Richard B. Spencer

Richard Bertrand Spencer (born May 11, 1978) is an American neo-Nazi, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, and white supremacist.

Spencer claimed to have coined the term alt-right and was the most prominent advocate of the alt-right movement from its earliest days.

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Spencer has advocated for the enslavement of Haitians by whites and for the ethnic cleansing of the racial minorities of the United States, additionally expressing admiration for the political tactics of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell.

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Spencer has repeatedly used Nazi gestures and rhetoric in public.

Richard Bertrand Spencer was born in 1978 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of ophthalmologist Rand Spencer and Sherry Spencer (née Dickenhorst), the heiress to cotton farms in Louisiana.

He grew up in Preston Hollow, Dallas, Texas.

Spencer attended St. Mark's School of Texas, then Colgate University for one year before transferring to the University of Virginia.

In 2001, he received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Music from the University of Virginia and, in 2003, a Master of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Chicago.

From the summer of 2005 into 2006, Spencer attended Vienna International Summer University.

From 2005 to 2007, he was a PhD student in Modern European intellectual history at Duke University.

He joined the Duke Conservative Union, where he met future President Trump's senior policy advisor Stephen Miller.

His former website says he did not complete his PhD at Duke in order "to pursue a life of thought-crime".

From March to December 2007, Spencer was the assistant editor at The American Conservative magazine.

According to founding editor Scott McConnell, he was fired from The American Conservative because his views were considered too extreme.

Spencer spoke about the Duke lacrosse case and credits it with changing the course of his career.

From January 2008 to December 2009, he served as the executive editor of Taki's Magazine, a libertarian online magazine published by Taki Theodoracopulos.

He has claimed credit for coining the term alt-right in 2008 in order to differentiate himself from "mainstream American conservatism", although Paul Gottfried argues that both he and Spencer created the term.

In March 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, a website he edited until 2012.

Spencer was invited to speak at Vanderbilt University in 2010 and Providence College in 2011 by Youth for Western Civilization.

In January 2011, he became the owner and executive director of Washington Summit Publishers.

In January 2011, Spencer became president and director of the National Policy Institute (NPI), a White supremacist think tank based in Virginia, which was once run from his mother's $3 million summer house.

George Hawley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama, has described NPI as "rather obscure and marginalized" until Spencer became its president.

In 2012, he founded Radix Journal as a biannual publication of Washington Summit Publishers.

Contributions have included articles by Kevin B. MacDonald, Alex Kurtagić, and Samuel T. Francis.

He also hosts a weekly podcast, "Vanguard Radio."

In 2014, Spencer was deported from Budapest, Hungary.

In early 2016, Spencer was filmed giving the Nazi salute in a karaoke bar, and leaked footage also depicts Spencer giving the Sieg Heil salute to his supporters during the August 2017 Charlottesville rally.

After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Spencer urged his supporters to "party like it's 1933," the year Hitler came to power in Germany.

In the weeks following, Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews.

At a conference Spencer held celebrating the election, Spencer cried: "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!"; subsequently Mike Enoch led a number of Spencer's supporters in performing a Nazi salute and a chant similar to the Sieg Heil chant.

In early-to-mid-2017, when Spencer's following was at its height, his supporters would give him the Sieg Heil salute when he entered a room.

Following the Unite the Right rally, Spencer has been involved in several legal issues.

After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, during which an alt-right supporter drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring at least 19 others, Spencer was sued as part of Sines v. Kessler for allegedly acting as a "gang boss" and inciting the killing.

On November 23, 2021, the jury found Spencer liable on two counts and were unable to reach verdicts for another two, awarding $25 million in total damages.

Three supporters of Spencer were charged with attempted homicide following his October 2017 speech at the University of Florida.

Following an appeal by the Polish government, he was banned from the Schengen Area in 2018, having been banned previously in 2014 after being deported from Hungary.

Spencer has frequently contradicted his own previous statements about his beliefs and ideals; in one text exchange in 2022, he told a journalist that he "no longer identifies as a white nationalist."

As of 2024, he was still operating the web-based white nationalist publication Radix Journal.