American columnist and writer (1947?2005)
Samuel Todd Francis
(April 29, 1947 ? February 15, 2005), known as
Sam Francis
, was an American
white supremacist
writer.
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
He was a columnist and editor for the conservative
Washington Times
until he was dismissed after making racist remarks at the 1995
American Renaissance
conference.
[6]
Francis would later become a "dominant force" on the
Council of Conservative Citizens
, a white supremacist organization identified as a
hate group
by the
Southern Poverty Law Center
.
[6]
[7]
Francis was chief editor of the council's newsletter,
Citizens Informer
, until his death in 2005.
[7]
White supremacist
Jared Taylor
called Francis "the premier philosopher of white racial consciousness of our time."
[8]
Political scientist and writer
George Michael
, an expert on extremism, identified Francis as one of "the far right's higher-caliber intellectuals."
[9]
The
Southern Poverty Law Center
described Francis as an important
white nationalist
writer known for his "ubiquitous presence of his columns in racist forums and his influence over the general direction of right-wing extremism" in the United States.
[7]
Analyst
Leonard Zeskind
called Francis the "philosopher king" of the
radical right
,
[7]
writing that, "By any measure, Francis's white nationalism was as subtle as an eight-pound hammer pounding on a twelve inch
I beam
."
[2]
Scholar
Chip Berlet
described Francis as an ultraconservative ideologue akin to
Pat Buchanan
,
[10]
whom Francis advised.
[11]
Anarcho-capitalist
political theorist
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
called Francis "one of the leading theoreticians and strategists of the Buchananite movement."
[12]
Early life
[
edit
]
Francis was born
Chattanooga, Tennessee
. He received a bachelor's degree from
Johns Hopkins University
in 1969, and a master's degree in 1971 and doctorate in 1979 from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
.
[5]
Career
[
edit
]
The Washington Times
[
edit
]
Francis was a policy analyst at the
Heritage Foundation
and an aide to Republican Senator
John East
of
North Carolina
before joining the editorial staff of
The Washington Times
in 1986.
[13]
[3]
Five years later, he became a columnist for the newspaper, and his column became syndicated.
[13]
In addition to his journalistic career, Francis was an adjunct scholar at the
Ludwig von Mises Institute
of
Auburn
,
Alabama
.
[14]
In June 1995, editor-in-chief
Wesley Pruden
"had cut back on Francis' column" after
The Washington Times
ran his essay criticizing the
Southern Baptist Convention
for its approval of a resolution which apologized for
slavery
.
[15]
In the piece, Francis asserted that "The contrition of the Southern Baptists for slavery and racism is a bit more than a politically fashionable gesture intended to massage race relations"
[16]
and that "Neither slavery' nor racism' as an institution is a sin."
[13]
In September 1995, Pruden fired Francis from
The Washington Times
after conservative journalist
Dinesh D'Souza
, in a column in
The Washington Post
, described Francis's appearance at the 1994
American Renaissance
conference: "A lively controversialist, Francis began with some largely valid complaints about how the Southern heritage is demonized in mainstream culture. He went on, however, to attack the liberal principles of humanism and universalism for facilitating 'the war against the white race.' At one point he described country music megastar
Garth Brooks
as 'repulsive' because 'he has that stupid universalist song
(
We Shall Be Free
)
, in which we all intermarry.' His fellow whites, he insisted, must 'reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites ... The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.'"
[17]
After D'Souza's column was published, Pruden "decided he did not want the Times associated with such views after looking into other Francis writings, in which he advocated the possible deportation of legal immigrants and forced birth control for welfare mothers."
[13]
Francis said soon after the firing that "I believe there are racial differences, there are natural differences between the races. I don't believe that one race is better than another. There's reasonably solid evidence for
IQ differences
, personality and behavior differences. I understand those things have been taken to justify segregation and white supremacy. That is not my intent."
[13]
Later career
[
edit
]
After being fired from
The Washington Times
, Francis continued to write a column, which was syndicated through
Creators Syndicate
at least as early as January 2000.
[18]
Francis became a "dominant force" on the
Council of Conservative Citizens
.
[19]
Francis was chief editor of the council's quarterly newsletter,
Citizens Informer
, until his death in 2005.
[7]
Francis wrote the council's
Statement of Principles
, which "called for America to be a Christian nation"
[20]
and "oppose[d] all efforts to mix the races of mankind."
