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Aug. 9, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
53:46
Remembering Sam Francis (2015)
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My name is Jared Taylor, and I'm with American Renaissance, and today I'd like to say a few words about our great fallen comrade, Sam Francis.
On February 15th, 10 years ago, Sam Francis died at only 57 years of age.
He was a brilliant man and a courageous champion of our people.
And for the last 15 years of his life, I was lucky enough to call him a close friend.
In just a moment, we will show some selections from some of his speeches.
But for those of you who may not have known Sam or remember him very well, I'd like to give you just a brief sketch of his life.
Sam was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1947.
He received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins and a Ph.D.
in modern history from the University of North Carolina.
From 1977 to 1981, he was at the Heritage Foundation, where he worked on public policy analysis, foreign affairs, terrorism.
From 1981 to 1986, he was a legislative assistant to Senator John East, Republican of North Carolina.
And after Senator East died in 1981, Sam joined the Washington Times as an editorial writer.
And then he became a staff columnist.
So as you can see, he had a very mainstream establishment career up to that point.
Well, from 1987 to 1995, for about a seven or eight year period, Sam led something of a charmed life.
He was a prominent, mainstream journalist.
He wrote widely distributed columns, and yet these distributed columns had a clear racial consciousness.
He was absolutely unique in that respect.
And I first became aware of Sam when I was reading one of his columns.
I hadn't paid any attention to who the author was, and I got halfway through it, and I thought to myself,"My God, this guy is one of us, and he's writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, for heaven's sake." And I made a mental note of his name, and we got in touch, and we established relations,
and we were friends ever since after that.
Of course, liberals were absolutely furious about his columns, but that was in some respects a freer and more open time, and because Sam had established such a clear reputation as an expert and a wonderful editorial and commentary writer,
there wasn't any way to get rid of him.
You can speak only so much truth in this country in a mainstream journal and last.
And the blow finally fell in 1995.
First, he lost his job as a staff columnist, and then he was fired completely from the newspaper.
But for the next ten years, Sam wrote absolutely as he pleased.
And we are the better for that.
He also continued with his syndicated column, which began to lose circulation as political correctness clamped down more and more, but he was a wonderful, prominent voice for our way of thinking.
Sam also spoke at every single American Renaissance conference, beginning in 1994 until the 6th, 2004.
If he were alive, I'm sure he would be with us today.
Well, let's now hear directly, by means of video, from the man whom Patrick Buchanan called"The Clausewitz of the Right." is that for
perhaps the first time in history, certainly for one of the few times in history, we are witnessing the more or less peaceful transfer of power from one civilization and from the people or race that created and bore that civilization to different races.
The fraudulence of the liberalism espoused by the leaders of the racial revolution was clear to Spengler himself.
The hair he wrote in his last book, The Hour of Decision, may perhaps deceive the fox.
But human beings cannot deceive each other.
The colored man sees through the white man when he talks about humanity and everlasting peace.
He sensed the other's unfitness and lack of will to defend himself.
The colored races are not pacifists.
They do not cling to a life whose length is its sole value.
They take up the sword when they lay it down.
Once they feared the white man, now they despise him.
But behind all of these ideologies and slogans lies the pervasive venom of universalism, the vision of mankind with a capital M, but now often extended to include animal rights, so as not to offend our brothers of field and stream.
Instead of invoking a suicidal liberalism and regurgitating the very universalism that has subverted our identity and our sense of solidarity, What we as whites under assault need to do is reassert our identity and our solidarity,
and we need to do so in explicitly racial terms, through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.
Thank you.
The reassertion of our solidarity must be expressed in racial terms for two major reasons.
The attack upon us defines itself in racial terms and seeks, through the delegitimization of race for whites and the legitimization of race for non-whites, the dispersion and destruction of our own solidarity, while at the same time consolidating non-white cohesiveness against whites.
And at a time when the self-declared enemies of the white race define themselves in racial terms, only our own definition of ourselves in those terms can meet that challenge.
