[Senator Clay Davis]

King Pepe sounds like a winner

"We want something heroic. We want something that is not defined by liberalism, or individual rights, or bourgeois norms. We want something that is truly European and truly heroic," Spencer says at the podium. "That is fundamentally what the Alt-Right is about." Race, he says, "is real. Race matters, and race is the foundation of identity."

The Alt-Right prides itself on its leaderless ethos, using social media to spread its ideology through viral memes and anonymous attacks on its enemies, real and imagined. But Spencer coined the term Alt-Right, back in 2010, and has since positioned himself as the movement's leading intellectual and most visible spokesman.

Post-conference, Spencer invites a cluster of journalists and Alt-Right fans for drinks at the staid hotel, where he relishes being the center of attention.

Spencer says he guesses women comprise only about a fifth of the Alt-Right – an imbalance that's obvious at the gathering, where there appears to be only one female follower amid the dozen or so men who cycle in and out.

No matter. Spencer tends to see women as manipulative figures who are best when submitting to Alt-Right virility. Women, he tweeted during the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Trump, "should never be allowed to make foreign policy. It's not that they're 'weak.' To the contrary, their vindictiveness knows no bounds." Over drinks, he suggests that most women secretly crave Alt-Right boyfriends because they want "alpha genes" and "alpha sperm." When a man by the bar suggests someone should write a novel about "a liberal feminist studies major falling in love with a Richard Spencer type," Spencer suggests I write it.

More recently, in a podcast recorded after the exposure of the so-called Trump tape, Spencer scoffed at the "puritanical" criticism of Trump, saying it's "ridiculous" to call what Trump was talking about sexual assault. "At some part of every woman's soul," he said, "they want to be taken by a strong man." Pointing to how Trump said he had taken Nancy O'Dell furniture shopping, Spencer added, "Is this really the worst thing you've ever heard? In a way, he's like the most gentlemanly, kindly philanderer of all time."

At the Willard in September, over a Mint Julep followed by Manhattans, Spencer, whose free-wheeling style with journalists has made him the Alt-Right's "it boy," gabs about white nationalism and his disdain for electoral democracy. He also discusses why he supports Trump, and their shared respect for Vladimir Putin. "I admire Putin too," he says. "Who wouldn't?"

"I love empire, I love power, I love achievement," he goes on, growing animated. Spencer loves imperialism so much, he says, that he'll sometimes "get a boner" reading about Napoleon.

I first meet Spencer at the Republican National Convention in July, at a party headlined by Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart editor and self-described "dangerous ######" who tours college campuses to rail against "social justice warriors," political correctness and the left in general. (Spencer perceives Yiannopoulos as a fellow traveler of sorts, but not truly Alt-Right; he does, however, see Yiannopoulos' followers as ripe for Alt-Right recruitment.) The crowd, Spencer later notes, is populated by lots of Alt-Right "####lords" – a form of high praise on social media that designates true believers. They're wildly excited about a speech by far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who's attending the convention as a guest of the Tennessee Republican Party. After a lengthy diatribe about "so-called leaders" who've allowed "Eurabia" to be overrun by Muslims and who "do not defend our liberty, our sovereignty, our values, our national identity," Wilders elicits loud chants of "Trump! Trump! Trump!"

After the speeches, as the crowd mingles, Spencer reflects on the significance of what he sees as Trump's affinity for white nationalism. "It's not so much about policy – it's more about the emotions that he evokes," he says. "And emotions are more important than facts. Trump sincerely and genuinely cares about Americans, and white Americans in particular."

Those ideas boil down to open racism. The Alt-Right, Spencer says, "opposes the basic ideas behind the Civil Rights Act." He's called Martin Luther King Jr. "the god of white dispossession," the latter being one of the Alt-Right's major obsessions. True "####lords" are gripped by the fear that white people in America are being "dispossessed" by immigration and multi-culturalism, to the point that they face an imminent "white genocide." Spencer has called anti-discrimination laws "the enemy of all tradition, not just the Anglo-Saxon American society it has helped destroy."

The Alt-Right, in Spencer's formulation, signals a sharp break from Ted Cruz-style Christian right politics, which frames the United States as a Christian nation, as well as Ron Paul-style libertarianism that portrays government as an oppressive, freedom-crushing behemoth. So Spencer says he is neither a libertarian nor a constitutionalist, but rather a "statist" – one with a weak commitment to constitutional democracy. "The important thing," he says, "is that the people in charge are people like me."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...s-rise-w443902