On the May 16, 2016 episode of This Alt-Right Life, Matt Forney interviewed longtime white nationalist leader and American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor, who expressed his optimism in a prospective Trump presidency.

Taylor, currently hosting AmRen’s 14th annual conference in Tennessee, boasted of how white nationalist beliefs were becoming more mainstream, especially with the rise of Donald Trump. The pair also discussed the need for white nationalism, and the desire for preserving white heritage and white culture.

Matt Forney insisted that his interest in the alt-right stems not from malice for non-whites (though his own writings on non-whites make this far from believable) but rather a desire for “what other people have,” which is self-preservation. Repeating a portion of Bob Whitaker’s “Mantra,” Forney stated that every other racial group has the  “right to preserve their culture and their patrimony,” which means white people must, accordingly, have the same rights.

Jared Taylor agreed, and denounced the Southern Poverty Law Center for “pioneer[ing] this idea that, somehow, anyone who dissents from racial orthodoxy is a loathsome creature that really deserves to stay under a flat, flat rock.”

The SPLC, he said, wants to shut “racial dissidents” like himself up, and deny them “access to the airwaves, to television, or to mainstream print media” by classifying them as “hatemongers.” Taylor also echoed the point Forney previously made, noting that he and other white nationalists are afraid of being displaced by non-whites, and of the white race going “extinct.”

“And therefore, to me, the whole purpose of being a racial dissident is to explain, as you just pointed out, all we want really is to be left alone. We want the right to establish our own society, our own communities, and let our destiny develop free from the unwanted embrace of others.”

Forney: Another fine example is, I attended the NPI conference in Washington, D.C. in October. Me and my friend were coming in after having to go to the iPhone store for an unrelated incidence and we get cornered by this reporter from The Daily Beast, who was this sort of cute, youngish, 21, bottle-blonde and she’s, like, asking kind of very basic questions like, “What do you do inside of these conferences? What attracted you to such an outsider movement?”

And we’re like, what do we do? We sit around and we drink coffee and we talk about, you know, preserving our culture, you know? It’s not like some kind of Bohemian Grove-type thing. We’re not sacrificing, you know, goats or whatever. We’re just ordinary people who want to see our country sort of, see our nations being invaded, taken over, and we want to, you know…We want what other people have, you know? You’ve got the, some of the alt-right memes have become a bit trite, you know? It’s like, you know, “Africa for Africans, Asia for Asians, white countries for everyone else.” But you know, if everyone else has the right to preserve their culture and their patrimony, so do we, you know? We didn’t [unintelligible] out of a reflexive hatred of everyone but, you know just basic self-preservation.

Taylor: Of course. The Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] has pioneered this idea that, somehow, anyone who dissents from racial orthodoxy is a loathsome creature that really deserves to stay under a flat, flat rock. Their goal is not to show that we are wrong. Their goal is, if possible, completely to shut us up, make sure that we have no access to the airwaves, to television, or to mainstream print media. And, if it is not possible to shut us up entirely, their goal is to depict us as hatemongers. And the idea there, of course, is that anyone who is motivated by hate is blinded to reality, blinded to morality. And anyone who is blind to reality and to morality, and someone whom the SPLC designates as a hatemonger is someone that the rest of the country can simply ignore. That is their purpose.

It would be much better for us if they actually tried to grapple with our ideas. But of course that is the last thing they wish to do. I think that, at some level, they know they would have a very, very difficult time grappling with the points that we make. The one that you made, for example, that for every other racial group, and for every non-white country, it is taken for granted that they should preserve their heritage, that they should be proud of their origins, that as far as every non-white nation is concerned that they should preserve their national majorities and their heritage and their national culture.

It is only for whites, and exclusively for whites, that somehow morality demands that they let every group in the world into their countries even if it means that they are diluted physically — even genetically — even if it means that ultimately whites will go extinct because they’re pushed out by non-whites. This is a suicidal double standard, and I have never, ever heard anyone even attempt to explain why this double standard is legitimate. And therefore, to me, the whole purpose of being a racial dissident is to explain, as you just pointed out, all we want really is to be left alone. We want the right to establish our own society, our own communities, and let our destiny develop free from the unwanted embrace of others.

Taylor went off on a tangent about diversity after Forney claimed it was terrible for people of all races, stating that Forney was incorrect in his assessment. After all, Taylor said, if a person is “living in the black ghetto” and cannot leave the house without “having to duck gunfire” or see “crack whores” and “drug dealers,” then diversity might be a benefit. By “diversity,” Taylor means integrating black people into largely white neighborhoods which, he believes, is an attempt by liberals to civilize them.

