A NEW BUILDING GOES UP IN MONTANA – COURTESY OF WHITE SUPREMACIST DICK SPENCER

Well, the drama surrounding National Policy Institute’s Dick Spencer (pictured) never seems to fade, only the locals in his tiny town of Whitefish, MT is fighting back. But in the midst of their fight comes this little project courtesy of Spencer and his mother Sherry.

One People’s Project

WHITEFISH, MT – In the wake of a town council meeting where residents voiced opposition to the presence there of white supremacist Richard Spencer and his organization National Policy Institute (NPI), it is discovered that Spencer and his mother Sherry are constructing a mixed-use building in the historical and trendy Railway District in town that many believe will be a headquarters for NPI.

According to the Whitefish Pilot, the new building at 22 Lupfer Ave. will include two commercial spaces about 3,025 square feet each on the first floor while the second floor will have four apartment units. A house previously on the site was removed last summer and contruction of the foundation for the new building has already begun.

Spencer, according to records, owns Roediger Property, which shares the address at 85 Elk Highlands Drive in Whitefish with not only NPI but Washington Summit Publishers, a white supremacist book publishing company originally operated by late NPI Chairman Louis R. Andrews. There are no public records found showing the involvement Roediger Property in any recent ventures, including developing this new building.

Spencer and Wife, Russian Scholar Nina Kouprianova, aka Nina Byzantina.

Richard Spencer has been particularly active over the past year in white supremacist circles, most recently attempting to paint himself as a pseudo-martyr after his attempt to hold a white nationalist conference in Budapest, Hungary last month resulted in him being arrested, deported and banned from not only Hungary but all 26 countries under the Schengen agreement, which allows moving from one country to another without further formalities and includes most countries in Europe. In March, Spencer, who has been a regular associate of white supremacists and other conservatives in the Washington, DC Beltway, particularly as a onetime editor of white nationalist Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine, held a clandestine shadow conference of sorts during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that was attended by CPAC attendees with views similar to his own. However despite this, Rod Dreher writing for Spencer’s old magazine outed his wife Russian scholar Nina Kouprianova as an supporter of Russian neo-fascist Aleksandr Dugin that has translated into English some of his work.

Although living in Whitefish for a number of years, it wasn’t until an altercation at the Big Mountain Ski Club last year with former John McCain advisor Randy Scheunemann made news recently in light of Spencer’s noteriety from the Budapest conference. After getting into a row with Spencer at both on a ski lift that January and later that year at the Club’s Christmas Party, Scheunemann informed the resort that if Spencer is kept as a member he would leave, and the resort chose to keep Spencer. The news of this row had Whitefish residents outraged and on Monday, they packed City Hall during its town council meeting and called for an anti-hate ordinance that prevents groups like NPI from organizing and meeting in town.

“We had over 100 people show up, and for this little town that’s a lot,” said Rabbi Allen Secher who organized residents to oppose NPI through his organization Love Lives Here, a Flathead Valley affiliate of the Montana Human Rights Network. Rabbi Secher says that the next effort will be to publish an ad that will not mention the hate group particularly, but will be a condemnation of hate groups in general that try to organize in Whitefish. “So far we have over 300 signatures, and I imagine that will double by the weekend,” he said.

In a Nov. 12 op-ed in the Whitefish Pilot, Spencer denied attempting to establish anything for NPI in Whitefish. “NPI has never been ‘Montana-based’ in the conventional sense,” he wrote. “Our corporate charter is in Virginia, and we’ve never involved ourselves in Montana politics nor held a conference here—nor will we. We are, to a great extent, an international collaboration. The east coast is NPI’s natural home and that is where we are establishing a permanent facility.”

Rabbi Secher isn’t certain that he can take Spencer at his word however, pointing to not only the new building being constructed as being seen by residents as a possible location for an NPI headquarters, but the corportate presence of NPI in the State of Montana suggesting otherwise. “His tax form lists his headquarters here, his articles of incorporation listed here,” he said.

Whitefish is approximately ten miles from Kalispell, Montana, where April Gaede, the white supremacist mother best known for promoting her twin daughters now defunct neo-Nazi music group Prussian Blue, moved in 2006 to create a whites-only homeland in an effort called Pioneer Little Europe (PLE). In 2011, the same year Spencer and the National Policy Institute moved to Whitefish, he touted PLE efforts at the NPI Conference at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC.