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| Taylor Rose, with a 'Montana Sovereign' banner behind him |
[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]
Taylor Rose likes to project a fresh-scrubbed, wholesome image to his
fellow Montanans while campaigning for a seat in the state’s House of
Representatives. It’s easy for the blonde-haired, blue-eyed and
clean-shaven 28-year-old from the rural Columbia Falls area to do,
flashing a toothy grin and ranting about the need to get the federal
government out of workers’ hair and open up the state’s timberlands to
lumber operations.
The image, combined with a pleasing message (Rose likes to label himself a
“pro-labor Republican”)
and a slick campaign, have all raised the prospects that Rose might be
able to pull off an upset win over incumbent Rep. Zac Perry, a Democrat,
in the race for the House seat in District 3, which historically leans
Republican.
What many voters may not realize, however, is Taylor’s long history
of deep involvement with the white nationalist movement, and the
dangerously bigoted worldview he has promoted since his teenage years ––
a history well documented by
the SPLC and
the Anti-Defamation League in the years leading up to his campaign.
But Taylor has now carefully whitewashed his image with the help
of the Montana Republican Party. GOP candidates have employed Rose for
state campaigns and as a legislative aide. A number of mainstream
Republican candidates, including GOP gubernatorial candidate Greg
Gianforte, have contributed to Rose’s campaign. And one leading Montana
Republican dismissed concerns about his background, saying “the rest of
us think of him as a good conservative.”
Rachel Carroll Rivas, executive director of the Montana Human Rights
Network, said the GOP’s embrace of Rose is taking place in the broader
context of a national Republican party that has nominated Donald Trump,
whose own alliances with the radical right have radically altered the
nation’s political landscape.
"In the current climate it's hard to pick out the most concerning
things we see playing out on the ground, but Rose's candidacy makes the
list easily,” she said. “The political environment has clearly shifted
when there is mainstream party acceptance and grooming of someone with
well-documented white supremacist activity in recent years.”
Rose first came to enter the movement
in 2011 when his activities on behalf of the white nationalist
Youth for Western Civilization were reported by the
Center for New Community. Rose, then a recent graduate of Liberty University (the college founded by religious-right leader Jerry Falwell),
appeared at a YWC-sponsored “March for Freedom” in Cologne, Germany. He also met with members of
Vlaams Belang,
the far-right Belgian political party, and members of German
organizations designated by authorities there as “right-wing extremist.”
Rose also authored
a book in 2012 titled
Return of the Right: How the Political Right Is Taking Back Western Civilization, which
argued that Western humanists are attempting to impose a “vision to
destroy the nation-state, eliminate religion, break down all defined
barriers in society (such as family) and eliminate western civilization
from the face of the earth in the attempt to institute a radical,
multicultural, New World Order agenda.” In the book, Rose argued that
this nefarious plot is failing because “the Western world is coming to
realize the complete emptiness and harm of belief systems that are at
their core, nihilistic.”
The neo-Confederate hate group the League of the South
interviewed Rose about the book
when it came out. During the interview, Rose continued to warn of the
evil nature of “the Left” and predicted that a white nationalist Right
would soon rise to the fore in global politics. “You will first see the
Right-Wing act as a great power of political influence, mainly upon the
center-right, by reorienting the ideas of the center-right to reform
immigration policy and take a more hard-line anti-Socialist stance,” he
said.
Since returning to Montana, Rose has cultivated political ties with
an eye toward running for office –– mostly through the auspices of the
state’s GOP, which has made no effort to renounce or distance itself
from Rose. Indeed, in the years since Rose's radical beliefs surfaced,
the Montana GOP has warmly embraced him:
- Rose worked as the Northwest Montana campaign coordinator for
then-GOP candidate Steven Daines in his 2014 U.S. Senate race, which
Daines won. Sen. Daines’ office did not respond to Hatewatch’s request
for comment or explanation.
