11 Hours Of Alt-Right Speeches In The Ronald Reagan Building

This is the Ronald Reagan Building, a few blocks from the White House:



It was the scene of an alt-right conference held on Saturday, November 19. Click here for an article entitled "Alt-Right Exults in Donald Trump’s Election With a Salute: ‘Heil Victory’." (I recently learned that the German Nazi cry "Sieg Heil" means "Hail Victory.")

Apparently the speeches were not too fiery or extreme, and most of the reporters had left by the time the final speaker, Richard B. Spencer, leader of the alt-right movement (and the man who gave the movement the name "alt-right") spoke, and things heated up a bit.

He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back.

This clip (from The Atlantic, 3:08 in length) shows Spencer shouting "Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!" And he gives the Nazi straight-arm salute. The crowd responds with applause, and many return the Nazi salute. In 2016, a few blocks from the White House.



More after the jump.


Most of the speakers had not met Steve Bannon, Trump's advisor and former head of Breitbart.com, or had only met him briefly and shaken hands; few had met Donald Trump (one had met Trump at an event 30 years ago). And they didn't claim that either Bannon or Trump were themselves part of the alt-right movement, merely that they "had opportunistically seized on two issues that the alt-right cares most about — stopping immigration and fighting political correctness — and used them to mobilize white voters." Bannon has referred to Breitbart.com as "a platform for the alt-right," and a lot of Breitbart articles have been published: "As recently as last year, Breitbart published an op-ed article urging that “every tree, every rooftop, every picket fence, every telegraph pole in the South should be festooned with the Confederate battle flag.”

Mr. Spencer said that while he did not think the president-elect should be considered alt-right, “I do think we have a psychic connection, or you can say a deeper connection, with Donald Trump in a way that we simply do not have with most Republicans.”

White identity, he said, is at the core of both the alt-right movement and the Trump movement, even if most voters for Mr. Trump “aren’t willing to articulate it as such.”

Spencer used numerous Nazi references, such as the German word “Lügenpresse,” meaning “lying press"; “the victory of will,” the title of the famous Nazi propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl; and "golem," "a Jewish fable about the golem, a clay giant that a rabbi brings to life to protect the Jews."

“America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Mr. Spencer thundered. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”

But the white race, he added, is “a race that travels forever on an upward path.”

“To be white is to be a creator, an explorer, a conqueror,” he said.

The scariest thing for the alt-right is the fact that America is on a path to becoming less than 50% white before too many years -- perhaps by 2050. They see Trump as their standard-bearer, and they hope to help direct the new administration:

For the alt-right, the most exciting thing about Mr. Trump was that he built a campaign around the issues that mattered most to them, and that white people had voted for him in numbers that left the political establishments of both parties stunned. Now, Mr. Spencer said, it is up to the alt-right to formulate the ideas and policies to guide the new administration.

“I think we can be the ones out in front, thinking about those things he hasn’t quite grasped yet, who are putting forward policies,” Mr. Spencer said, that “have a realistic chance of being implemented.”