“If We Do Nothing”: White Supremacist Book Reviews

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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.” {snip}

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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.” {snip}

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.

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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. {snip}

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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.

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