By Ian Jobling • 12/10/06
White America is a website devoted to refuting the “whites as cancer” myth and promoting race realism and white activism. (For more on this, see our first feature.) I have long been active in the American race realist movement, and I have thought about it deeply. I started this website because I came to believe that none of the existing publications that promote white racial interests would ever do so effectively. I have many reasons for believing this, but the primary one is that all of them are too accommodating to the radical anti-Semitism that pervades the American racial right.
I first became interested in race realism and white activism through the work of writers like Charles Murray, J. P. Rushton, and Jared Taylor. In the early days, I was a passionate devotee of Jared Taylor’s magazine American Renaissance (AR). Here I found solid and well-supported arguments for the reality of racial differences and the need to maintain a white majority in the West. The combination of astounding audacity and unimpeachable rationality in the articles made a true believer of me. Also, the magazine was free of anti-Semitism; indeed, Taylor never dealt with Jews at all. Consequently, I eagerly sought out other subscribers to AR in my area.
It was then that my disillusionment began. I had expected my new acquaintances to constitute a secret community of realism in which I could take refuge from the delusions of the world I lived in. What I found was very different. At least half, and probably the majority, of these people were even more deluded than the typical racially unaware American. The real core of their beliefs was not the ideas of Taylor or Rushton, but those of David Duke and Kevin Alfred Strom. They subscribed to what I call the “theology of Jewish evil,” which sees the Jewish people as a sort of cosmic villain constantly conspiring against the white race.
When I first met these people, things would start out well. We would talk about IQ differences, minority crime and social dysfunction, and the importance of preserving a white majority in the West. However, eventually their anti-Semitism would emerge. It was because of Jewish malice towards whites that the borders had been opened, and the all-powerful “Israel Lobby” was getting white boys shot up in Iraq. Soon, they would be telling you that the Holocaust was a hoax and the Nuremburg trials a scam; Israel was a criminal state that constantly committed atrocities against Palestinians, and suicide-bombers were freedom-fighters. Indeed, it would be no surprise if Sharon and the Mossad really were behind the 9/11 attacks. When I challenged them on any of this stuff, they would treat me at first with the tolerant condescension of the master for the novice. If I challenged them persistently and effectively, they came to view me as a “kosher conservative,” and avoided me. What depressed me even more was that I found these beliefs not just among uneducated, working-class AR subscribers, but also among affluent subscribers with advanced degrees who really should have known better.
Of course, no one should be immune from well-founded criticism, and it is certainly true that Jews have traditionally been very active in liberal causes and have indeed done a great deal to demonize white racial consciousness. But these people did not trade in well-founded criticism; rather, they were conspiracy theorists whose minds twisted everything they disliked about the present and past into evidence for Jewish evil.
I continued to believe that a community of realism must exist somewhere, and I went to the 2004 and 2006 American Renaissance conferences in search of it. I did meet some reasonable people there, and they have become my friends. But the views of most of the attendees were sadly familiar.
What finally shattered my belief in AR was a series of events that started at its last conference, which took place in February. Near the end of the conference, one of the speakers, Guillaume Faye, said, in a talk about the decline of the West, that Israel might soon get wiped off the map. He viewed the prospect of Israel’s destruction as one sign of Western cultural collapse, but that was not how the audience took it. Rather, there was a thunderous round of applause coming from at least half of the audience.
At the end of the talk, David Duke got up during the question and answer period and spun out a long-winded speech on the subject of Jews’ eternal enmity to the white race, accompanied by much sympathetic chuckling and egging on from the audience. Michael Hart, a Jewish AR subscriber, got up and yelled at Duke, “You’re a fucking Nazi, and you’re a disgrace to this conference!” Then he walked out. He, however, got no support. I think I was the only one who tentatively applauded—I ought to have been more confident.
After this, I was one of a number of like-minded AR subscribers who joined an email group whose purpose was to discuss what happened at the conference and what our reaction should be. Many of the people on the list argued that the fiasco was a result of Jared Taylor’s tacit toleration, and perhaps even support, of radical anti-Semitism. Many of the speakers that Jared Taylor had invited to the conferences, such as Paul Fromm, Joe Sobran, and Sam Dickson, had been active in the Holocaust denial movement.
Besides, some of Taylor’s own writings showed extreme anti-Israeli sentiment. After 9/11, Taylor had published an article on The Last Ditch, a radically anti-Semitic website, in which he placed the blame for the attacks squarely on Israel. Israeli military actions against Palestinian terrorists—which Taylor referred to as “revenge killings”—had incurred the well-deserved hatred of Arabs. The lesson of the attacks was simple: abandon support for the nation that Arabs saw as having been “carved out of the flesh of their Islamic kinsmen.” If the US launched a war on Islamic terrorism in response to 9/11, it would simply be a “war for Israel” and could even lead to a general campaign to “exterminate all Muslims.”
