When I asked Spencer to meet me in January, before Trump’s inauguration, he showed better manners than his fans. (He denies that he advocates violence.) The front door of his apartment in Alexandria, just outside Washington, is not clearly marked, and even though he had given me the address, I wouldn’t have found it had a bespectacled young man not intercepted me outside, while I was rummaging around trash cans looking for a house number. “Can I help you?” he asked. He had brown hair and a geeky affect.
I wasn’t sure how to reveal to a stranger that I had come to meet Richard Spencer. “I am supposed to meet someone,” I said, so vaguely that I must have sounded like I was en route to a drug deal or an orgy.
“Do you have edgy political beliefs?” he asked, looking at me askance. (Yet another bland code word: edgy, discussion club, policy institute, even alt-right itself.)
“No,” I said, “but I’m here to meet someone who does.” He motioned me upstairs, to a newly renovated yuppie apartment where a television news crew was striking its equipment. The reporter, an Asian woman, stood in the corner and did not introduce herself, uneasy, perhaps, at the thought of exchanging pleasantries with a Spencer associate now that the cameras were off and she wasn’t professionally required to do so.
Spencer walked over, carrying a freshly pressed espresso, and said hello. He dresses nattily and today wore a patterned shirt, a wool vest, and a sport coat. He looked like the scion of a Montana banking family, dressed up and ready to film a commercial in a log cabin, assuring local ranchers that their deposits would be safe with him. Only the Reich-evoking fascist-chic (“fashy”) haircut would have been out of place.