Jared Taylor

Taylor is the founder of the New Century Foundation and edited its now-discontinued American Renaissance magazine, which, despite its pseudo-academic polish, regularly published proponents of eugenics and blatant anti-black and anti-Latino racists. After the last print issue of American Renaissance magazine was published in January 2012, Taylor concentrated entirely on the magazine’s website, Amren.com. Taylor also hosts the annual American Renaissance Conference, where racist intellectuals rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.

In his own words

“Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”
— American Renaissance, 2005.

“Our rulers and media executives will try to turn the story of Hurricane Katrina into yet another morality tale of downtrodden blacks and heartless whites. … [But] many whites will realize — some for the first time — that we have Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy that they thought could never wash up on our shores.”
— American Renaissance, 2005.

“At its most basic, racial consciousness has as its goal the preservation of a certain people. Its aim is to rekindle among whites what every previous generation until recently so took for granted they did not even give it a name: an instinctive preference for their own people and culture, and a strong desire that they should prosper. I note that every other racial group acts on this healthy instinct and desire. Race realism therefore has no theory of religion, the family, art, or the role of government, except in the very general sense that it expects whites to love, first and foremost, the infinite riches created by European man.”
— American Renaissance website, July 3, 2008.

“Europe is in a life-or-death struggle. Europe can’t remain Europe without Europeans. When we are being replaced by non-Europeans, it threatens our core way of life.”
— Taylor at a white nationalist conference in Budapest, Hungary, October 2014.

Background

Born to missionary parents in Japan, Taylor lived in that country until he was 16. He graduated from Yale University in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and graduated from Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) in 1978 with a master’s degree in international economics. Taylor speaks fluent Japanese and French. In the 1980s, Taylor was West Coast editor of PC Magazine and a consultant, particularly for companies working in Japan. Taylor also has taught Japanese to summer-school students at Harvard University.

Taylor entered the active racist scene in 1990, when he founded the New Century Foundation, a pseudo-intellectual think tank that promotes “research” arguing for white superiority. A year later, he began publishing American Renaissance, a magazine that focused on the alleged links between race and intelligence, and on eugenics, the now discredited “science” of breeding better humans.

The magazine has published dozens of racist articles by several different authors. “Never in the history of the world has a dominant people thrown open the gates to strangers, and poured its wealth out to aliens,” a “Thomas Jackson” wrote in 1991 in the second volume of the magazine. Jackson, a frequent contributor to the magazine who writes under a pseudonym according to Taylor, also said:

All healthy people prefer the company of their own and it has nothing to do with hatred. All men love their families more than they love their neighbors, but this does not mean they hate their neighbors. Whites who love their racial family need bear no ill will towards non-whites. They wish only to be left alone to participate in the unfolding of their racial and cultural destinies.

Jackson’s conclusion is that the current situation, where whites are expected to live with non-whites and devote themselves to non-white interests, is “utterly unnatural.”

Taylor, whose 1992 Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America makes similar points in book format, went further out on the racist limb in 1993 by speaking at a conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist group that has described black people as “a retrograde species of humanity.” Taylor’s New Century Foundation has been, according to the foundation’s tax forms, intimately related to the CCC through “common membership, governing bodies, trustees and officers.”

In the late 1990s, Taylor came out with The Color of Crime, a booklet that tried to use crime statistics to “prove” that blacks are far more criminally prone than whites — and argued, based on a misunderstanding of what constitutes a hate crime, that black “hate crimes” against whites exponentially outnumbered the reverse. That racist booklet is now a staple in white supremacist circles. Taylor’s New Century Foundation also plays host to American Renaissance conferences, suit-and-tie affairs that have attracted a broad spectrum of participants from the racist right, including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and eugenicists. The conferences nearly always have an international presence. Speakers have included such prominent figures in the European radical right as Nick Griffin, leader of the racist British National Party, and Bruno Gollnisch, at one time the second-in-command of the immigrant-bashing French National Front.

