It’s been amply established that Richard Spencer is one of the worst people in the world. His life’s dream is to establish a white-only country that would be a “safe space” for the white race. To that end, he has also called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing“–without explaining how it is possible for ethnic cleansing to be at all peaceful.
What you may not know is that his views on women’s rights are just as backwards as his views on race. Newsweek’s Michael Hayden discovered this in an interview with Spencer shortly after his second Tiki torch rally in Charlottesville.
Spencer and Hayden were discussing the Naturalization Acts of 1790 and 1795, a pair of breathtaking documents that effectively limited naturalization to free whites of good moral character who had lived in this country for five years. Hayden reminded Spencer that we lived in a very different world now, and then asked him if he wanted to go back to the days before women could vote. When pressed, Spencer said that he didn’t think it was “necessarily a good thing” to let women vote.
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Remember, Spencer is essentially a Nazi, and his views seem to echo the Nazi line on the role of women. Hitler felt that women should primarily be wives and mothers, and were locked out of most positions of responsibility.
It also represents a natural evolution on Spencer’s view that a woman has no business in the White House? Why? He doesn’t think women should be entrusted with foreign policy.
Women should never be allowed to make foreign policy. It’s not that they’re “weak.” To the contrary, their vindictiveness knows no bounds.
— Richard ? Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) September 27, 2016
Megan Squire, a professor of computing sciences at Elon University, sees something else. To Squire’s mind, Spencer’s wariness about letting women vote is an outgrowth of his racism. She believes the alt-right is “upset that the world is changing around them”–and one of the most visible signs of that change is the influx of women in the workplace. This certainly makes sense. After all, it gets on these knuckledraggers’ last nerve that they are indeed being replaced.
Christina Speer of Fordham University sees something even more ominous. She believes that if the alt-right wants to take the vote away from women, then there’s no longer any doubt–“they want to roll back the entire 20th century on us.”
Spencer’s only public response so far has been a couple of retweets. One was from reporter Ken Klippenstein, which summed up the alt-right’s view on women having the vote in just a few words.
https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/919285310248443906
Spencer then retweeted a reply from Evan McLaren, the executive director of Spencer’s racist think tank, the National Policy Institute.
She asked, “Who do I vote for,” instead of, “For whom do I vote.” Disqualified regardless.
— Evan McLaren (@EvanMcLaren) October 15, 2017
So even if women were allowed to have the vote, they should only vote the way their husbands tell them to vote. Lovely.
For some time, I’ve wondered what it would be like to be a white nationalist’s girlfriend or wife. Well, now we have our answer.
(featured image courtesy Vas Panagiotopoulos, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)
