Jared Taylor

Samuel Jared Taylor (born September 15, 1951) is an American white supremacist and editor of American Renaissance, an online magazine espousing such opinions, which was founded by Taylor in 1990.

He is also the president of American Renaissance's parent organization, New Century Foundation, through which many of his books have been published.

He is a former member of the advisory board of The Occidental Quarterly and a former director of the National Policy Institute, a Virginia-based white nationalist think tank.

He is also a board member and spokesperson of the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Taylor and many of his affiliated organizations are accused of promoting racist ideologies by civil rights groups, news media, and academics studying racism in the United States.

Taylor was born on September 15, 1951, to Christian missionary parents from Virginia in Kobe, Japan.

He lived in Japan until he was 16 years old and attended Japanese schools up to the age of 12, becoming fluent in Japanese.

He attended Yale University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy in 1973.

Taylor then spent three years in France and received a Master of Arts degree in international economics at Sciences Po in 1978.

During a period that interrupted his undergraduate and later graduate college years, he worked and traveled extensively in West Africa, improving his French in the Francophone regions of the continent.

Taylor is fluent in French, Japanese, and English.

Taylor worked as an international lending officer for the Manufacturers Hanover Corporation from 1978 to 1981, and as West Coast editor of PC Magazine from 1983 to 1988.

He has also taught Japanese at the Harvard Summer School, and worked as a courtroom translator.

In the 1980s, at the time of the country's strong economic growth, Taylor was viewed as a "Japan expert" in the mainstream media.

In the mid-1980s, he developed an interest in the emerging fields of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, especially in the controversial works of Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton and Helmuth Nyborg, and came to believe that differences between human beings are largely of genetic origin, and therefore quasi-immutable.

In 1983 he published a well-received book on Japanese culture and business customs entitled Shadows of the Rising Sun: A Critical View of the Japanese Miracle.

While critical of certain aspects of Japanese culture, Taylor argued that Japanese society was more successful in solving social issues than the West, with lower crime rates and a similar or higher standard of living.

Sometime in his early thirties, Taylor reassessed the liberal and cosmopolitan viewpoint commonly professed in his working environment, which he had himself shared until then.

He became deeply convinced that human beings are tribal in nature and feelings, and that they differ in talent, temperament and capacity.

In November 1990, he founded and published the first issue of American Renaissance, a white supremacist subscription-based monthly newsletter.

All the social miracles of Japan, Taylor averred by 1991 under the pen name Steven Howell, were at least partly a result of Japan's racial and cultural homogeneity.

In 1992, Taylor published a book titled Paved with Good Intentions in which he criticizes what he deems the unwise welfare politics that contributed to the economic situation of the African-American underclass.

Unlike many of his American Renaissance articles, the work avoids genetic-based reasoning due to fears of not being able to get it published had he talked about IQ differences.

He created the New Century Foundation in 1994 to assist with the running of American Renaissance.

Many of the early articles were written by Taylor himself and were intended to put white racial advocacy on a higher intellectual level than the traditional Klansman's or white skinhead's discourse that dominated the media at that time.

In 1994, he was called by the defense team in a Fort Worth, Texas black-on-black murder trial, to give expert testimony on the race-related aspects of the case.

Prior to testifying in the trial, Taylor, presented as a "race-relations expert and author" by the Washington Post, called young black men "the most dangerous people in America" and added "This must be taken into consideration in judging whether or not it was realistic for [the defendant] to think this was a kill-or-be-killed situation."

Taylor has been described as a white nationalist, white supremacist, and racist by civil rights groups, news media, academics studying racism in the US, and others.

Taylor has "strenuously rejected" being called a racist, and maintains that he is instead a "racialist who believes in race-realism."

He has also disputed the white supremacist label, preferring to describe himself as a "white advocate", and contends that his views on nationality and race are "moderate, commonsensical, and fully consistent with the views of most of the great statesmen and presidents of America's past".

News coverage of Taylor has associated him with the alt-right.

Taylor is a proponent of scientific racism and voluntary racial segregation.

Taylor also asserts that there are racial differences in intelligence among the various ethno-racial groups across the world.

Taylor argues that Blacks are generally less intelligent than Hispanics, while Hispanics are generally less intelligent than whites, and whites are generally less intelligent than East Asians: "I think Asians are objectively superior to Whites by just about any measure that you can come up with in terms of what are the ingredients for a successful society. This doesn't mean that I want America to become Asian. I think every people has a right to be itself, and this becomes clear whether we're talking about Irian Jaya or Tibet, for that matter".

Taylor describes himself as an advocate for white interests.

He states that his publication, American Renaissance, was founded to provide a voice for such concerns, and argues that its work is analogous to other groups that advocate for ethnic or racial interests.

American Renaissance, however, has been described as a white supremacist publication and a "forum for writers disparaging the abilities of minorities".

In the journal in 2005, he stated, "Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization – any kind of civilization – disappears."

A 2005 feature in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described Taylor as "a racist in the guise of expert".

The journal ceased its print publication in 2012 to focus on a daily webzine format.