http://lukeford.net/blog/?p=119681 From The Intercept, Sep. 7, 2017:
RICHARD SPENCER’S RACIST GROUP HAS A NEW LEADER
THE INFAMOUS WHITE nationalist Richard Spencer occupied his fair share of the spotlight at the “Unite the Right” gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, last month. As the far-right rally turned deadly — with 19 injured and 32-year-old Heather Heyer killed when a man rammed a crowd of counterprotesters — Spencer appeared shirtless on a livestream talking about how he was pepper-sprayed. Later, he held a brief press conference. As usual, Spencer had foisted himself into the center of attention.
Quietly attending the rally alongside Spencer, however, was the new executive director of the right-wing leader’s nonprofit, the National Policy Institute. Evan McLaren had seemingly come out of nowhere: a far-right figure of little note, with little more than a history of online postings that espoused his white nationalist beliefs and a trail of older postings revealing the path that brought him to his worldview. In Charlottesville, McLaren didn’t attract the same attention as Spencer, but he was there nonetheless, taunting journalists on social media before the event kicked off, and tweeting out slogans of white pride after its bloody conclusion.
“Brothers and sisters across the alt-right — this is a taste of how it feels to be the tip of the spear entering our civilizational crisis,” McLaren tweeted the day after the Charlottesville bloodshed.
In an interview with The Intercept, McLaren relished the chance to capitalize on the chaos and controversy of the Charlottesville rally. “I’m actually happy to be arriving at somewhat of a crisis moment, because it has given me the opportunity to show that I’m not just here to take a paycheck and play pretend ‘alt-right’ person,” he said.