I was amazed by the crude one-sidedness and the tone of feverish exaggeration in this article, as well as the others that Taylor had published on The Last Ditch (see here and here), which also dealt with the Middle East. All of Taylor’s capacity for moral evaluation seemed to disappear when he wrote about this subject. For Taylor, there was a simple moral equivalence between Israel and Palestinian terrorists: one side simply killed the other, and that was that. However, there are clear moral differences and good reasons for America to be on Israel’s side. Israel has succeeded in creating a free, first-world society; neither the Palestinans, nor any other Arab country has proved itself capable of that. Israel has made efforts to reach a reasonable compromise with the Palestinians, which have all been answered by terror. Furthermore, Taylor referred to clashes between the Israeli army and terrorists as mere “revenge killings,” as if a state’s actions to defend itself were equivalent to a mafia vendetta. There was little reason to fear the US would launch a campaign to exterminate Muslims. Rather, the real prospect of genocide comes from the Muslim side of the conflict: Muslim spokesmen regularly express their wish to wipe Israel off the map. Besides, the lurid language that Taylor used when speaking of the US and Israel in these articles—“carved out of the flesh of their Islamic kinsmen,” the “Israeli tanks rolling through the rubble of Nablus or Ramallah,” America’s “grindingly brutal imposition of alien will upon” Iraqis—made it look as though the West was a greater enemy to freedom and human rights than Middle Eastern dictators and Islamic fundamentalists were.
I pointed out to the group something that had long disturbed me: the AR links page links to the American Nationalist Union website. Run by Don Wassall, the ANU is a purveyor of the zaniest anti-Semitic propaganda. The editors of the site plainly view the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a long-discredited hoax, as a real historical document in which powerful Jews outlined their plan for the conquest of the world. The site also peddles conspiracy theories about the Skull & Bones Society, the Rothschilds, Freemasons, and God knows what else. I had long been astonished that AR would promote this kind of nonsense.
Even then, however, we still had hopes for AR. Eventually the group drafted a letter urging Taylor to write an article in the pages of AR that condemned the audience at the conference for applauding the destruction of Israel and rejected the beliefs of Duke and his followers. We also asked him to stop inviting anti-Semites to speak at AR conferences. The tone of the letter was tough and angry, but we had a right to this tone.
We were pessimistic about the outcome, but Taylor’s reaction exceeded our worst fears. In April, he published an article called “Jews and $American Renaissance$” on what had happened at the conference. Although he criticized some of the attendees for treating Jews at the conference rudely, Taylor said nothing about the audience’s behavior during Faye’s talk. While he called David Duke’s remarks inappropriate for the conference, he said nothing about their truth or falsity; he merely called Duke a man of “strong views”—really the understatement of the century for a man who has stated that he believes Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks. But the real shocker was that Taylor publicly insulted those of us who had written and signed the letter. He called it condescending and said it had not influenced him at all; we had made a “mistake” by writing it.
Let’s get this straight. For Taylor, it was not the people who cheered on genocide who needed to be taken to task; rather, we did for urging him to speak out against this behavior.
It was this article that finally convinced me my hopes in AR had been misplaced. Taylor would plainly never give up his collaboration with anti-Semites. While I will always respect AR as a great achievement and refer to it when it is useful, I have lost my faith in Jared Taylor’s ability to build a viable race realist community in America. And the same is true of the lesser white activist institutions in America, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens and the National Policy Institute. The CCC invited Dickson, Fromm, and Wassall to speak at their last conference. The NPI links to Wassall’s absurd ANU website.
Even if these organizations stopped inviting anti-Semites to speak at their conferences and took down all the offending links, it would still not be enough. Rather, it is incumbent on the leaders of the American race realist movement to speak out against anti-Semitic lies. This involves more than the superficial, insubstantial disavowals of anti-Semitism that one sometimes reads in race realist publications. It means spelling out in detail why the theology of Jewish evil is nonsense.
Few people will see the justice of our cause when so many of our supporters are so manifestly unbalanced. Also, allowing anti-Semitism to fester in our ranks gives the appearance of justice to those who wish to kill the race realist movement off. Consider how the Southern Poverty Law Center attacks AR:
“Jared Taylor is the cultivated, cosmopolitan face of white supremacy,” said Mark Potok, editor of Intelligence Report, the magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “He is the guy who is providing the intellectual heft, in effect, to modern-day Klansmen.” Link
However unfair such a judgment is, one must admit that the SPLC is at least partly right since no race realists speak out against the theology of Jewish evil.
White America will remedy this failing as part of our larger project of establishing a mature race realist movement. In this way, we hope to establish at last the community of realism that I have long sought, and to help it thrive and grow.