Transcript by Kat (@leftgoth)
Greetings fellow cucks, snowflakes, soy boys, and antifa super soldiers, and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the podcast in which I get Daniel Harper, internet lefty person and my friend and colleague, to tell me what he learned and heard during more than two years of listening to and reading what the Alt-Right (which is really the far-right) say to each other in their safe spaces, their podcasts, their YouTube videos, etc…
We're going to be tackling a single subject per episode and this first episode is about Richard Spencer. We are going to be discussing racists and racism and fascism generally so trigger warnings definitely apply. Okay, first question: how would you define what you've been researching, Daniel?
DANIEL
To sort of casual listeners, normally I would say broadly Alt-Right, although Alt-Right is not a term that I like to use very much because it's really nebulous. It means a lot of different things to a lot of people, it's kind of intentionally that, it's always served their purpose in fact. I think we'll kind of get into the origins of the term here in a second. But there's no really clear definition that is sort of universally applicable as to who is and is not Alt-Right. And most of the figures who even kind of work within that kind of broad movement will sort of like define themselves relative to this term or they will kind of like say, “Oh, I'm not Alt-Right,” because they’re meaning it to mean, kind of one in particular definition of it. Well yeah, it is, it's just really not a clear term and so I try not to use it. And there are other kind of like subgroups in what is kind of broadly called the Alt-Right to, you know, I try to more use sort of their terms and kind of like how they define themselves as being slightly more clear, or at least not as prone to misuse, as Alt-Right. I mean a “dissident right” or “nationalist right” or “far right”, “hard right”. You know, all kinds of various terms that work for different sorts of factions within that. And one thing that I do want to make clear, one distinction I will make is the Alt-Light versus Alt-Right distinction. I really spent very little time with sort of the Alt-Light figures, these are your kind of Info Wars, your Paul Joseph Watson’s, Milo, those kinds of figures—
JACK
Sargon [of Akkad].
DANIEL
Sargon, who I don't think even, we could talk about whether Sargon is even Alt-Light, you know, by that standard he would probably not refer to himself as such, but—
JACK
Well, I’m sure he wouldn’t.
DANIEL
Yeah, I mean, Alt-Light is also kind of more of a style that—
JACK
Yeah.
DANIEL
It's sort of like, you know, “we're gonna push these sort of right wing, anti-gay, SJW”, quote unquote, talking points and, to put this fairly straightforward, kind of like right wing conservatism, at least in the US. It's basically Republican talking points, but we're going to do it in kind of a snarky, in-your-face way, and we call ourselves, “we’re the Alt-Light”, you know, and therefore, “we’re not your dad's conservatism because we'll use the swear words that they won’t". So the people that I spend my time with, that I really spent my time studying and learning, are the explicitly race realists, ethno-nationalist, white nationalist right who gird their arguments in pseudo-science and socio-biology and evolutionary psychology, and who use those those kinds of explicitly racial arguments because that's really come to the forefront, it's really come to popularity and it infects the whole discourse, I think online, and has for the last four or five years now and that side of it I think, A) just sort of interested me more than the Alt-Light, the Milo figures, just in terms of it feels like there's a little bit more of an intellectual or pseudo-intellectual, I put everything in quotes here, but there is a little bit more of a an argument that you can push against there. But also the fact that we are seeing people embrace more and more of this really, really far racist rhetoric and it's infecting more and more traditional politics and our traditional stuff that’s just in the air and the way that that works, the way that sort of online culture and meme culture and social media have enabled this to spread like wildfire until the president of the United States can spread genocide conspiracy theories and it's sort of a thing that happens. That's the stuff that really upsets me, that's the stuff that scares me. And that's where I've really put most of my focus. So again, I spent very little time with someone like Milo, he is more just kind of a figure of fun for me. The people I follow are mostly people who are in that explicitly ethno-nationalist, white nationalist Right.
JACK
Right. I don't want to get sidetracked into the Alt-Light, because as you say, it's not your focus, but that is kind of the vector or one of the vectors whereby this more hard-right fringe that you've been investigating has had that kind of influence, hasn’t it. Particularly I'm thinking of you know Bannon and Breitbart and so on.
DANIEL
Yeah no, it's all in this, again, gets into the question of where's the dividing line here? And to me, I have a pretty clear thing in my head of like, there are these people who are spreading the explicitly race realist stuff and then there are people hiding that, but who clearly are working on the same assumptions, and then there are people who are not and who are pushing more kind of like Trumpists, you know, more straightforwardly just Republican, right wing kind of stuff even though they may be very far-right on like, for instance the transphobia, and let me be clear, I don't approve of any of these people. But you know, I do see there being a difference between the sort of like coded, implicit racism of some of, you know, talking about states’ rights vs. actually wanting to, you know, push all of the black people into their own like ghetto, their own country or something. It’s a very different kind of thing if you've been looking at the history of American politics in the last 80 years or so, the fact that this is now fairly mainstream rhetoric in a lot of places and particularly online and in that people are being radicalized to this. You see teenagers who just don't believe the Holocaust because it’s been mocked so many times in their presence. It's just like nobody believes in the Holocaust because that's just the way they, where they come in, you know. And that's really scary.
JACK
Yeah, well, maybe another time we'll get into it.
DANIEL
We'll definitely have to talk about the Holocaust. I am not prepared today to spend too much time talking about where that comes from. But it's a very prominent example.
JACK
Now I do want to get into that and I say, maybe at some point, we'll get onto the way in which this hard-right fringe that you've been looking at reaches out through these more disguised versions into the mainstream. But as you say, or, I mean, I'm sort of emphasizing the fuzzy spectrum, you're emphasizing the hard distinction, and I think that's just as valuable, if not at a certain point, politically more valuable. So let's focus in on that one figure who's been very much a nexus figure between the two, or has tried to position himself that way, and who's very well known, is of course, Richard Spencer. So tell me about Richard Spencer.
