Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Richard Spencer Kicked Out Of Farm Halfway Through Event

A conference organized by white nationalist Richard Spencer on a farm this weekend was quickly curtailed after the farm owners discovered his role in the event.

Spencer’s think tank, the National Policy Institute, hosted around 100 people at an events space at Rocklands Farm in Maryland on Saturday, The Washington Post reported.

The event space was booked by a third-party service that did not reveal the think tank’s role, Spencer told the Post. Guests themselves were not told that the farm would be the location — they were picked up by vans at various locations and driven to the space.

When Rocklands Farm’s owners discovered who was behind the conference on Saturday afternoon, they told everyone to leave and refunded the group’s deposit. The event attendees agreed.

The farm said in a statement on its website that it had never asked a group to leave before, but acted when they discovered that they were hosting “an organization that is strongly in opposition to our values.”

“I’m not mad, but if I were a business owner, I would not do that,” Spencer said. “If communists came to my establishment, but they were civilized, I couldn’t imagine kicking them out. So I’m certainly disappointed, but we are not going to retaliate. It’s just life in 2017 for us.”

Spencer has had trouble booking and keeping event spaces lately — his attempts to speak on college campuses have led to multiple court challenges, and his think tank was barred earlier this month from hosting a meeting at a federal office building in Washington, D.C..

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.