In 2017, author, producer, and restaurateur Eddie Huang, then the host of Huang's World for Viceland, sat down with white nationalist Jared Taylor, who gave Huang a painfully honest answer for why he supported Donald Trump in 2016.
The video has gone viral once again now that Trump is the president-elect—and many feel Taylor summed up perfectly what motivates the MAGA movement to support him.
At the time, Taylor was characteristically upfront with Huang—whose parents hail from Taiwan—about his views on perceived European supremacy and dismissed Huang's point that Western civilizations largely "took" and appropriated things from other cultures and places to suit their own ends.
You can watch their exchange in the video below.
Their complete conversation can be seen here.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
When the topic pivoted to why Taylor backed Trump, things got interesting once Huang said:
"I want to know how you voted for Donald Trump when you're so into facts because his entire campaign is not based in facts, it was all based in propaganda and emotion."
Taylor was crystal clear about where he stood:
"I voted for Donald Trump for one reason only. His policies, if implemented, would slow the dispossession of whites in the United States. If he were to deport all illegal immigrants, if he were to think very hard about letting in any Muslims, all of this would slow the rate at which whites are becoming a minority."
When Huang asked Taylor to explain why he is "so worried about white dispossession," Taylor replied:
"Because I want my people to survive. Is that so strange? We don't control China, we don't control any place where whites are not a majority, and if we become a minority, we will not control our own destiny anymore."
Huang responded:
"I grew up in this country as a minority, as the children of immigrants. I was their first child born in America, and while I didn't have much possession or control, I really enjoyed myself and I think if you asked a lot of Americans, they would say I had a lot to offer this country."
"You know, according to you, I guess I would be perpetuating the dispossession of white America. ... Would you say you wouldn't want me in this country?"
To which Taylor had this to say:
"That is true. ... At some point, when my ancestors built this nation, they did not build it with the intention of giving it away to Mexicans, or Chinese, or anyone else."
But Huang pressed him further:
"You keep saying your ancestors built this country. You consider that a fact. ... [Who built it were] Black people. Native Americans. The Chinese people who came and built the railroads. Italian people."
Taylor concluded:
"They're Europeans, aren't they?"
The exchange is more than seven years old now—but now that it's resurfaced in the wake of Trump's election win, people feel Taylor's words said it all.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Taylor "projects himself as a courtly presenter of ideas that most would describe as crudely white supremacist — a kind of modern-day version of the refined but racist colonialist of old."
Taylor, who was born in Japan and lived there until he was 16, published the magazine American Rennaissance beginning in the 1990s, which the SPLC notes "focused on the alleged links between race and intelligence, and on eugenics, the now discredited 'science' of breeding better humans."
