Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
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Benoist, the intellectual leader of the French New Right, who won the
prestigious Académie française prize in 1978 for his Seen from the Right
( Vu de droite).21 What defines Spencer is not his writings but his orator-
ical skills and his ability to use social media to communicate messages of
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racial solidarity and white, nationalist identity to larger and mainstream
audiences.
Spencer is author of the “Alt- Right manifesto,” discussed in more de-
tail later. His other major work is an edited volume titled The Uprooting of
European Identity (2016).22 The book’s blurb states: “The White man lives
in a world his race once dominated and in which Black and Brown are
now colonizers, in which European heritage is being taken away piece by
piece: cultural heroes, literature, popular icons, identity ultimately, every-
thing.” In addition, the work sees whites as victims of multiculturalism
and cultural dispossession, and insists that “non- whites are vengeful
and intent on destroying white identity.” Here he is echoing Alt Right
thinkers who call liberal multiculturalism “genocidal”— a term used by
Greg Johnson to claim that he is more interested in the contemporary
“white genocide” than the Holocaust.23 A key contributor to the volume is
Kevin MacDonald, author of the anti- Semitic The Culture of Critique: An
Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth- Century Intellectual
and Political Movements. MacDonald’s work informs Spencer’s view that
Jews are not part of the white race; they are instead a dangerous group apart
from Euro- American societies, and promote liberal and socialist multicul-
turalism in order to destroy rooted, white, and European identities. Unlike
Johnson, Taylor does not have particular animus toward Jews as long as
they let whites create their own homelands.
Spencer also contributed a foreword, “What is the American Right?”, to
Gottfried’s The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement.24
In this piece, he suggests that the mainstream Right in the US is today de-
fined by five characteristics: free- market capitalism, generic Christianity,
staunch support for the US military, unambiguous support for the State of
Israel, and a values- based conception of American identity, which is uni-
versal rather than ethnically based.25 Spencer himself rejects most of these
positions for a more revolutionary politics. He rejects the capitalist model;
he is a cultural atheist rather than Christian (echoing the French New
Right’s paganism);26 he supports the US military but criticizes its morally
tinged interventionism abroad;27 he is not a staunch supporter of Israel
(Israel is a rich country and some US wars are supposedly used to advance
Israeli rather than American national interests);28 and he supports an ex-
plicitly ethnic conception of American identity, rejects immigration and
refugees, and calls for white ethnostates.29
Spencer is known for his numerous speaking engagements, especially
to university audiences. These lectures are designed to cultivate an image
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of a Right that is intellectual, a champion of free speech against political
correctness, and to push his agenda in settings seen to be friendly to-
ward the liberal Left and multiculturalism. Spencer was thus invited to
Vanderbilt University in 2010 and to Providence College in 2011 by Youth
for Western Civilization. His speaking engagements at universities have
been fiercely protested and sometimes denied on public safety grounds,
including at Texas A&M University and Michigan State University in 2016.
He also speaks to more right- wing audiences such as Hans- Hermann
Hoppe’s Property and Freedom Society, Taylor’s American Renaissance
conference, and Gottfried’s H. L. Mencken Club.
Spencer greeted the inauguration of Donald Trump with optimism.
Trump’s antiestablishment tone, his anti- immigrant, anti- Mexican rhet-
oric, his populist economics, and his breaking of the boundaries of polit-
ical correctness pleased Spencer. Spencer even attended the inauguration
of the new US president. As he was giving an interview there, he was
punched in the face.
As has been said, Spencer gained greatest fame for his “Alt- Right man-
ifesto,” discussed later in this chapter. He also attained notoriety from the
violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. While
the rally sought to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General
Robert E. Lee, it tragically saw a white nationalist violently drive over and
kill a liberal counterprotester. Spencer condemned the use of violence
on his Twitter account. The protesters included a collection of right-
wingers: white supremacists, white nationalists, neo- Confederates, neo-
Nazis, and various militia movements. A number of marchers chanted
racist and anti- Semitic slogans such as “Jews will not replace us,” some
carried semiautomatic rifles, swastikas, Confederate flags, and anti-
Muslim banners. There were also pro- Trump banners: those supporters
would have been pleased when Trump blamed the Charlottesville “vi-
olence on all sides.” Spencer could also claim that “Trump has never
denounced the Alt- Right. Nor will he.”30
Intellectual inspiration
Visitors to Spencer’s principal website, AltRight.com, were at one point
greeted by a picture of Julius Evola. Founded in 2017, AltRight.com states
that it includes “the best writers and analysts from the Alt- Right, in
North America, Europe, and around the world.” The media partners of
AltRight.com include right- wing websites such as Arktos (Daniel Friberg),
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Radix Journal (Richard Spencer), and Red Ice (Henrik Palmgren). Its key
European editor is Friberg himself.
