I hope your breakfast is settled now, because here’s a video of Jared Taylor being interviewed by Jorge Ramos. In case you don’t know who Taylor is, he’s an unpleasant and pretentious leader of white supremacists — if you’ll watch the video (I don’t blame you if you don’t), you’ll see an unctuous, smiling glad-hander trying to sell hate as if it is pancakes. He’s a slimy, smarmy, sneering snake of a man, a slithering sibilant walking among us with little humanity in his smirking skull. But hey, watch and learn.

I only made it a third of the way through; I applaude Ramos’ persistence. But I have to address a few of Taylor’s assumptions.

Homogeneous countries have less violence. That’s a weird claim, because even if it were true, I’d want to know why. He’s going to constantly harp on the idea that Mexico is homogenous, just to get a dig in at Ramos, but the thing is that Mexico’s violent crime rate is higher than that of the more ethnically diverse USA. A good part of that is the drug war that the US has fostered. Maybe it’s not race, or conflicts between races, that cause the major problems?

I’d also like to point out that the US has more right-wing terrorism — that the people we ought to fear are not our Hispanic neighbors, but the people who argue that we need to provoke violence with our Hispanic neighbors. People like Jared Taylor. The real problem isn’t diversity, but the minority who so hate others with different skin color that they think oppression, discrimination, and forcible ejection are calm, reasonable, rational responses.

Mexico is just as racist as we are. He tries hard to bait Ramos by claiming that he just wants the US to be like Mexico, which he tries to pretend is some kind of uniform brown skin tone with no racial differences. But that’s not true! Mexican internal race relations are complex — there are rankings based on skin color, and different attitudes towards people who look more “Indian” vs. “Spanish”. I don’t know if there are people like Taylor who would argue for the superiority of the population who look more European (there probably are, given human nature), but at least I’m unaware of any prominent figures arguing for expulsion of all mestizos. If there is less conflict, it seems to me it has to be because people are more aware the deep history and obvious diversity of the Mexican people, making a simple binary distinction that demonizes one group harder to do. The US has a long history of treating anyone with “one drop” of black heritage as inferior. We’ve taken a range and turned it into a black and white distinction.

“Us” and “Them”. Taylor often claims he just wants to make his country safe for “us” against the invading hordes of “them”, those immigrants. He mentions that his family came over to North America from England in the 18th century — hey, so did my paternal line! But here’s the deal: his “us” includes people with Northern European ancestry (like me!), but no one else. I just have to say that I feel no intellectual kinship with Jared Taylor. I do not want to be part of his “us”. Skin color is nothing but a granfalloon, and to automatically assume that people with a similar genetic lineage are closer to you than someone with shared ideals is a mistake. He is part of a “them” to me — the racist club that excludes others. I am part of an egalitarian club that is inclusive and open to everyone with similar ideals. Jared Taylor would probably call me a “race traitor” because I can find common cause with my fellow Americans without worrying about what color skin they have, or what language they spoke while growing up.

Diversity makes us weaker. Pure madness. I’m looking at the scientific enterprise in America, and here’s a curious fact for you: of the 6 American Nobelists in 2016, every single one of them was an immigrant. Stop by an “American” research lab sometime, and you’ll find it is well-stocked with people from all kinds of exotic places — often only the PI was born in this country, while all the grad students and post-docs and technicians are British, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Malaysian, Nigerian, Indian. And quite often the PI isn’t American-born, either. Science is international. It becomes strongest when we don’t impose artificial barriers of race.

I’m not exactly the world’s biggest fan of Michio Kaku, but here’s an antidote to Jared Taylor, and it’s something on which Kaku and I agree 100%. Diversity has been one of the strongest tools we have in building the American scientific enterprise. We have grown by being attractive to people all around the world, gathering together new ideas, combining them in novel arrangements, and taking advantage of the brightest brains, which, it turns out, are all the same color.

What scares me is that the American public school system is doing such a poor job of educating students — guaranteed to get worse as long as we consider people like Betsy DeVos to be tenable candidates for running it — and at the same time we are now driving away the intelligent people who would otherwise be happy to come here and learn and teach. I refuse to be grouped with an “us” that so ignorantly insists on a racist delusion that is entirely destructive to a reality that has benefited us so much over the decades.

When the Jared Taylors of the USA destroy an environment that has formed me and led to new ideas and new strengths, I won’t identify with it anymore. I’ll find a new “us”. Canada is looking more like my people than the theocratic, racist cult that’s taking over here.