Samuel Jared Taylor (born September 15, 1951) is an American white supremacist and editor of American Renaissance, an online magazine espousing such opinions, which was founded by Taylor in 1990. He is also the president of American Renaissances parent organization, New Century Foundation, through which many of his books have been published. He is a former member of the advisory board of The Occidental Quarterly and a former director of the National Policy Institute, a Virginia-based white nationalist think tank. He is also a board member and spokesperson of the Council of Conservative Citizens. Taylor and many of his affiliated organizations are accused of promoting racist ideologies by civil rights groups, news media, and academics studying racism in the United States. Early life and education Taylor was born on September 15, 1951, to Christian missionary parents from Virginia in Kobe, Japan. He lived in Japan until he was 16 years old and attended Japanese schools up to the age of 12, becoming fluent in Japanese. He attended Yale University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy in 1973. Taylor then spent three years in France and received a Master of Arts degree in international economics at Sciences Po in 1978. During a period that interrupted his undergraduate and later graduate college years, he worked and traveled extensively in West Africa, improving his French in the Francophone regions of the continent. Taylor is fluent in French, Japanese, and English. Career Taylor worked as an international lending officer for the Manufacturers Hanover Corporation from 1978 to 1981, and as West Coast editor of PC Magazine from 1983 to 1988. He has also taught Japanese at the Harvard Summer School, and worked as a courtroom translator. In the 1980s, at the time of the country's strong economic growth, Taylor was viewed as a "Japan expert" in the mainstream media. In 1983 he published a well-received book on Japanese culture and business customs entitled Shadows of the Rising Sun: A Critical View of the Japanese Miracle. While critical of certain aspects of Japanese culture, Taylor argued that Japanese society was more successful in solving social issues than the West, with lower crime rates and a similar or higher standard of living. Sometime in his early thirties, Taylor reassessed the liberal and cosmopolitan viewpoint commonly professed in his working environment, which he had himself shared until then. He became deeply convinced that human