If and when that challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us, as the Tutsi people have been slaughtered in Rwanda in the last few weeks, they will do so not because we are Westerners or Americans or Christians or conservatives or liberals,
but because we are white.
Secondly, we need to assert a specifically racial identity because race is real.
Biological forces, including those that determine race, are important for social, cultural, and historical events.
I do not suggest that race as a biological reality is by itself sufficient to explain the civilization of European man.
If race were sufficient, there would be no problem.
But race is necessary for an explanation of it, and it is likely that biological science in the near future will show even more clearly.
How necessary racial, biological, and genetic explanations are for historical and social affairs.
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.
If the people or race who created and sustained the civilization of the West should die, Then that civilization also will die.
As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category in or out of the United States is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession and their eventual possible physical destruction,
a fate that may well lie in the not distant future.
Before we can seriously discuss any concrete proposals...
For preserving our culture and its biological and demographic foundations, we have to address and correct the problem we inflict upon ourselves, our own lack of a racial consciousness, and the absence of a common will to act in accordance with it.
What Benjamin Franklin told his colleagues at the birth of the American Republic remains true today as the Republic and the race and civilization that gave birth to it approached their deaths.
If we do not hang together, not only as members of a common nation, What are your observations on the feasibility of ever curing the Republican Party under this will-of-the-wisp sort of thinking?
There's no possibility of curing the Republican Party.
The Republican Party ought to be destroyed.
We live in the illusion that our deaths have consequences, and that eventually...
The ideas that Professor Levin was talking about, about scientific research on race, eventually these will seep down to the actual intellectual classes.
That will have an impact on them.
I have no faith in that, but many people do believe that.
Fifty years after Franz Boas and his colleagues supposedly destroyed the idea Of race, newspapers still find it necessary to have 13-part installments.
That's right.
I mean, no one, you know, no one refutes out Kenny anymore.
You don't have newspapers having 12-part installments refuting astrology.
Even though Ronald Reagan believed in astrology.
But the elite that has come to power in the United States and the Western world in this century actually has a vested interest in managing and manipulating social change, the destruction of the society it rules.
Political analyst Kevin Phillips pointed this out in his 1975 book, Mediocracy, which is a study of the emergence of what he calls the new knowledge elite, the members of which approach society from a new vantage point.
Change does not threaten the affluent intelligentsia of the post-industrial society the way it threatened the landowners and industrialists of the New Deal.
On the contrary, change is as essential to the knowledge sector as inventory turnover is to a merchant or a manufacturer.
Change keeps up demand for the product, research, news, theory, and technology.
Post-industrialism, a knowledge elite, and accelerated social change appear to go hand in hand.
The new knowledge elite does not preserve and protect existing traditions and institutions.
On the contrary, far more than previous new classes, the knowledge elite has sought to modify or replace traditional institutions with new relationships and power centers.
And egalitarianism and environmentalism serve this need to create and manage social change perfectly.
Traditional institutions can be depicted not only as unequal and oppressive, but also as pathological, requiring the social and economic therapy that only the knowledge elite is skilled enough to design and apply.
The interests of the knowledge elite in managing social change happen to be entirely consistent Not only with the agendas of the hard left, but also with the grievances and demands of various racial and ethnic groups that view racism and prejudice as obstacles to their own advancement.
So that what we see is an alliance between the new elites and organized racial and ethnic minorities to undermine and displace the traditional institutions and beliefs of white Euro-American society.
What we need to do, in addition to building the scientific and scholarly case against egalitarianism and environmentalism, is to take a page from the book of the left to expose those who resist scientific evidence and who respond to it only with lies and repression as the beneficiaries of the egalitarian ideology they are trying to protect.
We need to show that an entire political and economic industry gains wealth and power from egalitarian environmental ideology, and in a word, unmask or deconstruct those interests.
And we need in particular to show how Americans, as taxpayers, as crime victims, as job and college applicants, and frankly simply as white people, are being exploited and victimized by the lie of equality and the power structure that rests on it.
