My question is this: Why is this nut case getting so much attention? Why is his speaking on campus a national news story? Angela Davis spoke at my campus in 1975; why wasn't that news?
The reason was because of the "counter-demonstrators". They're the ones that make violence possible. They're there to provoke Spencer and his crowd to violence. Which is what Spencer wants, as to the more hairy followers of Spencer.
"Counter-demonstrators" are what keep these alt-right lunatics "relevant". They, and the media that can't wait to cover the speeches of folks like Spencer, in the hope that violence will break out and some "journalist" will get a leg up toward his next Pulitzer Prize or book contract. If a tree fell in forest and nobody heard it fall, did it make a noise? If Richard Spencer spoke on whatever he speaks about and no media showed up, was it an event?
Here's the key to drying up the alt-right: STOP GIVING THEM ATTENTION!
Nazis and the KKK are the political equivalent of pornography. They draw attention for all the wrong reasons and are in our faces for all the wrong reasons. OK, there is a difference: breasts give nourishment to babies, vaginas provide the place through which babies come, and penises supply the seed for babies. Sex can create life; Nazis associate themselves with mass murder, and the KKK has never brought anything but misery to people for which it expresses hatred. I can attest that breasts and vaginas are beautiful. Penises? One must be female or gay to truly appreciate them.
Pornography and the Alt-Right share a tendency to bring out the self-righteousness of multitudes. Being on higher moral ground than Nazis or even the Klan is incredibly cheap. Harvey Swinestein, whose personal life is pornographic, is on a higher moral plain than is the typical Nazi. If anyone says that the Klan at least never operated any death camps, then I see such as strictly the failure of the Klan to achieve the national power that would have allowed them to perform anything like the Holocaust; the KKK had much the same objects of hatred that the Nazis had. If the Nazis had won World War II, then the Klan would have been the most likely collaborators in the Holocaust in America. (Note that Philip K. Dick, in his A Man in the High Castle, did not name the Klan as such -- I presume out of concern of his publisher about costly lawsuits by America's worst fascist pigs).
But remember ho much news coverage serial killers Ted Bundy and John Gacy got for demonstrating the worst in human character. Think of the highly-successful novels In Cold Blood about a pair of losers who would be unknown except for a botched robbery that led to the slaughter of a family, and Helter Skelter about the sick cult around Charles Manson. A loser prostitute (Aileen Wuornos) who murdered her johns would get little attention otherwise.
Truth be told, Spencer's speeches are awful, just as those of Hitler were. America in 2017 has some parallels to Germany in 1931 in the masses having to suffer economically and emotionally for exploitative elites who deflect blame to successful people who are somehow different, with the elites largely supporting the 'fascism-light' of the DNVP in the latter years of the Weimar Republic and a GOP taking an excursion on the fascist road in America. In America the objects of hatred are the black middle class, which (horror of horrors to white racists) does much intermarriage with white people and incorporates them permanently onto the black gene pool, much as was the concern of Nazis about Jews bringing 'Aryans' into the realm of Jewish 'blood'.
Spencer draws brutal toughs around him, as did Hitler. He uses much the same euphemisms as Hitler while exuding the same hatred. Considering what Hitler and his crime syndicate did, and that people born after World War II have images of Nazi atrocities seared into their minds as if they lived through the times... Spencer draws attention.
The real mess is that the economic elites of America are transforming America into a plutocratic nightmare. Between corporate farmers squeezing out family farmers, super-rich families like the Koch and Mercer families with their dream of an America that resembles a Marxist stereotype of capitalism, an executive class that has come to resemble the Soviet nomenklatura, sold-out intellectuals as in right-wing think tanks and in corporate lobbying firms, and some factions of organized crime all united in making America a place in which opportunity and any possibility of happiness are to be enjoyed only in the Afterlife (in which those elites make no obvious investment) in return for suffering with smiles for the rest of us... we have a big problem.
The real problem is that we have economic elites trying to turn a free people into peons. The Alt Right is a diversion.
They're not only a diversion. Sure, they're used that way by parts of the establishment. (Vote for the lobbyist-loving DNC candidate or the GOP will make Spencer a cabinet secretary!) But at the same time, they're a real depiction of a really nasty set of views that the establishment has more in common with than anyone -opposition or establishment - is comfortable admitting. Neo-feudalism in practice is pretty close to where we're going. Entrenched misogyny and racism are very real.
The alt-right's public presence is a worrying symptom, like the high temperature of a fever.