Spencer’s AltRight.com notes that “The Alt Right draws its inspiration
from a variety of schools of thought: the European New Right, Radical
Traditionalism, German Conservative Revolutionaries, Paleoconservatism,
Human Bio- Diversity and other racialist thinkers.” The historian of fas-
cism Roger Griffin would have described this ideological syncretism
as “mazeway resynthesis” in which “old and new ideological and ritual
elements— some of which would previously have been incongruous or
incompatible— are forged through ‘ludic recombination’ into a totalizing
worldview.”31 The specific thinkers that inspire Spencer’s Alt Right include
French New Right thinkers de Benoist, Faye, Dominique Venner, Dugin,
the English nationalist Jonathan Bowden, and “race realism” and white
nationalist thinkers from the US such as Samuel Francis and MacDonald,
Taylor, and Richard Lynn.
Like the French New Right, Spencer is a fan of the German thinkers
Nietzsche and Schmitt. Like de Benoist, he sees Nietzsche as the
prophet of the decline of
Western civilization, the supporter of elitist
antiegalitarianism, and the critic of the “weak” and egalitarian Judeo-
Christian values which produced the egalitarian “sicknesses” associated
with liberalism, socialism, feminism, and multiculturalism. Spencer sees
in Schmitt the champion of friend and enemy as the crucial definition of
the political, in contrast to liberals searching for an “end of history” devoid
of friends and enemies. In Schmitt, Spencer sees a thinker who hated
parliamentary debate and democracy, a supporter of a state that was deci-
sive and violent, and a champion of the ultranationalist cause. “Politics is
inherently brutal” and “the state is crystallized violence,”32 insists Spencer,
echoing Schmitt. Spencer also cites other Conservative Revolution thinkers,
including Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger. In addition, Spencer is
influenced by more overt fascists such as Evola, Yukio Mishima, and
Francis Parker Yockey. With both the fascists and Conservative Revolution
thinkers, Spencer plays a clever double game: openly rejecting violence
but simultaneously legitimizing thinkers that promote violence, racism,
anti- Semitism, and the rejection of liberal, parliamentary politics.
Four other thinkers are significant for Spencer’s intellectual evolu-
tion: Jack Donovan, creator of “male tribalism”; Wilmot Robertson, au-
thor of The Dispossessed Majority (which influenced Spencer’s notion that
white Europeans who built the US are in decline and hence the decline
of the US); the political philosopher Leo Strauss (a fierce critic of liberal
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democracy and the “crisis of the West”); and Paul Gottfried (in particular,
After Liberalism and Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt).
The “Alt- Right Manifesto”
Spencer’s major work is his “Alt- Right manifesto,” also known as “What It
Means To Be Alt- Right: A metapolitical manifesto for the Alt- Right move-
ment” or “The Charlottesville Statement.” It was released on August 11,
2017, just before the tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The “Alt- Right manifesto” is an attempt by Spencer to create a broad
white nationalist movement and influence the masses of white Americans
wedded to liberal or socialist multiculturalism. It clearly mimics the right-
wing manifesto written in 1999 by de Benoist and Charles Champetier.33
Spencer himself likens it to the manifestos of the conservative and New
Left movements of the early 1960s, The Sharon Statement (1960) and
The Port Huron Statement (1962).34 Spencer’s own manifesto consists
of twenty points.35 In suggesting that the manifesto is “metapolitical,”
Spencer borrows from the cultural struggle of the French New Right.
Spencer, like the French New Right, believes that the radical Right must
be more Gramscian— winning hearts and minds, changing vocabulary,
and bringing issues of race, “Jewish influence,” immigration, multicul-
turalism, ethnic consciousness, and white political solidarity to the center
of American political life.
The first point of the manifesto is about race:
Race is real. Race matters. Race is the foundation of identity. White
is shorthand for a worldwide constellation of peoples, each of
which is derived from the Indo- European race, often called Aryan.
“European” refers to a core stock— Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic,
Latin, Nordic, and Slavic— from which related cultures and a shared
civilization sprang.
