Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, October 13, 2014

Salon.com has just published an article called “America’s virulent racists: The sick ideas and perverted “science” of the American Renaissance Foundation.” It is an excerpt from a book called The Myth of Race, written by Professor Robert Sussman of Washington University and published this year by Harvard University Press. It is also the most sloppy, tendentious, deceitful piece of writing I have seen in a long time. The language alone should raise doubts about the author’s objectivity. He describes me, my work, and associates as “shockingly ugly,” “hateful, dangerous, ancient, and outdated,” “virulently racist,” not to mention “neo-Nazi” and “white supremacist.”

This kind of hysterical name-calling is one thing; outright fabrication is another. People who want to call AR “shockingly ugly” or “virulently racist” find that what it actually says doesn’t come anywhere near justifying their breathless talk, so they start twisting and fabricating. Prof. Sussman is following directly in the footsteps of Dinesh D’Souza.

Some of Professor Sussman’s nonsense is easily exposed. However, the Salon excerpt gives no sources, so even though the entire body of work of American Renaissance is archived online, it is hard to track down exactly what I might have written that could be the basis for this claim, for example: “He [Taylor] complains that civil rights laws prohibiting racial discrimination have turned ‘common sense’ into a ‘crime.’ ” One- or two-word “quotations” are always suspect.

We will alert Salon.com and Harvard University Press to Prof. Sussman’s reckless disregard for the truth and ask for a retraction and an apology–short of which we will consider legal action.

I have gone through Prof. Sussman’s article and have highlighted–in order of appearance–only the most prominent outright errors, falsehoods, and distortions, as follows:

Prof. Sussman: “The American Renaissance Foundation is an extremely conservative right-wing organization that also publishes a monthly magazine of the same name, American Renaissance (AR).”

There is no American Renaissance Foundation. I am president of the New Century Foundation, which used to publish a monthly magazine called American Renaissance. AR content is now entirely on-line; we stopped publishing a paper magazine more than 2-1/2 years ago.

Prof. Sussman: “Jared Taylor (1952-)”

I was born in 1951.

Prof. Sussman: “the National Policy Institute, a self-styled racist think tank”

The National Policy Institute, of which I was one of the founding directors, has never described itself as racist.

Prof. Sussman: “Taylor has close ties with members of various neo-Nazi groups”

If anyone with whom I have “close ties”–or any ties at all–is a member of a neo-Nazi group, it is news to me. I will expect Prof Sussman to supply details.

Prof Sussman: “He is a frequent radio guest of Don Black’s . . . .”

To my knowledge Don Black has never had a radio program. His son, Derek Black, briefly had a radio program on which I appeared once.

Prof. Sussman: Frédéric Legrand, a member of the National Front, is a frequent contributor to American Renaissance.

Of the several thousand articles published in AR, Mr. Legrand wrote three. The last one was published seven years ago.

Prof. Sussman: “One of AR’s and Taylor’s favorite and oft-used quotes, recalling fifteenth-century polygenecist thought, is that of zoologist Raymond Hall from an early issue of Mankind Quarterly: ‘Two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area.’ ”

There is nothing 15th century about the statement, which is widely accepted among biologists. If the gray squirrel is introduced into the red squirrel’s territory, it steadily replaces the red squirrel. E. Raymond Hall was chairman of the Department of Zoology at the University of Kansas. He made this observation in his two-volume classic, The Mammals of North America, first published in 1959 and revised in 1981. By my count, this quotation from Hall has appeared in three AR articles.

Prof. Sussman: Taylor believes that slavery may have been wrong but the alternative was “Negro pandemonium.”

I wrote that many slaveholders believed that the alternative to slavery was, in their words, “Negro pandemonium.” I was expressing their view, not mine.

Prof. Sussman: “the foundation’s goal is to demonstrate the purported superiority of the white race”

AR’s consistent position is that races are different. Blacks are superior to whites in many sports, for example, and North Asians are superior to whites in average intelligence.

Prof. Sussman offers this sentence as a quotation from AR: “Blacks and Third World immigrants did not really belong in the United States and certainly could not be ‘real’ Americans.”

This sentence has never appeared in AR.

Sussman makes much of a poll of AR readers, helpfully adding that the poll was taken “before Obama’s presidency.”

Indeed, it was taken 17 years ago and consisted of 391 people. Full results are available here.

Prof. Sussman: “Samuel Francis, a regular contributor to AR”

Samuel Francis has been dead for 10 years.

Prof. Sussman: “Francis believes that the ‘phony’ rights of nonwhites should be revoked. These include voting, holding office, attending schools with whites, serving on juries, marrying across racial lines, serving in the armed forces, buying homes near whites, and eating at lunch counters with, riding on buses with, holding jobs with, or even associating with ‘superior’ whites.”

