The Nazi salutes could be clearly seen across the room as Richard B. Spencer proclaimed: “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”
The Atlantic, Quartz’s sister publication, just released excerpts of its upcoming documentary on Spencer, who’s become the face of the alt-right movement in the US. They show Spencer speaking to an audience of about 200 people, most of them white men, at the annual conference held by the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank where he serves as president and director, on Nov. 19 in Washington, DC. The documentary will be available in December.
Unlike the robed Ku Klux Klan or skinhead neo-Nazis of the past, the men in attendance were unmasked, clean-cut, and looked like they could belong on Capitol Hill. They enthusiastically applauded—some of them at times saluting—as Spencer made incendiary racial remarks about how America was a country for white people.
“America was until this past generation a white country,” he proclaimed. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”
He continued:
To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explore, and a conquerer. We produce, we go upward, and we recognize the central lie of American race relations. We don’t exploit other groups. We don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around.