- In 2015, Rose was hired by Montana Senate Republicans
as a legislative bill title reader and as a majority aide, a staff
position that enabled Rose to network widely with party officials and
senators. According to Carroll Rivas, Rose used that position not only
to make political connections but to actively tamper with the political
process: “He was so bad and out of line that there were times in
committee that he would actually say a vote in the back of the room –
they would be voting in committee, and he would say ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ in
the back of the room.”
- When asked about Rose’s candidacy during a roundtable political talk
show in June, Rep. Matthew Monforton of Bozeman, a leading House
Republican, dismissed concerns about Rose’s white nationalist
background, saying “the rest of us think of him as a good conservative.”
- On his campaign Facebook page, Rose has boasted of his broad engagement with the local Republican Party, including posing for photos with local leaders at the Flathead County Fair.
- Several mainstream Republican candidates have donated to Rose’s
campaign, notably GOP gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte, who gave a $170 donation to Rose
that was matched by his wife. Rose also received donations from
Republican Sen. Mark Blasdel of Kalispell and Rep. Greg Hertz of Polson.
Hatewatch attempted to reach a number of Montana GOP officials, including Monforton and Daines.
In addition to coverage by the SPLC, Rose’s white nationalist background has been detailed at
Montana Cowgirl,
Raw Story, and
Wonkette. However, most Montana media coverage of his race and his candidacy (such as
Rose’s profile at the Missoulian) has omitted any mention of his history of radicalism.
Rose has never renounced or apologized for his radical past, which
is extensive. Indeed, he has continued to embrace it, even appearing
last fall
on a young-conservative website's podcast discussing
his candidacy with a “Montana Sovereign” banner proudly displayed
behind him – referencing his apparent involvement in the
far-right sovereign citizens movement as well. In a
recent interview in the Flathead Beacon, Rose denied that he was a racial supremacist and focused on defending the traditional cultural values of Western Civilization.
“I am not affiliated with white supremacist groups or leaders,” Rose
told the newspaper. “To say otherwise is slanderous. YWC was a cultural
group, not a racist group. We defined Western civilization by the
classic definition of ancient Greeks and Romans, and we were
pro-Christian. We did not say it was exclusively white. We were also
very critical of Islam, but that is an ideological issue, not a racial
issue. I can promise you that Liberty University would not have
tolerated a white power group on its campus.”
In reality, YWC was
an overt white nationalist organization with multiple connections to
white supremacists, though it
often used code words
such as “cultural identity” and “racial chauvinists” to disguise its
racism, arguing that white people face rampant discrimination at the
hands of multiculturalism. Some of its better-known members and
associates ––
Matthew Heimbach and
Kyle Bristow –– have gone on to found their own white nationalist groups.
In the meantime, Rose has been busily voicing racially and ethnically
incendiary sentiments on social media over the past year. He expressed
revulsion at the prospect of a white couple giving birth to two black
babies via artificial insemination. He also bitterly complained when it
was announced that Harriet Tubman, the black woman who helped lead the
Underground Railroad during the Civil War, would replace Andrew Jackson
on the $20 bill. In one of his
Facebook posts,
he compared the action to the removal of Confederate monuments around
the nation in the wake of the mass shooting at a black church in
Charleston, S.C., by a white-supremacist Confederacy admirer.
One of his commenters chimed in: “It’d be a lot quieter if they were all hanging from nooses.”
On Rose’s campaign Facebook page, he has openly indulged in Islamophobic attacks on Muslim immigrants and
Syrian refugees. In one post
published in March,
he wrote, “Terrorism in Europe during the Cold War was mostly conducted
by homegrown, native European Leftist terrorist groups. Now it is
committed by Islamic immigrants or the decedents of Islamic immigrants.
If we stop the importation of the jihadies, we won't have these
attacks.”
Rose also posted
a racially incendiary rant
about “domestic terrorism by the black supremacist group ‘Black Power
Political Organization,'” and called for legislation making it a hate
crime to assault a police officer. The BPPO is an obscure group that
claimed responsibility for
the shootings of seven police officers in Dallas earlier this summer, but which subsequent investigations showed had
no known connection to the shooter, Micah Xavier Johnson, though Johnson in fact was
apparently enamored of several other black nationalist groups (the BPPO was not among his Facebook “likes”).