“I think their purpose is one which they think that if these people from the black ghettos can live in middle class neighborhoods that they will somehow absorb the good habits — the idea of being married and getting a job — they will absorb the good habits of the people in whose neighborhoods they live, and that they will also benefit with better schools, perhaps from the cleaner environment, this would be good for them without being bad for the whites,” he said.

Taylor: Well I have to disagree with the idea that diversity is always detrimental to certain people. If you are living in the black ghetto and you can’t step out [of] your house without having to duck gunfire, if you can’t go ’round the corner without finding crack whores, you can’t find — without finding drug dealers, then probably you’re going to be better off if Section 8 housing puts you in the midst of well-behaved white people.

There can be benefits to certain people from being taken outside of their communities. Obviously though, for the whites, onto whom this kind of diversity has been parachuted against their wills, it is a terrible plague. Those people probably will then bring some of their habits with them, and before long, if there’s a sufficient number of them, then once again you’ll have drug dealers and crack whores around the corner. You’ll just have them surrounded by horrified white people.

But to give Barack Obama and the people who work for him at least the benefit of the doubt, I don’t honestly think that their purpose to bring and to drag down white people. I think their purpose is one which they think that if these people from the black ghettos can live in middle class neighborhoods that they will somehow absorb the good habits — the idea of being married and getting a job — they will absorb the good habits of the people in whose neighborhoods they live, and that they will also benefit with better schools, perhaps from the cleaner environment, this would be good for them without being bad for the whites.

I don’t think that there are very many people out there who are rubbing their hands and saying to themselves, “Okay, how are we going to destroy white people? Let’s turn loose the most degenerate, ghetto black people in their neighborhoods and watch ’em squirm.” I really don’t think that Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama actually think in those terms. Of course, every one of these experiments of trying to uplift blacks by putting them in white neighborhoods or in white schools has failed.

You can spend millions and millions of dollars busing black children into white schools, having them sit next to whites in class, having them take instructions from the very same teachers, and you do not improve their academic performance. This has been shown over and over and over again. In terms of having black people live among whites, there are going to be some blacks who will benefit from being protected from the environment that blacks in large numbers very frequently produce. But this comes at a terrible cost to the whites on whom they are inflicted.

Taylor revealed that he is currently more optimistic than ever before, due to the ease at which young white people can access white supremacist literature and videos. He credits this to both the rise of Donald Trump — whom, he says, cannot simply be dismissed as a racist — and the advancement of technology.

“Today with a few clicks of a mouse a young white man can stumble onto a wonderfully diverse and rich selection of introductions and then even graduate courses on what it is to be a white man today,” he claimed.

This is certainly true, since this is how Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof became radicalized.

As he wrote in his manifesto, he was “awakened” by the Trayvon Martin case, and felt compelled to “type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google.” He stumbled upon the website for the Council of Conservative Citizens, which had “pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders.” This led him both to question whether or not there was a media cover-up of black-on-white crimes, and to his embrace of virulently racist beliefs.

Taylor: I’m more optimistic now than I have been at any point in 25 years of trying to wake white people up to this terrible crisis that they face. I think that Donald Trump is certainly an important ingredient in that. I think even without Donald Trump, though, there has been a huge proliferation of websites, of podcasts, of video production, publishers. We have a whole sector of thought, of groups, of a message that is out and available to people in a way that was never the case before.

The truth is more easily available than any time in the last 50 or 60 years. And much of what we are producing in terms of ideas, podcasts, videos, et cetera, books, is of very high quality, very persuasive. When I was first learning about racial reality — and I grew up a conventional liberal, and I abandoned conventional liberalism with a great struggle and with great regret — but, in those days, 30 or 40 years ago, you had to write off to obscure PO boxes to find subversive literature. You had to scratch around in the dusty corners of university libraries to find books that’d [been] written before the Iron Curtain fell on realistic talk about race. It was a much greater effort.

Today with a few clicks of a mouse a young white man can stumble onto a wonderfully diverse and rich selection of introductions and then even graduate courses on what it is to be a white man today, and why what we are taught in school right from kindergarten is poison and must be washed out of our systems.

It’s never been easier for people to see the light, and that’s a huge, huge thing and we see the effects all the time. I’m always meeting young white guys in their 20’s, some of them in their teens — they understand race in a thorough, and consistent, and well-formed way that I didn’t understand until I was 35. Maybe in my late 30’s. There is a remarkable progress in that respect, that has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

Of course, I don’t want to underplay his importance. He is a guy who cannot be shut up! And when he says, “What do we need more Muslims for?”, well that becomes part of the national dialogue. I’ve been saying for 25 years we don’t need any more Muslims, but I can be ignored. The SPLC can say I’m a hatemonger and then people will ignore me. The SPLC can say all it wants that Donald Trump is a hatemonger, but if he is the Republican nominee, then he is in an entirely different position.

