At a time when nativism and xenophobia burn at white-hot intensity, a brief tour of the Internet introduced me to S.(amuel) Jared Taylor, 51 of Oakton, VA.
Taylor carefully avoids epithets, writes in language that approximates that of academia, and generally seeks to put a rational and well-argued face on anti-black racism and the immigrant menace from the south.
Taylor is a Yale graduate who worked for 17 years in Japan, is fluent in that language, and greatly admires his former hosts. The reason for that admiration is instructive — the Japanese, Taylor told British journalist Nick Ryan, "think with their blood, not their passport."
Taylor entered the active racist scene in 1990, when he began publishing American Renaissance, a magazine that focuses on alleged links between race and intelligence, and on eugenics, the now discredited "science" of breeding better humans.
"Never in the history of the world has a dominant people thrown open the gates to strangers, and poured its wealth out to aliens," Taylor wrote in his magazine, under the pseudonym Thomas Jackson, in 1991. "All healthy people prefer the company of their own kind." Blacks, Taylor writes, are "crime-prone," "dissipated," "pathological" and "deviant."
Taylor, whose 1992 Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America makes similar points in a book format, went one further in 1993, speaking at a conference of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens. (Today, Taylor's New Century Foundation, which publishes American Renaissance, is intimately related to the council through "common membership, governing bodies, trustees and officers," according to the foundation's tax forms.)
In the late 1990s, he came out with The Color of Crime, a booklet that tries to use crime statistics so as to "prove" that blacks are far more criminally prone than whites. That racist booklet is now a staple of white supremacists like former Klansman David Duke.
One thing that separates Taylor from much of the radical right, however, is his lack of anti-Semitism; he told MSNBC-TV interviewer Phil Donahue in 2003 that Jews "are fine by me" and "look white to me." That view may be related to his wife (Evelyn Rich), who some in the movement have said is Jewish.
Evelyn Rich became well known because of her 1985 and 1986 interviews of Duke, conducted as part of her dissertation research, and was perceived by many as an anti-racist. (The recorded interviews, in Tulane University's archives, were used by anti-Duke forces to make radio ads attacking Duke during his run for Louisiana governor in 1991.) As a result, Taylor's long term cohabitation with Rich has shocked many of those who know about it.
Today, Jared Taylor's conferences are well-attended, suit-and-tie affairs that reflect his international reach. In 2002, speakers included Nick Griffin, leader of the neofascist British National Party, and Bruno Gollnisch, who was then second in command of Jean Marie Le Pen's immigrant-bashing National Front in France.
[x Pittsburg Post-Gazette]
Jared Taylor, a Racist in the Guise of 'Expert'
by Dennis Roddy
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day last week (2005), when much of the nation took a holiday, "race-relations expert" Jared Taylor was hard at work. He began at 6:45 a.m. with an interview with a Columbus radio station. At 7:05 he was on the air in Orlando. An hour later his voice greeted morning commuters in Huntingdon, W.Va.
At 10:10 a.m., he was introduced no fewer than four times as "race relations expert Jared Taylor" on Fred Honsberger's call-in show on the Pittsburgh Cable News Channel. Four hours later, he was back on the air with Honsberger on KDKA radio, where he repeated the message he'd been thumping all day: Martin Luther King Jr. was a philanderer, a plagiarist and a drinker who left a legacy of division and resentment, and was unworthy of a national holiday.
What Taylor did not say, and what Honsberger didn't seem to know until I picked up the phone and called in myself, was that Jared Taylor believes black people are genetically predisposed to lower IQs that whites, are sexually promiscuous because of hyperactive sex drives. Race-relations expert Jared Taylor keeps company with a collection of racists, racial "separatists" and far-right extremists.
Taylor heads the Virginia-based New Century Foundation. Its board of directors has included a leader of the Council of Conservative Citizens, successor to the White Citizens Councils of the 1960s. A former board member represented the American Friends of the British National Party, a neo-fascist and anti-Semitic far-right group in England. Another board member is an anti-immigration author who has also reviewed books for a Holocaust denial journal.
Race-relations expert Jared Taylor publishes American Renaissance magazine, which features an array of pseudoscientific studies that purport to show the folly of multiculturalism and the inherent failure of the races to live together. Or, as Taylor once wrote, "If whites permit themselves to be displaced, it is not just the high culture of the West that could disappear but such things as representative government, rule of law and freedom of speech, which whites usually get right and everyone else usually gets wrong."
What Taylor represents and how he got himself on no fewer than a half-dozen radio and television stations in large markets to denounce Martin Luther King illustrates the new tactics of white supremacy. Employing the dispassionate language of sociological and genetic studies, and under the veneer of academic inquiry, an assortment of highly educated people now push the theory that everything from unwed motherhood in Atlanta to economic collapse in Gambia can be explained by the genetic code imprinted on the races.
With a magazine that sounds as if it might be found on a coffee table in Mt. Lebanon, a degree from Yale, and fluency in three languages, Taylor easily found takers when his assistants blasted e-mails to scores of radio stations offering a Martin Luther King Day guest.