DANIEL
Sure. Well, Richard Spencer is definitely Alt-Right. He is actually, to the degree that this thing has a definite origin point, it is actually not technically with Spencer himself, it was a speech given by a guy named Paul Gottfried and Paul Gottfried is still alive. He does not claim the term “alternative right”, but at a speech at H.L. Mencken club during, I think, Thanksgiving weekend of 2008, he gave a speech called The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right. This was reproduced in Taki’s Mag [takimag.com], which was edited by Richard Spencer at the time, and Richard Spencer was also editing at the American Conservative. And these are paleo-conservative/paleo-libertarian magazines. And if you read the actual thing, I can see your notes, it's actually kind of a tough read unless you understand the context in which it is given, because Gottfried is very much the Old Man of the paleo-cons. Some people actually say he coined the term “paleo-conservative” back in the 80s, although I haven't seen a really concrete reference for that, but he is widely credited with coining both the term “paleo-conservative” and “alternative right”. Now, the reason it becomes associated with Richard Spencer is that Spencer is both editing Taki’s Mag and American Conservative. But he kind of likes tension and kind of makes it his own. He forms AlternativeRight.Com, just a website, like basically a Blogspot blog, a few months later and then eventually shortens it to Alt-Right and makes “alt-right” common, in the sense like actually doing events, giving speeches with that banter and made that term into a kind of defined political thing. But if you read the speech that Gottfried gave, it's very much about a reaction, a rejection of movement conservatism, of the time of the Reagan and Bush years from say, the mid-70s to what was (at the time current), you know, 2008, basically the failures of this neo-conservative style of politics and really, kind of read between the lines, it's very clear that like the war in Iraq went really badly. And the conservative movement was scrambling to see what they were going to do next. And it really gave a vacuum, this power vacuum or this ideological vacuum, that really gave power to this rising movement of the paleo-cons. [They] could take back over just because Bush was so hated, even within the Republican Party, and again, largely, largely not. I think it's amazing that 60 million people voted for George W. Bush and I can't find a single one of them anywhere. It's like, you see in this piece and again, you can link to it if you if you want to, but it is very much about kind of rejection of this particular kind of conservatism and this particular kind of— you know, the endless wars, the spreading of democracy around the world and kind of fighting communism abroad, and that sort of thing. And in that sense, what’s interesting about Spencer, then, is that he was very much kind of in this paleo-conservative, but not in the core of the conservative Republican Party. He wasn't being groomed for those higher positions, but certainly within this smaller world they’re outside of the warm fires of the neo-conservative think tank money. So there was definitely some— he was definitely one of those blue bloods. He was definitely one of those people being groomed for this kind of position. I have a video that was actually on C-Span of a Ron Paul event at what was called the Robert Taft Club which was— And again, I can give you this link [to the C-Span video], I've got in front of me, I re-watched them. But Richard Spencer actually introduces Ron Paul on October 11, 2007, so this is when Ron Paul is sort of doing the, you know, his Ron Paul ‘08 run for president.
JACK
Ron Paul Revolution.
DANIEL
The Ron Paul Revolution, right. And Richard Spencer is right there. And you look at him here, I mean, I guess he's like 28 or so. I mean, you can tell the difference that the 13 years or so or 12 years or so has made in terms of the lines on his face. He definitely looks like a more callow youth at this point [in 2007], but it's amazing how much he still sounds exactly like he sounds today. But he's definitely sort of hiding, he's not going out nearly as far as he would [on] a right wing podcast or Alt-Right podcast today, but he's toeing the line, out of respect, I think, for Ron Paul and out of respect for trying to keep access to those institutions.
JACK
Right. I mean, that's what Ron Paul's doing as well.
DANIEL
Exactly. And ironically, Spencer, again, I just re-watched this a few minutes ago — just his little introduction, and it's entirely about the failures of foreign policy and he's making jokes like about the other Republicans that are running in that primary campaign at the time. I have to go look up some of the references, some of the jokes [because] I don't even remember that incident, but apparently it was current at the time. But it’s fascinating to look at him then and see just how completely he's just one of these up-and-coming people and within two years, he’s founded this alternative right movement. And he's going off and he starts up a campus speaking tour in like 2009 or 2010. He's doing a ton of speaking at events. He did a big event at Vanderbilt that was like 200-300 people in attendance, talking against affirmative action and spreading this idea that affirmative action is quote/unquote “anti-white”, which was a term. He's using the terminology that was on that far-right wing of the paleo-conservatives. He's still in that [paleo-con] headspace, he’s still part of that movement, but he's pushing at the further right fringes of that. Because the paleo-cons [back] then, there were some sort of quote unquote “white nationalist” thinkers who are included within that paleo-con label. But the movement itself, even the paleo-cons really didn't want anything to do with open white nationalism. And if you went too far from them then you ended up being in, like, the Third Party hell-hole, this hellscape, and you couldn't get any kind of money or any kind of institutional support. So at this point certainly when he's introducing Ron Paul, he's so thoroughly ensconced within this blue blood world of blazers and ties and, you know, “we're going to talk about conservatism and foreign policy”, etc…
JACK
So he's still at that point maybe not entirely, fully ensconced inside the mainstream, but a basically mainstream-adjacent, respectable political career, you think?
DANIEL
He's basically looking to be, you know, some kind of, I don't know— It is funny that Richard Spencer is someone that I really go back and forth a lot [with] exactly how I feel about what he's done and who he is and what he's really been. Like what's really going on behind his eyes, what’s in Richard Spencer's head and what's his meaning? Because when I first started approaching these topics in late 2016 and I first heard, really listening to, these guys and following the movement, I thought of Richard Spencer as just more of a PR guy. At that point, I never really felt like he was pushing the memes and pushing the ideology and pushing that the movement was really his. It always struck me that he was just kind of the guy that cleaned up real nice, that you could put in front of an NPR microphone and give him five minutes and he'll do a pretty good job of trying to turn the tables on the liberal media or whatever.
JACK
In between getting punched obviously.
DANIEL
Well, this was— I started following him even before that. You know the funny thing is that I wish I had been archiving some of these podcasts and stuff like way earlier than I ended up archiving them, because there are podcasts that were recorded— There's one recorded right after that incident, where he talks about, like, “oh, I've been silly-stringed too many times before and I've never actually been punched,” and he's like talking about, “oh, it wasn't that bad there”. But, I wasn't archiving yet, I guess, and I deleted it when I was finished listening to it and now all that has been down a memory hole, because as these guys lose their hosting providers, they tend to not put up their old material again. So unless somebody has it, it's gone. One of the real negative things about de-platforming these guys is that it's harder for me to track them. It really makes it easier if you could just like put them on, like, iTunes, then that would be really easy for me to follow them. But I'd rather not be the case.
JACK
I would sort of put out an appeal to our listeners, you know, if any of you have all this stuff backed up get in touch with Daniel, but I'm pretty sure you're the only person from the left doing this.
DANIEL
I'm pretty sure I have a larger archive of this stuff than almost anyone out there. I'm in contact with other people who are tracking it as well and comparing notes and yeah, I'm pretty sure because I've been archiving pretty completely since around Charlottesville, actually a little bit before that. And I try to just grab whatever archives I can and I'm pretty sure I have stuff that literally no one else has at this point.
