White Flight
America’s white supremacists are ignored at home. So they are looking to start over with a little help from Europe’s far right.
![Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance, in Heroes Square, Budapest. Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist publication American Renaissance, in Heroes’ Square, in Budapest, Hungary.](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20141113234542im_/http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2014/11/141111_ROADS_Square.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg)
Photo by Martin Gelin
BUDAPEST, Hungary—In the United States, nobody listens to Jared Taylor. Despite his Ivy League education and polite manners, few people working in politics take him seriously. That’s because he is a white supremacist, although he would prefer to be called a “racial realist.” When he tries to organize a meeting for his publication, American Renaissance, it is typically banned from hotels and conference rooms as soon as the proprietors find out about its racist mission. His ideas obviously hold little sway with established political parties or institutions. Which explains why Taylor traveled to Hungary last month to organize an international conference of white supremacists and anti-immigrant nationalists from more than 10 countries with the express purpose of making common cause with Europe’s own burgeoning far-right political movements. The conference was blandly dubbed “The Future of Europe.”
Taylor and his fellow organizers, the Montana-based white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute, chose Hungary because of the rise of far-right nationalists in that country; they thought it might offer a hospitable environment for their assembly. In fact, it was the opposite. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a member of the leading conservative party who has been criticized for his increasingly authoritarian politics—banned the conference. While Orbán has support from Hungary’s far-right parties, he likely saw this move as an easy way to help position himself as a moderate conservative in the runup to local elections last month. Orbán even ordered police to arrest anyone trying to organize the event. William Regnery, the founder of the National Policy Institute (and heir to the conservative publishing powerhouse Regnery, home to best-sellers from Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, and Edward Klein, among others) was immediately sent back to the United States when he arrived at Budapest’s airport. Richard Spencer, the director of NPI, was arrested in a Budapest pub when he tried to organize a casual gathering of the conference’s attendees. The conference-goers already had been evicted from the hotel where their meeting was scheduled to take place.
Spencer spent the next three days in a Budapest jail, which he didn’t seem to mind. He kept emailing fellow attendees and journalists from his prison cell. When I met Taylor in Budapest, he compared Spencer’s Budapest emails to Martin Luther King’s “Letter From a Birmingham jail.”
Most of the media coverage of the conference centered on Spencer’s arrest. But, even if it was foiled and ill conceived, the entire episode represented something else: It was the first attempt by NPI and American Renaissance to establish a presence in Europe, in an effort to establish a kind of Euro-American partnership for white nationalism, or “Eurocentrism.”
Taylor, Spencer, and the other Americans visiting Budapest see their cause as an uphill battle. The race-industrial complex in America just isn’t what it used to be. By crossing the Atlantic and trying to organize Europe’s disparate far-right groups into a unified movement, they are trying to breathe new life into their own cause. It is an ambitious undertaking coming from two tiny, fringe organizations. The National Policy Institute is based in Whitefish, Montana, and has four employees. Taylor’s American Renaissance, based in the D.C. suburb of Oakton, Virginia, is really just a one-man show.
With Spencer in jail, Taylor became the host of the conference. Despite the fact that the government had forbidden the gathering and informed all attendees that they might be arrested if they went ahead with their plans, 70 of the 135 registered attendees showed up in Budapest, including a Mexican man who claimed to have traveled “10,000 miles.” Others traveled from Britain, Norway, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Spain, Hungary, and Japan, as well as a dozen from the United States. What did they all have in common? “The conviction that Europe is in a life-or-death struggle. Europe can’t remain Europe without Europeans. When we are being replaced by non-Europeans, it threatens our core way of life,” Taylor said.
We were standing in a hotel lobby close to the Buda part of the city, on the western side of the Danube River. Taylor was looking around the lobby anxiously, aware that he might be arrested at any moment. Every man walking by could, in his mind, be a plainclothes Hungarian police officer. But overall Taylor was upbeat. He was happy to be in Europe, where he said things are going in the right direction, referring to the recent voter backlash against immigrants and multiculturalism. “Europeans, like Americans, see their world changing. They never asked for this change. Their neighborhoods are becoming different, and they don’t recognize it anymore. So they are reacting against this,” Taylor said.