If you agree with the ideas you have heard at this conference, in which you read in American Renaissance, or in my columns, or in the books by the distinguished authors who have come here, and if you believe those ideas are important, then you and all of us are going to have to do something yourself.
Thank you.
You're going to have to run risks and take hits.
Not recklessly, but with prudence.
If we are not prepared to accept some risks and take some hits, then these ideas will never go anywhere.
And those on the left who have the courage to work and fight for their beliefs are going to win.
We all know what their victory would mean.
And until we are willing to display the kind of courage that civil rights workers in the South showed, that anti-war protesters in the 1960s showed, that indeed gay rights activists have shown, Until we are willing to risk some of our security and advantages for what we believe in and for what we believe is fundamental for the survival of our civilization and our people,
then we will have no reason for optimism and every reason to expect the victory of our enemies and our lives.
The idea of America as a universal nation, then, is an idea shared by an increasingly defining both sides.
of the political spectrum in the United States.
And the fact that the right in such persons as George Will, Ben Wattenberg, and Mr. Miller, to name but a few, share that idea with Mr. Clinton helps explain why the right today can think of nothing better to criticize the president for than his sex life and his aversion to telling the truth.
Any substantial criticism of President Clinton's globalist foreign policy, his defense of affirmative action, his policy of official normalization of homosexuality, his support for mass immigration, and in particular the national dialogue on race,
would involve a criticism and a rejection of the universalist assumptions on which those policies are based.
The common universalist assumptions of both left and right, then, are a major reason for the rapid convergence of left and right in our political life, the reason why there is not, in George Wallace's famous phrase, a dime's worth of difference between them on so many issues,
and a major reason why we are seeing the emergence not just of a one-party state in the United States, but also of a single ideology that informs the state and the culture.
The myth of the universal nation or proposition country It is by no means clear what the proposition that all men are created equal does mean.
The Equality Clause of the Declaration opens so many different doors of interpretation that it can mean virtually anything you want it to mean.
It has been invoked by Christians and freethinkers.
By capitalists and socialists, by conservatives and liberals, each of whom merely imports into it whatever his own ideology and agenda demand.
Taken by itself, it is open to so many different interpretations that it has to be considered one of the most arcane, if not one of the most dangerous sentences ever written, one of the major blunders of American history.
In 1993, Bill Bennett delivered a speech at the Heritage Foundation entitled, The Conservative Virtues of Martin Luther King, Jr.
And I invite you to listen carefully to the way in which Adam Meyerson, at that time Heritage's Vice President for Educational Affairs and the editor of its journal, Policy Review, talked about King in introducing Bennett.
"We gather today," said Meyerson, "to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, who did so much to bring America closer to the ideal of our Pledge of Allegiance, one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all."
We thank Dr. King for his love of country, his love of peace and nonviolence, his love of his fellow man.
We thank Dr. King for the healing he brought to the wound of racial hatred in our national soul.
We thank him for his righteous indignation, his insistence that all Americans be allowed to enjoy the rights secured by our Declaration of Independence.
The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We thank Dr. King for his dream, that someday our children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
What is significant about this passage and its rhetorical style is not only that it is entirely indistinguishable from a liberal or leftist tribute to King, but also that it is actually a prayer.
Meyerson is actually praying to Martin Luther King.
We thank Dr. King for this and that, just as we would thank God for certain things.
And given the status of King as the patron deity of the new reconstructed America, the prayer is actually appropriate.
It did take a while for the conservative quest for respectability to catch up with the movement, of which Mr. Buckley was the mainly self-appointed guiding light.
And while the right in the 1950s and'60s did discuss race rather frankly, by the time of the victory of the Civil Rights Movement, any serious discussion of race from the perspective of white interests was becoming taboo within the dominant culture.
The right, at least the wannabe respectable right, was entirely unwilling to resist or even dissent from the taboo.
Perhaps if they just dropped any future reference to race, The left would see that they were really okay.
Maybe if we just don't talk about immigration or affirmative action or IQ or multiculturalism, they'll let us play ball with them.
Maybe if we hire a few black secretaries and aides or support an Asian editor or two or carry a black columnist, they'll see we aren't really bigots, that we're not really threats to them, that we're just as committed to egalitarianism and environmentalism as they are.
Teenage boys think that if they drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and talk dirty, they're acting just like grown-ups and will be accepted by them.
They have exactly the same mentality as these pathetic conservatives who think the liberal grown-ups will respect them and accept them into their clubs.
Let me remind you that of the so-called martyrs of the right in the 1990s, journalists on the right who lost their jobs or their positions because of what they published, Joe Sobran, myself, Peter Brimelow at National Review, Scott McConnell at the New York Post, every one of us lost our jobs at conservative institutions,
and we lost them essentially because of what we said about race or race-related issues.
It's not Bill Clinton or Al Gore or our enemies on the left whom we on the racial right need to worry about.
It's our friends on the right we need to keep our eyes on.
What we who are centered around American Renaissance need to do now is to establish our own movement with ourselves and our racial consciousness present at its creation and at its core.
I do not say that race should be the only issue such a movement should address.
But clearly, at least to most of us, race will be at the center of politics for a long time to come.
Not only will race remain and even grow as an issue as whites increasingly perceive their likely fate as a minority in a non-white nation, but also placing race and racial consciousness at our core will differentiate us from both the co-opted right and the dominant left.
Any movement that places race at its center must also reject without qualification the egalitarianism and environmentalism on which all leftism is based.
A movement that rejects equality as an ideal and insists on an enduring core of human nature transmitted by heredity cannot be assimilated into a cultural mainstream that worships equality and gains power by the social engineering of supposedly malleable human beings.
Finally, if a movement centered on race and racial consciousness cannot be co-opted or assimilated by the dominant culture of the left, neither can it hope to alter that culture except through radical and even revolutionary measures.
At the same time as we unmask the moral fraudulence of the mainstream, let us also begin building or rebuilding our own institutions, even within the belly of the beast, that can provide continuing support for whites.
Schools, women's groups, youth groups, student groups, workers groups, associations for military and law enforcement officers, even reading and discussion groups that can clarify and educate whites on the meaning of race.
That kind of work is far more important than the various fictitious magic bullets that the mainstream right has usually looked for and depended on.
A presidential candidate who will ride out of nowhere and in one election vanquish our enemies and take back the nation.
We can, I believe, still take back our nation, but not through magic.
We can take it back if we are willing to do the work, take the risks, and make the sacrifices that make a nation worth having.
If we are not willing to do that, then we probably don't deserve to have a nation or to be a people at all.
Thank you for listening.
Nevertheless, the point I want to come to is simply this, that despite the rising tide of color, the clash of civilizations, the world's historic conflict between West and East, white and non-white, Christian and Muslim, or however we wish to frame it and describe it,
there is no real danger to the West or to America from the Muslim world apart from the mass immigration that we ourselves have allowed to take place.
The Muslims may hate our guts, Perhaps they even have good reason to hate our guts, but there is virtually nothing they can do to us as long as they are in the lands they conquered a thousand years ago and we are in our lands.
What President Bush has told us, that Islam is peace, that the terrorism of September 11th does not represent real Islam, and that American Muslims are not a danger, is simply untrue.
I do not say that all or most American Muslims are a danger, but some clearly are.
Some do everything they can to recruit others into becoming dangerous, and many who are not actually dangerous are still sympathetic to them and are willing to lend them various degrees of support, ranging from mere sympathy and vocal support to monetary assistance to full-scale collaboration in the planning of terrorist activities.
If there are indeed something like 300,000 such people in this country, then we have a little problem on our hands.
The way to fix that problem seems simple: round them up and ship them out.
On October 5th, the New York Times in an editorial commented that there was every reason to enhance visa security, border security, and monitoring foreign visitors, visiting foreigners.
To go further, it said, and suggest that the attack calls for a drastic reduction in the number of immigrants and foreign visitors would be irrational and counterproductive.
That is essentially the line that both liberal and neoconservative reformers have been taking ever since.
Linda Chavez, who might be called the First Lady of the Open Borders Lobby, a lady I once called the Chiquita Banana of the Republican Party, Wrote exactly the same thing in both the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Don't seal the borders was her headline in the latter.
Would you say that many Hispanics do have European Christian culture to some extent?
As opposed to Algerian Islamic type of culture?
They may be more...
I don't know.
There are now more Muslims than Episcopalians in this country.
Frankly, the Muslims are probably closer to Christianity, to tell the truth, than the Episcopalians.
But the...
I don't see how the Hispanics are going to help that.
I just don't want to be part of Mexico, is the thing.
I don't care whether it's...
But just one other point.
Where Islam exists and advances, you have nothing but death, war, bloodshed, poverty, misogyny.
You see that wherever it advances.
What's the difference between that and Latin America?
I don't care about Islam so much.
I don't mean to attack Islam.
I mean, it's not my religion.
There are pluses and minuses and all that.
I just don't want them here.
It's not an Islamic country.
I mean, you know, Muslims have their own countries.
They conquered a lot of our countries in the 7th century, and we've let them keep them.
We couldn't get them back.
We tried in the Crusades, but it didn't work.
So they can live there and they can have that.
But I don't see why they have to come to my country.
I ought to start off commenting on the obvious that I weigh a good deal less this year than I did in previous years.
Many of you have been kind enough to comment on it.
I told Jared some weeks ago that it actually has caused me to rethink my position on race because I now know what it's like to be three-fifths of a person.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had years ago with a young conservative colleague of mine about racial differences, long before the bell curve was published and these arguments became fairly common.
I suggested to him that there was evidence for hereditary differences between the races in IQ and his immediate response, not unfriendly, was that I would be concerned where that argument could lead.
I didn't pursue where he thought it might lead, partly because it was obvious enough, not to the abolition of affirmative action, not to the end of a great deal of egalitarian nonsense in social policy, but it would lead to slavery, to Jim Crow,
to lynchings, to Auschwitz.
As with most conservatives in recent years, all you need to do is ring the bell and they salivate the way the left has trained them.
I could continue with these kinds of reactions to my efforts to write about white racial problems and consciousness for some time, but the point would be the same.
Many whites, and while I can't prove it, I think the kind of responses I've received are fairly typical of what most American whites today believe and how they think about race and about being white.
Many whites are deeply terrified by the very concept of race as it applies to whites.
Their reaction to any frank discussion of the subject It's what I have called before escape and evasion, on an intellectual level but also on a deeper psychological level, to deny that race is real.
To assert that even if it's real, it's not important.
To assert that even if it's real and important, it's wrong.
To assert that even if it's real and important and not wrong in itself, it could lead to terrible wrongs.
And to share, consciously perhaps, but even more commonly, unconsciously, the assumption that whites, even though there is no such thing as whites, have done great evil throughout their history, and that that history forbids them from any positive white racial identity or consciousness or even existence as a group.
Burnham concluded his book with an analogy that keeps coming to mind when discussing not the liberal responses to foreign communist conquests and western decline, but the white responses to the realities, natural and social, of race.
It is as if a man, struck with a mortal disease, were able to say and to believe, as the flesh of the fever spread over his face, ah, the glow of health returning, as his flesh wasted away.
At least I am able to trim down that punch the doctor always warned me about.
As a finger dropped off with gangrene or leprosy, now I won't have that bothersome job of trimming those nails every week.
Liberalism, Burnham concluded, permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution, and this function, its formulas, will enable it to serve right through to the very end, if matters turn out that way.
For even if Western civilization is wholly vanquished or altogether collapses, we or our children will be able to see that ending by the light of the principles of liberalism, not as a final defeat, but as the transition to a new and higher order in which mankind as a whole
joins in a universal civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions and discriminations of the past.
