The founder of the so-called "alt-right" movement can't believe Donald Trump actually won -- but he envisions the newly elected president as the next step toward a white "ethnostate."
Richard Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute, told Reveal host Al Letson that Trump represents a new conservatism that's less interested in "freedom and liberty" than American nationalism.
Listen to the entire interview posted online by Reveal.
"I don't think Donald Trump is me, I don't think Donald Trump is alt-right," Spencer said. "I don't think Donald Trump is an identitarian as I would use that term. I think Donald Trump is a kind of first step towards this. He's the first time that we've seen a genuinely if, you could say incomplete, politician who's fighting for European identity politics in North America. This is the first time we've seen it."
The 38-year-old Spencer's long-term goal is a white-only ethnostate, although he's not sure how that could happen in the United States, because he does not think humans from different racial backgrounds can live harmoniously together
"What the ethnostate is, is an ideal," Spencer said. "It's a thing, it's a way of thinking about we want a new type of society that would actually be a homeland for all white people, all European people. So that would include Slavs, that would include Germans, that would include Latins, it who would include people of all ethnicities that we would always have a safe space. We would always have a homeland for us. Very similar to, very similar to how Jews conceive of Israel."
Letson admitted that he found Spencer charming and articulate, but he pressed the white nationalist to explain how he was different from his ideological predecessors who lynched black Americans.
"Look, I'm not going to comment about you know some hypothetical Klansman or or whomever," Spencer said.
Letson refused to let Spencer off the hook, saying that his views had a clear historical connection to anti-black terrorism, even if he was able to make them sound cooly intellectual.
"I'm sure there is some commonality between these movements of the past and what I'm talking about," Spencer said. "But you really have to judge me on my own terms. Like I am not those people and I don't fully know, I don't know in the specifics of what you're referring to. Like, I am who I am. And you, if you're going to treat me with good faith, you have to listen to what I'm saying and listen to my ideas. I think someone who would go down the path of becoming a Klansman or something in 2016, I think that is, those people are very different than I am. It's, it's a -- it's a non-starter. I think we need an idea. We need a movement that really resonates with where we are right now."
