White Supremacists in the Closet

Question 1: Would you invite a neo-Nazi over for dinner?

Question 2: Would you attend a dinner party where a neo-Nazi was in attendance?

Question 3: Would you socialize with people who openly cavort with neo-Nazis?

To most decent people, this little quiz is a no-brainer. But for some of America’s leading conservative pundits, it poses a quandary of immense proportions.

Over the next several days I’m going to post a series of exposés on the relationship between leading American conservatives and a small but vocal group of white supremacists. I’ll also place this relationship in historical context and suggest possible reasons why many mainstream news outlets have turned a blind eye to the sordid partnership between suit-and-tie conservatives and the nation’s most outspoken merchants of hate.

I first learned of this story from Alan Petigny, a close friend and colleague who is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Florida. Alan, who is a remarkably talented scholar of twentieth-century American history, and I worked together on this research. What follows is entirely a collaborative effort.

So let’s begin.

One of America’s leading white supremacist publications is a magazine called American Renaissance. Its editor, Jared Taylor, is a self-proclaimed “racialist” and outspoken critic of interracial marriage. Under Taylor’s stewardship, the magazine publishes articles with revealing tag lines like, “Statement on Race as a Biological Concept,” “American slaves had surprisingly positive things to say about slavery,” and “scientific data show that the races differ in intelligence—dogma holds otherwise”

Make no mistake about it. American Renaissance isn’t insensitive. It’s racist. In 1997 the magazine ran a glowing tribute to Madison Grant, the long-deceased author of "The Passing of the Great Race (1916), a pseudo-science tract -- highly popular in its day -- that blasted interracial marriages and championed eugenics, all in the service of preserving white racial integrity. The American Renaissance article casually observed that when Grant was in his scholarly prime, “just as it does today, the American identity faced a two-pronged threat: a large influx of aliens and the presence of a large, Negro element.”

In the final balance, according to George McDaniel, one of the magazine’s editors, Grant’s “dreams of racial preservation, which he saw as part and parcel of nature conservation, are reviled today by all but a few. They owe it to the memory of this early activist to carry on his work, to ensure that the ideals of Madison Grant do not perish.”

In another article, “Why is Africa Poor?” an American Renaissance writer asserts that “black nations, whether or not they were ever colonies, have been failures. White nations, whether or not they were ever colonies, have been successes. It is the people of a nation that forge its destiny.” Does the author mean to suggest that black humans are less equipped for self-government than white humans? Yes. “Whether in Africa or America, Haiti or Great Britain, blacks are poor because they are, for the most part, incapable of lifting themselves from poverty. Africa is poor, just as Harlem is poor, because it is populated by Africans.”

These sinister polemics are a remarkable throwback to a time, not long ago, when many ordinary Americans agreed that blacks and non “Anglo-Saxon” immigrants were a racial menace.

It is surprising, then, that many prominent conservatives have not repudiated Jared Taylor or his magazine. On the contrary, they’ve embraced or at least tolerated them.

Right-wing writers who have explicitly praised Taylor include Peter Brimelow, a former editor at National Review and senior editor at Forbes, and David Horowitz, the reconstructed 60s radical who edits the on-line conservative journal, FrontPage. While quick to divorce himself from Taylor’s white nationalist vision, Horowitz describes Taylor as “no more racist…than Jesse Jackson and the NAACP,” a “gutsy,” “very intelligent and principled man” whose views on race do not represent a “mean spirited position.”

As late as May 2000 – several years after the launch of American Renaissance – the Washington Times, a leading conservative mouthpiece, saw fit to run one of Taylor’s op-eds, entitled, “Are blacks more likely to go to jail?” (May 29, 2000, p. A19). Guess what his answer was.

One wonders why commissioning work by Jared Taylor is any better than commissioning work by, say, Joseph Goebbels.

Apparently this question doesn’t keep Reed Irvine up at night. Irvine, the old conservative stalwart who founded Accuracy in Media (AIM) and its sister organization, Accuracy in Academia, invited Taylor to serve as a guest lecturer at a couple of AIM conferences and has reverentially cited Taylor in his AIM Report.

Through Accuracy in Academia conferences, Irvine has also promoted Taylor’s close associate, the late Samuel Francis, who was arguably the best-known figure to come out of American Renaissance until his death earlier this year.

In 1995 the Washington Times fired Francis from his position as an editorial writer for promoting white supremacist views. The previous year, in an article written in American Renaissance, Francis had called on fellow whites to restrict the “phony rights” exercised by people of color. According to Francis, these so-called phony rights included “the right to political equality,” “the right to vote,” and “the right to attend the same schools, to serve on juries, to marry across racial lines.”

After leaving the Washington Times, Francis landed on his feet as editor of the Citizens Informer, the official organ of the Council of Conservative Citizens -- the successor group to the Jim Crow-era White Citizens Councils.

Kudos to the Washington Times for firing Francis (though strange that the newspaper should choose to run a piece by Jared Taylor some five years later.). Too bad other conservative groups and individuals haven’t been as principled.

In Francis was invited to speak at the International Conservative Congress, an impressive gathering of prominent conservative intellectuals. Both the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute sponsored the two-day conference. David Frum, who would later serve as a speechwriter in the Bush ’43 White House and who currently writes an online journal for the National Review, served on a panel with Francis. Though the two men represented different strains of the conservative movement and engaged in a vigorous debate, it’s curious that Frum would even deign to shake hands with someone whose crude racism was by then well-established fact.

A year later, Francis participated in a Lincoln Day Colloquium sponsored by the Claremont Institute. Appearing on the program alongside this unreconstructed white supremacist were the respected conservative columnists David Brooks and Bill Kristol, radio impresario Rush Limbaugh, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and former Attorney General Ed Meese. In their defense, none of these prominent conservatives served on Francis’s panel, But they clearly didn’t mind sharing top billing with him.

If all of this sounds bad, it gets worse. Tomorrow I’ll introduce a few characters who make Samuel Francis and Jared Taylor look like boy scouts.

You’ll be surprised by the company they keep.