JACK
So, yeah I don’t want to get sidetracked. So on the subject of Spencer, I mean, what is his ideology
DANIEL
The interesting thing for me is that if you look at the history of Spencer, sort of after 2010 but before 2015, that five year period, he kind of went nowhere. In fact, even the alternative right label, he kind of stopped using it. He got this job at NPI, the National Policy Institute, and he moved away from doing those campus events and away from using that label just because it wasn't very effective. A couple of buddies of his who were involved in the beginning, I don't have the names in front of me right now, but a couple of buddies kind of took over the website [Alt-Right Blogspot] and they just kept publishing this little web zine that might as well have been— I mean, there are plenty of right-leaning little web projects that have a few thousand readers or whatever, and they just keep going by luck and by pluck. And it was kind of one of those. And interestingly, the fact that Richard Spencer was not directly associated with it [the term Alt-Right] and that it wasn't explicitly a white nationalist term for a while seems to be the thing that allowed it to be embraced by the sort of “edgy right”. And it seems they just embraced it as a term and so that's where Breitbart and Milo and a lot of those kind of figures start calling themselves Alt-Right around the 2013 to 2015-ish period. And in fact, in 2015 basically up until the 2016 election cycle, the term Alt-Right was very young. It was this catch-all term that kind of included everybody and they all embraced it as they were all moving under this one banner. It just kind of meant “edgy right winger” and that could be anybody from sort of a center-right libertarian all the way to you know like, “gas the Jews”. It’s kind of everybody working together. And it was really only after the election and only after this event, Heilgate, which is after Trump's election and before his inauguration. Richard Spencer gave a speech at one of the Washington D.C. ballrooms, I forget the name of it, but the Atlantic had a reporter there and they shot some video of Richard Spencer and this is a really fascinating speech. I'm going to go through this bit by bit as part of the pieces of writing I do. I mean, it's really fascinating in terms of what it tells you about Spencer and about where this movement is. In a lot of ways, it's as important, if not more so, than the original Paul Gottfried piece. But what's really interesting, what kind of like bit them all in the ass, was Richard Spencer is lording it over that suddenly, “we are the ones in charge,” and he's using terms like “Lugenpresse” and he's really openly rubbing it in that, “oh no, we're actually going to have this far-right, racialist ideology that's going to be in charge now,” and Trump is sort of the vehicle for that, but also a bunch people in the back. After the speech, they’re giving their Roman salute, the “Heil Hitler" salute, and the Atlantic cut together this, like, two minute piece of video that's the highlights and lowlights of Spencer's speech alongside this kind of dark and toning music. Then, you know, some people throwing those Roman salutes and suddenly all of the Alt-Light figures who did not want to be associated with outright neo-nazism are really distancing themselves from the term. So after that, Alt-Right was very much more that kind of openly racialist, white nationalist term and really, in fact, the Unite the Right rally, the original point of that was to combine everybody back into one thing again, which became a total complete failure for a lot of reasons. But Spencer, as for what he believes in, Spencer is an interesting figure in that sense in that he believes in sort of a racial— that white people are genetically superior, or at least different, from other people and that white people, because of sort of inherent genetic advantages, have built civilization around themselves like that, that “we as white people,” as he would say, “made this.” And like all the other people in the world, like black people and East Asians, etc, are not, have not, been able to do that, and that colonialism is good because then, suddenly, Africans get access to this amazing thing that white people can make because black people are not able to build this for themselves, and isn't it beneficial for white people to control them— Richard Spencer is an open colonialist. I have some audio of him talking it in not uncertain terms.
JACK
To say, go back even 100 years and that's a completely standard, mainstream set of ideas.
DANIEL
Exactly. And I think that, what one of the interesting things is, that they do kind of openly embrace this idea that “this is what’s our answer, this is what our grandfathers believed was just natural and right”. And this has all been subverted sometime in the last 60 or 70 years by, you know, certain people, who have parentheses around their names, to convince us that this is not right and natural. I mean, it's with him that really this idea, that the ethno-state— he didn't invent the term “ethno-state”, that draws back from the, I think the 70s or 80s, you started seeing people using that terminology explicitly— but certainly, he's the one on the Alt-Right who's really thinking in terms of that big picture, in terms of saying, “look, what we need is to re-embrace a sense of our destiny as white people to make things for ourselves and to rule by will and to not feel guilty about the things that we might have done in the past to other people”, and that this is sort of right and natural and good, and that we need this sort of ethnic identity in order to move forward as a people, and that that ethnic identity being subverted is what's the root cause of the weakness of modernity. It's very much a direct rejection of modernity in ways that feel very similar to what the neo-reactionaries are like. But, you know with certain slightly different valences. I mean, there is some kind of interesting overlap there. But it is in Spencer— you know, he has serious academic credentials. I mean, one of the two things that really differentiates Spencer from a lot of the other figures in this movement is that he has serious academic credentials, he has a master's degree from Duke, he was working on a PhD until he kind of entered politics more directly. And he is actually a son of very, very wealthy family. Most of the other kind of figures you end up being,you know I hate using class this way, but some of the upper middle class you know grew up in a suburb somewhere and dabble in the tech industry. Basically most of the other figures look a lot more like that. Spencer is actually a, you know, blue blood his family line. I mean they own plantations in Louisiana, I believe. And he still has think, I think, some family down there. I think he owns an acre there. There's a bunch of— where Richard Spencer's family comes from— there's a lot of conspiracy mongering in the Alt-Right about Richard Spencer really being Jewish. I mean there's a lot of that going around as well. And again, the thing that kind of gets me about Spencer is that he does have this very big picture view. I mean, he is not interested in like local races, he's not interested in things like who's controlling the House this cycle, or he's interested in that in terms of being able to push ideas, but he's not interested in the details of policies. He’s interested in creating that vision and doing that very, very big picture viewpoint. He’s thinking in terms of centuries and not decades, if that makes sense. Whereas a lot of the other figures, if you do follow this movement, a lot of them are doing sort of like the day-by-day looking at what Trump is doing. You know, here and now and a lot of the day-to-day politicking. Richard Spencer, I mean he does a bit of that, but even on his own, he's kind of hanging out with his buddies, doing some sort of Alt-Right— it's kind of his personal brand. It feels like he's definitely trying to not get caught up in the minutia of the day-to-day, like he finds it just beneath him. And that's another thing, personality-wise I mean, he just bleeds this sense of natural superiority to other people. He's really disgusting, when you see behind the scenes footage of him, the way he he talks to the people around him, and he sees himself as just inherently superior, because, you know, he comes from wealth, because looks good in a suit, because he drinks— he actually drinks very mediocre bourbon. I'm kind of amazed at some of his bourbon choices. If I had his budget, I would drink better than he does. But that's neither here nor there.
JACK
So I was going to ask about his his funding, how he funds himself?