[21]
In his writings, Francis advocated for a moratorium on all immigration, plus an indefinite suspension of all immigration from non-European and non-Western people.
[20]
Francis was also an editor of
The Occidental Quarterly
, a
white nationalist
journal edited by
Kevin Lamb
and sponsored by
William Regnery II
.
He served as a contributor and editor of the
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
's quarterly,
Modern Age
. After his dismissal from
The Washington Times
and the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
, Francis continued to write a syndicated column for
VDARE
and
Chronicles
magazine,
[3]
and spoke at meetings of American Renaissance and the Council of Conservative Citizens. He attended the
American Friends of the British National Party
's meeting on April 22, 2000, where he heard and met
Nick Griffin
.
[
third-party source needed
]
His articles also appeared in
Middle American News
. Francis' last published work was an article penned for the 2005
IHS Press
anti-war anthology,
Neo-Conned!
.
[
third-party source needed
]
Francis died on February 15, 2005, at Prince George's Hospital Center in
Cheverly, Maryland
, following an unsuccessful surgery to treat an
aortic aneurysm
. He was 57.
[22]
Francis was buried at the foot of
Lookout Mountain
.
[
citation needed
]
Thought and legacy
[
edit
]
Francis's term "
anarcho-tyranny
" refers to armed dictatorship without
rule of law
,
[23]
or a
Hegelian synthesis
when the state tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens' lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law.
[24]
[25]
Commentators have invoked the term in reference to situations when governments focus on weapon confiscation instead of stopping looters.
[23]
[26]
On Francis's death, the
Rockford Institute
magazine
Chronicles
dedicated its April 2005 issue to his memory and the concept.
[27]
[
third-party source needed
]
Francis had a significant influence on the
paleoconservative
movement.
[28]
Francis argued that the conservative movement was made of "beautiful losers", being either "rootless men" attracted to archaic things or crypto-liberals who sometimes resist progressive change before eventually caving in. He argued that the political right kept losing because it was too focused on ideas and less on power. According to Francis, the political left has dominated politics due to the ascendancy of a progressive
managerial class
, leading to more bureaucratization and more state power while eroding the power of other authorities in society. To combat the emergence of this new class, Francis argued that the political right needed a base for its goals, this base being the white middle class or "Middle American radicals." In order to capture this base for the political right, Francis argued in favor of emphasizing "crime, educational collapse, the erosion of their economic status, and the calculated subversion of their social, cultural, and national identity" to create a class identity for this group.
[28]
Writing in
The Week
, commentator Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote that Francis's writings, and his rejection of
movement conservatism
, presaged the 2016 election of
Donald Trump
.
[11]
In September 2017,
New York Times
columnist
David Brooks
wrote: "The only time I saw Sam Francis face-to-face ? in
The Washington Times
cafeteria sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s ? I thought he was a crank, but it's clear now that he was at that moment becoming one of the most prescient writers of the past 50 years. There's very little Donald Trump has done or said that Francis didn't champion a quarter century ago."
[29]
In 2023, historian Joshua Tait said that "Before a Trump-inspired resurgence in interest in Francis, he was a cautionary tale from conservative intellectual history."
[30]
During the 2022 electoral cycle,
Blake Masters
, a Republican candidate for US Senate, promoted
Beautiful Losers
.
[3]
Although Francis sometimes engaged with Christian thinkers and publications during his life, he was also harshly critical of Christianity in his later years and his worldview has been described as irreligious and materialistic. Francis wrote that "Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it" and suggested that the "
religious wrong
" operated under a "false consciousness" that prevented white Christians from recognizing their true interests. Because of this, he has been cited as part of a trend toward increasingly "secular, even pagan" ideas among certain segments of the American radical right.
[31]
[32]
Works
[
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]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
"Sam Francis, Voice of the Radical Right, Dies Unexpectedly"
.
Southern Poverty Law Center
. April 28, 2005
. Retrieved
February 22,
2024
.
Sam Francis, a white supremacist writer and veteran of such publications as The Washington Times, the CCC's Citizens Informer, and The Occidental Quarterly, died in February 2005 at the age of 57.
- ^
a
b
Leonard Zeskind,
Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream
(
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
, 2009).
