Yesterday, Michigan State University confirmed that the National Policy Institute, a fascist think tank led by white supremacist Richard Spencer, had requested the opportunity to have Spencer speak on campus. Today, the university’s president, Lou Anna K. Simon, issued the following statement, making it clear that he and his organization are not welcome.

“After consultation with law enforcement officials, Michigan State University has decided to deny the National Policy Institute’s request to rent space on campus to accommodate a speaker. This decision was made due to significant concerns about public safety in the wake of the tragic violence in Charlottesville last weekend. While we remain firm in our commitment to freedom of expression, our first obligation is to the safety and security of our students and our community.”

This, by the way, comes the day after both Texas A&M University and the University of Florida uninvited Spencer from their campuses citing safety concerns in the wake of what happened in Charlottesville.

The proposed event in East Lansing, according to reporting by Lansing City Pulse was to have been co-hosted by “the Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas and the white nationalist group Identity Europa,” the first of which was just recently launched by 2009 MSU graduate Kyle Bristow, who can be seen in the image above with Spencer. [Richard Spencer is a board member of Bristow’s Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas. Other board members, according to Lansing City Pulse, Include “people like California attorney William Daniel Johnson, who in 1985 proposed a Constitutional amendment to revoke the citizenship of every non-white person in the U.S; Jason Robb, son of the national director of the KKK; and Ryan Sorba, a writer who claims that being gay is a ‘hoax’.”]

While I don’t want to link to Bristow’s website, here’s a clip from a recent post about how, in the wake of Charlottesville, the far right is under attack. It would appear that, like some of the commenters on this site, Bristow believes that the deadly chaos in Charlottesville was orchestrated by what Trump would call the “alt-left” in order to justify a crackdown against the civil rights of Nazis.

I’d like to ramble on for a few hours about freedom of speech, and why I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t extend to Nazis, but I’m falling asleep. So, instead, I’d like to leave you with this clip from a recent National Review piece by Kevin D. Williamson titled “Angry White Boys.” [Thank you, Jcp2, for making me aware of it.]

…What does an angry white boy really want?

“A girlfriend,” comes the mocking answer, and there’s probably more to that than mockery. The proprietor of one of the nation’s premier websites for neo-Nazi knuckleheads advised his colleagues in Charlottesville that, after the protest — which included a murder — “random girls will want to have sex with you.” I ran this proposition past a few random girls, and I suspect that the apfelstrudelführers are going to go home disappointed. There are many shades of white, and Mom’s-basement white is the least popular crayon in the box.

Of course we should mock them, criticize them, lament them, and, in the case of James Alex Fields Jr., the trust-funder from Ohio charged in the death of Heather Heyer, prosecute them. What does James Alex Fields Jr. want? A transcript of a 911 call from his mother describes him beating her after she told him to stop playing a particular video game. She is disabled and uses a wheelchair. That wasn’t the only 911 call she made in fear of her son.

The angry white boys do not have a serious political agenda. They don’t have any straightforward demands like the Teamsters or PETA do, and they do not have a well-developed ideological position like the Communists do, though it would be inaccurate to say that they lack an ideology entirely. Their agenda is their anger, an anger that is difficult to understand. Middle-class white men in the United States of America in anno Domini 2017 have their problems, to be sure. Life is full of little disappointments. But their motive is not to be found in their exterior circumstances, which are pretty good.

Maybe too good: A great many of these young men have an interest in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary sociology — they like to think of themselves as “alpha males,” as though they were living in a chimpanzee troop — but it never occurs to them to consider their own status as rejects and failed men in that context. Online fantasy lives notwithstanding, random girls do not want to have sex with them. How do we know this? Because they are carrying tiki torches in a giant dork parade in Charlottesville. There’s no prom queen waiting at home. If we credit their own sociobiological model, they are the superfluous males who would have been discarded, along with their genetic material, by the pitiless state of nature. The fantasy of proving that they are something else is why they dream of violence and confrontation. They are the products of the soft liberal-democratic society they hold in contempt — and upon which they depend, utterly. James Alex Fields Jr. is angry at the world, and angry at his mother, probably for the same reason.

What does an angry white boy want? The fact that they get together to play dress-up — to engage in a large and sometimes murderous game of cowboys and Indians — may give us our answer. They want to be someone other than who they are. That’s the great irony of identity politics: They seek identity in the tribe because they are failed individuals. They are a chain composed exclusively of weak links. What they are engaged in isn’t politics, but theater: play-acting in the hopes of achieving catharsis. Their online personas — knights, Vikings, reincarnations of Charles Martel — will be familiar enough to anybody with a Dungeons and Dragons nerd in his life. But sometimes, role-playing around a card table isn’t enough: Sometimes, you need a stage and an audience. In the theater, actors and audience both can forget ourselves for an hour or two. Under the soft glow of the tiki torches, these angry white boys can be something else — for a night…

[note: The Southern Poverty Law Center has a fascinatingdossier on Kyle Bristow.]