Twitter ends ban of notorious white nationalist Richard Spencer

DALLAS – A month after Twitter suspended Richard Spencer’s account, it has given the megaphone back.

Spencer, a self-professed founder of the “alt-right” movement advocating for a whites-only state, seems to want to make up for lost time, spawning tweet after tweet since his return Saturday.

The alt-right movement is not well defined, but it has attracted people who identify themselves as white nationalists or white supremacists and who spouse anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments.

“America, at the end of the day, belongs to white men,” Spencer said at an event at Texas A&M University last week as some attendees booed and hissed at him.

Spencer’s Twitter page was one of several accounts by alt-right personalities that Twitter suspended a week after the presidential election, USA Today reported. Twitter also unplugged other accounts tied to Spencer, such as the one for his think tank, National Policy Institute, and his magazine, Radix Journal.

Another high-profile casualty came months earlier, when Twitter permanently banned Milo Yiannopoulos, a journalist for far-right news outlet Breitbart. Though Twitter didn’t specify the reason for the ban, it happened right after Yiannopoulos encouraged his followers to hurl racist and misogynistic attacks against “Saturday Night Live” comedian Leslie Jones. She left the social media network in the aftermath.

The suspensions appeared to be a crackdown on the alt-right movement as Twitter announced it was going to combat online abuse with new tools. One of those features allows users to “mute” notifications about tweets directed at them that include certain words and hashtags.

But a Twitter representative told The Washington Post that Spencer was barred from Twitter for having multiple accounts with overlapping uses. The accounts for his think tank and magazine were not restored.

Spencer lives in a Montana resort town, but he was born and raised in Dallas. He told The Dallas Morning News last month that Donald Trump’s victory in the election was like a dream come true.

“That is something major,” Spencer said. “He’s not your father’s conservative. He’s not in this to promote free markets or neoconservative foreign politics or to protect Israel, for that matter. He’s in this to protect his people. He’s in this to protect the historic American nation.”

At a recent white nationalist conference in Washington, D.C., Spencer’s call to “Hail Trump!” got a crowd to stiffen their arms in a Nazi salute.

Trump, who launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and who has retweeted white supremacists, disavowed the alt-right movement in an interview with The New York Times.

“I’m not looking to energize them,” he said.