He inveighs towards unlawful immigration in phrases extra applicable for a vermin infestation. He needs all folks with out papers deported instantly, rattling the associated fee. He thinks Los Angeles is a cesspool and that flying the Mexican flag in the USA is an act of riot. He makes use of the web largely to share crude movies and photographs depicting Latinos as subhuman.
Stephen Miller? Completely.
However each time I hear the chief architect of Donald Trump’s scorched earth immigration insurance policies rail in uglier and uglier phrases, I recall one other xenophobe I hadn’t considered in awhile.
For practically 30 years, Glenn Spencer fought unlawful immigration in Los Angeles and past with a singular obsession. The previous Sherman Oaks resident kicked off his marketing campaign, he advised The Instances in a 2001 profile, after seeing Latinos looting throughout the 1992 L.A. riots and pondering, “Oh, my God, there are such a lot of of them and they’re so uncontrolled.”
Spencer was a key volunteer who pushed for the passage of Prop. 187, the 1994 California poll initiative that sought to make life depressing for undocumented immigrants and was so punitive {that a} federal decide later dominated it unconstitutional. A multiplatform influencer earlier than that turned commonplace, Spencer hosted a neighborhood radio present, produced movies that he mailed to all members of Congress warning about an “invasion” and turned his vitriolic publication into a web site, American Patrol, that helped join nativist teams throughout the nation.
American Patrol’s residence web page was a group of hyperlinks to newspaper articles about suspected undocumented immigrants alleged to have dedicated crimes. Whereas Spencer commonly trashed Muslims and different immigrants, he directed most of his bile at Mexicans.
A “Household Values” button on the web site, within the colours of the Mexican flag, highlighted intercourse crimes allegedly dedicated by undocumented immigrants. Editorial cartoons featured a Mexican flag piercing a gap in California with the caption “Sink-hole de Mayo.”
Lengthy earlier than conservative activists recorded themselves infiltrating the conferences of political enemies, Spencer was doing it. He provoked bodily fights at protests and printed reams of digital nonsense towards Latino politicians, as soon as superimposing an enormous sombrero on a picture of Antonio Villaraigosa with the epithet, “Viva Mexico!”
On the morning Villaraigosa, the long run L.A. mayor, was to be sworn in as speaker of the meeting in 1998, each seat within the legislative chamber was topped by a flier labeling him a communist and chief of the supposed Mexican takeover of California.
“I don’t keep in mind if his identify was on it, but it surely was all his terminology,” mentioned Villaraigosa, who recalled how Spencer helped make his faculty membership within the Chicano pupil group MEChA a problem in his 2001 mayoral loss to Jim Hahn. “However he by no means had the balls to speak to me in individual.”
Spencer turned the Johnny Appleseed of the modern-day Know Nothing motion, lecturing to teams of middle-aged gringos about his work — first throughout the San Fernando Valley, then in small cities the place Latinos had been migrating in massive numbers for the primary time.
“California [it] has typically been mentioned is America’s future. Let me inform you about your future,” he advised the Council of Conservative Residents in Virginia in 1999.
White Home Deputy Chief of Workers Stephen Miller speaks with the media exterior the White Home in Washington, DC, on Might 9, 2025.
(Saul Loeb/ AFP through Getty Pictures)
Spencer is the individual most chargeable for mainstreaming the lie of Reconquista, the wacko concept that Mexicans got here to the U.S. not for financial causes however due to a plot concocted by the Mexican authorities to take again the lands misplaced within the 1848 Mexican-American Conflict. He wrote screeds like “Is Jew-Managed Hollywood Brainwashing Individuals?” and threatened libel lawsuits towards anybody — myself included — who dared level out that he was a racist.
He was a favourite punching bag of the mainstream media, a slovenly suburban Ahab doomed to fail. The Instances wrote in 2001 that Spencer “foresaw thousands and thousands of converts” to his anti-immigrant marketing campaign, “solely to see his temple founder.”
