Richard Spencer
Article
Richard Spencer is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 19, 2021 and October 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “The KKK and Richard Spencer did not play a major role in the Trump administration”; “arch-alt-rightist Richard Spencer was leading white nationalists in Nazi salutes for Trump”; “Richard Spencer, who invented the term ‘alt-right’ and whose Trump salute helped spark the panic”. It most often appears alongside Trump, Donald Trump, George Floyd.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: April 19, 2021
- Last seen: October 30, 2024
Appears In
- Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
- The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
- Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
- ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein
Related Pages
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- Trump (4 shared issues)
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- Donald Trump (3 shared issues)
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- George Floyd (3 shared issues)
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- Hillary Clinton (3 shared issues)
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- Obama (3 shared issues)
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- Republican Party (3 shared issues)
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- Twitter (3 shared issues)
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- 4chan (2 shared issues)
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- alt-right (2 shared issues)
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- Bernie Sanders (2 shared issues)
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- cancel culture (2 shared issues)
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- Charlottesville (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I think time has proven me right here. There was no large-scale state-sponsored violence against minorities during the Trump presidency. Trump’s race-related policies were similar to those of other recent Republican presidents. The three most-discussed Trump supporter hate crimes all turned out to be hoaxes (1, 2, 3, I swear I’m not trying to cherry-pick, these really were the most discussed incidents at the time). There was no huge spike in hate crimes during the Trump presidency, just fluctuations of about the same scale as during previous years. The much-reported-upon study showing that Trump rallies increased local hate crimes was reanalyzed and found to be wrong; adjusting for population correctly showed they did not increase hate crimes at all. Trump lost support among white voters, and gained support among voters of color at an unprecedented rate among Republicans. The KKK and Richard Spencer did not play a major role in the Trump administration, and the media stopped covering them in favor of new, less-racialized pro-Trump groups like QAnon.
Racist supporters: Around the 2016 election, there were a lot of stories about the KKK marching for Trump, about how arch-alt-rightist Richard Spencer was leading white nationalists in Nazi salutes for Trump, et cetera. We were promised an age of renewed white supremacist activity, supported by or maybe actively merging with the government.
Inline links: leading white nationalists in Nazi salutes for Trump
Further, white supremacists generally stopped being interested in Donald Trump, and have mostly abandoned him. In 2018, Southern Poverty Law Center wrote Are White Nationalists Turning On Trump? - by now, the answer is clearly yes. From VOA News: Once Ardent Trump Supporters, White Nationalists Splinter Ahead Of Presidential Vote. Richard Spencer, who invented the term "alt-right" and whose Trump salute helped spark the panic, disavowed Trump in early 2020 and announced he was supporting Biden in the election. White supremacists are irrelevant and you should not care what they think, but if for some reason you insist on caring what they think, they are no longer particularly pro-Trump.
The alt-right started completely separate from any of this. The name was invented by Richard Spencer, a very serious movement white supremacist more on the "hold scary rallies full of skinheads" side of things than the "gripe about SJWs on Reddit" side. Although there have been white supremacists on the Internet forever - Stormfront was founded in 1996 - they didn't interact much with the early anti-SJW movement, who (again) were mostly liberal Democrat nerds who found geek feminists annoying.
While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers. I can’t deny that many far-right people have been banned. But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way.
Time to own the libs! ACX joins such based heterodox thinkers as Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, and David Duke in telling you what the woke Washington Post and failing LA Times don’t want you to know: Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President.
Inline links: Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, David Duke, the woke Washington Post, LA Times