Many Americans and some Europeans will now recognize the name of Trump’s recently fired “Border Patrol Chief” Gregory Bovino. A smaller number may be familiar with Jared Taylor, founder of the longstanding white nationalist and “race realist” website American Renaissance and the New Century Foundation. In late May, European white supremacists took photos with both men at the second annual Remigration Summit in Portugal, where Bovino was a featured speaker, and Taylor was a VIP guest. The summit’s slogan was “shaping the future of Europe and the West through sovereignty, identity, and demographic renewal.” Remigration, a term successfully pushed by Austrian Martin Sellner and adopted by the Trump administration, describes a collection of Nazi-inspired policies to remove immigrants and even some citizens. To a standing ovation, Bovino presented mass deportation efforts in the United States as an example for Europe. Taylor was scheduled to speak in Paris several days later, hosted by extremist group Les Natifs, but the French government cancelled the event. The cancellation of that event and its attempted replacement in Versailles provided new material for the victimhood narrative across several far-right platforms, though it received little mainstream press coverage. Opportunizing these circumstances, Taylor published the contents of his speech on the website of the far-right Arktos journal under the title “Jared Taylor’s Banned Conference Speech: The American (European) Dilemma.”
Taylor has long aspired to be taken seriously as an academic and scholar of the most existential civilizational questions. In addition to such appearances in Europe and at American colleges where he has called for a “racial divorce,” Taylor has written numerous books and essays on American race relations, white identity, and immigration. His 2020 If We Do Nothing collects essays “from 25 years of white advocacy.” He also organizes an annual gathering in Tennessee. Convening since 1994, American Renaissance conferences have been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “suit-and-tie affairs that attract a broad spectrum of participants from the racist right, including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members, Holocaust deniers and eugenicists” from around the world. Despite the dress code, registrants are reminded they can use an alias; the organization cannot accept credit cards; and at least one disruption has occurred over the place of antisemitism in the far-right agenda.
American Renaissance’s deep well of pseudo-intellectual reviews matters not only because they deliver white nationalist talking points, but because they imitate one of the traditional academy’s most recognizable insider genres.
Nevertheless, the interests of this group are not entirely different from those of more typical academic conference-goers; for one thing, they read and write a lot of long book reviews. American Renaissance’s deep well of pseudo-intellectual reviews matters not only because they deliver white nationalist talking points, but because they imitate one of the traditional academy’s most recognizable insider genres. Just as the far right’s use of poetry acts as a legitimizing form of high-cultural production and participation, so too do these reviews.
A Family Affair
Aping traditional academic discourse is an enduring white supremacist strategy. A notable example is Mankind Quarterly. Since its 1961 launch by disgraced researchers (including a former Nazi scientist), this journal has, in the apt words of Cassie Miller, “taken eugenicist thinking and flavored it with academic jargon…to enforce a self-referential ‘scientific’ community among academic racists.” As Anglo-Indian writer Angela Saini traced in her 2019 book Superior, networks of self-citing bad-faith academics are to blame for the survival of many of society’s most harmful ideas.
For Taylor and his compatriots, the exclusion from respectable academic publishing clearly hurts.
For Taylor and his compatriots, the exclusion from respectable academic publishing clearly hurts. The AmRen storefront strains to justify why Gedahlia Braun’s Racism, Guilt, Self-Hatred, and Self-Deceit is available only from the author as a $12 PDF. “Since the subject is race,” Jared Taylor’s review explains, “this book has not found a commercial publisher.” Never mind that credible books on race are highly marketable. Taylor’s response to another book he mainly approves of, Robert Sternberg’s edited collection The Nature of Human Intelligence, reveals his yearning for a legacy press imprimatur: “It’s published by Cambridge University Press, which was founded in 1534 and is probably the most prestigious publisher in the world.” Taylor’s review accuses “our rulers” of ignoring the implications of this book because of their obsession with egalitarianism and fear of white supremacy.
The American Renaissance reviews replicate the insularity of the broader white supremacist community. Jared Taylor and another white nationalist, Kevin DeAnna, are responsible for most of the American Renaissance book reviews, along with a few other longtime contributors such as Thomas Jackson, Robert Hampton, and Roger Moore, using the pseudonym F. Roger Devlin. DeAnna has written thousands of posts for right-wing conspiracy and anti-immigration sites like WorldNetDaily and VDARE, often pseudonymously as Gregory Hood or James Kirkpatrick. DeAnna’s writing has shaped what Hannah Gais described as “the alt-right’s more ‘intellectual’ wing, bridging the thought of the chin-stroking racist paleoconservatives with that of more traditional white nationalism.” Praised by Taylor as “the best writer” of his generation and possibly “in the entire movement,” DeAnna has written for American Renaissance since 2008.
Many of the books reviewed are written for them and by them, published by their authors, by small identitarian presses, and in some cases by mainstream companies. Books received positively have titles such as Eugenics: A Reassessment, The White Nationalist Manifesto, and The Diversity Delusion. Paul Gottfried—a prominent Paleoconservative intellectual who influenced the American “alt-right” personality Richard Spencer and has written books critiquing the managerial state—thanked American Renaissance for their flattering review of his 2021 Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade. In that response, Gottfried claimed that the “increasingly repressive Left…seeks to destroy all traditional human relations and to abolish our civilization” while he dismissed fascism as only a “phantom danger.” This type of rhetoric is common in articles and reviews across the website.
Many of the books reviewed are written for them and by them, published by their authors, by small identitarian presses, and in some cases by mainstream companies.
A “Declaration of Incompatibility”
Many of these long essays abandon the book under review to reiterate their favorite topoi and trigger fears about immigration and black crime.
Beyond books that intentionally support movement ideology, AmRen reviewers self-qualify to analyze works on practically any subject. But many of these long essays, while providing some legitimate content, abandon the book under review to reiterate their favorite topoi and trigger fears about immigration and black crime.
As a propaganda outlet, American Renaissance systematically reads books as separatist justifications. For example, Taylor’s review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me concludes, “This book and the reaction to it are yet more evidence that blacks and undeceived whites live in different mental worlds. They should formalize the break and separate.” Gregory Hood’s review of political commentator Elie Mystal’s 2022 Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution is sarcastically titled “A Brilliant Defense of White Nationalism.” Hood sizes the book up as “an unwitting declaration of incompatibility” and as evidence that the “racially aware men” who wrote the Constitution “didn’t go far enough. Mr. Mystal’s presence on this continent is proof of that.” The “break” mentioned by Taylor is meant literally—for decades he has opposed multiculturalism and non-white immigration while advocating for voluntary separation of the races.
A common tactic in these reviews is to claim that nearly any book about American history contains a warning about immigrants and Black people taking over a country made by and for whites, regardless of the original writer’s intention. Many conclude with a call to take action. In the space I have here, I will share only a few examples.
In response to Peter Silver’s prize-winning 2008 frontier history, Our Savage Neighbors, a reviewer called Robert Hampton complains about Silver’s “relentlessly progressive…treatment of white settlers, endlessly retelling stories of cowardly white settlers either fleeing from attack or slaughtering peace-loving Indians.” Hampton reinterprets the book as a story about “a shared white identity” that emerged amongst diverse frontiersmen. As European groups came together against “a shared enemy,” Hampton argues, their “commonality was not equal rights or natural law. It was race.” And though “these foundational Americans kept this identity well into the 20th century,” the author bemoans the midcentury end of white supremacy: “Only after the Second World War, with Indians relegated to the past, did white Americans lose touch with their nation’s foundational identity.” Without a racial enemy, the narrative goes, white Americans no longer knew themselves or their country.
Gregory Hood wrote a mixed review for former Portuguese foreign minister Bruno Maçães’ 2020 book History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. Hood confirms the central thesis that contemporary media has weakened American identity, but he rejects the need for racial justice. For Hood, white freedom requires “being free to live away from blacks.” In the egalitarian society proposed by Maçães, Hood observes, “we [white people] are slaves.” Cartwheeling away from the book, Hood ticks off a series of historical tableaux in which whites’ “experience with blacks” and other non-whites revealed racial inequality. “Race-realism began,” Hood explains, when peaceful groups like the Scots-Irish frontiersmen were forced to fight Indians. Today’s social problems are blamed on integration, which Maçães’ “own blindness about racial reality” prevents him from understanding as well as his reviewer.
Hood closes with two of his set pieces. First, he calls for a new narrative: “Our rulers’ media mouthpieces tell a story about ineradicable white guilt. We have a better story to tell.” Second, he calls for action: “History demands everything from us, and we have a duty to give it everything we have.”
A third representative example is Gregory Hood’s review of David McCullough’s 2019 book, The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West. The book’s title alone is encouraging to Hood, who gushes, “This isn’t the popular version of American history today. When an eminent historian writes the ‘Heroic Story of the Settlers,’ it’s eye-opening.” This excitement recalls Taylor’s discovery of The Nature of Human Intelligence.
McCullough’s narrative of the first 18th-century Americans to establish themselves in the Northwest Territory identifies religious freedom, public education, and the refusal of slavery among their lasting contributions, though reviews from outlets such as NPR fairly note the author’s lack of attention to Native American experiences. Ohio’s slavery ban is presented as progressive thinking, but Hood sees a different benefit: “Whether intended or not, this guaranteed the territory would be almost entirely white.” The story told by McCullough, according to Hood, “remind[s] whites that our country was not ‘built by immigrants.’ Pioneers and conquerors built it, and to do so they had to defeat warrior tribes.” He honors the book as “a profile of white people at their best.”
