In what looks like a horrendous “own goal” for the wider Alt-Right movement, Richard Spencer's site AltRight.com has come out in direct support of an act of terrorist violence against random people with an article by Vincent Law titled "Innocent Fascist Man Arrested For Religious Expression By Intolerant Police In Italy," and subtitled, "All he did was fire off a few rounds at some black people. Calm down."
If or when Spencer damage control kicks in, an attempt may be made to dismiss this off as "edgy ironic humour," except that it's not very funny even in the sub-Stormer-esque style in which it is written, and also it will be eagerly used as ammunition by those seeking to marginalise any attempt to promote healthy White Identitarianism in the West.
In fact, running a story like this seems to cut directly across the declared purpose of AltRight.com, which was supposed to be a kind of Breitbart for the Alt-Right, namely a professional, news-centred hub, producing reliable and morally defensible content to promote the Alt-Right message. Instead what we have here is a Andrew-Anglin-or-Weev-style "Kill the N*****s" story courtesy of an anonymous protege of Anglin, writing under a sock name in Russia of all places.
This will unfortunately renew the persistent rumours that many in the Alt-Right believe, about Spencer being a Deep State shill whose purpose is to ghettoise and sabotage the movement. This is of course highly improbable as Spencer himself played the key role in founding the AltRight back in 2010, and then actually turned his back on the term "Alt-Right" in December 2013 before returning several years later after the term went viral.
The more probable explanation for Spencer's behaviour is that he is attempting to at least partly emulate the popularity of the Jewish-run Daily Stormer now that Anglin and Weev's site has more or less been deplatformed from the internet, and that his reason for doing this is to raise much needed funds for his cash-hungry projects.
It appears that Spencer may have money troubles, despite being from a rich and privileged background himself, and having rich donors like the Regnery family, and also receiving many donations from supporters of AltRight.com.
Recently, it was even reported that he was having trouble finding a lawyer to take his part in a civil case filed against him in the wake of Charlottesville. Some have speculated that this points to deeper financial problems with AltRight.com, a project that was originally set up with high expectations of considerable funding from associates of Jason Jorjani that later disappeared like a Persian mirage in the desert.
 |
| Spencer with Jorjani - his camels laden with bags of gold did not arrive. |
If that is the case, then the "clickbait, neo-nazi, circle-jerk Stormer" tone in an increasing amount of AltRight.com's content makes a certain degree of sense, as the Jewish-run Daily Stormer was highly successful at removing money from the more "emotionally incontinent" types among its readership, after stoking up crude emotions with its gutter style, at least before it was deplatformed.
Brett Stevens recently warned of the problems of this sort of approach in an article published at Alternative Right, the site that Andy Nowicki and Colin Liddell set up after Spencer decided to shut down the original AlternativeRight.com site in December 2013. In the article, titled "An Outbreak of LARPing Could Destroy the Alt-Right," Stevens eloquently sums up the failings of the white nationalist movement in the 1990s with obvious application to the Alt-Right:
"Like any other fringe movement, White Nationalism 1.0 bulked up on antisocials and then, because these people wrote checks and bought products, they took over from the five percent or so of the movement who had all the brains, guts, and vision. This meant that your average white nationalist gathering was nineteen tables of beer, violence, and crass racism, while one group sat in the corner talking sense, mostly ignored."
From the tone of some of the writing now appearing on AltRight.com, it seems there is reason to believe that Spencer is following the same self-defeating path instead of moralising and maximising a movement whose time has so obviously come.
