CPAC's Flirtation With the Alt-Right Is Turning Awkward
Late the night before the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Richard Spencer, the de facto leader of the white nationalist movement calling itself the Alt-Right, texts me to say he'll be there – not to disrupt, he insists, but to ask questions after the "Anti-Alt-Right speeches on [the] main stage." The next day, at the Gaylord Convention Center just outside of Washington, D.C., there is no Q&A, but Spencer, who gleefully attracts a throng of reporters everywhere he goes, holds forth outside the hotel ballroom. Dan Schneider, the executive director of the American Conservative Union, which hosts the conference, has just decried the Alt-Right as a "sinister organization that is trying to worm its way into our ranks." Spencer denounces the speech as "stupid" and "pathetic."
Inside the ballroom, four Republican governors are speaking about how they are "reclaiming America's promise," something reporters might have covered in years past to glean glimmers of presidential ambitions. But Trump – and his success at electrifying the Alt-Right – has changed all that. Instead, dozens of reporters cluster around Spencer, who most recently made headlines for eliciting Nazi salutes at a conference he hosted in November, and becoming the butt of a meme about whether it is acceptable to punch Nazis.
Surrounded by media, Spencer persists for so long that organizers eject him from the conference. No matter: His mission is accomplished.
Schneider, rather than provoking a serious discussion of the conservative movement's relationship with the Alt-Right, has thrown up a straw man. The Alt-Right, he says (correctly) are "anti-Semites," "racists" and "sexists." But, he adds (incorrectly), they do not emerge out of conservatism's own trenches. Instead, he maintains, "they are garden variety left-wing fascists."
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