Georgetown Professor: Richard Spencer Doesn’t Get To Work Out In Peace

Richard Spencer Image by Getty Images

By Sam Kestenbaum May 25, 2017

C. Christine Fair, the Georgetown University professor who caused her local gym to revoke the membership of “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer, took to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post to defend her move.

“Spencer sought to garner sympathy by arguing that … he should be allowed to spread hate and stoke racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and other bigoted forms of violence,” she wrote in a Thursday piece, “all without facing consequences for his actions when off the job, so to speak.”

Fair charged that Spencer’s promotion of white nationalism means he has forgone any right to have a private life.

“Spencer wants us to believe that when he is not publicly exclaiming the superiority of the white, Christian male and asserting that this country belongs to such men, he should be allowed to mingle in polite, ethnically diverse society,” she wrote. “Spencer is wrong.”

Fair wrote her own account of the gym incident on her blog; Spencer countered with his own YouTube address to followers. Fair has faced a barrage of hate mail, some of it falsely identifying her as a Jew. While Fair is not Jewish, she did consider conversion as an adult and has not bothered to correct her anti-Semitic critics online.

Email Sam Kestenbaum at [email protected] and follow him at @skestenbaum

Sam Kestenbaum is a contributing editor and former staff writer for the Forward. Before this, he worked for The New York Times and newsrooms in Sana, Ramallah and Beijing. Contact him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum and on Instagram at @skestenbaum.

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