White nationalist Richard Spencer has launched a new site to promote his “academic” brand of racism: Alternative Right - An Online Magazine of Radical Traditionalism.

We’re not talking Stormfront here, with neo-Nazi troglodytes tossing around the ‘N’ word with abandon. Spencer and his cohorts are slicker than that. Their twisted breed of white supremacism masquerades as intellectualism. These “racialists” (as they sometimes call themselves) use the scientific-sounding phrase “human biological diversity” to make their argument: that whites (and Asians) are inherently, genetically superior to other races.

It’s the same age-old racism with a pseudo-scientific rationale.

Also participating in this shiny happy-faced hate site: the National Review’s John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer of VDARE.com (a site that has also featured Michelle Malkin for years). And they don’t appear to lack funding — the site is very professionally designed, and obviously not done on the cheap.

Erik Kain has a piece at True/Slant about “Alternative Right,” and he links to this article at Frum Forum by Alex Knepper, describing an encounter between Knepper and Richard Spencer at last year’s CPAC circus:

“Show me one black nation that’s ever been run competently,” he [Richard Spencer] challenged me.

“That’s a ridiculous methodology. I’ll accept that claim for argument’s sake and still say that it’s bogus: African nations have not failed because the skin color of the people is black. The skin color is just a coincidence. It’s the culture that’s the problem.”

“Not true,” he said. “You look at Liberia, where ex-slaves went back to Africa, tried to bring American ideals to the country, and failed, because the blacks wouldn’t accept them.”

“This is not Western,” I said. “How can you possibly claim to stand for Western civilization? What’s brilliant about our values is that they stand for the individual, not the supremacy of the group. You come to America, you’re judged by your merits — not by what you look like.”

After a few more back-and-forths, we arrived at our destination, and as our car-mates went ahead, he told me to stay with him for a minute so he could talk to me. As the others faded into the background, he moved just inches away from my face, gave me a menacing look and yelled: “You little child. How dare you talk to me — me! — about the West! You don’t know the first thing about the West! You’re a little twelve-year-old who thinks he knows shit. Don’t you ever talk to me like that again or I will beat your face into the fucking ground!”

As with my infamous argument with gay-basher Ryan Sorba, my confrontations with collectivists always tend to end up degenerating into threats of physical force. Richard Spencer is a fairly tough guy, and I’m, well, kind of scrawny. So I kept my mouth shut. But I was frightened.

I let him walk ahead of me, and it ended there. But that is the real Richard Spencer: a white nationalist, a bully, and an intellectual coward.

These “racialists” know how to clean up when the cameras are on them, but when it’s one-on-one it doesn’t take much to make the mask drop.

But perhaps even more disturbing are the comments posted at Frum Forum underneath Knepper’s article — because it’s quite clear that even at FF, a site that’s trying to define a moderate style of conservatism, there’s quite a bit of support for the ugly racism of people like Spencer.