The Right's Quiet Uncanceling of a Dead White Supremacist

[Celerity]

In 1995, conservatives cast off Sam Francis for being a virulent racist. Nearly 30 years later, Blake Masters has openly recommended Francis’s book, his name is cited in conservative conferences, and his thinking is hailed as a prescriptive path forward for Republicans’ post-Trump presidency.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/10/right-uncanceling-dead-white-supremacist-sam-francis

https://archive.ph/U8Xj2



In September 1995, Pat Buchanan adviser and columnist Sam Francis was ousted from The Washington Times for virulent racism. It was, according to the Washington City Paper, the culmination of monthslong campaign carried out by young conservatives in Washington, DC, who wanted Francis to be removed not just from the Times but from the conservative movement as a whole. Francis had kept his white nationalism semiprivate—a feat easier accomplished in the pre-internet era, when his most extreme views, like calling for a “white reconquest of the United States,” could be circulated in more obscure publications without wide distribution.

But in May 1994, in the course of researching his book The End of Racism, Dinesh D’Souza, then a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, caught Francis saying (at a conference put on by white nationalist Jared Taylor, no less), among other things: “What we as whites must do is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.” When the galley for D’Souza’s book circulated the next summer, and some of the quotes D’Souza captured were featured in The Washington Post, what Francis had said and written were deemed beyond the pale and incompatible with conservatism. It didn’t help that earlier that summer Francis had written a column for the Times criticizing the Southern Baptist Convention for apologizing for slavery. Sample line: “neither ‘slavery’ nor ‘racism’ as an institution is a sin.” (D’Souza’s book was no anti-racist tract itself; highly controversial and panned by historians and critics, The End of Racism was considered so problematic by Black conservative intellectuals Glenn Loury and Robert L. Woodson that they announced they would no longer associate with AEI after its publication.) In today’s parlance, Francis was canceled; his career at the Times was over and he spent his final years largely confined to the fever swamps of explicitly white supremacist organizations before he died in 2005.

Now—nearly 30 years later—rising names in the Republican Party are trying to bring Francis back into the fold. His name comes up in speeches at conservative conferences; at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference, Hillsdale College professor and former Heritage Foundation fellow David Azerrad cited Francis when arguing that American law unfairly targets conservatives while oppressed groups get a free pass. Peter Thiel protégée turned Donald Trump–backed Senate candidate Blake Masters has been promoting Francis’s ideas throughout his Senate campaign, going so far as to recommend his book of essays, Beautiful Losers, which Masters has cited as an influence on his style of conservatism, in an Instagram Story that was pinned at the top of his account. (Vanity Fair reached out to Masters’s campaign for comment. They did not respond; the archived Instagram Story has since been removed.) Joe Kent, another Republican candidate endorsed by Trump this cycle, seems familiar enough with Francis’s writings to reference his work multiple times while running for Washington’s third congressional district seat. Francis is cited in articles by influential, and relatively mainstream, conservative writers working for publications like National Review; former Trump administration staffer and essayist of “Flight 93 Election” fame Michael Anton and founder of the Trump-promoted Compact Matthew Schmitz have also both referenced him.

Francis’s work started popping up again in 2016 as a way to understand the phenomenon that led to Trump. Michael Brendan Dougherty, then a senior correspondent for The Week and now a senior writer for National Review, wrote an article in 2016 calling Francis “the Rosetta Stone for Trumpism.” Dougherty cited a 1996 essay written by Francis in which he argued that white working-class resentment from economic globalization could be channeled into electoral success. (Dougherty also argues that Francis wasn’t a white nationalist until later in his career. When that transition occurred is debatable, but one thing is clear: It was well before 1996.) Shortly after Doughtery’s article was published, Rush Limbaugh read an essay of Francis’s on air. But while discussion of Francis in the early Trump days was oriented toward trying to understand how we got to Trump, now his ideas are cited not descriptively, but prescriptively.

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[electric_blue68]

1. More evidence that the Shame Center in their brains was cauterized!

Gggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. 🤬

[at140]

2. White supremacy is a hoax

Every non-white immigrant ethnic group is better educated and much more successful than average whites.
The highest earning ethnic group in USA is south Asians from India, followed closely by SE Asians.

[paleotn]

3. The facade exists only through discrimination

We’re a relatively inbred species genetically. To think any one tribal group is somehow better than another is ludicrous.

[brush]

4. Because immigrants from those regions are...

the highly educated, financially able and the fortunate ones of their countries and therefore able to qualify to immigrate legally because of skills they have which benefit the US, and they of course do not have to risk the dangerous trek through the valley of death in Central American and ultimately across the Rio Grande river, or on crowed boats from Cuba or Haiti?

[at140]

8. You are correct on all counts..

I did not come as immigrant. I came on a student visa to work on master's degree in engineering.
In that era after graduation students were allowed a job for maximum 18 months. I did find a job in my field of study, and was ready to go home after 18 months. My employer did not want me to leave, and sponsored me for permanent resident visa. It was not easy process to get permanent status.

[DBoon]

7. Because native whites think they deserve something just for being white

The immigrants know better

[dalton99a]

5. Their newfound idol was a professional racist and an incel

"If whites wanted to do so, they could dictate a solution to the racial problem tomorrow — by curtailing immigration and sealing the border, by imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites and encouraging a higher white birth rate, by refusing to be bullied into enduring "multiculturalism," affirmative action, civil rights laws and policies; and by refusing to submit to cultural dissolution, inter-racial violence and insults, and the guilt that multiracialists inculcate."
— "Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival," American Renaissance, 1995

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/sam-francis

[DBoon]

6. There is no "white race" except in opposition to people of color

There is nothing that the groups called "white" have in common other than they do not come from formerly colonized southern civilizations.

What do a recent immigrant from Bulgaria, a southern California surfer, and a 5th generation resident of Appalachia have in common? Why were some European immigrant groups originally considered "non white"? "White race consciousness" is a complete fiction.