On Saturday, Aug. 19, I went to the Boston Free Speech Rally organized by the Boston Free Speech Coalition. I went there with the goal of talking to people from both sides, people who were there to support the Free Speech Rally and the counter-protesters.
Talking to counter-protesters was easy, they were there in full force. In fact, their force was so strong that the rally basically fell apart, which made it very difficult to find someone who was there in support of the rally.
I was running all around the Boston Commons, listening to chants and chasing them down to see if they would lead to what I was looking for. Eventually, I found it. A white man was being heckled and escorted by police. He sported a shirt that read Stop White Genocide.
This is a white survivalist who was escorted out of the rally by two police officers. @ABernucca heard his agenda, and asked some questions. pic.twitter.com/wD57sZPN3X
— Def Pen™ (@defpen) August 19, 2017
The man claimed to be a white survivalist, rather than a white supremacist. His agenda was backed by the following claim: According to the US Census Bureau, white people aren’t reproducing at a high enough rate to support the continued existence of the race. White survivalists are concerned about the future of white people, fearing future extinction.
Contrary to the man’s claim, the U.S. Census Bureau’s data does not support that statement at all. The Bureau provides demographic projections based on factors such as age, race and gender up to the year 2060. If you examine Table 12 on the Bureau’s website, Projected Change in Population Size by Hispanic Origin and Race for the United States: 2015 to 2060, the data projects that, in terms of population, no race will even be a close second to whites until 2040, and white will still be the majority race in 2060.
It also gives no indication that the white race will be anywhere near extinction. My guess is the man is afraid of becoming a minority. In theory, all people in the United States, minority or otherwise, are meant to be treated equally. That, of course, is not the case. These white survivalists likely fear one day suffering the same oppression that they inflict upon minorities.
My research didn’t stop there. This was the first I had ever heard of White Survivalists, so after fact-checking the man’s false claim, I began to research this group and discover what they are truly all about.
The White Survivalist group is led by a man named Jared Taylor; he is the most influential speaker on their ideology.
Taylor has been called a white nationalist, a white supremacist and a racist by many groups. One example of this came in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where Dennis Roddy referred to Taylor as a racist in a headline: Jared Taylor, a racist in the guise of ‘expert.’ Many other news outlets – national ones – have used these labels to describe Taylor as well.
Peter Holley of The Washington Post called Taylor a white nationalist in a piece back in February of 2016. The piece was called Hear a White Nationalist’s Robocall Urging Iowa Voters to Back Trump.
The white supremacist example comes from Rory Carroll of The Guardian who called Taylor a white supremacist in an article from December of 2016 called ‘Alt-right’ groups will ‘revolt’ if Trump shuns white supremacy, leaders say.
I remember when I was a kid, my father told me that if one out of three people calls you a jerk, they’re probably the jerk. But if all three people are calling you a jerk, you’re the jerk. Replace the word jerk with racist, white nationalist or white supremacist in that saying and it still rings true.
Taylor has refuted these labels on many occasions. He denied them when talking to Carol M. Swain and Russell Nieli of the Cambridge University Press. He told Swain and Nieli that he considers himself “an advocate for white interests.”
Let’s try and take Taylor at his word here and not operate on the opinions of others. We’re raised to believe that actions speak louder than words, so now we can evaluate Taylor’s actions. Since a lot of Taylor’s actions involve speaking, we’ll evaluate his words as well. Both Taylor’s actions and words speak volumes about who he is as a person.
One of the biggest accomplishments Taylor has made in his career was starting the site/publication called American Renaissance. Taylor uses this publication as a platform for publishing his views to a large audience of people with views similar to his. Taylor told Swain and Nieli that the site was founded “to provide such a voice for white interests,” and argues that its work is “analogous to other interest groups that advocate for ethnic or racial groups.” In that very interview, Taylor supports racial segregation, which isn’t surprising given that he once told Bob Garfield of WNYC Radio that he believes segregating races is natural for humans.
If Taylor hasn’t disgusted and terrified you already, let’s examine a few people whose work has been published on American Renaissance.
One such person is Gedaliah Braun. Braun is a white American male who taught philosophy in several African universities from 1976 to 1988 and then continued to live in South Africa.
Braun believes whites are superior and tries to prove this based on anecdotes from his time in South Africa. In a piece called South Africa Under Black Rule, Braun writes:
“Ask any African why blacks can’t, for example, make airplanes or computers and he’ll look at you as if you were foolish for asking, since the answer is obvious: ‘The white man has the brains for it, and we don’t.’”
