Spencer was ostensibly expelled from CPAC last week for heading a “left-wing fascist group”; he “asked if he could stay if he would simply ‘stay out of trouble’”; and then said something even weirder:
One reporter “asked if he liked rock music,” and Spencer replied cryptically, “Depeche Mode are the official band of the alt-right.”
As a snotty mic-drop response to an irritating journalist, that comment isn’t just unwarranted under the circumstances, it doesn’t work, the way a patently absurd pick like the Partridge Family or the Grateful Dead would have.
And it lacked the knowing trolling potency of Trump’s “Sweden” streamer fly. If only Spencer had namechecked Eric “Enoch was right” Clapton or, orders of magnitude better, David “yes, I believe very strongly in fascism” Bowie, thereby dispatching droves of Bowie’s postmortem millennial fans to lose their ideological innocence in the archives of The Guardian or Rock’s Backpages.
Someone just smart enough to be stupid might have chosen Sham 69, the Cockney Rejects, or even Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Someone stupid enough to be smart? Skrewdriver.
But Depeche Mode?
My NEW Taki’s column: Blasphemous Rumors about Richard Spencer
