‘Hail Trump’ and Nazi salutes abound as alt-right leader champions white supremacy
At National Policy Institute conference in DC, Richard Spencer ‘hails’ Trump victory, appears to allude to Jewish power controlling national media
A new video posted by The Atlantic on Monday night showed the man often described as the leader of the the American alt-right movement as he evoked Nazi imagery and language and ranted about white supremacy, while his audience responded with Nazi salutes.
Richard Spencer, head of the white nationalist National Policy Institute, made the speech Saturday at the NPI’s annual conference at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC.
“Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” Spencer cried out, as he praised president-elect Donald Trump’s recent election win. A rapturous audience responded with applause and quite a few Hitler salutes.
Spencer spoke in militaristic terms, expressing the movement’s need to “conquer or die,” and railed against the mainstream media which he smilingly called “Lugenpresse,” a term used by Nazis that translates as “lying press.”
He then appeared to insinuate that the media was controlled by Jews, referencing the Jewish legend of the Golem of Prague. “One wonders if these people are people at all,” he said of journalists. “Or instead soulless golem animated by some dark power to repeat” left-wing talking points.
Speakers described Trump’s election victory as “the victory of will,” using the name of a famous Nazi propaganda film that championed Hitler and the Nazis’ rise to power in 1930s Germany, The New York Times reported.
Spencer, who claims to have coined the term alt-right, said that white identity was the driving factor behind the movement and that since the meteoric rise of Trump, white people have been “awakening to their own identity.
“To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, and explorer and a conqueror. We build. We produce. We go upward,” he claimed. “Within the very blood in our veins as children of the sun lies the potential for greatness.”
Giving voice to the alt-right’s emboldened national position in the wake of the Trump campaign, Spencer said “We are not meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace. We were not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most despicable creatures to ever populate the planet.
“We were meant to overcome, overcome all of it, because that it natural and normal for us.
“We don’t exploit other groups,” he said, referencing other ethnicities. “We don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us and not the other way around.”
Spencer said that “America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” adding, “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”
Since Trump’s election, much ink has been spilled over his campaign’s part in the rise of the alt-right, a vague grouping of far-right nationalists who have taken a hard line against immigration and what they see as the cultural degradation of America. Spencer has made clear that in his eyes the alt-right is by no means a mere nationalist movement but one based on a doctrine of white supremacy and hatred toward Jews and non-whites.
Last week, Spencer’s Twitter account was suspended for violating prohibitions on “violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct,” leading him to lash out at what he called “corporate Stalinism” and saying that “there is a great purge going on,” according to AFP.
Much of the recent focus on the alt-right stems from Trump’s appointment of his campaign CEO and Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen Bannon as a senior presidential adviser, who earlier this year said that Breitbart News is “the platform for the alt-right.”
In a Wall Street Journal interview on Saturday, Bannon said that “our definition of the alt-right is younger people who are anti-globalists, very nationalist, terribly anti-establishment.” He added that while there are “some racial and anti-Semitic overtones” on the alt-right, he strongly condemns their views and says they are “a tiny part” of Breitbart readers.
While some at the National Policy Institute praised Bannon, one attendee said that “Trump and Steve Bannon are not alt-right people,” as they had merely used the issues of immigration and political correctness to rally white voters, without being true believers.
In a Mother Jones profile of Spencer published shortly before the election, he called Bannon and Breitbart News readers “alt-light,” saying that their agenda was to promote “Western values” rather than white supremacy.
With Trump’s election victory, Spencer said, “people will have to recognize us” and the fact that “white identity politics is inevitable.”
Alexander Fulbright contributed to this report.
The Times of Israel Community.