Friday, October 20, 2017
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — The hostile audience drowned out white nationalist Richard Spencer with anti-Nazi chants. They booed him off the stage under the watchful eye of police officers in riot gear.
In other words, Spencer sees his speech Thursday at the University of Florida as a smashing success.
"I'm very happy with what happened in the sense of the [public relations] victory," he told The Associated Press today. "But at the same time, it's a little frustrating and a little sad that I wasn't able to talk to people."
Once an obscure figure in a fringe movement, Spencer has become a household name thanks in part to his infamous "Hail Trump!" toast, a videotaped punch to his head and the bloodshed at a Virginia rally where he was a headliner.
But his notoriety, amplified by social media and mainstream news coverage, far exceeds his modest following of tiki torch-bearing racists and anti-Semites.
Protesters vastly outnumbered Spencer's supporters at the University of Florida on Thursday, his first campus appearance since the deadly clash at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August. A woman was struck and killed by a car that plowed into a crowd of counter protesters after authorities broke up the "Unite the Right" rally.
In Florida, police flooded Gainesville after the governor declared a state of emergency ahead of Spencer's event.