This racist, irrelevant individual stands in Charlotte's blustery cold, spewing trash about blacks' lack of intelligence. It's the kind of idiocy that disappears into the wind, unheard, at Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park or on a New York City street corner.

Yet a bank of television cameras and tape recorders captures Jared Taylor's every word outside the Government Center on Monday. He has won an audience not because of the quality or even provocative nature of his ideas, but because of efforts to silence him and his group.

Taylor runs American Renaissance, a little-known monthly magazine filled with anti-minority screeds. The group planned to hold a gathering next weekend at the Sheraton Airport hotel, where it made reservations last year.

The hotel abruptly cancelled those reservations last week, saying management had learned more about the controversial nature of the American Renaissance group. Taylor says the group warned the hotel all along of its contentious reputation and had advised the hotel to keep the group's presence confidential.

City Council member Patrick Cannon sent an e-mail to a constituent last week that suggested he was working to keep American Renaissance from coming to Charlotte. Cannon said area hotels "seem to be cooperating" with keeping the group out. "An attempt was made for accommodations at another hotel but based on what I ask to take place they were denied again," Cannon's e-mail said.

We don't know precisely what Cannon or anyone else did to make things difficult for American Renaissance. But their solution was wrong. The First Amendment's protections of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are meaningless if they do not protect speech that most of society despises. The way to counter offensive ideas is to a) ignore them or b) contrast them with your own, better ideas, not ban them.

"Democracy does not survive in any place where dissident ideas are silenced," Taylor said. He's right on that, at least. It's not Cannon's job or anyone else's to deny American Renaissance its basic rights. Doing so has given this man from another century a visibility he never would have had.

Taylor's comment about free expression is about the only thing he said Monday that made sense.

Ashkenazi Jews are the most intelligent people on earth, Taylor said, followed by north Asians, followed by Caucasians. Blacks are somewhere far down the list, he said. His website says, among other things, that civil rights "undermine the ability of whites to lead their lives as they wish." The site hails the accounts of "ordinary people describing their everyday experiences with non-whites" with each tale illustrating "the continuing tragedy of multi-racialism." He writes of America as whites' "own homeland," an assertion that not a few Native Americans would find absurd.

Rather than stand in the cold and listen to these ramblings, we recommend a visit to Discovery Place and its Race exhibit, which opens Saturday. This nationally renowned project reveals surprising truths about our similarities and differences, including the fact that you cannot tell someone's race from their DNA.

Or their intelligence from their skin color. Jared Taylor is proof of that.