Richard Spencer Cancels Tour After MSU Epic Failure [View all]

[Initech]

A year after launching a barnstorming tour of the nation’s colleges, delivering at each stop controversial speeches designed as much to trigger protests from an increasingly energetic antifascist movement as they were to introduce racist ideas to America’s youth, Richard Spencer is hanging it up.

Spencer, the head of the National Policy Institute, announced over the weekend that he was ending his college speaking tour, saying he plans to make a “course correction” after his speech last week at Michigan State University drew a less-than-sizeable audience and ended with violent clashes and the arrest of one of Spencer’s closest confidants, a former school teacher.

“In our lives, we always need to be course correcting. We always need to take a step back and think, and ask ourselves honestly, is this the right direction?” Spencer said in a 25-minute video uploaded on Sunday to YouTube. “We need to do that with regard to my public appearances going forward or really any public appearance involving a controversial, alt-right identitarian figure.”

Spencer’s announcement ends an expansive effort that criss-crossed the country and involved repeated court battles –– some of which remain unresolved for speeches planned at the University of Cincinnati and Penn State –– as the white nationalist “alt-right” sought to spread racist ideologies among America’s youth. The effort led to repeated controversy as colleges and universities fought to restrict access and prevent violent clashes between the alt-right and the antifascist protests that followed Spencer wherever he spoke.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/03/12/richard-spencer-cancels-speaking-tour-college-campuses-after-speech-michigan