Natl’ Policy Institute & Its Leader No Longer Welcome On Twitter

Dick Spencer, National Policy Institute, Radix Journal, Washington Summit Publishers – all their accounts smacked down in the past few hours.

Days before the White Supremacist National Policy Institute (NPI) holds their fall conference in Washington, DC, all Twitter accounts associated with the organization, including that of NPI Executive Director Richard Spencer, have been suspended.

Visitors to the Twitter accounts of Spencer, the NPI blog Radix Journal, NPIAmerica, which was NPI’s official Twitter account, or Washington Summit Publishers are greeted by a message indicating that those accounts have been suspended. Spencer’s last tweets were about being interviewed for National Public Radio and the Daily Show, as well as a dig at conservative writer David Frum, whom he has had a longstanding feud with for years.

Spencer, who is the one who popularized the term “alternative right” by making it the title of a blog he formerly owned, is planning to hold the NPI fall conference at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC, a venue he has used three times in the past. Opposition to the conferences have increasingly grown, and one held on Halloween last year at the National Press Club generated enough protesters to prompt the Club to block an alt-right press conference from taking place there in August, quite possibly the only time in its 108-year history a group has been banned there. In March, when NPI held a conference at the Reagan Building, the protest was even larger, including members of Code Pink, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Showing Up For Racial Justice, and outnumbering the mere 50 attendees inside.

Spencer is one of three high profile neo-Fascist associates of the so-called “alt-right” that have been banned by Twitter in recent months. Blogger Chuck C. Johnson and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos have also seen their accounts suspended, Johnson after asking for funds to “take out” civil rights activist DeRay McKesson, and Yiannopoulos after he spearheaded online harassment of Black comedienne Leslie Jones. At press time, it has not been said what prompted the ban of Spencer’s accounts, although there has been other accounts related to the “alt-right” that have been similarly suspended, and the social network service also has a hateful conduct policy that notes that users cannot “promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.”

Spencer told the Daily Caller that he believed his suspension was an attack from Twitter on the “alt-right”. “This is corporate Stalinism,” Richard Spencer said. “Twitter is trying to airbrush the Alt Right out of existence. They’re clearly afraid. They will fail!”