How white is Richard Spencer, really?

White nationalist Richard Spencer has the erect bearing of a Leghorn.

Richard Spencer strongly identifies as white, like his mother, despite rumors that his father is a tube of chicken semen she accidentally sat on at the fair. Spencer is the president and director of the National Policy Institute, a “racial realist” think tank he founded, and the executive director of Washington Summit Publishers, a publisher he also founded. He is about my age. His professional accomplishments make me wonder why I don’t run a policy institute and a publishing house, but maybe I’m just not as white as he is. It would be scientifically unsound to conclude that, though. We also must control for education. Spencer went from the prestigious St. Mark’s preparatory high school in Texas to the University of Virginia, then immediately to a master’s program at the University of Chicago, followed by two sessions at the Vienna International Summer University and then a PhD program at Duke. Given this trajectory—from prep school to grad school to president of his own think tank—it’s easy to understand why whiteness is so important to Spencer. Getting born to the right parents has been the key to his professional and political life.

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