DANIEL
For the funding of the stuff, honestly if there was one question I could get really concrete answers on, [it’s] where this money comes from. That would be the thing that I would— that's a really big open question and it's sort of like this movement-wide. Because they are very reticent to sort of give out any information at all about, like, where their money comes from. My understanding is that Spencer has a kind of personal family wealth that he's able to use. There are quite a few sort of millionaires, not billionaires, like they're not getting, like, Koch Brother money, but there there are people who are known as donors, who will make small donations of “only” 20,000 dollars or so to fund these projects. And that's where a lot of the nationalist-right, this Alt-Right, this explicitly race-realist-right gets a lot of funding, through those kinds of sources [where] there are people who have enough money to be able to drop in a few thousand dollars at a time, but not actually sort of creating foundations that will be self-sustaining the way that movement conservatism was able to do. This is, again, a source of that resentment. Richard Spencer thinks he should have some billionaire giving him all the money he wants and he doesn't. And that resentment is very, very clear in a lot of these guys, that they can’t, that Richard Spencer has to kind of balance gripes in a way that, say, Ben Shapiro doesn’t. Ben Shapiro has an actual institution behind him that, they’ll pay him and researchers and, you know, graphics and all that, whereas Spencer has to do it by himself in his really nice apartment in Alexandria, Virginia. He’s not missing meals here. But he doesn't have access to the kind of funding streams that he thinks he should. And, again, this is all over this movement. Like they all think they should be making way, way more money.
JACK
There's always a question of you know the form following function or the other way around. But you wonder if partly why he's not getting more money from more quote unquote respectable sources is going to be that he's got this profile of somebody sort of beyond the pale. But at the same time, if he was getting more money, he'd be able to set himself up to look respectable and he probably wouldn't be beyond the pale anymore.
DANIEL
Oh no, absolutely. And, again, Richard Spencer has been really clear from the beginning, from the get-go, if you look at interviews he made to the Atlantic right after Heilgate, in that same package of interviews, he has been very explicit about, like, “the whole point, the whole thing we're trying to do is to move the Overton Window in our direction. We are trying to move the realm of acceptable discourse towards where we can say we just want to make a state for white people. We just want to be working in favor of white people and white people only”. And [he’s] very open about that. But the whole point is that because he's kind of on the edge of that, he's not able to get that kind of institutional support. But he's actively trying to make it to where he can. That's the whole point. Also I think that there are. And this is where some of their own conspiracy mongering comes from, like kind of real places, because one of the most powerful lobbies in DC is AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, and the Israeli lobby is obviously not going to give money to Richard Spencer for many, many reasons. And so the fact that AIPAC won't fund these guys, the fact that like the Jews control all these kind of neo-conservative funding sources, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right. Like, “you know they won't fund us because we want to throw them into ovens” or, you know, it's complicated, exactly how they feel about what they want. “We want to ship them all back to Israel” [is] essentially the mainstream opinion, I think that would be Spencer's perspective. it's like, “they should they should go live in Israel instead of here”.
JACK
Well, it always is at start, that’s what the Nazis said at the start, deport them.
DANIEL
I'm trying to be clear about about what I mean and also not getting sued by one of these guys because I made a joke. But clearly, yes. They say, “yes, we want to export the Jews to Israel, we want to get them, we want them to have their own country, they should go live there and not subvert our society”. But from somebody like Spencer's point of view, whenever he tries to go and get real institutional money, there's “always some Jew saying no”, and that definitely feeds into that same persecution complex, you know. It's like, “oh, the banks are all [in] control, the credit card processes are all controlled by the Jews”. It's not like, no, people find your views really repellent and they just don't want to be associated with you. No, it has to be this group ethnic identity that the Jews are gaining on “me". It's completely absurd and it’s, like, absolutely pervasive in this movement.
JACK
Yeah, because paranoia is one of the animating forces. On the subject of anti-Semitism, there's a book by George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right.
DANIEL
That is an excellent book.
JACK
You know, I haven't read it, but I read the review of it by Noah Berlatsky and he interviewed Hawley, and he talks about how the the big dividing line in American conservatism after World War II was anti-Semitism. You know, anti-Semitism was kind of, I wouldn’t say purged because that's giving them too much credit, but the line was that it had to be eliminated from American conservatism. Then you have William F. Buckley famously viewing that as the main task of the "respectable right” in America and anathematizing Pat Buchanan and stuff like that.
DANIEL
Anti-Semitism became completely associated with the Nazis and the Holocaust. And this, again, comes right back to the centrality of the Holocaust and justifying this ideology. I am very cognizant of like, you could cut some of this out and make it sound like I'm saying this— I obviously don't believe this— but the animating myth of you know, “well, after World War II, the Jews used the stories of the Holocaust, whether it is real or not, to browbeat ordinary white people, ethnic Europeans or Anglo Saxons or Germanic people and whatever, to act against their ethnic group cohesion by accepting more and more Jewish people into society, and once the Jewish people were allowed to take positions of power and authority over white people, they basically ran the country into a ditch by then allowing African-Americans to have expanded rights to vote and the Hart-Celler Immigration Act 1965 which changed the racial makeup of who was allowed to immigrate into the country”. And on and on and on. I mean, it's like, “the Jews took over” and suddenly “we had all these quote unquote mud people in our country”, and it's all with the explicit goal of removing white people from quote unquote white countries. This is the white genocide myth, exactly. And you can you can hear these guys. They will put it in almost exactly these terms that— I don't think I've ever heard Spencer himself really kind of like put it this explicitly, but I think he believes it. I don't think, I don't have any doubt that he believes that, I think he's just slightly cagier about [it], he doesn't talk much about the Jews. I was actually thinking about this as we were planning to record, I'm not sure if Richard Spencer believes in the Holocaust or not. I legitimately don't think I've heard him discuss it one way or the other. This is the central idea why they believe this. And just to be clear, there's some truth to the idea that after World War II, basically Americans and Western European countries, western societies in general, recoiled at how terrible the Holocaust was and that became a rhetorical tool in terms of making life better for ethnic minorities within Western countries. For instance, a lot of lynching legislation went into effect after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed. And that was certainly used as a, “this is the really bad version of this and we don't want this to happen”. And returning American GIs saying, “look, no, we fought those Nazis and we're going to be not racist, we’re going to be better people”, and you know, there's something kind of admirable in that. We saw how bad things can get. And that's good. But because there wasn't like a sort of real left material basis to a lot of it, it just kind turn into, “it was all we needed to do”, right. And that's where this gets complicated. Like to what degree is Richard Spencer really speaking for the sort of mainstream beliefs that people hold underneath, and what degree is he actually— as he would describe himself as sort of a dissident within American politics. And of course, that's a whole other kind of complicated about what we mean by “white supremacy” and complicated issues there around where the rhetoric works.
