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Notes -
Richard Hanania interviewed Jared Taylor.
Jared Taylor, founder of white nationalist publication American Renaissance, was recently reinstated on Twitter/X after a years-long (and, under the Elon Musk “free speech” era, increasingly controversial) ban. Many have hoped that, as Dissident Right and race realist ideas are beginning to break into semi-mainstream online discourse, some of the old-guard figures like Taylor may enjoy a long-overdue rehabilitation in the public eye. (Something like this has recently taken place for Steve Sailer, who, after decades of being the commentator whom all the serious thinkers read but never publicly acknowledged, recently undertook a lucrative book tour and has finally been published by several mainstream conservative publications.) While Taylor was once a semi-regular fixture on serious news programs, and his speeches at American Renaissance conference were even occasionally broadcast on C-SPAN, his banishment over the past decade has been comprehensive; if he is, at this late stage of his life, able to make some money and get his name out there, it would be a well-deserved culmination of an honorable life. Taylor’s work has been formative in my intellectual development, and I consider him a formidable thinker as well as a true gentleman.
That being said, I think his conversation with Hanania (who promoted the interview as a debate) unfortunately revealed how the world has, in some sense, passed Taylor by. Part of this is simply that he is old and has lost a step cognitively. In his prime, back when he was often asked to appear on mainstream news segments, Taylor was known as a sharp, charismatic, and erudite debater; at his advanced age, he can now be outmaneuvered by more agile thinkers — and, whatever you think about Richard Hanania (who, in his now-disavowed younger days as a white identitarian commentator, wrote several pieces for American Renaissance), he clearly has a keen mind. More importantly, though, Taylor’s model of the world does not appear to have adequately adapted to observed reality.
One of the central pillars of Taylor’s racial worldview is that human beings naturally seek to cluster among others to whom they are similar. For Taylor, the “white flight” of the 1960’s and 70’s, in which white families fled urban areas for the growing suburbs in response to the growing presence of blacks, is an archetypal example of humans naturally and subconsciously coordinating to segregate themselves into racial affinity groups. Writing and speaking in the 1990s and 2000s, when Mexican immigration to the U.S. (both legal and illegal) was at a tidal surge, Taylor predicted that this would set off a fresh white flight, in which white Americans would flee states with growing Hispanic populations. The looming confrontation between whites and Latinos, in which whites would be forced to put up a mighty fight to prevent themselves from being replaced and politically outvoted by drunken and crime-prone illegals clamoring for Latin American socialism, was a central theme of white nationalist discussion at this time. “Demographics are Destiny!”
However, as Hanania deftly points out, the intervening years have been… less than kind to these predictions. Though left-wing agitation by a certain section of the Latino population did have some impact on politics in the early part of this century — I distinctly remember a segment of the Mexican and Mexican-American segment of the student body at my high school staging a full-fledged walk-out in 2006 in protest of the failed “Sensenbrenner Bill” (H.R. 4437) which would have curtailed illegal immigration — the long-term political realignment among Latinos in this country has been a surprise to both political parties. Famously, Trump’s 2024 campaign achieved considerable success among Hispanic men.
Additionally, while white identitarians were correct to predict an exodus of conservative whites from racially-diverse liberal states, they probably did not anticipate that such whites would flee not to Whitopias such as Idaho and Montana, but rather to racially-diverse conservative states. The racial demographics of Florida and Texas are hardly more favorable to racially-conscious whites than California’s or New York’s! As Hanania points out, it seems like the revealed preference of many white Americans is to move to places with plenty of Hispanics (and a decent number of blacks, provided they’re well-policed) as long as the economic prospects and the political environment seem headed in a positive direction. White Americans seem to have no problem whatsoever living alongside Asian immigrants, who generally make excellent neighbors, friends, and classmates.
(Taylor’s stance on race relations between whites and Asians has never been coherent, which is particularly surprising since he was famously born and raised in Japan as the child of two American missionaries. He acknowledges the many great things about Asian culture and the various metric on which Asians are on par with, or even superior to, whites, yet when asked why it would be a bad thing for whites and Asians to intermarry and their countries become more integrated, he retreats to some wishy-washy petty nationalist “Well, I just think white people should stay white and Asians should stay Asian because I believe in real diversity.” This has never been persuasive, and Hanania rightly skewers him for it.) Ultimately, Taylor’s predictions of mass racial strife and whites fleeing to the hinterlands to form whites-only communities just have not panned out. As Hanania says: There are plenty of extremely white places in America, and almost nobody is moving to any of them.
This particular section of the interview (beginning around the 55-minute mark) has also produced controversy among Taylor’s ostensible allies. Hanania brings up West Virginia and asks why, if living among other whites is the highest instinctive concern for most white people, why are so few people moving there? And, furthermore, what sort of white person would want to move there, knowing how poor and dysfunctional the local whites are? Who would prefer living among fentanyl-addicted hillbilly whites rather than living among educated and productive Asians and Hispanics? Taylor expresses agreement with Hanania, and indulges in some accurate criticism of the white people he witnessed while visiting the capital city of West Virginia.
