Chris Keane/Reuters
One of America’s most prominent white supremacists is making robocalls in Iowa imploring voters to support Donald Trump. Jared Taylor, the publisher of the white-nationalist American Renaissance website and the author of White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century, is making the calls on behalf of the American National Super PAC, which filed a statement of organization with the Federal Elections Commission late last week.
“I’m Jared Taylor with American Renaissance,” he says on the call, which was first flagged by Talking Points Memo. “I urge you to vote for Donald Trump because he is the one candidate who points out that we should support immigrants who are good for America.
“We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”
Rev. Donald Tan, who TPM identifies as a Filipino-American pastor and talk-show host, also endorses Trump on the call. A press release announcing the robocall effort refers to Trump as the “Great White Hope” and says Tan decided to team up with white nationalists to support Trump because he had been “called of God to make America great again.”
At the end of the Iowa robocall, the group’s treasurer, William Johnson, who filed the statement with the FEC, identifies himself as a “farmer and white nationalist” and says the call has not been authorized by Trump.
Taylor has been a major player in white-nationalist circles since the 1990s and is a spokesman for the racist Council of Conservative Citizens, the ideological heir of the White Citizens Councils, which fought desegregation during the civil-rights era. The CCC was prominently cited in the manifesto of Dylann Roof, who massacred nine people at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, last June. Speaking for the CCC, Taylor denounced the killings while insisting Roof had “legitimate grievances.”
Trump has become an extremely popular figure among white nationalists, who tend to believe that the United States should be dissolved in favor of “ethnostates” and the creation of a white homeland. At a white-nationalist conference held on Halloween in Washington, D.C., Richard Spencer, another leading figure on the far right, praised Trump as an ideological “icebreaker.”
“[W]hat I think he’s done is that he’s delegitimized—and I think he’s to a degree he’s humiliated—mainstream conservatives, the elite of the GOP, and certainly the kind of fuddy-duddy conservative movement types, the National Review,” Spencer told The Daily Beast at the time. “He’s delegitimized them, he’s humiliated them, and I think that opens a space for someone else… it’s not so much Trump per se. It’s not like we think he’s going to save the world. It’s like we finally felt like we’re breaking through, that something’s breaking out, and what comes after Trump is going to be interesting.”
So far, Trump has been reluctant to offer a full-throated condemnation of his white-supremacist fans such as Taylor and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. The robocall, however, may put the Republican frontrunner in a tough position, as it shows some white nationalists are now actively campaigning on his behalf. As Taylor himself told The New Yorker over the summer: “I’m sure he would repudiate any association with people like me, but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit.”—The Daily Beast