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This is exactly how to deal with the alt-right

Journalist Gary Younge shuts down white supremacist Richard Spencer with expert precision

This is exactly how to deal with the alt-right

By Emily Reynolds

07 November 2017

Journalists have been wrestling with whether or not they should engage with the alt-right for the last 18 months. And when the Guardian journalist Gary Younge decided to meet the movement’s posterboy white supremacist and all-round piece-of-shit Richard Spencer, he was similarly conflicted.

“Ordinarily, giving someone like that oxygen is something I don’t think journalists should do,” he says in this new clip from Channel 4 News. “But Spencer and people like him credit themselves with providing the intellectual underpinnings for the Trump revolution, and I fear they might be right”.

Surprisingly enough, the meeting… did not go well. Discussing the meeting in the Guardian, Younge describes Spencer as “more odious troll than eloquent polemicist”, and it’s easy to see why – before Younge shut down the interview, Spencer claims that he’s proud of his ancestor’s slavery.

Younge writes of the incident: “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. that If Africans had never existed, world history would be almost exactly the same as it is today.”

The video is an excruciating watch, Spencer’s clear intellectual inadequacies laid bare in the face of Younge’s questions. “People are now aware of the term ‘alt-right’,” Spencer rambles. “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,”

Eventually, after Spencer claims he would “never really be an Englishman”, Younge shuts him down completely. “You don’t get to tell me anything” he responds, emphatically. “I was looking for someone who could give some intellectual ballast as to what’s on in this country, in terms of race, in terms of white people, but I found the wrong guy.”

Anyway, here are some videos of him being punched in the face.

(Image: Channel 4)