One of America’s most notorious racists, Jared Taylor, is being allowed to travel freely around Europe and the UK, even though he was banned from the entire Schengen area a few years ago.
Taylor turns up on both the relatively mainstream wing of the racist movement (with ties to far-right conservative parties and the fringe of Donald Trump’s MAGA) and also in the wilder circles of neo-nazi movements with well-documented terrorist connections.
Rabid nazis
An example of the latter was Taylor speaking at Mark Collett’s Patriotic Alternative conference last month in the company of some of Britain’s most rabid nazis and antisemites.
Not only did he get into the UK unhindered but, in order to do so, he travelled first to Ireland , where he was also allowed to enter freely.
Then, only two weeks ago, Taylor was one of the stars of a “Remigration” conference in Oporto, Portugal.
This was hosted by a relatively new racist group Reconquista founded by Afonso Gonçalves in 2023.
Taylor, the founder of American Renaissance, has developed a more respectable image in recent years, distancing himself from Jew-baiters. This has led some of the antisemitic fringe to attack him for “selling out” to “Zionism” (their code word for Jews).
But recently, he has begun to associate with more radical fringe groups. A few months ago he spoke in Texas at the first conference of Patriot Front, a white supremacist breakaway from the neo-nazi Vanguard America.
In 2019 he was deported from Switzerland and banned from the entire Schengen Area because of his extremist activities. That has all changed.
Racist agitator
The Oporto event eventually went ahead in a hastily-booked sports hall where, amongst its ‘VIP Guests’ was the lowlife UK racist agitator Steve Laws who, like Taylor, also addressed the Patriotic Alternative conference in the UK in October.
Although Reconquista leader Gonçalves is under several police investigations for hate speech, and his conference was seen as so disreputable that its original hotel venue cancelled the booking, he received a message of support from Pedro Frazão, a member of parliament for Portugal’s main ultra-right party Chega, now the second largest party in the Portuguese parliament.
Openly far-right
It seems that Chega leaders are slightly embarrassed by Frazão (who is a vice-president of the party and a member of the cult-like Catholic right-wing sect Opus Dei) linking them to such an openly far right group as Reconquista.
They have tried to argue that he was acting in a personal capacity without the party’s approval.
Apart from Jared Taylor, the Portuguese conference’s biggest star was Austria’s Martin Sellner, regarded as leader of the “Identitarian” movement that has tried to rebrand European racism.
Sellner is now 36 and admits that until his early 20s he was a neo-nazi activist. He is permanently excluded from the UK and together with his American wife Brittany Pettibone is seen by others on the right as especially close to pro-Russian “alt right” factions.
US libertarians
A younger generation of the alt right was represented by another speaker Manuel Morgado, a medical student in Lisbon and leading representative of a US-funded “libertarian” movement, Students for Liberty.
Morgado is another example of how this conference sought to unite radical racists such as Taylor and Sellner with those closer to mainstream American conservatives.
Students for Liberty is part of a constellation of ultra-conservative movements funded by the billionaire Koch brothers.
Pro-Putin party
Another speaker was though very far from the “mainstream”. While Chega works closely with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), conference speaker Hilaire Bouyé is head of the youth wing of Le Pen’s rivals, the even more blatantly racist and pro-Putin party Reconquête.
This pro-Russian thread running through the conference is disturbing given that among the other speakers was a retired lieutenant-colonel in the Portuguese Air Force, Joao Brandão Ferreira, who has some reputation as a military historian and commentator and was for a short time a Portuguese military attaché at embassies in Africa.
Moscow connections
Chega has (like Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage) tried to minimise its connections to Moscow and its leader André Ventura has made some anti-Putin statements even while other party spokesmen have undermined European support for Ukrainian defence.
Jared Taylor, on the other hand, (as we’ve explained in earlier articles) has a long record of suspicious ties to Kremlin funded organisations, and so has Martin Sellner.
Porous borders
In the end, Taylor’s renewed freedom to criss-cross Europe and even enter the UK is more than a bureaucratic oversight, it is a warning. A man once deemed too toxic for the entire Schengen zone is now turning up without obstruction alongside everyone from slick “Identitarians” to openly pro-Putin extremists and the UK’s own fringe neo-nazi agitators.
His presence at these events is not incidental. It signals how porous Europe’s borders have become to transatlantic networks of white supremacy and authoritarianism.
If Taylor can once again move freely through Europe and Britain, then the question is no longer how he slipped back in, but why governments seem willing to look the other way while he helps build the very networks they once agreed were dangerous.
