Alternative Right's Ugly Racism

The new website Alternative Right is run by a white nationalist, for white nationalists. A conversation I once had with its editor Richard Spencer revealed him to be a bully and an intellectual coward.

Tim Mak is right: the website Alternative Right is run by a white nationalist, for white nationalists.

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!"

As with my infamous argument with gay-basher Ryan Sorba, my confrontations with collectivists always tend to end up degenerating into threats of physical force. Richard Spencer is a fairly tough guy, and I'm, well, kind of scrawny. So I kept my mouth shut. But I was frightened.

I let him walk ahead of me, and it ended there. But that is the real Richard Spencer: a white nationalist, a bully, and an intellectual coward.