for white supremacists to get together and discuss selective breeding of the human race, and if you get involved with it, your credibility takes the express route to the crapper. That's the case with Spencer. "This (Alternative Right) is white nationalism, folks, dressed up in faux-intellectualism," blogger E.D. Kain wrote on the True/Slant blog. "Indeed, they are so ‘alternative’ that Spencer has disavowed paleo-conservatism altogether, claiming that 'Sadly, a lot of paleo[-conservatives] now… have actually denounced human biological diversity. Paleo-conservatism is now irrelevant.'" Kain goes on to note that when you are talking about human biological diversity in this context, it means "essentialy that some races are superior to others", but we don't know any other context it can be put in. And Spencer's heart is broken because a lot of folks within his circles would much rather keep their distance from this crap.
By this point Spencer racism now has everyone's attention. For starters there's the pissing contest he had with David Frum and the folks at FrumForum. First an article by Tim Mak ripped AlternativeRight.com apart, then Alex Knepper wrote about his own experience with Spencer during the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference:
"I happen to intermittently know Richard Spencer, the site’s director. Through a couple of mutual contacts, I met him in the midst of CPAC 2009 and received a ride from him from Washington DC’s Dupont Circle, where we were each protesting the censorship imposed upon Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, to the Marriott Hotel where the convention was being held."Along the way, things got a little testy. We somehow got into discussing biological differences between the races. Our ideological differences soon emerged, though, because, simply put, I am an individualist and he is a collectivist.
"'Show me one black nation that’s ever been run competently,' he challenged me.
"'That’s a ridiculous methodology. I’ll accept that claim for argument’s sake and still say that it’s bogus: African nations have not failed because the skin color of the people is black. The skin color is just a coincidence. It’s the culture that’s the problem.'
"'Not true,' he said. 'You look at Liberia, where ex-slaves went back to Africa, tried to bring American ideals to the country, and failed, because the blacks wouldn’t accept them.'
"'This is not Western,' I said. 'How can you possibly claim to stand for Western civilization? What’s brilliant about our values is that they stand for the individual, not the supremacy of the group. You come to America, you’re judged by your merits — not by what you look like.'
After a few more back-and-forths, we arrived at our destination, and as our car-mates went ahead, he told me to stay with him for a minute so he could talk to me. As the others faded into the background, he moved just inches away from my face, gave me a menacing look and yelled: 'You little child. How dare you talk to me — me! — about the West! You don’t know the first thing about the West! You’re a little twelve-year-old who thinks he knows shit. Don’t you ever talk to me like that again or I will beat your face into the fucking ground!'"
Spencer's response was to fire off his own, rather petty blog entry titled "David Frum's Satanic Girlymen" which didn't address a single thing that Knepper wrote, instead resorting to just calling him, among other things, a "Satanic, anti-Catholic, eugenicist Mormon-basher". A\Apparently Knepper didn't lose any sleep over this (or maybe he did from too much laughing that Spencer called him a eugenicist!), as he responded with a reiteration that Spencer is aa "intellectual coward".
Now in the interest of full disclosure, we should note that Spencer doesn't care too much for One People's Project. He is pretty tight with Jared Taylor and tried to assist when the American Renaissance conferences started suffering their cancellations, which as many people know we have been a party to. When the 2011 conference suffered that fate, he started a blog to keep people up to speed on developments, and when the conference was officially put down, he was promised to provide a live stream - that patrons paid $10 for - to see the AmRen speakers give their presentations in an "undisclosed location". Well, that didn't work out either. For some reason Spencer said the live stream could not happen and instead he will provide the recordings of those speeches in the near future. To date, only two of them have been made available.
The cute thing is how, as this crowd often does, Spencer effortlessly tried to make all this an example of some sort of tyrrany that threatens to tear apart the very fabric of the globe or whatever. When the conference was cancelled, he wrote, "This episode should alarm not only the movement for European identity but all decent people who want to live in a free society." Is that so? Well, a free society would include Ice-T right to produce records that don't get censored when Charlton Heston is mad at you, but that was okay with Spencer. Even more to the point, as we learned as we were writing this, a free society apparently should not be somthing a Libyan fighting for it should have either. A Mar 7, 2011 blog entry by Spencer titled - you are going to have to sit down for this one - "Save Gadaffi" is him freaking out because the Libyan Dictator Muammar Gaddafi and his son Seif warned that if he is deposed, hordes of African immigrants will sweep Italy and France. To quote Seif: "You will see the pirates in Sicily, in Crete, in Lampedusa. You will see millions of illegal immigrants. The terror will be next door." Talk like that gets to Dick Spencer's sweet spot and he went for it:
"I recognize that this is a cry in the wilderness, but -- for once! -- could Western foreign-policy makers put aside their "democracy" fetish and actually pursue what is best for us? Gadaffi and his sons are people we can deal with. The stability of his dictatorship is infinitely more attractive than the refugee crisis that would almost certainly ensue were the Libyan regime to disintegrate."So a guy who's lunacy is being compared to that of Charlie Sheen that's saying his people are hopped up on instant coffee laced with drugs from Al Qaeda, who not only is killing his people just as he has in the past and has kept an iron grip on his country 42 years is preferable to his people enjoying the freedoms he demands for himself? The DEA should run tests on Spencer's Nescafe.
Spencer has another outlet for all this crap. In 2008, Elizabethtown College professsor Paul Gottfried founded the H.L. Mencken Club, which bears a logo similar to that of the Robert A. Taft Club: a drawing of H.L Mencken (as opposed to Robert Taft) to the left of the club's name. Interestingly enough. Taft Club founder Dick Spencer is also a member of the Mencken club, and sure enough it holds the same politics and attracts the same people. They have held three conferences so far in Mencken's hometown of Baltimore that featured some well known white nationalists like VDARE'S Peter Brimelow and Steve Sailer, and plan to hold their fourth in November, 2011. Spencer also works closely with his friend Kevin DeAnna and his group Youth for Western Civilization, and was invited to speak at Vanderbilt University in October 2010. Let's just say he was treated as any neo-Nazi would have been treated if he came to speak on any campus.
Truth be told, Spencer more than likely has given up on trying to be in the mainstream of society, which he should. This brand of politics had it's time, and it isn't coming back. Period. We suppose for Dick being a hatemonger pays well, otherwise he would just do a skiing blog or something from his spot in Montana. If he thinks the designs he keeps suggesting for this society are going to have any true success however, we opine that he hit one of those trees while skiing just a little too hard. Sadly, not hard enough. He still lives.