More recently, Taylor has sounded off against all black culture, writing in a 2005 article in American Renaissance, “Africa in our Midst: Lessons from Katrina” that “the barbaric behavior” of the city’s black population after the hurricane revealed a key truth: “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”

One thing that separates Taylor from much of the radical right, however, is his lack of antisemitism. He told MSNBC interviewer Phil Donahue in 2003 that Jews “are fine by me” and “look white to me.” Taking this position, however, has proven problematic for Taylor. Although he once banned discussion of the so-called “Jewish question” from American Renaissance venues and, in 1997, kicked Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis off his email list, Taylor still continued to allow people like Don Black, the former Klan leader who runs the neo-Nazi Stormfront.org web forum, and Jamie Kelso, a onetime Stormfront moderator, to attend his conferences. The problem for Taylor is that many of the most active participants at his conferences and the most committed members of the American radical right are passionately antisemitic. To ban them for their antisemitic views would be a devastating blow to Taylor’s efforts to make his journal and conferences the flagship institutions of the American radical right.

Despite Taylor’s best efforts to keep the internal peace, this long-smoldering issue finally burst into the open when David Duke, the former Klan leader and author of an antisemitic autobiography, My Awakening, grabbed the microphone at the 2006 American Renaissance conference and went on a thinly veiled antisemitic rant about “a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and spirit.” In response, Michael Hart, a Jewish astrophysicist and longtime American Renaissance conference attendee, leaped from his seat and declared, “You f------ Nazi, you’ve disgraced this meeting.”

What ensued was a donnybrook in which Duke supporters, including Black and Kelso, jeered Hart’s comments while others who backed Hart denounced Duke. This incident set off a months-long battle of words, with each side declaring that the other was undermining the broader efforts of the movement.

Taylor issued a nonsectarian statement in which he said that all sorts of extremists would be welcome at his conferences as long as they acted appropriately. That didn’t sit well with some of his racist Jewish supporters, such as Hart, who had hoped for a more declarative statement banning antisemites from the conferences. Such former associates of Taylor as onetime American Renaissance webmaster Ian Jobling and well-known anti-black commentator Lawrence Auster have spoken out against Taylor’s refusal to clearly condemn antisemitism. (Jobling left the movement and in 2012 spoke about his experiences in an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

The 2006 dispute had the look of a major split in the group. In one email, Shawn Mercer, co-founder and moderator of AR List, an American Renaissance email group, warned, “These are the makings of a major schism.” But the 2008 American Renaissance conference was held and drew a substantial crowd, even as the “Jewish question” remained unresolved.

Taylor has some support from far-right organizations. In 2008, he was invited to speak at Michigan State University by the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom. In ensuing years, he continued to network effectively with white nationalists and wrote regularly for the racist, anti-immigrant website VDARE and others.

In 2011, Taylor spoke at the National Policy Institute (NPI), a racist think-tank whose mission statement says it aims “to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights,” as well as to “study the consequences of the ongoing influx that non-Western populations pose to our national identity.” Taylor has spoken at additional NPI conferences since then.

Taylor suspended publication of his magazine after the January 2012 issue, concentrating instead on building up his website, Amren.com. The site makes several posts on weekdays about racial issues and features a lively comment section filled with white nationalists.

On Sept. 29, 2014, Taylor and other white nationalists began to arrive in Hungary to attend an international conference of anti-immigrant and far-right extremists. Co-hosted by Taylor and Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute (NPI), the symposium was intended to link white nationalists from around the world. (Most of the attendees were from America and Europe.) Taylor and Spencer may have chosen Hungary because of what they anticipated would be a politically hospitable environment, given the far-right political ideology of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party. If so, that was a miscalculation; Orbán not only banned the conference but ordered some attendees to return immediately to their countries of origin. Some, including Spencer, were jailed for several days. (Spencer was released and departed Hungary on Oct. 7.) During Spencer’s brief incarceration, Taylor took charge of the conference and a gathering of about 70 people took place at a restaurant on Oct. 4.