This has caused many on the online right to turn on Taylor, as discussed by Scott Greer. (Many of the responses to Greer’s tweet perfectly encapsulate the phenomenon pointed to in his article.) The criticism of Taylor’s remarks strikes me as identical to a phenomenon many have observed in black culture. When blacks congregate among themselves in places like churches, a frequent topic of discussions and sermons is frank self-criticism of the failings of the black community. “Black men, we need to do better! Work harder, be better fathers! There’s too many young black men out there acting a fool, killing each other over nothing, leaving our communities shattered.” All true, all healthy, all necessary, and maybe at some point the introspection will lead to material changes. However, when blacks (or, at least, black activists and “community leaders”) are talking to white people, suddenly they’re a united front: “All our problems are your fault.” Any criticism of even the worst aspects of underclass black culture is suddenly forbidden, as it might give succor to the enemies of black political advocacy. Black commentators who break this taboo (Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, etc.) are savaged as traitors and dancing monkeys by the very same blacks who, among their own, will acknowledge the truth behind that very same criticism.
Apparently we now have a vocal contingent of aspiring “white community leaders” who similarly cannot brook any public criticism of the worst elements of white trash culture, lest it empower “the enemies of our people.” This is pathetic, insecure, dishonest behavior. Whatever one might say about Jared Taylor, he has never been afraid to publicly air out the neuroses and failings of his own people; his brand of upstanding, intellectually honest discourse appears fundamentally unsuited for an increasingly propagandistic “siege mentality” discourse on the modern racially-aware right.
I have many problems with Richard Hanania, but seeing the army of pro-Taylor trolls spamming the comments section of the debate with petty insults about his appearance rather than even attempting to engage with the substance of his arguments, I have to concede that the new contours of the debate have squeezed out principled but overly-old-fashioned men like Jared Taylor, and will require the torch to be passed to high-character individuals who can thread the needle between the increasingly low-brow Chud Populism of right-wing Twitter, and the respectable but vacuous thought leaders of the dying Boomer right.
I haven't followed Taylor's work too closely, but it's wrong to characterize the entire Dissident Right as predicting that whites will flee to rural white communities. I don't want to live in a rural white commune in Idaho, I want to live in a world-class city! The fact that non-whites migrate to the most desirable places to live is not really a rebuttal to "demographics are destiny." And white flight to the suburbs is evidence of that fact- it's a compromise: they want access to a world class city but they don't want to live around blacks.
And if you don't call the past 10 years racial strife, I'm not sure exactly what it would take for you to admit this has happened. Take something like white representation in Ivy League 25 years ago compared to today. That is a reckoning. If Taylor predicted White people would flee all the cities to form rural communes (I can't verify that, I'll take your word for it), then you can register that as a false prediction, but the "White Nationalist" prediction I've heard is it will cause civilizational decline and urban decay. If White Nationalists predicted urban decay would you say their prediction was correct?
Richard Hanania's entire schtick is trolling with insults about how low-status it is to be a white identarian, including ample insults about appearance. Turnabout is fair play.
Hanania’s stance, which I basically agree with, is that the real strife isn’t “everyone against white people”, but rather “blacks against everyone else”. If the oppositional culture of black was taken out of the equation, whether by crushing Indian Schools style cultural reprogramming, eugenics, or geographic/political separation, white people would have almost no difficulty living with a substantial number of immigrants from other races. Latinos certainly took time and significant effort to integrate, and obviously the country needs to get a handle on the number of Latinos to make sure they don’t become a majority population too quickly, but having lived in a heavily Latino city my entire life, I can honestly say that they have not been a significant source of any strife or discomfort to me. Asian immigrants to America have done wonderfully, and there should not be any meaningful effort to stop them from coming here. (Again, proportions matter — I wouldn’t want America to accept 4 million Chinese immigrants next year — but pretending like Asians are a significant contributor to racial division in this country is simply dishonest.) The problem, overwhelmingly, is blacks and the fallout from the eternal question of how to deal with them. Applying a model of race relations designed for black-white conflict to other races is simply missing the point. It’s a distraction.
There are places in the world from which developed countries should want a very small number of immigrants. The United States has, thus far, managed to do a spectacular job of avoiding receiving very many immigrants from those places. Europe has done a much worse job of this, and has suffered the consequences. As I’ve said before, if Europe had let in a million Vietnamese instead of a million Syrians, the continent simply would not be facing any serious problems with multiculturalism. Jared Taylor’s model is, like yours, over-focused on whites vs. non-whites, while it should instead be trying as hard as possible to muster Asians and Latinos in a coalition against blacks and Arabs.
Minor point- the Hispanics that do well in the US seem to be mostly Mexicans, Cubans and certain other carribean groups, and the upper crust and upper middle classes from elsewhere in Latin America. Centracos(most of the people coming to the border now) do much worse, possibly as badly as blacks.
Yeah, it's frustrating that people, including Hoffmeister who I feel ought to know better, don't property account for European admixture in Latinos when they get defensive of Latino immigration to America and treat it as a monolith.
Kind of like how Hollywood makes Ana de Armas the character who is the stand-in for Hispanic migration to the United States in the film Knives Out. Not this Guatemalan guy.
I don’t know why you think I see all Latin American peoples as a monolith. I live in San Diego, which is very heavily Mexican, but we have communities of other nationalities and I have interacted with them. I’m well aware that Mexican mestizos and brown Dominicans are very different sorts of people on average. The difference is that thus far, America simply has not had to deal with very large numbers of non-Mexican Latinos. I’m as hawkish as you are about keeping it that way.
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