- ^
a
b
c
d
Dent, Alec (October 14, 2022).
"The Right's Quiet Uncanceling of a Dead White Supremacist"
.
Vanity Fair
.
- ^
Balleck, Barry J. (2019).
Hate Groups and Extremist Organizations in America: An Encyclopedia
. United States: ABC-CLIO.
ISBN
9798216094685
.
- ^
a
b
Holley, Joe (February 26, 2005).
"Conservative Writer Samuel T. Francis"
.
Washington Post
.
ISSN
0190-8286
. Retrieved
June 26,
2022
.
- ^
a
b
Heidi Berich and Kevin Hicks, "
White Nationalism in America
" in
Hate Crimes
(ed. Barbara Perr: Praeger, 2009), pp. 112?13.
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
Extremist Files: Individuals: Sam Francis
, Southern Poverty Law Center (last accessed May 5, 2017).
- ^
Taylor, J.
(2005). Personal Recollections of Sam Francis.
The Occidental Quarterly
,
5
(2), p. 55.
- ^
George Michael,
Confronting Right Wing Extremism and Terrorism in the USA
(Routledge, 2003), p. 51.
- ^
Chip Berlet, "Who Is Mediating the Storm?" in
Media, Culture, and the Religious Right
(eds. Linda Kintz & Julia Lesage: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 251.
- ^
a
b
Michael Brendan Dougherty,
How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996
,
The Week
(January 19, 2016).
- ^
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
, "
The Intellectual Incoherence of Conservatism
,
Mises Daily
, March 4, 2005.
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
Howard Kurtz
,
Washington Times Clips Its Right Wing
,
The Washington Post
, October 19, 1995.
- ^
Rockwell, Llewellyn H., ed. (August 18, 2014).
Murray Rothbard, In Memoriam
(PDF)
. Auburn, AL: von Mises Institute. pp. 64, 127.
- ^
Timothy Stanley,
The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan
(
New York City
:
St. Martin's Press
, 2012), p. 358;
ISBN
978-0-312-58174-9
- ^
Samuel T. Francis, "All those things to apologize for,"
The Washington Times
, June 27, 1995.
- ^
Dinesh D'Souza
, "Racism: It's a White (and Black) Thing",
The Washington Post
, September 24, 1995.
- ^
Simon Maloy,
The lowlights of Sam Francis, distributed by Creators Syndicate
, Media Matters for America (December 13, 2004).
- ^
Berich & Hicks (2009), p. 112.
- ^
a
b
Elizabeth Bryant Morgenstern, "White Supremacist Groups" in
Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia
(Vol. 1: A-R; ed. Kathleen R. Arnold), p. 508.
- ^
Chris Haire,
The problem with Sam Francis
,
Charleston City Paper
(April 14, 2010).
- ^
Holley, Joe (February 26, 2005).
"Conservative Writer Samuel T. Francis"
.
Washington Post
. p. B8.
- ^
a
b
Lew Rockwell
. "
Anarcho-Tyranny in Baghdad
",
lewrockwell.com
, April 12, 2003. Retrieved May 25, 2019.
- ^
Chilton Williamson Jr.
"
Synthetic Syntheses
Archived
2019-08-18 at the
Wayback Machine
",
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
, October 3, 2005.
Archived
.
- ^
Kevin D. Williamson
. "
A Bit More on the Speech Police
",
National Review
, April 18, 2014. Retrieved August 7, 2019.
- ^
David Kopel
. "
Defenseless On the Bayou
",
Reason
, September 10, 2005. Retrieved August 7, 2019.
- ^
"
April 2005?Anarcho-Tyranny: The Perpetual Revolution
",
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
, April 2005 issue. At the
Internet Archive
.
- ^
a
b
Tait, Joshua (August 10, 2023).
"What Was the Alt-Right?"
.
Tablet
.
- ^
"The Coming War on Business"
The New York Times
, September 22, 2017.
- ^
Tait, Joshua (August 10, 2023).
"What Was the Alt-Right?"
.
Tablet
.
- ^
"The Outsider | Matthew Rose"
.
First Things
. October 1, 2019
. Retrieved
August 29,
2023
.
- ^
Tait, Joshua (November 22, 2022).
"The Growing Religious/Secular Rift on the Illiberal Right"
.
The Bulwark
. Retrieved
August 29,
2023
.
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