Richard Spencer

Richard Spencer is a writer and organizer widely credited with popularizing the term “alt-right.” He led the National Policy Institute and edited the publications Radix Journal and AltRight.com. The origin and use of the term are treated on the alt-right page; this page covers Spencer himself.

The Institute and Its Actual Size

Spencer’s organizational base was the National Policy Institute, registered in Whitefish, Montana. Its tax filings are the corrective to the impression its name creates. For the year ending December 2018 it reported total revenue of $37,536 — of which$29,363 was contributions — expenses of $37,584, and net assets of$12,906. ProPublica records that it no longer appears in the IRS list of tax-exempt organizations.

This matters for how the period is understood. The reach of the material Spencer produced was a function of the internet and of press coverage, not of institutional resources: the organization behind it operated on a budget smaller than a single staff salary at the groups it was often compared to.

Terminology

The label “alt-right” was, by Spencer’s own account and by general agreement among those who wrote about it at the time, a deliberately vague umbrella term. Characterizations of the ideology it denoted — including the descriptions applied to Spencer by researchers, journalists and civil-rights organizations — are attributed to those sources rather than asserted here. Readers should consult the alt-right page, where the term itself is treated.

Charlottesville and Its Consequences

Spencer participated in the August 2017 Unite the Right events in Charlottesville and was a defendant in Sines v. Kessler, the civil action brought in the Western District of Virginia by people injured there. A jury returned its verdict on November 23, 2021; appeals from the judgment were decided by the Fourth Circuit in 2024 and 2025. The verdict form as filed is a scanned image without a text layer, and the findings as to each individual defendant are not summarized on this page.

Spencer was removed from major platforms and payment services in the period following Charlottesville. The specific removals, their dates and the policies invoked are recorded on the pages of the platforms concerned; this page does not carry sources for them and makes no claim about their cumulative effect on his audience.