One of the white nationalists featured in a Hillary Clinton attack ad on Donald Trump believes the alt right is going to continue to grow.
Jared Taylor, founder of the prominent white nationalist publication American Renaissance, spoke to The Daily Caller Friday about what the alt right stands for and how he doesn’t see it as a white supremacist ideology.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton devoted a speech Thursday to connecting Republican nominee Donald Trump to the alt right, a movement she described as the “paranoid fringe.” A prominent white nationalist writer speaking on the condition of anonymity told The Daily Caller, “Jared is the intellectual godfather to the Alt Right, whose writings on race and genetics have greatly influenced the movement.” (RELATED: What Is The Alt Right?)
Taylor, 64, is a graduate of Yale and was raised in Japan. He has authored several books on issues related to race and started American Renaissance as a magazine in 1990. It is now solely online and is described on its website as “the Internet’s premier race-realist site.”
Taylor told TheDC he considers himself part of the alt right and described it as a “dissident movement and basically it rejects the current orthodoxies about equality and this egalitarian assumption about virtually all things.”
He added, “the alt right accepts that race is a biological fact and that it’s a significant aspect of individual and group identity and that any attempt to create a society in which race can be made not to matter will fail.”
Due to this talk of differences between the races the alt right has been described as a white supremacist ideology. When asked if he was a white supremacist, Taylor said: “Presumably a white supremacist is someone who wants to rule over people of other races. We have no such desire. Nor do people on the alt right think that whites are a superior race. In many respects Asians are more objectively superior to whites and certainly athletically blacks are probably superior to whites.”
Clinton’s Thursday speech has given the alt right wall-to-wall coverage on cable news and the nation’s newspapers. It has brought much attention to the ideology but Taylor does not think it is the best thing to happen yet to the alt right.
“It has certainly called attention to our movement. But our movement has been growing very very rapidly over the past several years because of the obvious contradictions in American society and the very clear failure of traditional explanations to make sense of what’s happening in this country,” the author said. “The notion that whites are responsible for the failures of all non-whites. White people get beaten over the head every day with this kind of thing, and they reject that. They also reject the idea that they should cheerfully become a minority in their own country. And things like the Black Lives Matter movement have probably swelled our ranks far more than anything Hillary Clinton could ever do for us.”
The alt right isn’t just in the news because Democrats and the media have a sudden interest in the American Renaissance but rather because of a connection being made between Trump and the ideology. The Clinton campaign released an ad Thursday featuring Taylor speaking favorably of Trump.
WATCH:
There’s a reason the most hateful fringe of the right wing is supporting Donald Trump.https://t.co/AqB3DM2m0N
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 25, 2016
“Donald Trump is not supporting the alt right nor is he part of it. And it’s, as I say, completely illogical and dishonest for Hillary Clinton to try to pin our ideas on him,” Taylor said. “Now he has proposed a certain number of policies that people on the alt right support. But he has arrived at those ideas, not on the basis of any kind of sophisticated consideration of race.”
When asked about the three policy proposals he would like to see the American government carry out, Taylor did not name any of Trump’s plans.
“One would be an immigration policy that returned to the pre-1965 standards of trying to maintain a European majority in the United States—that would be a very important policy,” Taylor said. “The second would be a recognition of the legitimacy of freedom of association. The idea that if white people wish to establish their own communities, their own institutions, or if blacks or Hispanics did — that that’s entirely legitimate. Wishing to be around people like oneself is absolutely normal and healthy and should not be discouraged.”
“I think the third would be to propagate the idea that the United States was founded on European values by European people and that it should continue to express the values of Europe and be populated by the decedents of people who created European Western civilization,” Taylor continued.
Stephen Bannon the former head of Breitbart has called the organization a “platform for the alt right.” Now that Bannon is Trump’s campaign CEO, the Clinton campaign has said that the alt right has effectively taken over the GOP. Taylor rejects this idea.
“The GOP has been taken over by Donald Trump. Donald Trump took over the GOP because he made an appeal to the GOP’s base constituency,” the alt right writer told TheDC. He sees the GOP establishment’s failure as a result of them forgetting about their core constituency, white people.
Movement conservatives frequently bring up historical Republican figures to push back on Trump. A common line is that the GOP is “the party of Lincoln.” In the interview, Taylor said he was “agnostic” on whether Republican leaders are ignorant or “cowards.” Certainly not a rousing endorsement of the party Clinton claims he has just taken over.
“All they ever talk about is the act that he freed the slaves, they forget to mention, or perhaps they don’t even know, that he wished to send all of those freed slaves outside of the country because he didn’t think it was possible for free whites and blacks to live in any kind of productive society together,” Taylor told TheDC.
“They have been deliberately blind to the frustrations of their natural constituency. They have bought the myths about race. They’ve swallowed that completely. In terms of the interchangeability of races, of the idea that America is up for grabs, that whoever can manage to sneak in more or less belongs to them – they’re no different from the Democrats,” Taylor said. “What conservatives fail to understand is that if they do not conserve the founding stock of the United States, nothing they think they’re trying to conserve can possibly remain.”
The American Renaissance founder added, “This notion of limited government, the rule of law, high culture, the right to bear arms – if you try to import that into Guatemala it would just fail.”