A few things about Richard Spencer\u2019s successfully delivered speech at Auburn University the other night.\n
\nONE, 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\u2026 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.\n
\n(There is now a campaign by Florida man-cum-fascist lawyer Augustus Sol Invictus and alt-right folk hero Kyle \u201cBased Stickman\u201d 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\u2019d be a bit surprised if WeSearchr poobah/Count of Monte Christo Pax Dickinson wasn\u2019t somewhere in the background on this.)\n
\nRichard Spencer knows what he is doing. And what did he do? Well Auburn\u2019s claim that they couldn\u2019t safely host him already struck a federal judge like a cover for not wanting to and the event going smoothly won\u2019t hurt going forward - the American legal system does not weigh \u201cstructural oppression, such as public speech and the American legal system\u201d as violence. Between that and Berkeley\u2019s proof that the system can\u2019t just look away and let things harmlessly burn themselves out, I think he\u2019s probably breaking through no-platforming to the next stage.
\nDo 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\u2019re really closer to \u201870s student Italo-fash than mensur but it\u2019s 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.\n
\n\nSO, now that he\u2019s giving speeches what is he saying? Well the only memorable thing I hear repeated (and I\u2019m sure this is planned - he gets interviewed so often because you\u2019re guaranteed an interesting article with two good pullquotes and a clickable headline) is him going after college football and people being \u201ca-hyuck, that won\u2019t play in the South\u201d.\n
\nOkay to repeat, Spencer knows what he\u2019s 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.
\n\nWhat he\u2019s 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 \u201crounded development of the natural (white) aristocracy into a class of gentlemen\u201d 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).\n
\n(The title of Kersey\u2019s site, Stuff Black People Don\u2019t Like, shows how long he\u2019s been beavering at this, I\u2019m honestly surprised his \u201cwe could have gone to Mars\u201d \u2013 basically Gil Scott-Heron\u2019s \u201cWhitey on the Moon\u201d played backwards as a way to cultivate white STEMthusiast resentment of blacks and Great Society welfare programs \u2013 never caught)
\nSo 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. \n\n
Cross the strains and fertilize with publicity, toss in state budget issues, the adjunct and student loan crises and the inchoate sense that there\u2019s some relationship between campus leftism and a loss of focus on academic instruction (or STEM in particular) and\u2026 I\u2019m 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.\n
\nPlus, you know, there IS the campus rape angle, that\u2019s 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\u2019s gonna scavenge it, and already the Kony-fuckers are weaving that feminist energy into their \u201chuman trafficking\u201d reenactment of the old white slavery panics (which are where we got the Dawes Act and a bunch of that black-repressing \u201ccarceral feminism\u201d we were being reminded to dislike circa like 2012. White women SMDH.)\n
\nFinally, one of the new, woke sports journalism\u2019s hobby horses is college athletes as exploited professionals who should be paid (and this as a racialized issue). But \u201ca disproportionate share of televised NCAA athletes are black commercial performers unsuited to the amateur scholar model\u201d is the core of the Kersey line too.\n
\nAnd 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.
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