White supremacist roving haircut Richard Spencer dropped by the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday morning to yell about race and tweet sulkily about the event. He was on the grounds for about two hours before he was asked to leave by the American Conservative Union. Spencer was also asked last week to leave a Libertarian students’ conference, because nobody wants him at their party.
Spencer tried to crash last week’s International Students for Liberty Conference before he was kicked out. He managed to lurk around CPAC for a bit longer, hanging around the hallways of the Gaylord National Harbor Hotel and getting a mystifying number of reporters to listen to him speak. Here he is, thronged by people feeding his misplaced sense of importance:
Spencer was particularly piqued about a speech by the ACU’s Dan Schneider, which denounced the “alt right” movement. (Spencer coined the term “alt-right,” which functions as nothing more than thin linguistic cover for white nationalism, which is what the movement actually entails.)
Schneider went so far as to suggest that the alt-righters are secretly “left-wing fascists,” which is a bizarre opinion, factually wrong, and reportedly didn’t go over well with the CPAC audience.
Spencer also didn’t enjoy the speech or being elided from the cool racist movement he helped create.
ACU chairman Matt Schlapp told the Los Angeles Times’ Matt Pearce that Spencer wouldn’t be asked to leave. Moments later, he was asked to leave.
The line for the ACU, if you’re keeping track, is that speakers can’t openly promote pedophilia and guests can’t display racism quite as blatant as Spencer’s. It is also worth noting that in recent weeks, very white groups of people have asked Richard Spencer to leave their gatherings, and two of them have punched him in the face. It’s almost like the real enemy is within?