And when people start thinking in those terms, “Well, wait a minute, are Muslims really of any use to the United States?” Then the next step, of course, is to say, “Well, are there any other groups that are of no use to the United States? What do, oh, Guatemalans, for example, bring to our country? What do Somalis bring to our country? What do Haitians bring to America? Do we really need 30,000,000 Mexicans living in this country?” When you start thinking in terms of group differences, then the camel’s nose is under the tent. That opens the door to all kinds, all kinds of anti-orthodox, subversive thinking. And so Donald Trump has played a huge role in breaking down the gates of orthodoxy and making it possible to raise these questions in a way that they’ve never been raised, at a level at which they’ve never been raised ever before.

Taylor also lauded Donald Trump’s policy proposals, from building a wall along the southern border (which Mexico would somehow be forced to foot the bill for), to the mass expulsion of undocumented immigrants, to his suggested temporary ban on Muslim immigrants. Taylor stated that it “would be wonderful if he did these things,” but warned that it “look very bad” if he changed his mind about them. Nonetheless, Taylor continued to heap praise on Trump, commending him for his “good instincts.”

“Donald Trump is the only candidate in the last 50 years of whom I could realistically imagine his tossing off to a group of journalists a question such as, Well, what’s wrong with white people wanting to remain a majority in their own country?” he gushed. “I can imagine him saying that. He will not necessarily, but I can imagine it.”

Forney: What are your thoughts on a potential Donald Trump presidency and the effects he would have for America, and for whites in general?

Taylor: It’s very hard to say, of course. We’d like to believe that he will follow through on his promises, that he will build a wall, that he will expel all the illegals, that he will even temporarily stop immigration of Muslims. It would be wonderful if he did these things, and he might very well. These are the trademarks of his campaign, as well as other things such as bringing industrial jobs back to the United States. He has other appeals, but for us, those are, to me, the three main aspects of his appeal.

I think that he has committed himself so strongly to those ideas that it would look very bad if he were to back out on them. Even if he did only those things and nothing more, that would be a radical transformation of the way America does politics when it comes to immigration, and that would be a wonderful thing.

We can then imagine a Donald Trump who goes even further. Donald Trump is the only candidate in the last 50 years of whom I could realistically imagine his tossing off to a group of journalists a question such as, “Well, what’s wrong with white people wanting to remain a majority in their own country?” I can imagine him saying that. He will not necessarily, but I can imagine it. I cannot imagine any other candidate ever saying such a thing.

I can even imagine him saying, “Well you know, ultimately, you just can’t expect as many blacks per capita to be in the advanced placement courses because they’re just not as smart.” I mean I can imagine that with a little bit greater difficulty than the remark about being majorities, but that too is not an utterly inconceivable thing for Donald Trump to say. And if the president of the United States makes remarks of that kind, they simply cannot be brushed aside.

I mean, I’ve been making that kind of remark, as I say, for 25 years. I can be ignored by the mainstream. The president cannot. And he is a person who is actually, I think, perhaps capable of saying such things.

Now I agree one hundred percent with you. He is not a sophisticated racialist. He does not have a well-formulated understanding of the significance of race, the biology of race, the inextricable relationship between race and culture. I don’t think he sees the world in those terms. What I see in Donald Trump is simply good instincts. He has good instincts that have survived all this onslaught of egalitarianism, this multi-culti lunacy. None of that has been able to beat out of Donald Trump the notion that groups of people are, in fact, different; that America is a country that deserves our support because it’s America and it’s ours, and it’s our country, rather than thinking that America should play some sort of self-sacrificing role for the benefit of the world at large.

Perhaps the biggest red flag came when Taylor speculated that a hypothetical Trump administration would attract scores of white nationalists to it. These people may not publicly identify as such, but they will secretly listen to white nationalist podcasts and read white nationalist websites. This infiltration, as Taylor put it, would be “extremely useful both to Trump and to us.”

Taylor: On the other hand, there is an aspect of this that very few people are talking about. If there actually is a Trump presidency, he will attract, at all sorts of levels in his administration, people who do think the way we do. Even though they’re not publicly associated with racial dissidents, or white advocacy. He will attract people who read our web pages, who listen to our podcasts, and they will work in all sorts of very, very useful ways in all levels of his administration to bring about sensible policies.

I think I can also imagine that some of them, they will be caught out, oh, saying rude things about blacks or rude things about Mexico, and there will be little scandals here and there. But there will be a great number who will infiltrate his administration, his campaign, his advisers in ways that cannot but be extremely useful both to Trump and to us.