If there’s one person most responsible for resurgent white nationalism, it’s William H. Regnery II.
The scion of a wealthy conservative family, he started and funded nonprofits and journals based on the idea that white people are under attack from inferior minorities.
And, in what he described as his crowning achievement, he turned over his National Policy Institute to Richard Spencer, who has become the public face of the new white nationalism movement that rode President Donald Trump’s coattails over the last year.
As he moved from the GOP establishment to an “alt-right” mentor, Regnery has consorted with Ku Klux Klan apologists, anti-Semites and boosters of carving a white-only “ethnostate” out of the United States.
We profiled Regnery in a story last week. Here, from public records, is a closer look at some of his associates.
The Ku Klux Klan defender
Name: Sam Dickson, Atlanta lawyer
Ties to Regnery: Board member of the Charles Martel Society and National Policy Institute, nonprofits founded by Regnery
Background: A onetime segregationist candidate for lieutenant governor of Georgia, Dickson has represented former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Spencer and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He once invited British Holocaust denier David Irving to the Atlanta suburbs for a speech on World War II history.
Perspective: Dickson contends that President Abraham Lincoln was a leftist responsible for atrocities during the Civil War, and he faults Thomas Jefferson for larding the Declaration of Independence with “senseless notions of liberty.” He says the U.S. is being colonized by minority groups allied with “sociopathic whites like the Clintons and Bushes.”
Quote: “We have to plan our utopia of the future, our ethnostate.”
The host of ‘Political Cesspool’
Name: James Edwards, Memphis radio host
Ties to Regnery: Martel Society board member
Background: “The Political Cesspool,” a weekly talk show, offers an “unapologetically pro-White viewpoint,” Edwards says. Guests have included Duke, Holocaust deniers from the anti-Semitic Institute for Historical Review and, in 2016, Donald Trump Jr. The candidate’s son later claimed that he was duped into an interview.
Edwards is on the board of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. Its website featured lurid accounts of black-on-white crime. It inspired mass murderer Dylann Roof, who killed nine African Americans in a South Carolina church in 2015.
Perspective: Edwards is “Pro-Christian (God), Pro-White (Family), Pro South (Republic)” and opposes “abortion, feminism and homosexuality,” according to his radio show’s statement of principles. He blames “Zio-Hollywood moguls” for promoting violence, drugs and “sexual degeneracy.”
For years, he fought a City of Memphis plan to remove a statue of Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former slave trader and KKK leader. Edwards is the author of a 2010 self-published book, “Racism, Schmacism: How Liberals Use the ‘R’ Word to Push the Obama Agenda.”
Quote: “Anyone who stands against the Confederate flag also stands against Christians and are anti-American.”
The white advocate
Name: Kevin MacDonald, retired college professor
Ties to Regnery: Editor of The Occidental Quarterly, a journal founded by Regnery
Background: MacDonald has written academic-style books that portray Jews as “an elite hostile toward White America.” He serves as director of the American Freedom Party, allegedly founded by neo-Nazi skinheads. A Southern Poverty Law Center exposé accusing McDonald of anti-Semitism made him the target of protests at California State University, Long Beach, where he had tenure in the psychology department. He retired from teaching in 2014. He denies anti-Semitism, saying he is a “white advocate.”
Perspective: MacDonald complains that Jews control the media and use their influence to make whites “powerless and victimized minorities.” In a 2012 essay called “Disenfranchised White Males: Time for Secession,” he argues that white men in the U.S. face the choice of political impotence or “futile violence” against the government.
Quote: “Righteous anger is an entirely appropriate response for Whites whose cultural and demographic displacement is now well-advanced as a result of Jewish activism.”
The racialist
Name: Jared Taylor, Virginia editor
Ties to Regnery: Board member of the Charles Martel Society and National Policy Institute
Background: Educated at Yale University, fluent in Japanese and a former editor at The Washington Times, Taylor runs the white nationalist think tank New Century Foundation. His American Renaissance website has featured posts contending that black people are inferior to white people and prone to crime. He refers to himself as a “racialist” and his website as “race realist.” Taylor’s book “Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America,” argues that racial integration is wrongheaded and unworkable. His writing inspired Spencer.
Perspective: Taylor denies that he is racist. After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, he wrote, “We have Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy that they (white people) thought could never wash up on these shores.” His refusal to embrace anti-Semitism has alienated some on the far right. Taylor once told a TV interviewer that Jews “look white to me.” Last year, his longtime girlfriend sent a letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center denying she was Jewish.
Quote: “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization – any kind of civilization – disappears.”
The Holocaust denier
Name: John Gardner, retired Texas lawyer
Ties to Regnery: Onetime publisher of The Occidental Quarterly and a board member of the National Policy Institute
Background: Gardner writes for The Occidental Quarterly and the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, using the pen name Yggdrasil – the “tree of life” in Norse mythology. He is among Stormfront’s biggest donors, Stormfront founder Don Black told the Southern Poverty Law Center. In a 2005 fundraising drive, Stormfront offered donors online advice from “financial guru Yggdrasil.”
Perspective: Gardner contends that America is ruled by a multicultural regime of nonwhites including “competing Asiatic and Hebraic elites.” The U.S. government despises white people and targets them with high taxes, affirmative action programs and hate crime laws, he says. He predicts that whites, to avert “gradual genocide,” will form a separate nation “when the rest of the U.S. begins to look like Southern California” demographically. He disputes the Holocaust, saying “homicidal gas chambers” didn’t exist.
Quote: “Many Whites are beginning to believe that no amount of tribute, other than mass suicide, would satisfy the non-White demands.”
Lance Williams can be reached at lwilliams@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @LanceWCIR.
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