In other words, all the scientific arguments about IQ and DNA, all the facts about the reality of race as a force of nature or as a social and political force, all the statistics about black crime, black educational failures, black poverty, and the absence
of significant black accomplishments over history, all that will avail us nothing because those are rational and intellectual appeals and are easily ignored or deflected by those who are unconsciously terrified by the realities to which
they relentlessly point.
I am reminded
Of the children's poem about the little man upon the stair.
The little man upon the stair.
The little man who was not there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish to hell he'd go away.
Whites today spend an enormous amount of intellectual energy trying to persuade themselves that the little man of grace that lurks upon the stair is not really there and wishing that he would just go away.
What we need to do is to explore more fully what it is that lies at the root of that delusion and of the mental block that prevents today's whites from confronting these realities, to discover why it is there and how it got there, and to find out how that block can be dissolved before the realities it hides destroys us.
Thank you.
The first thing we need to do is to build white consciousness, white racial consciousness.
We cannot do anything until we do that.
And once we have done that, once whites begin to think of themselves as being white, and as other things, as Americans or as Christians or as whatever they are, I don't mean that race is the only identity they should have, but once they begin to think of themselves as white and that they should be white and that their children should be white and they have something to preserve as whites,
then we can talk about the political and the social.
Structures and policies that we want to develop.
we do that, we're not going to go anywhere.
I think you got some idea of what sort of man Sam Francis was.
I'd like to see a show of hands.
How many of you actually knew or met Sam or had attended a lecture of his?
Well, that seems not quite half of you.
Well, that means we have a number of people who have joined our movement in the last ten years.
I'm glad to see that, too.
I'd like to say just a few words about Sam as a person.
I think these videos do capture, especially in the question and answer sessions, the kind of brilliance and wit that was characteristic of him.
And I can tell you that there was hardly ever a better conversationalist.
At a meeting like this, he was always at the center of a group of admirers who wanted to hear his opinions on just about anything, and you could not spend a more pleasant evening than in the company of Sam Francis.
Sam also had an amazingly retentive mind.
He seemed to be able to remember everything he'd ever read, and of course, he had read everything.
Sam loved history.
He studied it with pleasure and absorption, and he seemed to understand the past almost as well as he understood the present.
For him, human existence was this intimate and organic connection all the way back to the Greeks, and he seemed to be able to inhabit any different stage of history.
I've never known anyone who was so skilled at analyzing the present in terms of lessons of the past.
And I might add that Sam was well aware of his gifts.
I remember when we were both in our 50s.
He was four years older than I am.
And I said that I seemed to detect some signs of mental decline in myself.
A slipped cog here, a loose bolt there.
He looked at me in great surprise.
He says, As far as myself, my mind has never been so powerful and reliable.
Sam was doggedly combative in any intellectual sense, but he was in fact a shy man.
He knew an enormous number of people because they were attracted to him and sought him out because of his brilliance.
He did not seek them out.
And in fact, at a gathering of this kind, Many people would come up to him and wish to know him better, but he would always manage to detach himself from them and come back into the orbit of old friends.
And I think because Sam was shy, he had a real almost shocking capacity for gruffness.
I think some of you here will have been, in some respects, the victims of that gruffness, and I will give you a particularly startling example.
After one of his brilliant dissertations on the plight of Western man, he was leaving the podium and an admirer came up to him and said, Dr. Francis, is there any hope?
Well, Sam's reply was unkind but certainly memorable.
How the fuck would I know?
Well, Sam never married, but not for any lack of interest in the ladies.
I did not witness this incident myself, but once he had dinner with Ann Coulter.
And another person present was an older lady who was also a pretty good friend of mine.
And she told me later that she spent the entire evening in drop-jawed amazement at a Sam Francis she had never seen before.
Witty, charming, debonair, gallant, solicitous.
I'm sure that Sam never answered any of Ann's questions with, how the fuck would I know?
There was one occasion that I did witness, and this was once when he came to my house in the company of two other male friends.
Well, Sam had been to my house many times, and my daughter Charlotte was about eight years old, had seen him many times, and he walked in the door, and she rushed up and threw her arms around him.
