Kontextmaschine

20th April 2017

Post with 20 notes

Richard Spencer at Auburn

A few things about Richard Spencer’s successfully delivered speech at Auburn University the other night.

ONE, from what I heard firm policing pacified the assembly enough for the speech to go off same as any other campus event but only after Auburn tried to cancel citing security concerns… only to be countermanded by federal court order sought by a white supremacist lawyer. I would not, in fact, be surprised if Spencer aimed at Auburn because Sam Dickson operates out of Georgia.

(There is now a campaign by Florida man-cum-fascist lawyer Augustus Sol Invictus and alt-right folk hero Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman to assemble a National Lawyers Guild-style network of rightist defense and civil rights lawyers. I suppose all those BIDER and AutoAdmit guys are out there somewhere. Come to think of it, I’d be a bit surprised if WeSearchr poobah/Count of Monte Christo Pax Dickinson wasn’t somewhere in the background on this.)

Richard Spencer knows what he is doing. And what did he do? Well Auburn’s claim that they couldn’t safely host him already struck a federal judge like a cover for not wanting to and the event going smoothly won’t hurt going forward - the American legal system does not weigh “structural oppression, such as public speech and the American legal system” as violence. Between that and Berkeley’s proof that the system can’t just look away and let things harmlessly burn themselves out, I think he’s probably breaking through no-platforming to the next stage.

Do wonder what becomes of those left behind tho. The new campus Burschenschaften have been one of the biggest post-election loci of alt-right energy (ok, they’re really closer to ‘70s student Italo-fash than mensur but it’s a fun word). And I catch word that college leftists are starting to hear ominous drums in the off-campus hills. People came cross-country to stand with Based Stickman at Berkeley, while Austin is already surrounded by Texas.

SO, now that he’s giving speeches what is he saying? Well the only memorable thing I hear repeated (and I’m sure this is planned - he gets interviewed so often because you’re guaranteed an interesting article with two good pullquotes and a clickable headline) is him going after college football and people being “a-hyuck, that won’t play in the South”.

Okay to repeat, Spencer knows what he’s doing. He went to Duke, he knows what college sports mean in Dixie. Here is an entire POLITICO article about Richard Spencer calculatedly invoking football to manipulate attention.

What he’s doing (as I can tell from wisely paying attention to Internet racists all these years) is using his platform to promote a line of thought developed at length by overlooked alt-right ideological entrepreneur Paul Kersey. The idea being that in adopting a win-at-all-costs, professional pipeline model of sports, colleges have abandoned the “rounded development of the natural (white) aristocracy into a class of gentlemen” role of collegiate athletics in favor of lowering standards to bring in unworthy rapist negroes as ringers for the sake of decadent spectacle. (And that this is a microcosm of American colleges and society generally).

(The title of Kersey’s site, Stuff Black People Don’t Like, shows how long he’s been beavering at this, I’m honestly surprised his “we could have gone to Mars” – basically Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” played backwards as a way to cultivate white STEMthusiast resentment of blacks and Great Society welfare programs – never caught)

So does Spencer expect a mass conversion to the Kersey line here? I doubt it, but the two of them push it, CasteFootball exists, someone could be won over. The sports leagues, NCAA included, have been bigfooting states over gender enforcement and religious liberty measures lately and the Benedict Option-type social cons have already been simmering up some resentment against them and their fan enablers.

Cross the strains and fertilize with publicity, toss in state budget issues, the adjunct and student loan crises and the inchoate sense that there’s some relationship between campus leftism and a loss of focus on academic instruction (or STEM in particular) and… I’m not sure exactly what they could do with that issue, but putting it into play might open up the option to wedge something apart, or trade for some influence on colleges down the line.

Plus, you know, there IS the campus rape angle, that’s hot these days. Spencer (and Stephen Miller) debuted off the Duke lacrosse hoax, they know the power there. Go flaunting your ideology out in public someone’s gonna scavenge it, and already the Kony-fuckers are weaving that feminist energy into their “human trafficking” reenactment of the old white slavery panics (which are where we got the Dawes Act and a bunch of that black-repressing “carceral feminism” we were being reminded to dislike circa like 2012. White women SMDH.)

Finally, one of the new, woke sports journalism’s hobby horses is college athletes as exploited professionals who should be paid (and this as a racialized issue). But “a disproportionate share of televised NCAA athletes are black commercial performers unsuited to the amateur scholar model” is the core of the Kersey line too.

And if Richard Spencer can draft off that such that the payoff of a woke journalist crusade is advancing his program, or at least occupy enough space in the discourse that no article on the subject feels complete without an aside (pull-quote?) on what Richard Spencer thinks? Gotta admit that would be a hell of a troll.

Tagged: richard spencerstudent athlete