Was anyone actually surprised Richard Spencer’s speech at the University of Florida today was a total train wreck?

As a major figurehead of the Alt Right, White Supremacist, White Nationalist or whatever you choose to call it movement, Richard Spencer is a controversial and polarizing personality even amongst his peers. For him to give a speech at a university full of young people in the prime of their personal passions about whatever ideology they’ve chosen was asking for trouble. But this was Florida…

Compared to most of the United States, Florida has large populations of Hispanics, Blacks, Jews, immigrants and refugees. It doesn’t take a lot of foresight to figure out an event featuring a man who proposes ethnic cleansing would not be well received in an area composed of those ethnicities on the cleaning list.

Yet the event was primarily peaceful. Someone was punched, someone was pepper sprayed but the only damage done was to the pride of Richard Spencer and his crew.

Maybe it’s my bad for expecting some degree of professionalism from someone who often speaks in front of an audience, but I was amazed how Spenser lost control of his event and of himself. The auditorium was only half full and seemed to be composed mainly of chanting hecklers. Rather than ignore them, Spencer chose to berate and insult them which riled them up even more. He came off as a total fool. As I said on Twitter, you almost felt sorry for Richard Spencer, except it was Richard Spencer.

It didn’t take long before he gave up and tried a Question And Answer session but even that made him look bad. Below are tweets posted during the fracas.