JACK
But yeah, I mean the whole founding myth you just outlined is, et’s be in no doubt whatsoever, poisonous bullshit, but like a lot of poisonous bullshit, you can find bits and bobs in that that are based on truth, distantly, like it happens to be, for contingent historical reasons, that the fact that Jews in America have tended to be politically liberal for pretty obvious reasons, really. They've been an historically oppressed and persecuted minority so they're going to identify with other oppressed and persecuted minorities despite the fact that they're white, generally speaking. And then you have the question of Israel becoming a major American ally in the Middle East after the ’67 war, I think it was. And you have a group of people, quite well-off, you know, Jewish liberals, and conservatives, who realize in that atmosphere that they can do very well for themselves by aligning themselves with Israel, because being loyal to Israel is now no longer something to be scared of in terms of the old dual loyalty charge. It is now kind of a good thing, you can boast about how patriotic you are via being behind Israel. I mean that they're not doing it because they're Jewish, they're doing it because they're opportunistic chancers, but they're using this set of circumstances.
DANIEL
So then politicians use rhetoric around Israel to justify things like a Middle East interventionism, which is ultimately about controlling oil revenues, and stamping down populist movements, left movements. I'm assuming you know far more about sort of the late 20th century history of Middle East wars than I do necessarily, but certainly you know Israel gets used as a sort of like intellectual justification. “Oh, it's the one democracy in the Middle East and they're surrounded by these sand people.” I mean, I don't want to use the language, but essentially that's what plenty of otherwise “respectable” people will essentially say, though in private they may not say “people” there. But you know, “all of these savages surrounding Israel" and Israel is this Cosmopolitan modern state, it's a democracy, and therefore we have to defend it— it becomes the intellectual justification for what is ultimately just a power play. But people like Richard Spencer don't they see it as that, that it's just sort of the fig leaf covering a naked excuse for power. They see it as, in some sense, a real expression of an ideology that is causing these things to happen and therefore, that's where you get things like the Zionist Occupied Government, you hear “ZOG”. That dates back to the 70s, actually.
JACK
Yeah, because the fascist viewpoint is intensely racial. I mean, it conceives the world in racial terms. So they look at this contingent, contested, messy history about Israel, and America forging an alliance with Israel to have an ally in the Middle East so they can contain Arab nationalism, to do with controlling oil and oil supplies and stuff like that. They see that. And a group of people who are quite well off, who happen to be Jewish, rising in the establishment, and the fact that you have, you know, AIPAC and all this messy contingent history. They see it in terms of races. So all they see is a bunch of Jews controlling the world, And again, it can't be said enough, this is toxic bullshit.
DANIEL
And you find that same rhetoric, if you watch my YouTube recommendations, most of you would not like to see all my youtube recommendations, just to make it clear, for a while I was getting actual—
JACK
The algorithm pretty bad anyway, but with you I mean—
DANIEL
I actively go and search like other things just so it's not literally just like that. Ironically, it mostly gives me things that I'm interested in seeing, but not because I think this is good, because it's worth knowing.
JACK
You’re one guy that the algorithm works for. Just because, you know, research purposes.
DANIEL
Just for research purposes, right, although it doesn't tend to push me further right, it seems to push me into more of the same. Meaning that I've pretty much found the Right wall of what is allowable on YouTube.
JACK
You found the edge, the very edge.
DANIEL
Yes. It's a scary edge, but for a while YouTube was actually recommending actual 1930s, 30s and 40s, Nazi propaganda films. And so if you watch some of those, I don't speak German, but if you watch them, you know with subtitles. I have not spent a whole lot of time on it, but a lot of these things, it’s the same rhetoric. I mean, there are films that were basically, they look back toward World War I and they'd say, “Oh, there's this group of people that didn't really suffer the way that the rest of us did during World War I and during the Weimar days, and they’re not starving and look at these wealthy Jews, they've got diamonds and they've got money and they're not hungry and they're subverting our society.” I mean, again, the exact same logic, the exact same rhetoric. And that's the stuff, when when you do find those kinds of direct parallels, it's something I'm used to at this point, but certainly when I first started running across them, that's like chill the blood kind of stuff for me. When you can look at something, when you can really pull rhetoric and change the word Germany to America and a couple of other words around and you just plop it right back in, and then see some 22-year-old chud on YouTube, repeating the exact same thing to 100,000 views. You know, it's scary.
JACK
Getting back to Spencer, from the description you've given so far, he's a well-off, privileged young man who—
DANIEL
Although he's now 40.
JACK
But yes, young man. Well, I'm sort of telling a story here. He's a privileged young man from a wealthy background who finds his way entering politics as a career, the way a lot of these guys do. And he seems to have entered that sphere with pre-existing extreme right views. Would you say that's right?
DANIEL
Oh, yeah yeah. No, I think he always had this at least implicit white nationalist kind of ideology. The earliest stuff I see from him, from anybody who kind of knew him back in the day, I see no indication that this was something that just came to his mind in 2008 or whatever. Like it feels like it was always a part of his ideology. He was always in that, ensconced in that far-right version of paleo-conservatism as opposed to [being] openly National Socialist or openly genocidal, you know.
JACK
So he enters the sort of semi-respectable political sphere with preexisting hard-right views, finds himself in essentially a sort of eccentric cul-de-sac, which is what paleo-conservatism is by that point, I would say. Sort of experiments with breaking out into the, as I say, the mainstream-adjacent by getting into the Ron Paul thing, because you know libertarianism, paleo-libertarianism, it's so adjacent to paleo-conservatism. Ideologically it's almost identical, as we've talked about in the past. And then it sounds like he kind of gives up and then takes advantage of the fact that this phrase he picked up from this Gottfried guy, Alt-Right, gains traction in the result of events out in the world that he really doesn't have anything very much to do with. It just sort of happens while he's not looking. And from then on it's a matter of, it looks to me, escalating opportunism. Would you say that's a fair enough summary?