As she always did when Sam came to our house.
Sam beamed and he looked at the other two guys and he says,"I get a hug." Well, as you saw in the videos, for many years Sam was overweight.
Well, he also smoked and many of us worried about his health and we tried to remind him as gently as we could how important he was for our movement and how we hoped that he would take better care of himself.
And he did.
He made some real serious changes.
He stopped smoking.
He lost weight.
And ironically, it was just at those points when he was making such serious efforts for better health that he suffered a ruptured aortic aneurysm and he died just a few days later.
I remember thinking, what a terrible, tragic waste.
All that brilliance, all that knowledge, all that commitment to our people.
All those things that he had yet to do, all just snuffed out in an instant.
Some years later, I wrote an introduction to a short book of his essays, copies of which are available at the back.
And I'll close by quoting a few words that I wrote in the introduction to that book.
Our generation will not produce another Sam Francis.
The few who could match him in learning and brilliance will not have his courage.
Those who have his courage will lack his brilliance.
Our work must go on without him, but there's no greater tribute to him than to take inspiration from his words and carry on with all our strength the struggle to which he gave his life.
I'd like to now ask Sam Dixon to say a few words about our fallen comrade.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It is impossible with words to convey someone's personality.
It's one of the tragedies of history that you, like Sam Francis, you read history, and you form impressions of people like Mark Anthony and Julius Caesar and Elizabeth I. But we know that these impressions are imperfect, that you cannot preserve a person's personality,
nor can you convey a person's personality to people who did not experience that personality.
But within the limits of the human word, I'll try to sum up some of my memories and a sketch of Sam's character.
Sam was someone who evolved.
He did not spring like Minerva from the mind of Zeus.
He initially was not entirely on our wavelength and started out in mainstream conservatism.
But he was always open to ideas and thoughts, and he moved in our direction, and he had the honesty to face facts and truth, and he, over a period of years, readily embraced what we had to say and spoke and wrote about those truths,
and as is the way in the soft totalitarianism of the United States, he paid a great price for that.
He wrote a piece for the Washington Times.
I think this was the one that his enemies used to get him fired from that position.
But he held out to well-deserved and obvious ridicule the Baptists who had passed some sort of a statement of contrition where the white Baptists groveled and apologized to the black Baptists for the sins of their great-great-grandfathers.
Something unheard of in Christian theology that you're supposed to feel guilt.
For the actions of your great-great-grandparents.
You would think that they would address things like the shockingly high divorce rate, the failure of fathers to pay their child support, mundane manners like this that fill our society.
But no, the Baptists were interested in getting on the train of political correctness.
So Sam, quite properly, as a good Presbyterian, I might add, reared as one.
He held up this Baptist act to the ridicule that it deserved.
And this provided the pretext for his enemies who had long wanted to have him fired, to get him fired.
And, of course, this worked enormous economic hardship on Sam.
I have done many things in my life of which I am embarrassed or ashamed, but one of the ones I'm not is that I tried very hard to help Sam financially in the ensuing years and to do so in such a way that would not hurt his ego.
And speaking of ego, Jared talked about the delights of an evening with Sam Francis.
It required a certain type of person to enjoy the delights of an evening or a lunch with Sam Francis.
He was not for sissies.
He was not for the timid.
He did not mince words.
He was a southerner, and a southerner from an extraordinarily fine family, which I'll mention in a minute.
But he had none of the usual southerners' softness or mildness or politeness or manners as illustrated by the example that Jared gave of his brusque answer to the woman asking desperately for some indication of hope.
And you had to be prepared to receive a lot of insults and corrections in the course of talking to Sam.
I hesitate to say this because I know my enemies within our own cause will use it, but it's such an amusing incident that I will go ahead and open myself to their attacks and their utilization of Sam as a means to attack me.
But some years back, a few years before his death, there was a significant organization that was in need of someone to head it.
And my name had been floated, and I had told the people who floated I could not do it, would not do it.
So the phone rang one day about that time.
I picked it up, and Sam was on the phone.