It is significant that race is the first point of the manifesto, because
for Spencer the US should be a race- based ethnic state devoid of non-
Europeans, nonwhites, blacks, and Jews. Whereas historically many white
nationalists might have excluded Latin and Slavic peoples from the US,
Spencer calls for the unity of all whites on both sides of the Atlantic.
Guillaume Faye similarly calls for the unity of white Europeans of dif-
ferent stock.36 Or, as Spencer puts it in another piece, “Our dream is a new
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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.”37 How this would be attained is never pre-
cisely sketched out by Spencer and the Alt Right, argues George Hawley.
Race is central for Spencer because both the mainstream political
parties (Democrats and Republicans), he argues, deny the centrality of
race, push for open borders that dilute the sanctity of the white race, and
promote a multiculturalism that is a homogenizer of white peoples and
ultimately all peoples. “As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their
own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic cat-
egory is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to
resist their dispossession,”38 stated Spencer, echoing Wilmot Robertson.
It is also significant that the notion of race is thoroughly discredited, es-
pecially in the West. Spencer thus uses race in order to attack politically cor-
rect liberal- Left discourses, which negate the importance of race in politics
and human history. He wants to create racial ethnic states globally, which
borrows from the New Right’s global “cultural ethnopluralism.”39 These
ethnostates are seen in a positive light— forces against a “one- world civili-
zation,” globalization, multiculturalism, and homogenizing capitalism—
all “destroyers” of peoples.40 Alternative elites like Spencer must lead the
drive toward white ethnostates, which Spencer notes in point three of the
manifesto. In point two of the manifesto, Spencer writes:
Jews are an ethno- religious people distinct from Europeans. At var-
ious times, they have existed within European societies, without
being of them. The preservation of their identity as Jews was and
is contingent on resistance to assimilation, sometimes expressed
as hostility towards their hosts. “Judeo- Christian values” might be
a quaint political slogan, but it is a distortion of the historical and
metaphysical reality of both Jews and Europeans.
Here Spencer breaks one of the major taboos of post– World War Two poli-
tics: anti- Semitism. Fascism and Nazism were discredited for their racism,
imperialism, violence, totalitarianism, and virulent anti- Semitism. The
Final Solution demonstrated the genocidal thrust of Nazism and its bio-
logical anti- Semitism. Spencer also repeats what Nazis and some others
(including Evola) have said about the Jews: that they are a distinctive
people compared to Europeans, and hence cannot be Europeans; that they
maintain their identity and refuse to assimilate into their host societies;
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and that they are hostile to whites or Europeans as they allegedly support
internationalist ideologies such as liberalism and socialism and promote
capitalism— all “antinational” and “traitorous” forces.
Spencer further advances the notion that the concept of Judeo-
Christian values is “a distortion of the historical and metaphysical reality
of both Jews and Europeans” and suggests that Jews imposed the egal-
itarian Judeo- Christian tradition on Europeans. What Europeans really
want is elitist, hierarchical, and homogeneous societies, a point repeatedly
made by de Benoist.41 Like whites, Jews should have their own ethnostate
(Israel). In one interview for an Israeli television station, Spencer shock-
ingly called himself a Zionist.42 Despite his anti- Semitism, Spencer also
supports a “sort of white Zionism,” that would inspire “dispossessed”
whites with the dream of such a homeland in a way that Zionism helped
push for the establishment of Israel.43 Finally, Spencer holds that Jews
should not be part of the body politic because they are a different race— a
position Taylor rejects.
In point three, “ethnostate,” Spencer demonstrates the power of the
Alt Right to create its own vocabulary on its own terms. “Alt Right” and
“ethnostate” are terms used first by Spencer, then picked up by the main-
stream media and spread to the public at large— part of the Alt Right’s
metapolitical war against the liberal- Left elites and establishment. In point
three, Spencer writes: “Nations must secure their existence and unique-
ness and promote their own development and flourishing. The state is an
existential entity, and, at its best, a physical manifestation of a people’s
being, order, and will to survive. Racially or ethnically defined states are
legitimate and necessary.”
If we dissect these lines, it follows that whites in both Europe and
America need racially and ethnically homogeneous states. Each nation
must be racially defined and this alone will allow it to develop and flourish.
Multicultural states are doomed to fail because of their racial mixing and
are thus illegitimate. Unlike ethnic nationalism, civic nationalism is ille-
gitimate because it focuses on political values that unite rather than racial
unity. Finally, there will eventually be a larger, white ethnic racial state.
In point four of the manifesto, “Metapolitics,” Spencer states
maintains that the Alt Right “wages a situational and ideological war on