Membership has its privileges — if you’re a well-to-do white nationalist in Whitefish, Montana.
The Big Mountain Club in scenic Whitefish, claims to be “a family friendly four-season club featuring private facilities, access to 3 golf courses, skiing services at Whitefish Mountain Resort, valet parking, and first tracks everyday of the ski season…just to name a few benefits.” Those benefits apparently include sticking with a white nationalist member over a conservative foreign policy expert member.
The Daily Beast first reported that longtime GOP foreign expert policy and former advisor to John McCain, Randy Scheunemann, found himself on a chairlift at Whitefish Mountain next to Richard Spencer, the director of the white nationalist National Policy Institute (NPI).
As IREHR has discussed often, NPI is headquartered in Whitefish, where Scheunemann owns a vacation home (just five minutes from where Spencer’s parents used to live). Although both were members of the town’s Big Mountain Club (not the Big Mountain Ski Club as has been erroneously reported), neither man recognized each other at first, until the two began chatting on a chairlift ride. According to Scheunemann, Spencer asked him where he worked. Spencer then began berating him, complaining that Scheunemann actually believed in “this democracy BS.”
Scheunemann was “horrified” that a leading racist activist would be a member of the same ski club. At the annual club Christmas party last year, he confronted Spencer. “Do you want to talk now before you can run away you f-cking racist p-ssy?” Scheunemann asked. According to Scheunemann, Spencer then scurried off.
After these run-ins, Scheunemann gave the club an ultimatum — kick out a white nationalist member or kick him out. The club decided to keep the white nationalist and expel the conservative leader.
News of the victory for Spencer comes just weeks after he was arrested and deported from Hungary, as his big NPI conference in Budapest fell into disarray.
If you’d like to let the Big Mountain Club know that you are disappointed in their decision, you can contact them here, or on Facebook here.
