Black Attack
In 1990, Jared Taylor, a Yale graduate who had spent 17 years working in Japan, joined the active white supremacist scene with his launching of American Renaissance, a magazine focusing on the alleged links between race and intelligence and on eugenics, the discredited "science" of breeding better human beings. The magazine scrupulously avoided racist epithets, employed the language of academic journals, and sought to put a palatable face on hate (though that didn't stop Taylor from describing blacks as "deviant," dissipated" and "pathological," or later writing a booklet that claimed that blacks are far more "crime-prone" than whites).

At the same time, Taylor made it clear that he had no problem with Jews. At the group's very first conference, held in Atlanta in 1994, the dinner speaker was a rabbi named Mayer Schiller, and the meal was kosher. Taylor banned discussion of the so-called "Jewish question" from American Renaissance venues, and, by 1997, had kicked Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis off his E-mail list. In recent years, a growing number of Jews have attended Taylor's conferences.

But Taylor, who operates in a world that is peopled with anti-Semites as well as black-bashing "white nationalists," also tried to have it both ways.

Atlanta lawyer Sam Dickson, for instance, has been invited to speak at every one of Taylor's biannual conferences -- despite a long history of Holocaust denial that includes membership on the editorial board of The Barnes Review, a journal that specializes in that topic. Joe Sobran, a columnist fired from the National Review for his anti-Semitism and repeat author for the Holocaust-denying Journal of Historical Review, gave a speech on Jewish power at Taylor's 2004 conference. Don Black, the former Klan leader who runs the neo-Nazi Stormfront web forum, has attended many conferences and visited Taylor's home. Another attendee and old Taylor pal, Mark Weber, heads up the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review.

Taylor, whose journal and conferences were fast becoming key institutions of the American radical right, tried to keep internal peace. But that was not to be.

In 2003, a remarkable E-mail debate between the late racist writer Sam Francis and neo-Nazi lawyer Victor Gerhard was made public by Gerhard. In it, Francis, widely regarded as the leading white nationalist intellectual in America, lambasted Gerhard, who had been an official of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, for his views of the Jews. He denounced what he saw as "a monomaniacal obsession with the omnipotent Jew" and instead discussed the threat of blacks and Hispanics. The E-mail exchange was widely circulated on the American radical right.

The same period saw several groups -- the Social Contract Press, the Charles Martel Society (publisher of The Occidental Quarterly), the Pioneer Fund, the Council of Conservative Citizens and the recently formed National Policy Institute -- focus in on the perceived ills of blacks, Hispanics and Muslims. Joining them was a new crop of racist intellectuals with no interest in the Jews.

Taylor, it seemed, could not stop the inevitable. The split between those who saw Jews as the primary enemy and the others was bubbling to the surface.

Battle of Words
The biggest threat to Jared Taylor's balancing act has always been David Duke, the former leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who has also been a convinced neo-Nazi since his teens. Duke, who came close to winning a campaign for Louisiana governor in 1992, was for years a celebrity on the radical right. Still, Taylor has sought to discourage Duke from attending his American Renaissance conferences ever since Duke crashed the first one in 1994. But even in years when he didn't enter the hall, Duke was often found outside, talking to participants.

It wasn't just Duke, either. Over the years, more and more participants at Taylor's conferences were Duke allies -- most notably, Don Black and supporters of Black's Stormfront website, including Stormfront moderator Jamie Kelso.

This year, the Duke/Black/Kelso crew was larger than ever. In an interview with the Intelligence Report, Kelso said that he had organized a contingent of some 75 Stormfront supporters to come to the conference. And these supporters were the most enthusiastic members of the 300-strong audience, standing and applauding each speaker after receiving the signal to do so from Kelso. They were also not the only anti-Semites present. Others, not affiliated with Stormfront, included Kevin Alfred Strom of Virginia, leader of the neo-Nazi National Vanguard group; Hal Turner, a neo-Nazi radio host from New Jersey; and David Pringle of Alaska, the former membership coordinator of the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

As a result, the Duke-Hart clash, which occurred on the last day of the conference, rapidly assumed epic proportions, spinning out across the entire radical right. Just days later, Duke published an essay on the conference, expressing deep admiration for Taylor as a man with the courage to tell the truth on race. But he went on to say that non-white immigration and a host of other ills "all have been driven by Jewish extremists in their relentless search for supremacy." Hart, Duke added tartly, had risen "in an almost perfect Jewish caricature and started to scream at me."

That set off an often testy back-and-forth between the two sides.

From London, Nick Griffin, a conference speaker who also heads the whites-only British National Party, denounced those who see behind every evil some kind of "world-Jewish conspiracy." Griffin's BNP, which harshly attacks Muslims and other British minorities, made major electoral gains this May -- a success that Griffin thinks would be undermined by neo-Nazi attacks on Jews. In his essay, Griffin suggested that Jews are a natural ally in the battle against Islam.

Black, on the other hand, threatened to pull his anti-Semitic supporters out of Taylor's conferences. "I guess that would solve the overcrowding problem," Black wrote. "Not only would he cut loose the ... Stormfronters, but, should he apply such an ideological filter [barring anti-Semites], about 90% of his other attendees."

Lawrence Auster, a former American Renaissance speaker who also is a Christian convert with Jewish ancestry, chimed in on his own blog, describing Duke as "a major Jew-hater and an attention hog" and asking Taylor how he could be so "naïve as to allow Duke to attend at all." Another poster to Auster's site added, "It is imperative that neo-Nazis be asked to leave AR. ... European-Americans need to be assured they can affirm themselves and still be decent human beings."

In the end, nearly every "intellectual" on the white nationalist scene was pulled into the debate. So hot was the months-long exchange, in fact, that more than half a dozen major racist thinkers agreed to speak to the Intelligence Report.