Let’s point out a few things here. First, Braun clearly has an agenda and already believes whites are superior. We can’t attest to the legitimacy of this anecdote, and with Braun’s mind already having been made up, it doesn’t seem to be that reliable.
The other point to make here is that Braun spent most of his time in South Africa, where apartheid laws were enacted in 1948 with the goal of continual white domination and racial segregation. These laws remained until 1994. That’s a total of 46 years during which blacks were oppressed and subjected to a lesser education system, stripped of their opportunity to learn. Do you think anybody on earth could truly make airplanes or computers without having had the opportunity to learn how to do so?
Braun’s insanity continues. In his book, Racism, Guilt and Self-Deceit, Braun refers to the 44th President of the United States – Barack Obama – as a: “Muslim president who hates America.” Braun also swirls feminism, homosexuality, abortion, hostility towards marriage and child-rearing all together and claims that they are all, “anti-life and tend towards death.”
Braun isn’t the only racist lunatic who’s published on Taylor’s website. Duncan Hengest is another.
Hengest is a white American male (noticing a theme yet?) who is an Army Veteran. Hengest uses anecdotes from his time in the Army to promote white supremacy. Examples of this come from his piece, Diversity in the Army. Here’s one anecdote Hengest used:
“in Iraq, I was repeatedly astonished by the inability of many senior black officers to think through problems.”
One of the examples he gives is a suggestion by a black officer in Iraq to put “snipers in trees.” That officer apparently had not noticed that there not many trees in Iraq, and that the few one finds there are mostly palm trees–which are of no use to snipers.
Really? You expect me to believe that in all your time in the Army, only the black officers gave you a suggestion that you considered stupid? Again, this is just them pushing their agenda and selectively using anecdotes to make a black officer look bad. Also, what’s the rest of the context here? When was the officer asked and was this truly his final response, or was it just his gut response that could serve as an indication of him just thinking of putting snipers in high areas, and sniping from trees just happened to be the first idea that popped into his head?
Hengest, like Braun, doesn’t stop there. He also claims that blacks required remedial training to learn how to use weapons. I mean, shouldn’t everyone get remedial training on how to use weapons as a precautionary measure?
Hengest goes on to make further ridiculous claims in his piece, but to continue on would be redundant, and would take too long. It’s obvious; American Renaissance is a platform for hate-spewing racists.
If you’re still looking for specifics on Taylor himself, take a look at the speech Taylor gave at the National Policy Institute Conference in February of 2015.
The first part that blew my mind was when Taylor tried to draw a comparison between miscegenation and crocodile breeding.
“Remember the Cuban crocodile: “In a worst-case scenario, one crocodile lineage can cause the extinction of another.” Well, strictly as biological artifacts, white people are surely at least as valuable as Cuban crocodiles, if only for aesthetic reasons. And there’s a lot more than that. Europeans created the modern world. Shouldn’t they have the same rights as the tribes of the Amazon: to be left undisturbed?”
Humans are not reptiles, they are completely different creatures and their means and forms of breeding should never be compared to try and make a point. Also, Europeans didn’t create the modern world. They stole it from Native Americans and then enslaved blacks to build it.
Also in that speech, Taylor said outright that he prefers white society.
“I prefer the society that whites create. What’s wrong with that?”
What’s wrong with that is that your past behavior proves that you prefer it because you consider other societies inferior and hate them based on those bigoted views.
Taylor’s outlandish comments continue throughout the speech as he bashes Martin Luther King Jr. and says that all whites instinctively feel the same way that he does.
All of this – his site, the people who publish on it, the things he has said – justify claims, including my own, that Taylor is a white supremacist, a white nationalist and a racist.
Taylor is arguably the most dangerous white supremacist and member of the alt-right. It may not seem like it because he’s not out there violently assaulting minorities and beating them with sticks, but he is the voice of the people who are doing those things. He is the one brainwashing them. That brainwashing power, the brains of the operation, are what any movement since the dawn of time has needed to succeed.
Taylor’s influence is apparent. Mark Potok and Heidi Beirich of the Intelligence Report, a Southern Poverty Law Center Publication, described Taylor as a “cultivated, cosmopolitan face of white supremacy. He is the guy who is providing the intellectual heft, in effect, to modern-day Klansmen.” They also described American Renaissance as site that has, “become increasingly important over the years, bringing a measure of intellectualism and seriousness to the typically thug-dominated world of white supremacy.”
These claims have fallen on deaf ears before, and I truly hope that they don’t again. Taylor is the brain behind the alt-Right, and he is an incredible danger to the safety and humanity of our country