DANIEL
Certainly. There's a lot of the sequence of events I'm still not clear, that [are] kind of contested and you can have sources that can go one way or the other. Again, Hawley's book, I have my issues with Hawley's book. Hawley is sort of a guy who leans right, I believe so. We are mutual followers on Twitter. I haven’t spoken to him privately or anything. But I believe you probably would consider him kind of vaguely Republican-ish kind of guy. So I have my issues with him certainly politically, but he is definitely able to articulate some of the inner divisions of these movements in ways that I've seen no one else do and for that reason alone I highly, highly recommend that book [Making Sense of the Alt-Right]. A lot of the information that I have got, a lot of my perspective on this has come from that. But a lot of the details of what was actually going on between 2010 and 2015 I am kind of unsure of. A lot of it again from sort of listening to and reading and the materials that were produced by talking about Spencer, references to Spencer on other shows that were recorded in late 2014 or something like that. You know, there's a lot of figuring out exactly where he lands there. But I think that you basically get it right. I think that's really certainly my perspective of him, that between 2010 and 2015, he was kind of looking for his place. And the fact that Alt-Right kind of rose to prominence in some of these online spheres, pushed by a troll army is as much as anything, basically the sort of like misogynistic, GamerGate, man-o-sphere kind of movement. Through using this term Alt-Right, he can take advantage of it. It’s difficult to know exactly what's going on in his head and what sort of long term plan [he has] for himself. He very briefly planned to run for Senate, I believe Senate in Montana right after the Trump victory, like when they were all riding high in that two-month period between the Trump election and the inauguration. You can find a couple of news articles from The Times that this is confirmed, he was going to run for Senate in Montana and take over that seat and kind of become a politician. Although in other places he’s seen to talk about how that's beneath him, he doesn't really care about the mechanics of state level politics. He's interested in the national and international perspective on things. But yeah, I think that's a very accurate portrait of who he is writing. He's got the bull by the tail a little bit. There's a sense of bouncing around and, in fact right now, he just recently took over running this YouTube channel called HeelTurn, which I kind of know about. It was this very kind of a run-of-the mill, nothing, YouTube channel when I first kind of discovered. It's sort of like these guys on the Internet inviting these white nationalist figures to come out and do live streams and now, that's where he's putting a lot of his focus and he's not even really focusing on the Alt-Right brand. Like he hasn't released one of his podcasts in months at this point. He's really doing these live streams on YouTube and embracing that audience, which is definitely a way of, the fact that he's able to toe the line enough to not run afoul of the YouTube content moderation allows him to reach a much, much larger audience than he could producing just a podcast that's branded Alt-Right.
JACK
Youtube lets them get away with a hell of a lot.
DANIEL
Oh, no it does. And one of the one of the big stories of really the last year of 2018 into 2019, is that these guys have figured out how to not get banned from YouTube and a lot of that is literally just not using certain words. You know, they'll change, like in the in the n-word, they'll change the G's to B’s and say “nibber”, you know, in the end and literally that's enough. Like you can literally say, “I think all the nibbers should hang from trees” and that's perfectly acceptable apparently, according to YouTube. It's pretty disgusting, but it really is this legalistic approach and they've become very successful doing that. But the irony being that Richard Spencer, who's hypothetically this kind of big blue blood, wealthy, intellectual guy with serious academic credentials is running a, what I would consider to be, a no-name YouTube livestream [with] guests jumping on and off and yet, he's decided to do that. It's again, you know, Spencer himself is kind of a mass of contradictions. This is why I feel like I don't necessarily have a really clear picture on exactly what he's trying to do at any given time. But I think that maybe you're right, maybe he is sort of opportunistic in taking whatever is available to him at the time and just using it for his own agenda until it doesn't work anymore and then he can leave it behind. That does sort of make sense.
JACK
That outline that I just sort of improvised, that is a fairly classic fascist origin story. I mean, there are several fairly classic variants on the fascist origin story, one of them, of course, is to start out being on the left, a socialist like Mussolini. But the one I outlined, that's very definitely one of them. It's pretty standard.
DANIEL
And the irony, if you look at the degree that he has, policy presentations, like once you take race [out of it], if you don't consider the ethno-nationalist stuff, he's like, “yeah, I'm in favor of universal health care, sure. We should have nuclear power and green energy and all”. If you look at him in that sense, he's very heterodox. He's not a straightforward Republican on a lot of these issues. He's a Trumpist, more in terms of Trump's attitude, Trump’s troll-ish behavior in the way that he [Trump] pisses off the left as opposed to really embracing Trump as a real political figure. I think Richard Spencer and I think most of the larger, what I'm just going to keep describing as the Alt-Right but you understand what I mean by it, they really do kind of look down on Trump. They like him, they want him to do what they want to do, and they think that he he should. But you won't find them thinking of him as this intellectual giant, amazing politician. They see him more as kind of a tool that they can use to push their own agenda, whereas the more overtly Trumpist online figures, the “rah, rah, Trump” people, I mean, Richard Spencer is definitely not one of those.
JACK
No, he's not Ben Garrison.
DANIEL
Right, he’s not Ben Garrison or what's his name, Bill Mitchell. You know the kind of “Trump can do no wrong” thing. And this also means that none of this movement has any time for the QAnon stuff because all that is based on Trump [being] this secret mastermind, doing 11-dimensional chess or whatever, and I think this is another, this is one reason why I find these guys more interesting to follow and try to understand. In many ways they have a much more realistic view of the world than the mainstream Republican view, which is sort of based on lies about history, like “oh, America was always this multicultural,”— No. Richard Spencer will sell [that] America was built on this vision of white supremacy and genocide and that was good. You know, “that's just what we had to do to get things to happen, and I don't hold any animosity towards African Americans, I want them to go live somewhere else where they can be themselves and and build their own society.”
JACK
You know, how much of it is flimflam, for show, and how much of that is real? Do they genuinely have this sort of disinterested view of ethno-states and racial segregation based on this ideology of race? How much of it is that and how much of it is that they just hate black people?
DANIEL
I think it varies from person to person. It's hard to say whether Richard Spencer is one of these people. I think he's too canny and he's too…I think he sees black people, I think he sees Africans as distinctly inferior to him for the reasons we discussed.
JACK
I mean, I don't see a distinction without a difference. It's all hate, but there's no sense in which one would be better than the other. I'm just interested as an academic question.
DANIEL
Sure. I mean, I don't like framing these things as hate. I find it to be sort of a not useful metric, in terms of understanding. I think that if you listen to them long—
JACK
I mean on the level of emotions it's more about fear anyway, isn't it.