In 2015, Taylor became a media mainstay for a few days after Dylann Roof massacred nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17. Roof’s manifesto cited the CCC’s propaganda on supposed black-on-white hate crimes as the motivation for his murders. After Roof’s manifesto came to light days after the crime, the CCC came under harsh attack. Taylor stepped up to the plate and served as the group’s spokesman, condemning the killings and stating: “Our site educated him. Our site told him the truth about interracial crime. What he then decided to do with that truth is absolutely not our responsibility.”

There was an irony to Taylor’s role as CCC spokesman after the Roof massacre. Taylor’s New Century Foundation (NCF) first pushed the idea that black-on-white crime, all of which was wrongly deemed to be hate crimes, is an out-of-control problem. (A recent report by the SPLC proves this is untrue.) That was the main point of NCF’s 1999 pamphlet “The Color of Crime.” (A revised version came out in 2016.)

Like many figures in the racist “alt-right,” Taylor praised Donald Trump’s victory in the Presidential election on Nov. 9, 2016. In an post-election interview with Vox.com, referring to Trump, he stated, “For those of us who have been trying to slow the dispossession of whites, all of his policies — at least, those pertaining to immigration — align very nicely with the sorts of things we’ve been saying for many years.” But Taylor was also realistic about the likelihood of Trump fulfilling his pledged campaign goals on immigration, saying: “I’m not convinced he’s going to build a wall. I’m not convinced he’s going to persuade 13 million illegal immigrants to leave the country. If he actually did those things, I’d very much applaud.” Only days after Trump’s surprising victory over Hillary Clinton, the NPI held its fall conference on Nov. 19, 2016, in Washington, D.C. In what he later described as a moment of exuberance, Spencer, flush with victory, offered the toast, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” to the nearly 200 attendees. He was met with a handful of stiff-armed salutes from the crowd. The gesture electrified the more radical sectors of the white supremacy movement while generating stern disappointment from some of its elder statesmen, including Taylor. When asked about the incident, Taylor told Kristoffer Ronneberg: “I was as shocked as anyone by all of that. The alt-right is a very broad movement. I have always known that there were at least anonymous Twitter accounts that are openly Nazi and anti-Semitic, but I did not think that Richard Spencer was that sort of person. I was shocked by these images that we’ve seen.” 

On Dec. 18, 2017, Taylor’s Twitter account, as well as the account for American Renaissance and other white nationalists, was suspended. This was part of Twitter’s new rules banning accounts promoting hate speech and violence. In February 2018, Taylor filed a lawsuit against Twitter on First Amendment grounds. He is being represented by Marc Randazza, who has represented other neo-Nazis including Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer. In June 2018, a state judge ruled that the lawsuit could proceed.

Since 2012, Taylor and fellow American Renaissance members have held their annual conference at the Montgomery Bell State Park Inn and Conference Center in Burns, Tennessee, renting guest rooms and the facility’s 300-seat conference hall. When they attempted to reserve the facility for their May 2019 conference, they were informed by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) that their contract would be revised from previous years. Specifically, Taylor was informed that American Renaissance would be responsible for both the cost of extra security guards and any property damage caused by protesters. (Anti-racist activists had appeared outside the April 2018 meeting, requiring the deployment of additional park rangers, police dogs and other resources.) In response to this new security fee, Taylor filed a federal lawsuit on Sept. 6, 2018, against TDEC, alleging that the state of Tennessee is imposing an “unconstitutional security fee” to ensure public safety and to cover any damages caused to park facilities.

During the weekend of March 9-11, 2018, Taylor attended the first national conference of Identity Evropa (IE), held in Nashville, Tennessee. Titled “Leading Our People Forward 2018,” the conference was led by IE Executive Director Patrick Casey and was also attended by former KKK lawyer Sam Dickson. IE describes itself as an “identitarian” group that advocates for the preservation of Western culture and the creation of a white ethno-state, and opposes multiculturalism. Taylor’s presence at the IE meeting was a clear indication of his endorsement of the group’s goals and strategies.