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

Richard Spencer Image by Getty Images
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
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news. All donations are still being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000 until April 24.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.