Shifting to southern Arizona in 2002, the higher to observe the U.S.-Mexico border, Spencer spent the remainder of his life making an attempt to promote state and federal authorities on border-monitoring know-how he developed that concerned planes, drones and motion-detection sensors. His transfer impressed different conservatives to observe the U.S.-Mexico border on their very own.
By the Obama period, he was remoted even from different anti-immigrant activists for extremist views like banning foreign-language media and insisting that each one who got here to this nation illegally was a drug smuggler. Even the rise of Trump didn’t convey Spencer and his work again into the limelight.
He was so forgotten that I didn’t even understand he was useless till Googling his identify just lately, after enduring one other Miller rant. Spencer’s hometown Sierra Vista’s Herald Assessment was the one publication I discovered that made any notice of his demise from most cancers in 2022 at age 85, describing his life’s work as bringing “the disaster of unlawful immigration to the forefront of the American public’s consciousness.”
That’s a whitewash worthy of Tom Sawyer’s picket fence.
We stay in Glenn Spencer’s world, a spot the place the nastier the rhetoric towards unlawful immigration and the crueler the federal government’s efforts towards all migrants, the higher. Each time a xenophobe makes Latinos out to be an invading drive, each time somebody posts a racist message on social media or Miller throws one other tantrum on Fox Information, Glenn Spencer will get his evil wings.
Spencer “stood out amongst a vile swamp of racists and crackpots like a twister supercell on radar,” mentioned Brian Levin, chair of the California Civil Rights Division’s Fee on the State of Hate and founding father of the Middle for the Research of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, who monitored American Patrol for years. “What’s scary now’s that hate like his was once well-segregated from the mainstream. Now, the guardrails are off, and what Spencer advocated for is federal coverage.”
I first discovered about Spencer in 1999 as a pupil activist at Chapman College. Spencer applauded the Anaheim Union Excessive Faculty District’s resolution to sue Mexico for the price of educating undocumented immigrants’ kids, describing these of us who opposed it as communists — when he was being good. His American Patrol described MEChA, which I, like Villaraigosa, belonged to, as a “scourge” and a “illness.”
His web site was disgusting, but it surely turned a must-read of mine. I knew even then that ignoring hate permits it to fester, and I needed to determine why folks like Spencer despised folks like me, my household and my associates. So I commonly coated him and his allies in my early years as a reporter with an obsession that was a reverse mirror of his. Colleagues and even activists mentioned my work was a waste of time — that individuals like Spencer had been wheezing artifacts who would ultimately disappear because the U.S. embraced Latinos and immigrants.
And right here we’re.
Spencer often despatched me authorized threats at any time when I wrote about his ugly methods — threats that went nowhere. That’s why I used to be shocked at how comparatively well mannered he was the final time we communicated, in 2019.
I reached out through electronic mail asking for an interview for a Instances podcast I hosted about the twenty fifth anniversary of Prop. 187. By then, Spencer was brazenly criticizing Trump’s deliberate border wall, which he discovered a waste of cash and never practically as environment friendly as his personal system. Spencer initially mentioned he would contemplate my request, whereas sending me an article he wrote that blamed Prop. 187’s demise on then-California Gov. Grey Davis and Mexico’s president on the time, Ernesto Zedillo.
After I adopted up a number of months later, Spencer bragged concerning the legacy of his web site, which he hadn’t commonly up to date since 2013 as a result of declining well being. The American Patrol archives “would persuade the informal observer that The Instances did what it might do [to] defeat my efforts and advance the reason for unlawful immigration,” Spencer wrote. “Do I believe The Instances has modified its spots? No. Will I conform to an interview? No.”
Levin hadn’t heard about Spencer’s demise till we talked.
“I assumed he went into irrelevance,” he admitted with a chuckle that he shortly minimize off, realizing he had forgotten about Spencer’s legacy within the period of Trump.
“We ignored that cough, that speck within the X-ray,” Levin concluded, now somber. “And now, we’ve most cancers.”
