My conversation with Jared Taylor earlier this month has opened up a schism among his white nationalist supporters.

I was amused to find out that he began his last two American Renaissance podcasts by apologizing to his audience. Bizarrely, he said one of the reasons he regretted his comments was that he was talking to me, someone who has contempt for white people, which is something I haven’t heard before. Sure, you could argue that I have contempt for racial collectivists or the dysfunctional underclass of any background, but I haven’t heard anyone say I have particular animus towards whites. This is perhaps a way to calm his supporters down.

Regardless, what this entire episode demonstrates is that there is a deep contradiction at the heart of white nationalism, the dissident right, or whatever you want to call it.

There are basically two kinds of people within these circles.

The relatively Elite Human Capital faction is secular, hierarchical, and scientific in its outlook. It reads studies about racial differences in IQ, the importance of heredity, and crime statistics. It is of course selective in the evidence it focuses on, like all political movements are, ignoring for example the overwhelming contribution that immigrants make to the United States. But these are basically smart people who care about ideas. They often went to elite schools, and have in many cases had success outside of the movement. Taylor, for example, graduated from Yale, and, having grown up in Japan and written about it, was in the 1980s considered an expert on that country in the mainstream press.

There is also a Low Human Capital faction, which predominates among the audience, that is simply racist in the most primitive sense. They are egalitarians and don’t want snooty elites telling them what to do. They don’t read and are often religious, though more in a tribal than a truly spiritual sense. The world is frightening to them, and they are hostile to liberals and minorities because they represent uncertainty and change. They are often stupid and maladjusted, and have nothing to fall back on except the accomplishments of their race, which they demand credit for. While Jared Taylor spent part of his life comfortably in elite circles, his audience is composed of people who latch onto their identity out of a desperate need to maintain some sliver of self-esteem.