A man described as the "intellectual godfather" of the racist alt-right movement insists he isn't a white supremacist -- and says Republican voters are more racist than the Republican establishment realizes.
Jared Taylor, the editor of the magazine American Renaissance, has been prominently featured in a new Hillary Clinton campaign ad that links her rival Donald Trump to a variety of racists. But Taylor told The Daily Caller that he objects to being portrayed as a white supremacist.
"Presumably a white supremacist is someone who wants to rule over people of other races," he explained. "We have no such desire. Nor do people on the alt right think that whites are a superior race. In many respects Asians are more objectively superior to whites and certainly athletically blacks are probably superior to whites."
Taylor previously made headlines after placing thousands of robocalls urging GOP primary voters to support Trump. He said the alt-right movement has been "very very rapidly" growing thanks in part to white insecurities and the Black Lives Matter movement.
"The notion that whites are responsible for the failures of all non-whites," Taylor told the Daily Caller. "White people get beaten over the head every day with this kind of thing, and they reject that. They also reject the idea that they should cheerfully become a minority in their own country. And things like the Black Lives Matter movement have probably swelled our ranks far more than anything Hillary Clinton could ever do for us."
In a speech on Thursday, Clinton described the alt-right as "a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment." She said the racist movement had effectively taken over the Republican Party.
Taylor said that mainstream Republicans were mystified by the rapid rise of Trump because they didn't understand the racist views of their own voter base.
“They have been deliberately blind to the frustrations of their natural constituency. They have bought the myths about race. They've swallowed that completely. In terms of the interchangeability of races, of the idea that America is up for grabs, that whoever can manage to sneak in more or less belongs to them – they’re no different from the Democrats,” Taylor said.