DANIEL
Right, and it is more about material conditions. It's kind of built around this ideology…What I hear from them over and over again, if you listen to them talk to each other for hours and hours and hours, which I've done…I’m not going to talk about Spencer himself here because it's difficult, but you know, it's a very common story that, “Oh, I grew up in a white suburb where everything was clean and things were nice and the streets were swept and things just kind of looked nice. And then I went to the city for college, or I went to this, and then I had to be around black people for a while and look, the city is dirty and nasty and there's crime everywhere and this and it's basically because of these people, these human cockroaches, these monkeys”. You know, so many slurs, so much language that I could reproduce if I was trying to keep this relatively clean. But there is this sense that it's “these people doing ooga-booga and they're dirty and disgusting and I just don't want them around me”, and a whole lot of them, there are definitely figures for whom it really is this visceral dislike almost on this genetic— I [hesitate to] say genetic level because that just feeds into the same kind of racialist, socio-biological ideas that they would love. So, I don't want to use that as a metaphor, but you definitely get the sense that for some of these figures, it really is just almost intrinsic dislike of being around people who are not white and, in particular, dark-skinned people of African descent, and the darker the worse it is. The Australian Aborigines are the other people that they really find just physically disgusting and off-putting. And it does seem to be this gut instinct level that they seem to respond to. Spencer doesn't strike me as that. He strikes me as someone who sees himself as being superior to anyone who looks more like him. I find interesting. The British journalist Gary Young, I'm sure you know him. He did a documentary. He interviewed Spencer and he shows up at, I think, one of the NPI conferences, and he had been driving and he shows up and he's wearing a t-shirt and he's a journalist, right. But he had like a little sweat on him or whatever, I mean, it's Washington D.C. I think it's July or something like that, and Spencer comes out and he's clearly had a couple of bourbons in him, and if you listen to his voice he's clearly you know. He just thinks this man is disgusting, because he's black, because he's overweight, because he's not dressed nicely, and he really just dismisses him. I mean, he talks down to Gary. I don't know Young too well personally, but I follow him on Twitter and I find him to be a perfectly reasonable human being.
JACK
Well, he is a nice guy and he seems to be about as good as mainstream journalism gets,
I would say yes.
DANIEL
And he was certainly asking the appropriate questions and Spencer, you know, certainly at as bright as Spencer is in that moment. Spencer, he just he dismisses him completely. And it's based purely on this like physicality, on this purely, “Well, he's slovenly and fat and black and quite black at that, like not the high yellow”, like, again, I don't want to get into even talking about descriptors they use.
JACK
You know that's that's another old one.
DANIEL
I mean, that's what they will [do]. They will embrace very old terminology.
JACK
That's what they said about Jefferson. The rumor mongers would, “he had a taste for the yellow”.
DANIEL
Right. They embrace, I mean, the people [Alt-Right] say, “yes, we're going to talk about detailed, modern, genetic evidence which indicates clearly that the human race is composed of the negroid, the mongoloid, and the caucasoids”, they just embrace this completely outmoded, 20th-century, eugenic language and say, “oh, this is completely justified by 20th and 21st-century genetics”. You know, “those people in parentheses will not ever share this with you honestly”.
JACK
It’s completely discredited, 19th-century, imperialist race science that they just insist is verified despite the fact that, by every reputable scientist, it's been put in the same place as phrenology. They just insist that it's all true and it's been proven.
DANEIL
Or they'll take some genetic map from some paper, completely out of context, and then kind of draw on it and go, “see the gap between the African DNA and the rest of the world DNA”, and it's like, you don’t understand, but because they've got a graph and can manipulate it, and I think a lot of them, there’s a lot of the bottom-feeder kind of stuff to where they clearly believe it. And I think some of the other figures are lying and seem to be able to communicate clearly enough about this stuff, and I think some of them are openly misrepresenting stuff and then hoping it spreads. Spencer doesn't use a lot of genetic arguments, he uses more cultural arguments. More, you know, “Well, obviously our history tells us that we're just better”. You very rarely see him make the explicit scientific or pseudo-scientific arguments.
JACK
No, he doesn't. He doesn't nail himself down somewhere, like he’s pretty canny. He's good at debating people. He's good at presenting himself as Mr. Reasonable. A lot of that is knowing what not to say outright. So you mentioned that he's doing this YouTube channel now. I mean, what else is he doing now? What is his actual place in the movement? What is the structure of the movement and where is he in it?
DANIEL
What's funny is that, I feel like again, in late 2016 and 2017, you could point to a handful of people who were kind of undisputed leaders, thought leaders at least, in the movement.
And I don't think Spencer is— you know, it's much more fragmented than that. I know a lot of that has to do with Charlottesville. Charlottesville and the repercussions of that really had this this fragmenting effect where I think today, I was thinking about this earlier today like, who who are the leaders right now? They sort of have their own little fiefdoms, that are certainly like broadly respected within certain threads of the movement. I mean he’s [Spencer] certainly this big name and I think even people who don't like him broadly respect him for like what he's done for the white race or whatever. But I don't get a sense that there's one place where everybody goes for their information and talking points and stuff.
JACK
It's very diffuse, isn't it. It's one of its weaknesses and its strengths.
DANIEL
Right. So, what is Spencer's place? I mean, he's respected by a good solid chunk of the movement, [they] still respect him even if they don't personally like him. They think he’s got his head up his ass or his nose in the air. They think he's hoity-toity.
JACK
Well, they all hate each other personally.
DANIEL
Right, I mean it comes up over and over and over again, as if these people cannot get along for more than 15 minutes at a time. It's astonishing to see some of the fights that they have and again, any person of any kind of prominence, there is always the conspiracy that, “oh, they're secretly Jewish”. That's always the thing. You know, like I've seen people do family trees and like, “oh, this was his half-sister and she was a full Jew,” and, “it’s that awful DNA in him,” or something. But, no, I mean he still does HeelTurn and he still goes on the “Zee Pooblic Space”, which is JFK. Oh, there's another YouTube channel— it’s one that is interesting, like the number of different kinds of people that the JF [Jean Francois Gariepy] talks to on any given day because he seems to really have been able to carve space for himself. It’s kind of one of the central gathering points where everybody seems to like JF in the movement. I really don't see a lot of negativity directed at him specifically and I think it's because he's just a really canny operator. He, in some ways, does the same thing you were talking about Richard Spencer, knowing what to say and what not to say. There's another guy with real academic credentials, I think he has a PhD in biology and in neuroscience and so he puts out all the pseudo-science talking points about genetics and all that kind of bullshit. But Richard Spencer has been regularly on his program as well, which I think I mentioned earlier, he’s kind of like, in all but name, a co-host. He’s there often enough to do that. And I think one of the things is that, after the public speaking tour ended in Michigan, we had basically a big confrontation and then Spencer puts out a video like, “this isn't fun anymore, antifa is winning,” etc…Everybody clapped and cheered and my perspective was like, he's coming back, guys. He's been doing this for 10 years already, this is not going to end just because somebody punched him in the face. It’s not going to happen. It turns out he was going through a kind of nasty divorce as well, and he came out after it was over with his new girlfriend, who apparently is a liberal, quote unquote. There's been some kind of doxxing going on around her and some commentary about who she is and all that sort of thing, I don't know, which strikes me as kind of slightly unproductive. But he's got a new girlfriend now and she's appeared on his channel a couple of times and just kind of like said hi or whatever, and he's just kind of a person producing content, but not explicitly under the Alt-Right banner. He does seem to have distanced himself from his old people that used to be his crew from the old days, like Greg Conte and some of those guys. It's not that he's not associated with them, but it does feel like, the Alt-Right brand, he's moving away from that slightly, and he's just pushing the ideas through other channels, but he's in a nebulous place. I just don't know exactly what he’s got going on right now, but I'm not ready. So, yeah go ahead. What were you going to say?
