National Policy Institute
The National Policy Institute is an alt-right, white supremacist think-tank, presided over by Richard Spencer since 2011. It was founded in 2005 by William Regnery II, a member of a wealthy conservative publishing family, and influential white nationalist figure Sam Francis.[1]
According to its mission statement, it aims 'to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights. The institute ... will study the consequences of the ongoing influx that non-Western populations pose to our national identity.' [2]
Contents
Activities
First national conference 2011
The NPI hosted its first national conference in 2011, entitled Towards a New Nationalism. Speakers included Richard Spencer, Alex Kurtagić, Tomislav Sunić, and Jared Taylor. [3] Spencer started the conference with a direct invocation of Enoch Powell’s infamous Rivers of Blood speech, and the National Policy Institute also published a pamphlet by Spencer entitled The Majority Strategy – the Essential Argument – Why the GOP Must Win White America.[1]
Journal Launch
In December 2013, NPI launched a website, Radix Journal, which describes itself as, 'a periodical on culture, race, meta-politics, critical theory, and society.' It appeared later on that Spencer had secretly replaced his own journal's web address, AltRight.com, with Radix's. AltRight re-emerged once more afterwards, this time with a UK website address. One of the remaining Co-editors, Colin Buchan Liddell, once wrote an article entitled 'Is Black Genocide Right?'. The project still garnered Spencer significant attention: in May 2013, Spencer gained notoriety for the site when it was uncovered that a staffer for the Heritage Foundation had written two anti-immigrant articles for the site. [1]
That same year, the NPI also received a grant from the Pioneer Fund a racist pseudo scientific organization. [4]
2013 Leaders Conference
In October 2013, NPI held its leadership conference After the Fall: The Future of Identity in Washington DC. The event featured Alain De Benoist and Roman Bernard from France, Piero San Giorgio from Switzerland, Alex Kurtagic from Britain, and John Morgan from Hungary, alongside Americans Sam Dickson,Jack Donovan, Tom Sunic, Andy Nowicki, and Matt Parrott.
Just a week before the conference, Spencer flew to London to speak alongside Markus Willinger of Generation Identity and others at the Traditional Britain Conference. It was the second time Spencer spoke to the conference, having done so the year before. [1]
Failed European-wide conference 2013
In November 2014, Spencer and his team at the National Policy Institute (including Jared Taylor from American Renaissance and William Regnery, the founder of NPI) attempted to stage a far-right conference in order to link up white supremacist activists from Europe. Such an attempt failed as the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán banned the conference, even ordering police to arrest anyone trying to organize the event, in a surprise attempt to pander to his 'moderate' conservative voters. Spencer was arrested in a Budapest pub when he tried to organize a casual gathering of the conference’s attendees, and spent three days in prison. When Slate met Taylor in Budapest, he compared the emails Spencer had kept on sending from jail to Martin Luther King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail.
Despite the fact that the government had forbidden the gathering and a risk of arrest, 70 of the 135 registered attendees showed up from around Europe. Slate reports that Spencer's arrest turned him into a martyr on white supremacist chat rooms. 'His arrest may have inadvertently done more to help the American white supremacists connect with Europe’s far-right groups than anything else.' [5]
2016 Twitter block
In 2016, a few days after Trump's victory, Twitter suspended the accounts of the Institute, Radix Journal , its leader Richard Spencer and others under its terms of use. In response, Spencer posted a video to YouTube entitled 'the Knight of Long Knives' - a play on the Nazi operation's name and a reference to the Night of Long Knifes - in which he called this action 'corporate Stalinism', adding: 'I am alive, physically, but digitally speaking, there has been execution squads across the alt-right.' [6]
Annual Conference November 2016
The 2016 National NPI conference was held at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C. Spencer, the headline speaker, celebrated the presidential election victory of Donald Trump as 'the first step towards identity politics in the United States', and 'the victory of will' (a reference to a Nazi propaganda film). Spencer was overtly anti-Semitic, and finished his speech by yelling 'Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!' as audience members responded by standing up and making the Nazi salute. [7]
Affiliations
- Richard Spencer
- Pioneer Fund
- Jared Taylor and his organisation the New Century Foundation (and its publication American Renaissance)
- Generation Identity
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Devin Burghart, WHO IS RICHARD SPENCER?, Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, JUNE 27, 2014. Accessed 24 November 2016.
- ↑ RICHARD BERTRAND SPENCER, Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed 24 November 2016.
- ↑ 2011 NPI Conference, National Policy Institute, 11 January 2011.
- ↑ Maria Luisa Tucker, 'Warp and Woof'. The Village Voice. 30 June 2007. 52 (22): 12. ISSN 0042-6180
- ↑ Martin Gellin, America’s white supremacists are ignored at home. So they are looking to start over with a little help from Europe’s far right, Slate, November 13 2014. Accessed 23 November 2016.
- ↑ Travis M. Andrews, [Twitter suspends prominent alt-right accounts, including Richard Spencer's http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-twitter-alt-right-20161116-story.html], LA Times, November 16, 2016. Accessed 24 November 2016.
- ↑ DANIEL LOMBROSO AND YONI APPELBAUM, 'Hail Trump!': White Nationalists Salute the President Elect, The Atlantic, November 21 2016. Accessed 24 November 2016.
