What This White Separatist Expects From the Trump Administration

The alt-right and others who’ve proudly co-opted the “deplorable” title conferred by Hillary Clinton, see in Trump’s elevation an unprecedented opportunity, like former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke.

[CLIPS]:

DAVID DUKE: I will be Donald Trump's most loyal advocate to make sure his nominees go to the Supreme Court.

BOB GARFIELD: And head of the American Nazi Party, Rocky Suhayda.

ROCKY SUHAYDA: If Trump does win, it’s going to be a real opportunity for people like white nationalists to build upon that. Okay, you know how you have the black political caucus and whatnot, all right, in Congress and everything, to start building on something like that.

BOB GARFIELD: And Jared Taylor, avowed white separatist and founder and editor of American Renaissance.

JARED TAYLOR: That is Donald Trump’s great achievement, to have been the standard bearer, even if unconsciously, of white interests. The sleeping giant has been stirring for some time and Mr. Trump gave it a voice and a reason to act.

[END CLIP]

BOB GARFIELD: The Southern Poverty Law Center's intelligence report calls Taylor, quote, “The cultivated cosmopolitan face of white supremacy,” the guy who provides the, quote, ‘intellectual heft’ to modern-day Klansmen. Taylor calls himself a race realist and, as such, believes that blacks are less intelligent than whites, whites are less intelligent than East Asians and that the races are driven, by nature, to segregate.

And we’re having him on the show. Why? Because, like it or not, Taylor and his kind have moved just a little closer to the seat of power. And so, all Americans, especially those who are repulsed by the likes of him, would do well to learn something about his policy proposals. To know him is not to normalize him. Here’s the interview.

BOB GARFIELD: Do you now have or expect to have, as a result of this election, a seat at the grown-up table in the Trump coalition?

JARED TAYLOR: [LAUGHS] If invited, I will take my place, but I’m not holding my breath. I don’t think Trump sees the world in racial terms. I think he has a basic sense of fairness, however.

BOB GARFIELD: I got to tell you a story. Back in, I guess it was the early ‘90s, Sonny Bono was elected to Congress and I spent the day with him on his day of swearing in, and so forth. And while I was waiting for him in the foyer of his new congressional office, there was this other guy standing there, blue blazer, gray flannel pants, name badge on, and I - it finally dawned on me that the guy was from the National Rifle Association. And I said to him, well, what’s the NRA doing here? And he said - this is a paraphrase but it's pretty accurate - he said, I just wanted to remind the congressman who brought him to Washington.

Now, you're a guest on this program because we responded to your press release. And I'm wondering, is that when your media availability is all about, reminding the president-elect who got him to Washington?

JARED TAYLOR: Not necessarily. It is to point out a certain dynamic in this election which is different from that of other elections. For perhaps the first time, it seems that white people are voting the way every other group votes. In other words, they’re voting in their own interests. We all take it for granted that blacks, Hispanics, Asians, that they have legitimate group interests and they can push for them as hard as they can. But as soon as you start asking, well, do white people have legitimate group interests. well then no, you’re a Nazi, you’re a white supremacist. You're a very, very bad person. And I think many white voters react at a visceral level to policies that are in the interests of whites, and that’s absolutely as it should be.

BOB GARFIELD: In terms of your goals as a movement, what would you like to see happen next, I mean, a roundup of undocumented Mexicans, a bar against Muslim immigration? Those are two ideas that Trump campaigned on.

JARED TAYLOR: Those are very important steps, but to me the ultimate goal is to have at least a portion of the United States where whites are the recognized majority and in which their culture is recognized as the dominant culture and where they can live free from the embrace of people unlike themselves. And I believe that that can be achieved through voluntary separation. The government today is doing its best to try to force people together.

BOB GARFIELD: You know, Plessy Ferguson is no longer the law of the land. What about equal rights under the law?

JARED TAYLOR: Don’t I have the right to move to a place that’s whiter, that more – that’s more to my liking? Don’t I have that right?

BOB GARFIELD: I can tell you explicitly that the law says you do not get [LAUGHS] to have a say in where other people live.

JARED TAYLOR: Of course not.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, I don't know if you are, in fact, at the grown-up table but you, you certainly are in the room, at this point.

JARED TAYLOR: Well, as we should be.

BOB GARFIELD: What is your strategy, now that you've arrived there?

JARED TAYLOR: Ideally, the ideas of racial dissidents such as myself will increasingly become mainstream and be recognized for the correct understanding of human nature that they are. Eventually, if my people and my culture are to survive in some meaningful way, these ideas have to spread.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, we have equal protection under the law. We have antidiscrimination laws which have been repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court. Is it your intention to rewrite the Constitution?

JARED TAYLOR: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not part of the Constitution. Until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was perfectly legal for a private operator to discriminate in his place of business, in his choice of associates. It was perfectly legal for people to band together and establish communities in which they would agree not to sell their property to anyone other than people like themselves. I think that is an expression of freedom of association, free choice. I’m not talking about the government or monopolists. Private individuals should have the right to discriminate for good reasons, bad reasons or no reasons at all.

BOB GARFIELD: I think it's entirely the premise of a number of social justice and identity politics movements that the last group, [LAUGHS] the last group that needs protection in our society is white people, because that's where all the power resides, the political power, economic power. You know who Louis C.K. is?

JARED TAYLOR: Louis C.K.? No, don’t know who that is.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, he’s a very prominent standup comedian.

JARED TAYLOR: Okay.

BOB GARFIELD: And he does a, a bit.

[CLIP]:

LOUIS C.K.: - lucky guy. I got a lot going for me. I’m, I'm healthy, I'm relatively young, I'm white, which, thank God for that [BLEEP], boy.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

That is a huge leg up. Are you kidding me? And by - let me be clear, by the way. I'm not saying that white people are better. I'm saying that being white is clearly better. Who could even argue?

[LAUGHTER]

If it was an option, I would re-up every year. "Oh, yeah, I'll take 'white' again, absolutely. I've been enjoying that. I'm gonna stick with white, thank you."

[END CLIP]

BOB GARFIELD: He is making a joke about the [LAUGHS] manifest reality of being a minority in a society that still has a lot of repair work to do.

JARED TAYLOR: Tell me something, if white society is so oppressive to nonwhites, why is it that millions of them want to come and continue to come?

BOB GARFIELD: For political freedom and economic opportunity, just as every European immigrant group came in the 16^th, 17^th, 18th and 19th centuries, for exactly the same reason.

JARED TAYLOR: [LAUGHS] And – okay, and so they’re coming, despite the fact that we treat them so miserably and yet somehow they can have better economic opportunity here. How do you explain that, if we so hate them and despise them?

BOB GARFIELD: Right. I want to thank you for coming on to the show.

JARED TAYLOR: Okay. You really have a closed mind. I feel sorry for you, really. You’re unable to look around you and see the double standards, the contradictions, the facts. But I hope you're happy in your ignorance.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD: White Nationalist Jared Taylor is founder and editor of American Renaissance.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, fake news really took off this election, especially on social media, where most people get their news.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media.