Gary Younge, a feature for The Guardian and The Nation, might be the hero we all needed but didn’t know in these trying times. The Black British veteran journalist gave Richard Spencer the blues in a bruising interview that pretty much revealed that the racist figurehead isn’t as brilliant as he believes being part of the white race makes him.
From The Guardian:
One of those to whom he has given confidence is Richard Spencer, the intellectually unimpressive, historically illiterate huckster who rallied the far right in Charlottesville. Spencer, who wants to create an “ethno-state” for white people, claims to have coined the term “alt-right” – a sanitised word for the extreme right. In July last year, Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, boasted that his website Breitbart News was a “platform for the alt-right”.
When I encountered Spencer at Montgomery Bell park, he emerged carrying a glass of what smelled like bourbon and an entourage of adoring bigots soon surrounded me in the car park. More odious troll than eloquent polemicist, he claimed, among other things, that Africans had benefited from white supremacy and that, despite having been banned from 26 European countries, Europe would always be more his home than mine. “If Africans had never existed, world history would be almost exactly the same as it is today,” he claimed. “Because we are the genius that drives it.” Like a vulture preying on the anxiety, and with few alternatives on offer – as much as people cited Trump as the problem, few offered Democrats as the solution – he felt confident.
“People are now aware of the term ‘alt-right’ … I don’t think Trump shares the ideal of the ethno-state … But he wouldn’t have run the campaign that he ran if he didn’t feel some sense of loss, that America has lost something,” he said.
You can watch Gary Younge check Richard Spencer in the clip below. Read Younge’s full piece on his travels through white America here.
A documentary, Angry, White and American, regarding Younge’s trek, debuts this Thursday (Nov. 9) on Channel 4.
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Photo: screen grab