JACK
No, I was just going to say, I mean, he doesn't have an organization, like the Richard Spencer party or something like that.
DANIEL
No, I mean, I'm pretty sure AltRight.Com still exists and I believe he's still working for the NPI, the National Policy Institute. I think he's still kind of like drawing income from that and working on that level. He still writes sometimes. But certainly in terms of like his face out there, I mean he did kind of step away for several months, probably like eight months or so, where you barely heard a peep out of him. I think he put up two or three podcasts just sort of like to keep up appearances a little bit, but he really stepped away to where he is. You just didn't see him around much, whereas in 2017 leading up to Unite the Right, he was everywhere. He would just go on and show up on a bunch of shows, and he would do appearances on pretty much anybody that would have him for a while.
JACK
But the trouble, of course, with a high profile, it kind of paints you into a corner, doesn't it? It nails down what you mean to people, how people perceive you.
DANIEL
Right. Well, I mean a lot of these podcasts, a lot of these Alt-Right podcasts, I mean it's like you and I recording in a basement. You know, they don't really have any more of an audience or any more of a cultural push than you and I do. But there are literally hundreds of these kind of guys doing it and, you know, every little bit helps. But he [Spencer] would show up on a lot of those, even some of those little guys, would show up and do a 20 minute interview or whatever. So he’s mostly pushing the same kinds of ideas. But I mean, I think it was having that kind of an omnipresence. And again, that's changed since Unite the Right in Charlottesville, you see a lot more people deciding who is and is not in their little group and who is trustworthy or not. And I think Spencer's still navigating that space. I'm actually interested to see where this Heel Turn thing is going because it does seem like a really weird kind of left turn for him, a heel turn in a way, right.
JACK
Yeah, exactly, it works.
DANIEL
It does. No, I mean, it's kind of weird thing and I'm not sure quite what it means but I'm still following him. So I'll let you know if I figure it out.
JACK
Watch this space. Yeah. I mean, I feel like you know the death of the Alt-Right was pronounced far too early and they were clearly in a period of fragmentation, but it's also a period of retrenchment and they're waiting for the next, you know, like he sees the opportunity when the Alt-Right took off, they’re waiting for the next opportunity.
DANIEL
I think they’re going to. And again, I am not looking forward to the 2020 election, but also am. I think that they're going to use a sort of Trump re-election or, I mean, I can only imagine if like a Trump impeachment happened that they would really rally together again like they had. What the whole thing lacks, and this is something that Richard Spencer just has not really expressed interest in being, although I think a lot of people wanted to thrust it on him— Richard Spencer was going to be like the leader of White Nationalism and he was going to be that face and he was going to be like that charismatic figure who could really push it forward. And Spencer himself, he said that he didn't want to be Hitler, he wanted to be Goebbels, to be the cultural attache in the ethno-state. But he didn't want the job, he didn't want the top job.
JACK
I'm fine with him shooting himself.
DANIEL
Yeah, I would, you know, I really try not to wish death on anyone, but I would like him to just go away. I was really happy when he wasn't producing, I just didn't have to think about him for a while. It was really nice for me. I wish they'd all just do that, just go and live your life. Yeah, you have to stop, just stop.
JACK
Oh yeah. I'm happy for them to live if they just go and be quiet, just go and be quiet and happy and don't say things or talk to anybody. That's fine.
DANIEL
Just turn your microphones off. That's all, you know. That's what I'm asking. There was this thought that he was going to be the one big leader that everybody was going to rally behind, but I think he just doesn’t, I think he's just not good enough at it. Like he just doesn't inspire that kind of passion in enough of the movement. He's just too smarmy and he's too put together, but not in these kind of, again a mess of contradictions. He's not really one of them, in that way. Like he just doesn't have enough mainstream foothold to really become that.
JACK
Well, he's not quite the standard issue among his type. You know, if he was, he'd now have Ben Shapiro's job or whatever. He's ended up in this cul-de-sac because he’s, for whatever reason, he's decided to become a fascist and now that goes with certain things. You can see that they, you can smell it on them. He's the slickest and the most respectable and the most plausible of them and he's still, you know, he's a bit odd. I mean, he just is. I don't like to psycho-pathologize stuff, but these people, they're all a bit odd, and you see it on him too, you know the waistcoats and the tank tops and the weird hairdo.
DANIEL
He wears the like immaculately-constructed suits.
JACK
Oh yes, the dapper nazi.
DANIEL
He wears a 1,000 dollar suit, but suit jacket is a size too small. So whenever he buttons it when he’s marching, then it looks like he's wearing somebody else's suit jacket, you know and then we all make fun of him for that. It's again, I mean I've said a mess of contradictions a few times and I don’t know that I quite want to explore that, but there are a lot of different competing impulses. I think that he has this kind of idea of being the next David Duke. But I don't think that he really has the ability to do so. I think maybe if Unite the Right had not gone the way it went, he might have been able to build that, but I don't think he has this kind of like mainstreamist charm. David Duke is someone we should probably talk about at some point.
JACK
David Duke is somebody we should talk about, we should probably do an entire episode on just Charlottesville and Unite the Right. But I think we’re done for this episode.
DANIEL
I think we can wrap this one up. Any other any other details on Richard Spencer, I'm sure we can talk about them in the future.
JACK
Okay, that's great. Thanks for listening, everybody. And Daniel, do you know now what you'd like to do for the next one or if not, I can edit this out?
DANIEL
Well, I mean, it's tempting to just do another figure and I think David Duke would be an interesting one to talk about that history a little bit and like who he is now. And also, he's much funnier to talk about than Richard Spencer. Let this got a little bit dry. So, there are lots of details about David Duke and in particular David Duke in Charlottesville. And I think that might be, it’s hard to say like, “oh yeah, let's do a fun one,” but let’s talk about David Duke. I think he is legitimately an interesting figure in some of the history, a little bit before it was Alt-Right and the way that some of these old figures have embraced the term Alt-Right and embrace the terminology in some ways. So yeah, David Duke next time.
JACK
Okay, sold. You heard it here, listeners. Come back next week for us having a fun, amusing chat about David Duke. Until then, goodbye.
DANIEL
I promise you there will be jokes.
JACK
Oh, they're all jokes.