Rose also
wrote an article that appeared in the Citizens Informer, the official newspaper of the
Council of Conservative Citizens,
a white nationalist group that is the heir of the white citizens'
councils during the 1960s. Materials on the CCC website helped Dylann
Roof, the alleged killer of nine African American churchgoers in
Charleston, South Carolina,
radicalize in his white nationalist beliefs.
The article, which was published in the Jan.-June 2013 issue of the
paper, sings the praises of UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party),
headed by Nigel Farage, who,
according to a former classmate,
once sang a song with the lyrics "gas 'em all, gas 'em all" and liked
that his initials were the same as the neo-Nazi National Front.
Rose wrote that UKIP "provides the best model on how Anglosphere
right-wing parties should run," and then noted that "we must tactically
concede that conservative libertarians offer us the best hope for
delaying the destruction of our people." "If American nationalists, Rose
wrote, "decided to show up at Tea Party rallies and meetings and push
for white working class advocacy, the debate and structure would change
in favor of the American right” and, according to Rose, the national
debate “could change from amnesty to deportation and from
multiculturalism to nationalism.”
"UKIP: The Model Right Movement," written
by Taylor Rose and published in the Citizens Informer, the publication
of the Council of Conservative Citizens.
And while he’s running for a legislative seat, Rose nonetheless appears not to be a fan of democratic republics. He’s
a member of a Facebook public group called
Monarchists,
which “exists for the purpose of civil discussion between monarchists
and those interested in monarchy as the ideal form of human governance.”
Rose also conducted
an interview in April
with the “Patriot” movement website NorthWest Liberty News’ weekly
podcast (though the link for that interview appears to be broken).
In an interview for a podcast
with Ryan Girdusky
of the young-conservative website Red Alert Politics, Rose lightly
brushed over his radicalism and focused mostly on his status as a “young
millennial” running for office. However, behind Rose for the duration
of the interview was a banner declaring “Montana Sovereign – Don’t Tread
On Me,” clearly indicating that Rose considers himself an
antigovernment
“sovereign citizen,” a movement that has been part of the Montana scene since the 1990s, in the heyday of
the Montana Freemen and the
Militia of Montana.
Rose’s description of his warm welcome by the Montana GOP in that
interview made for a stark contrast with the banner behind him.
ROSE: Local Republican leadership in the county, and I’ve
spoken with a lot of the Republican leadership across the state, is
very, very excited. They really have been very nice to young people
rising up. In the current Legislature, we already have several
millennials sitting in House seats across the state, and so when I
decided to throw my hat in the ring and started talking to people about
this, the leadership was very excited. They’ve been very helpful,
they’ve been very excited at the idea that there are more young people
that want to get involved, and they don’t want to get in our way.
There’s definitely – they’re not being restrictive. The old guard of the
party is being very helpful and very nice to us young people in helping
us rise up and have a voice and speak for millennials.
In his
interview with the Beacon, Rose touted his broad acceptance by the local and state GOP as proof that accusations about his radicalism “don’t add up.”
“I was open about my past involvement with YWC, and I was vetted by
the Republican Party,” he told the newspaper. “I wouldn’t say that I am a
mainstream candidate, but I’m not on the fringe either. The minute you
reject multiculturalism, you become a target for the left, and that is
what’s happened
here.”
Rivas said that Rose’s embrace by the GOP represents an unfortunate
evolutionary shift in the state’s politics, in which such extremists,
always present in the background, had typically been relegated to the
fringe.
“In previous years, the Montana Republican Party distanced themselves
from candidates like Rose who had ties groups like the Klan and
National Socialist Movement,” she said. “The times have changed. The
efforts by the Alt-Right to put a nice suit on their racism may be
viewed as effective in this case. And, while Rose’s views seems aligned
with the
Richard Spencers of the world, his vision isn’t so different than April Gaede’s Pioneer Little Europe.
“This is the reality of what the people of the Flathead Valley are
facing right now –– a triangulation between two white supremacists on
the national stage and a candidate for state house that just might win. I
fear to imagine what’s next.”
