A leading white nationalist says it plainly: Trump’s victory was about white identity

Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist journal American Renaissance, believes African Americans are threat to American society. “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears," he wrote in 2005. He believes the chief goal of immigration policy should be “to keep the country majority-white.” He is a leading figure in the alt-right, the racist online movement that vocally backed the Trump campaign.

So when I called Taylor after the election, I expected to him to be excited by the results. Indeed he was: He sees Trump as the first modern president sympathetic to his ideas. Trump is, in his telling, a kind of diet white nationalist — not quite what Taylor wants, but he basically has the right instincts.

“I have never believed that Donald Trump is a secret race realist. I think that he has just normal reactions, healthy reactions,” Taylor said, using one of his preferred terms (“race realist”) for attitudes most of us would just call “racist.”

Understanding what people like Taylor believe is important. Trump won because of, not in spite of, his overt appeals to white racial grievances and identity. Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has championed the alt-right. This kind of politics is on the rise in America — and understanding its nature and appeal is vital to understanding the dangers and challenges of Trump’s America.

During our conversation, something struck me (beyond the difficulty of listening to the message): There was a clarity to Taylor’s analysis of the election.

Most of the media sees racism as a character defect; white liberal pundits see racism as bad and thus see it as offensive to call people racist. Thus, they think it's insulting, rather than analytically true or false, to say large swaths of Trump voters were motivated by racism. This results in a weird kind of reverse political correctness, where some white pundits dismiss any explanation of the election centering on racism as condescending and insulting. (Writers of color generally aren’t afflicted by these blinders.)

Taylor, by contrast, sees racism as a positive good. So he’s willing to say what a lot of white political analysts won’t: that in this election, white voters were actively attracted to Trump as a result of his racism.

“I think this election is significant because whites, for the first time, have behaved like everybody else,” Taylor said. “They have voted for a man in whom they see a reflection of their interests as a group.”

While Taylor’s substantive views on race and immigration are offensive and self-discrediting, what bothers me — what worries me about America’s future — is that such a bracing analysis of the 2016 election came from a white nationalist.

What follows is a transcript of my conversation with Taylor, edited for length and clarity (with some offensive language kept to give a fuller picture of how he sees the world).

Do you feel like the message that you’ve been preaching for a long time was echoed by the campaign, what motivated white voters to turn out for Trump?

If I were an egomaniac I’d say, “Yes, my message came through!” But it’s impossible to know what it is that Donald Trump said, and for what reasons, that genuinely motivated white voters.

I have never believed that Donald Trump is a secret race realist. I think that he has just normal reactions, healthy reactions.

He doesn’t like criminals sneaking across the border. He doesn’t like people coming into the United States and going onto welfare. He doesn’t want illegals living here; he thinks they should go home. He wants to take a hard look at Muslims, because Muslims have caused problems in Europe, and somewhat smaller problems here in the United States.

I think all of these are perfectly healthy, fair-minded notions that need not have any grounding in racial consciousness.

Racial consciousness?

That concept would be that white Americans, as whites, have collective interests that are legitimate — just as blacks and Asians and every other group have collective interests that are legitimate. One obvious legitimate interest of whites is not to be reduced to a minority.

Now, I don’t think Donald Trump really thinks in those terms. But 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.

I think that is almost — well, probably entirely — an accident. He does not arrive at these views because of any kind of sense that white Americans deserve to be a majority in their own country. I don’t think he thinks in those terms.

But, as I say, he doesn’t like illegals coming into the country; he doesn’t like criminals showing up. He doesn’t like the idea of birthright citizenship. He thinks — and this is revolutionary in today’s thinking — that immigration should serve America and the American people, not the immigrants. You can take that point of view without the slightest racial consciousness.

I don’t think he’s ever looked into what [former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard] David Duke has ever said about anything. He just genuinely has no knowledge or interest in anyone who can be described as a white supremacist.

So if you don’t think that Trump aligns with you, ideologically, what makes you so happy about his win?

Because he is expressing an instinctive willingness to violate taboos.

We have gotten to the point now in the United States that if you don’t act as though Mexican immigrants, whether legal or illegal, are some kind of wonderful addition to the American body politic, then you’re a racist! Simply to point out something that is factually irrefutable: that some of them are criminals. [Author note: The best available evidence says Mexican immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.]

That makes you a bad guy. And Donald Trump is impervious to being called a bad guy.

Also, the fact that the policies onto which he has stumbled, in a kind of innocent, America-first way, are ones that will slow the dispossession of whites. I’m very much in favor of him implementing those policies, for whatever reasons.

Is that what you want out of Trump? Just for him to implement his stated policies?

Well, that’s certainly a good thing — but I don’t think he’s going to do that. 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.

Now, I don’t entirely rule out the idea that he might develop a racial consciousness. He is the only candidate since Patrick Buchanan — and I’m not sure I would even say this about Buchanan — of whom I can imagine saying, in an offhand way, “What’s wrong with whites wanting to remain a majority in the United States?”

I can just barely imagine him saying that. Whereas Hillary Clinton would slit her throat, shoot herself, before she would say such a thing.

So if this is the first moderately sympathetic administration you’ve had, how do you approach that? What is your strategy for the age of Trump?

To me, the form of activism that Trump has made more likely, even inevitable, is candidacies by people who are very much sympathizers with the racial realists — the dissident movement of which I am part — but who are not, necessarily, publicly part of it, who will profit from this new spirit of white people waking up to the fact that they, too, have collective interests.

I think this election is significant because whites, for the first time, have behaved like everybody else. They have voted for a man in whom they see a reflection of their interests as a group. Now, blacks have been doing this ever since they could vote. Hispanics, Asians — everybody does this. Only whites are not allowed to have collective interests.

And given that, I see a kind of awakening — I think we will see this in local elections. School boards, city councils, mayor, maybe Congress in certain districts. That’s what I expect to happen first.

At the same time, the old guard of the Republican Party must realize, at this point, that their message failed. Their idea of a political platform — lower taxes for millionaires, privatization, this kind of thing — it fell flat. Donald Trump ripped their party right out from under them.

And despite Donald Trump’s enormous defects as a candidate, he still won! On this message, that is a kick to the teeth to the traditional Republican platform.

Now, are Republicans so stupid that despite this Trump victory on a brand new platform, they’re going to go back to cobbling together their old message? Surely not. So this will have had a galvanizing effect on Republicans themselves.

Conservative intellectuals had no explanation for the Trump phenomenon. The only way it makes sense is to take into consideration the idea that whites have a nascent sense of legitimate group interests.

So you think this election really does show an emerging white consciousness in America.

Yes, it’s inevitable. Trump simply came at the right time to benefit from this, which came to the fore for reasons that have nothing to do with him.

Black Lives Matter is an excellent reason. The continuing influx of nonwhites. The displacement of whites, in one state after another. Every time a nonwhite group demands their share of the Oscar nominations, for example, or their share of Harvard, or racial preferences of some kind — all of those little things send a few more white people our way.

Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Those people sent thousands of white people our way. And, of course, the way the media covered all of those phenomena.

Here’s what I don’t understand in all of this. You talk a lot about white collective interests — but what about those of people of color? Many such people are worried about what a Trump administration means for them, for precisely the reasons that you’re excited about it. What would you tell them about their “legitimate interests?”

I would tell them, I would challenge them, I would defy them to name one single negative thing Donald Trump has said about black people! He’s never said anything insulting about blacks, or to suggest that he doesn’t hold them in high regard.

And as for Hispanics, I would say: If you’re here legally, you’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about.