But the review soon darkens with the familiar “warning for white advocates.” Riffing off McCullough’s remark that “Only the Indian [place]names were to remain” after whites took their land, Hood addresses 21st-century white Americans:
If we do nothing, whites won’t even have that…[E]very day we hear of another school or street renamed, a statue destroyed, a symbol desecrated. Settlers worked, fought, and sacrificed to create a ‘rising empire,’ but their descendants have been unable to keep it…We owe it to our ancestors to reclaim it, no matter the odds…We are the heirs of heroes.
Employing the far-right strategy of appropriating the language of indigenous struggle, DeAnna (again, here writing under the alias Gregory Hood) echoes Jared Taylor’s essay collection title, If We Do Nothing.
“Loads of Heresy” and The Question of Writing Back to Racism
While real harms can result from the disinformation on sites like American Renaissance, the response from credible authors has been minimal. I have contacted some of the writers reviewed on American Renaissance, and all but one agreed that their books are misrepresented. But most have been unwilling to write back and challenge these reviews, for reasons of personal discomfort or fear of reprisal. When I began researching this several years ago, I contacted Heidi Beirich, former head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project and a founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. About the responsibilities of authors, Beirich stated:
I’ve always wished academics would take on these perversions of their work more directly. That said, confronting white supremacists often leads to threats—it has in my case.
Beirich was also concerned that “these reviews can/will be taken seriously and proliferate online among extremists because they are not being challenged” and that, “given the lack of media literacy in this country, students and others may actually take the reviews seriously.” These falsely authoritative texts are attractive to the in-group and to potential recruits, so it seems important to address them.
American Renaissance is only one dissemination site of pseudo-academic and racist book reviews. Other far-right sites like Unz Review and Counter-currents provide plenty of the same and frequently cross-post reviews. We should also examine the genre more closely in respected conservative publications like National Review, along with open-access platforms like Amazon.com. For example, in one National Review discussion of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book The Message, Manhattan Institute fellow Tal Fortgang dismisses Coates as nothing more than a “grifter” who has become the “darling oracle of race-obsessed Americans” by intentionally exploiting the myth of an ongoing race war against Blacks.
We should also examine the genre more closely in respected conservative publications like National Review, along with open-access platforms like Amazon.com.
Fortgang’s remark that “the most basic facts…actually point the other direction” would fit in on any of the openly racist, white-nationalist sites fearmongering about the Black threat to white America. One National Review commenter chimes in to call Coates an “Uncle Tom.” Amazon.com, which must be the book review repository with the widest American audience, is replete with racist books and racist reviews. Beirich observed, “You can find a whole lot of similar content on Amazon reviews of legit scholarship where extremists have taken over the debate in the comments.” Beirich’s 2008 book, Neo-Confederacy, was attacked in that space.
Unfortunately, the liberation of book reviews from mainstream publications also furthers the white supremacist trajectory. In Taylor’s 2012 letter to readers about transitioning into a fully online organization, he gloated:
Now, of course, traditional publishers can no longer control what the public reads…and loads of heresy slip past the gatekeepers.
Taylor celebrated the internet’s potential to introduce even “a 12-year-old with a computer” to the “universe of heretical ideas.” Warning that “it will take a great deal of work to move our ideas fully into the mainstream or to begin to shape policy,” he also noted, “And yet, race realism is clearly spreading.”
Indeed, in the years since Taylor’s letter, we have all seen the racist right brazenly reinstall itself in the American and European mainstream. But this, we should understand, is much less surprising to white nationalist propaganda writers like Taylor. Officials like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have positioned themselves to “control what the public reads” by removing books from schools, creating K-12 curriculum, rewriting college textbooks, and diminishing faculty autonomy.
The question we should all be asking ourselves is what happens next if we do nothing about the multiplying iterations of the white supremacist false narrative.
The question we should all be asking ourselves is what happens next if we do nothing about the multiplying iterations of the white supremacist false narrative—what Taylor calls the “loads of heresy”—appearing simultaneously in many forms, such as these disingenuous reviews that revise the texts of history and science one at a time.
Laura Jeffries is Professor of English at Florida State College at Jacksonville, where she teaches British literature, literary responses to imperialism, and writing about contexts of American race and ethnicity. Publications include articles situating Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” in its original American magazine provenance along with its afterlife in white supremacist meme culture; the intersections of British religious and political history; and language use among young women posting on YouTube. She writes Narrative Nation on Substack and is developing a book titled “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative. Contact: laurakjeffries@gmail.com.
Image made using only images in the public domain.