"Not everyone celebrates the legacy of Martin Luther King," the pitch reads. "Editor of American Renaissance magazine and race-relations expert Jared Taylor would be pleased to offer your listeners a view of Dr. King that challenges conventional wisdom."
Taylor's resume, conveniently linked to the e-mail, was formidable: bachelor's from Yale, master's in economics from the Institute for Political Study in Paris, business consultant in Japan, author of a quartet of books, two of them on race. It was all true, but gave nary a hint of what Taylor is really about.
"Jared Taylor is the cultivated, cosmopolitan face of white supremacy," said Mark Potok, editor of Intelligence Report, the magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "He is the guy who is providing the intellectual heft, in effect, to modern-day Klansmen."
Taylor insists leftists are simply using that language to demonize intellectuals who take on sensitive issues.
"I've never been a member of the Klan. I've never known a person who is a member of the Klan," Taylor told Honsberger.
It's hard to say if Taylor knows any Klansmen, but they certainly know him. When conservative author Dinesh D'Souza attended one of Taylor's American Renaissance conferences, he bumped into David Duke, former Klansman and segregationist, chatting with Taylor. Another Klan stalwart is Don Black, whose neo-Nazi Web site, Stormfront.org, is a clearinghouse for extremist literature. Black gained celebrity in 1981 when he was arrested as he boarded a boat for Dominica where he and nine other mercenaries planned to overthrow that predominantly black island's government and install a white colonial junta. Potok, whose group occasional infiltrates Taylor's gatherings, sent me a photo of Black sitting at Jared Taylor's kitchen table, a beer in hand.
Maybe Taylor doesn't know any Klansmen, but before selling his house he might have to spray for them.
Taylor's strategy when I confronted him was to deny things that are easily proven. He insisted American Renaissance had never published an article in which theocratic writer Rousas J. Rushdoony denounced interracial marriage as Biblically unsound.
I refer Taylor to the July 2001 edition of his own magazine, in which H.A. Scott Trask calls intermarriage "racial suicide" and observes: "The Late Rousas J. Rushdoony points out that Biblical law and example is against all kinds of unequal yoking. 'The burden of the law is thus against inter-religious, interracial, and inter-cultural marriages, in that they normally go against the very community which marriage is designed to establish."
One of the more tendentious exchanges took place when I challenged Taylor to state whether he had published articles in "the quarterly of the British National Party."
"I don't believe the BNP has a quarterly," Taylor replied.
He's right. They have a monthly. It's called "Spearhead," and it carried Taylor's writings in the early 1990s, under his other name, Samuel Taylor. This relationship is no accident. Taylor's conferences have included speeches on white nationalism by none other than Nick Griffin, a Holocaust denier and leader of the BNP. Spearhead's editor, John Tyndall, toured the United States last year. After stops to visit David Duke in New Orleans, where Tyndall noted with disapproval the large number of racial minorities, he moved on to Oakton, Va., where he stayed at Taylor's home.
Before that, Tyndall was treated to lunch by Samuel Francis, one of the board members of Taylor's New Century Foundation.
A decade ago, Francis was fired by The Washington Times for a racist speech he delivered at an American Renaissance Conference. Since then he has busied himself as editor of The Citizens Informer, monthly paper of The Council of Conservative Citizens. The paper features regular accounts of invasions by non-white immigrants, black-on-white crime and the need for racial purity.
Those who would suggest that the Council's connections to Francis and Francis's ties to Taylor are guilt-by-association might want to consider the New Century Foundation's own tax filings for 1999. On line 80 of their IRS Form 990, Taylor's foundation lists the Council of Conservative Citizens as an organization to which it is "related ... through common membership, governing bodies, trustees, officers, etc."
This was the very year that the Council of Conservative Citizens included a link on its Web site to the Free Market Party. The link was quickly cancelled when the Free Market Party's founder and sole member, Richard Baumhammers, left his Mt. Lebanon home with a pistol in hand, killed his Jewish neighbor, set her house afire, then embarked on a two-county rampage that targeted Asians, Indians and blacks. In all, five people died. Baumhammers was concerned, like those who circle Jared Taylor's planet of intellect, about the expansion of non-white races.
None of this, of course, would meet with the approval of Jared Taylor, race-relations expert, who took the pains to tell Honsberger that people should be free to marry whomever they want, and that suggestions he is a racist are meant simply to shut up anyone who wants to rationally discuss race outside the norms of safe politics.
Such assurances would be more comforting if the audience that orbits planet Jared did not include members of the National Alliance, the Council of Conservative Citizens, the British National Party, Don Black, and David Duke. Taylor says he doesn't know any Klansmen. What is scarier is that he doesn't know his audience -- and the radio stations that gave him a platform on Martin Luther King Jr. Day didn't really know their guest.
Dennis Roddy is a Post-Gazette columnist.
Copyright ©1997-2005 Pittsburg Post-Gazette Publishing Co., Inc.
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