Spenser For Hire

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

“As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession.” - Richard B. Spenser

David Duke did it already, Dick. And, before him, George Lincoln Rockwell.

      Today in the Gray Lady's pages, Kelly J. Baker wrote a bombshell of an article entitled, "White Collar Supremacy." Until recently, it was still trending on Twitter and for good reason. In it, Baker deconstructs the fallacy that the so-called Alt Right movement increasingly symbolized by Richard B. Spenser is not a new movement nor is it conservative intellectualism.

     Richard Bertram Spenser, a guy who seems to have been named after three butlers and whose very birthplace (Whitefish, Montana) sounds Aryan, has seen a disturbing surge in popularity since the improbable election of Germanic strongman Donald J. Trump. In a recent speech on the 19th, Spenser was videotaped saying, "Hail Trump" to stiff arm Nazi salutes from audience members (egged on by a hype man at the end of the video) and referred to the mainstream media, with a smirk, by their German name. With a shortening of a vowel from "Hail" to "Heil", we would've had a beer hall putsch, minus police intervention.

     Baker, a trained historian and essayist, writes in her second paragraph,

They want to convince the media that they are a “new form” of white nationalism that we’ve never seen before: clean-cut, intellectual, far removed from the unpolished white supremacists of the past. But the alt-right is not as new as we might think. In fact, efforts to dress up white supremacy in ideas and middle-class respectability have been around since the first organized movements emerged in the late 19th century — and once again, people are falling for it.

     While perhaps best saved as a peroration, Baker had there encapsulated the entire thrust of her article in the NY Times: That the white supremacist movement is hardly a new thing no matter how many fake "scientific" studies they trowel out, no matter how much their wardrobes cost and no matter what their intellectual pretensions.
     But the white supremacist movement began in this country since the first Continental Congress in 1774 Philadelphia, when the nation's first ratified laws immediately favored wealthy, white merchants, land and slave owners, laws that also immediately invested unprecedented powers to everyone who wasn't wealthy, white or male. With the election of multibillionaire Trump 242 years later, and with a Congress that is a third comprised of almost exclusively white millionaires and multimillionaires (as of 2014), nothing much, it seems, has changed.
     But tell that to craven racists such as Richard Spenser, head of a white nationalist organization named the National Policy Institute that boasts, among other assets, not one but two publishing divisions. To hear Spenser whine about the decline of a white America, you'd half believe, if you think pork rinds are a food group and that the outgoing Duck Dynasty is the epitome of arts and entertainment, the white man's days are numbered.

Take Up the White Man's Burden

     As "scientific" proof that the white man is superior, Spenser exhumes the bones of Madison Grant, a late 19th-early 20th century racist and white supremacist who'd written a book entitled, "The Passing of the Great Race." It apparently has been lost on Spenser that Grant was not a scientist by trade or training but a lawyer, a person more interested in the conservation of animals than non-Caucasian races. He's essentially to Spenser what Canadian racist Cleon Skousen is to Glenn Beck.
     Just as Skousen, who once wrote that, "American slave children were freer than white non-slaves" and fought tirelessly against anti-discrimination laws, Madison was a eugenicist who in his most cited work bemoaned the dilution of white blood in America and wrote of "racial hygiene" (just a half step removed from the ethnic cleansing of the German Nazi movement). The work of people such as Skousen and Madison and all too many others is rooted not in hard science but racism with an academic degree attached to it.
     To show how thoroughly unmoored from reality and science is Spenser, he said in his November 19th speech, "We don't exploit other groups", which I'm sure will come as a relief to the dead slaves who'd been stolen from Africa to pick our cotton and the Chinese coolies who'd mined our gold in the American Northwest and largely built our first transcontinental railroads. Indeed, it's amazing that Spenser hasn't yet trotted out "evidence" from 19th century phrenologists who'd also "proved" that white people were intellectually superior to blacks.
     But this 38 year-old wouldbe George Lincoln Rockwell, who's trying to appeal to whatever racist Millennials that are out there by dressing in black shirts and hipster sunglasses, is just another false prophet treading in the old jackboot footsteps of other men who'd tried to rebrand racism, white supremacy and homophobia with a simple wardrobe change.
     Rockwell, despite his obvious flaws in character, nonetheless was a highly intelligent man with a nimble, agile mind. As head of the American Nazi Party, he came dangerously close to making his racist views mainstream by perverting his high intellect to a worldview that is anything but intellectual. If conservatism is capable of teaching anything to normal people, it's that it's staunchly opposed to anything that carries with it even a whiff of intellectual elitism. In fact, the intellectuals, as with eastern Europe's LGBT population, were among the first to go to the Nazi death camps.
     Less than a generation after Rockwell's assassination by one of his own men in Arlington, VA in 1967, David Duke shrugged out of his Klan costume and put on a business suit. Duke, who'd actually gotten elected to the Louisiana legislature (and infamously endorsed Trump), did a more successful rebranding of racism and was one of the first to make the useless distinction that's still bought by the gullible that he wasn't racist but "pro-white." Duke put a fresh, youthful face over the once-dreaded white hood of the KKK and made racism hip and cool again.
     And now Spenser, buoyed by an impending Trump presidency that promises a supposedly peaceful ethnic cleansing (which was the line used by Nazi officials to the civilians in Germany), is the latest Hydra head that needs to be lopped off at the shoulders. And that's what American racism is: A Hydra in which, when you lop off one head, several more seem to take its place.
     Spenser is hiring out both himself and his own rancid world views to a gullible white America that still enjoys favoritism with the media, law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Like Trump, he's a useful idiot to those who share that morally and intellectually bereft world view that wistfully dreams of a pure white America that never was and never will be.