Prof. Sussman has deliberately twisted Francis’s words into their very opposite. Francis wrote this in 1995: “[E]quality before the law, does not mean political equality, the right to vote, or the right to hold political office, let alone social and economic equality, nor the “right” to attend the same schools, to serve on juries, to marry across racial lines, to serve in the armed forces, to eat at lunch counters, to ride on buses, to buy a house or rent a room or hold a job, to receive welfare, to be admitted to colleges and universities, to take academic degrees or to be promoted. All these are phony ‘rights’ that have been fabricated through the corruption of our constitutional law and our understanding of it, and no citizen of any race is entitled to them.” [italics added]

The word “superior” never occurs in Francis’s article.

Prof. Sussman: “The American Renaissance conferences, which began in 1994, have become a gathering place for white supremacists, white nationalists, white separatists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, Holocaust deniers, and eugenicists.”

Could Prof. Sussman provide names rather than name-calling?

Prof. Sussman: “Arthur Jensen in an AR ‘conversation’ stated that the country’s attempt to build a multiracial nation ‘is doomed to failure.’ ”

Arthur Jensen did not say that. I did.

Prof. Sussman: “He [Jensen] also claimed that at least one-quarter of all blacks are “mentally retarded” and “not really educatable.”

Jensen said this: “Once you get below IQs of 80 or 75, which is the cut-off for mental retardation in the California School System, children are put into special classes. These persons are not really educable up to a level for which there’s any economic demand. . . . People are shocked and disbelieving when you tell them that about one in four blacks in our population are in that category–below 75.”

Prof. Sussman: “Glayde Whitney, as a contributing editor of AR, wrote a regular column in which he suggested that different races did not belong in the same species.”

Prof. Whitney never wrote that. Citation, please.

Prof. Sussman: “Lynn wrote in AR that environment has no effect on IQ scores and that differences between blacks and whites are entirely genetic.”

Prof. Lynn never wrote that. He has always recognized an environmental effect on IQ.

Prof. Sussman: “Levin also believed that whites would . . . once again discriminate against blacks in housing, employment, and schools. Taylor approved of Levin’s predictions and speculated that his inspired vision would lead to “policies strikingly similar to those of the pre-civil rights American South.”

See here for what Levin and I actually wrote.

Sussman: “At the 2000 AR conference, Taylor was greeted with a burst of applause when he speculated that whites may have lost so much ground in the last century because of Jews.”

I have never said that, whether at the 2000 AR conference or at any other time. In answer to a question as to what had caused the “demoralization” of whites–not loss of ground–I said that others have speculated to that effect. I also rejected Jewish influence as unsatisfactory, even as a partial explanation. A video of my 2000 conference speech is available here.

Prof. Sussman writes that to argue that AR has the right to hold conferences is to “condone the ability or the right of hate groups to gather and incite racial and class hatred.”

Prof. Sussman has never attended an AR conference. Readers can watch the lectures from the most recent conference online here and decide for themselves whether AR is a “hate group” or incites “racial and class hatred.” Prof. Sussman is unique, to my knowledge, in claiming that AR takes any interest at all in class.

Prof. Sussman: “Modern science now undermines all of their basic premises”

Perhaps Prof. Sussman will provide a bibliography of studies that “undermine” the work of Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin, Linda Gottfredson, Tatu Vanhanen, Michael Woodley, Richard Lynn, John Baker, Nicholas Wade, Henry Harpending, Jan te Nijenhuis, Philippe Rushton, Robert Putnam, Walker Connor, and Frank Salter.

Prof. Sussman dredges up a hasty and now disproven allegation that Jared Laughner, who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, had some tie to American Renaissance.

All law enforcement agencies have conceded that there is no evidence for such a link.

Prof. Sussman: “when a group publishes a journal and holds conferences preaching pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and racial hatred and glorifies such hatemongers as Adolf Hitler, Jesse Helms, and David Duke . . .”

In the nearly 25 years that American Renaissance has been publishing and holding conferences, there is not one word that could be described as “pro-Nazi” or “anti-Semitic.” There is not a single word that glorifies Adolf Hitler, Jesse Helms or David Duke. Just a few minutes’ examination of our website and comprehensive archives would make this clear to anyone. Even Mark Potok of the SPLC, which is an organization that never misses an opportunity to say something derogatory about me or AR, has said, “Jared Taylor is not an anti-Semite.”

Prof Sussman quotes, as follows, from the summary of a conference talk that appeared in AR: “[Prof. Weissberg proposed] ‘A Politically Viable Alternative to White Nationalism’ [instead of proposing the complete elimination of nonwhites].

Professor Robert Weissberg did not propose an alternative to “the complete elimination of nonwhites” but to a “movement explicitly based on white racial identity.” What he actually said was apparently not wicked enough, so Prof. Sussman invented something else.

The title of Prof. Sussman’s book is The Myth of Race. He is clearly something of a myth-maker himself. If what he has written about me and American Renaissance is typical of his “scholarship,” nothing he has written in this book can be trusted. Harvard University Press–the university’s motto is “veritas”–should be embarrassed to have published it.