In an episode of Jesse Lee Peterson’s online show, the right-wing hate preacher sat down for an interview with Jared Taylor. Despite Peterson being black and Taylor being one of the most well-known white nationalists in the country, the pair found common ground in pathologizing blackness and praising white ingenuity.

This is slightly less surprising given Peterson’s past anti-black rhetoric — an accusation I don’t make lightly. Remember it was Peterson who once thanked God for slavery, since it brought black people from Africa to North America, and said most black people “lack moral character.”

Peterson told Taylor that he finds it “interesting” that certain groups of people “get together and they blame other groups for their failures in life.” Taylor agreed, calling this tendency to blame others “one of the things that most holds black people back” in this country. “This conviction that whitey is out there rubbin’ his hands, tryin’ to think ‘How am I gonna put black people down today?’ White people just don’t think in those terms,” he said.

“But the idea of saying to black people ‘The reason that you are poor and more likely to be in jail is cuz of those white people over there. Those teachers, those police officers, those librarians, those mayors, those congressmen. They’re all trying to do you in.’ That’s a terrible message to send to black people, and I think that if we, as a country, had as one of our objectives to make black people hate white people, that’d be the best way to do it.”

Later in the interview Peterson wondered aloud why it is that “it’s only white people who are able to build a great and free nation, or country.” He claimed that he didn’t “know of any other race or any other country where the dominant race have [sic] been able to do that and everybody want [sic] to go there.” Peterson asked Taylor what it is about white people that made this so.

Evidently this was too harsh even for Taylor, who was actually born in Kobe, Japan. “Well I think you’re not necessarily correct that only whites have done this — the Japanese, for example, or the Koreans. They have built very successful societies in which there is a kind of democracy, a kind of a freedom. The texture of life in Japan is certainly different from that of the United States and it reflects, I think, basic cultural and even deeper differences between those groups.”

Taylor went on to say that if Japan or South Korea were as “open to immigration” as “white countries,” they too would be “swamped with Pakistanis, with Iraqis, with Afghans who’d love to live in a successful, wealthy society.” As for why white people have supposedly been able to accomplish things other races cannot, Taylor chalked that up to superior genes and high levels of trust.