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The University of Florida shut down a request by white nationalist Richard Spencer’s group to have him speak on campus on September 12.
In a statement, University of Florida president W. Kent Fuchs said that “amid serious concerns for safety, we have decided to deny the National Policy Institute’s request to rent event space at the University of Florida.” Fuchs said the decision is due to the potential for violence that could arise.
The university’s decision comes after the violent protests last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia. Spencer attended the rally and promoted it on social media.
via ABC News:
Spencer has said he is neither a racist nor a white supremacist, which is someone who believes that white people are superior to other races. Instead, under the label of “alt-right,” which Spencer is credited with coining, white nationalists like him espouse “white separatist ideologies,” as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a legal advocacy organization that monitors extremist groups.
Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, which says it is a white nationalist organization “dedicated to the heritage, identity and future of people of European descent in the United States,” has become a lightning rod for criticism since the election of Donald Trump.
Spencer first gained notoriety back in November when video surfaced of him at a conference shouting “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory,” as some members of the crowd did a Nazi salute.
University president Fuchs said he finds “the racist rhetoric of Richard Spencer and white nationalism repugnant and counter to everything the university and this nation stands for.”
