6 July 2015

That white man in Whitefish who makes Whitefishers see red

Whitefish is in the national news again, and not in a way that most residents of the Flathead’s most liberal community will like. White supremacist Richard Spencer was mentioned over the weekend in stories in the National Journal and the New York Times on white supremacy and the internet. From the Times:

…Most of the best-known organizations also claim to have disavowed the violence of groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Richard B. Spencer, the 37-year-old president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute in Whitefish, Mont., embodies this new generation.

He holds a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and studied for a doctorate in history at Duke University. Now he runs an organization that produces papers on issues like racial differences in intelligence and the crime rate among Hispanic immigrants.

Spencer sings to the choir, although he’s seldom heard in Whitefish where there are people who would like to run him out of town. He commits his mischief online and at conferences on white pride that he organizes for people who yearn for an America whiter than titanium dioxide. I won’t say he’s harmless — just the way he raises a liberal’s blood pressure makes me fear for the health of some of my friends — but while he’s making money I don’t think he’s making a lot of converts. Most likely, he’s just finding those who were already too proud of being white.