And there was no pussyfooting around with Sam.
Nothing like, how you doing?
How do you feel about the dogs winning the football?
There was none of the usual sort of flowers and charm with Sam.
He always plowed directly into the task at hand, which he did.
He said, well, Sam...
You understand that your name has been floated to head such and such an organization.
I opened my mouth to tell him that, yes, I couldn't do it when he said, you have to understand that this would be a terrible mistake to make you the head of this organization.
This was Sam Francis when he was being polite.
Anyway, you had to be tough.
But he was, when you were...
He was strong enough to endure Sam and put up with the insults and the gruff and direct criticisms and admonitions and corrections, which I gave back to him.
I am not a weak person.
Sensitive people don't survive very long in law practice or in this cause.
So given those two, I'm really pretty much indifferent to personal insults.
They have no impact on me at all.
His mind was very facile.
Not only did he know history and could give historical examples, but he could retrieve things out of modern life.
And one of my memories, which I wish very much I had reduced to writing...
It was my last meal with Sam at my very beloved Tabard Inn, a big hangout of liberals, which I infiltrate often when I go to Washington.
And I invited Sam to come over and eat dinner.
So we were sitting at the table.
I sometimes go there and eat there as just sort of a memento, a commemoration of Sam's life.
But the subject turned to the...
So-called responsible right.
The whole buckly panoply of phony, corrupt organizations run, I think, in difference with my leader, Jared Taylor, I think these things are deliberately run to demoralize and channelize and wreck opposition.
But anyway, Sam was a little more charitable for them, but he had a much grimmer sense of them than a lot of people like Jared.
But the subject turned to the amendment swindles.
And we began discussing, I raised the issue of the amendments, the don't burn the Yankees' flag amendment, which Buckley and all of his crowd were milking for all the money they could get out of it.
They were going to pass a constitutional amendment to make it illegal to burn the Yankees' flag.
Well, I would never burn the federal flag.
I was a soldier.
I did wear this country's uniform, although I didn't believe in its war.
I'm not about to become a spy or a traitor to my country, but I view that flag with very ambiguous feelings.
And I certainly do not want to interfere with the First Amendment rights of people who want to burn the flag.
I would never burn it.
It would offend me if someone burned it.
But, you know, above all, it's just utterly useless.
If the amendment could have been enacted like that, what would it have mattered?
Has anyone in the room ever seen a federal flag burning?
Raise your hands.
Have you ever witnessed one?
One person has witnessed one.
But this was a big cause to the Buckley Empire.
So Sam turned the conversation from my raising the immediate issue and began listing all the amendment scams that had been run by the corrupt empire.
And it was astonishing.
He got up past ten.
The flag one, the balanced budget one, the school prayer one, the abortion one, the on and on and on.
I can't even remember.
I wish I had them all written down.
And he pointed out that it's hard to estimate the amount of money that has been raised for these completely worthless proposals.
And I'm not saying that Sam was against People who believe in life.
Same as against abortion.
I see my Catholic friends wincing when I mention the abortion amendment.
But as a practical matter, if you can't get a majority in Congress to vote for law against abortion...
It's obvious you're never going to get a two-thirds majority, and you're never going to get two-thirds of the states or three-quarters or whatever it requires to make the amendment.
It's just the people raising the money for this amendment were simply swindling sincere people out of money from coast to coast.
Sam came up with over ten of these, and his estimate was that perhaps as much as $500 million had been raised out of the pockets of people, of good-hearted people, to pay for the expense accounts of the Beltway Conservatives.
But anyway, Sam was full of practical advice, too, from years of experience.
And I'm going to convey one.
One day, he chewed me out.
And I'm going to share this with you because it will come back to you long after I am dead.
The young people in this room will remember this.
Sam did like me despite his gruffness toward me.
And so he paid me a great honor at a meeting.
He came over about 11 o'clock.
He said, I want to eat lunch with you.
Let's go eat lunch.
I said, all right.
So let me go eat lunch.
Well, the meeting adjourned at noon, and so we began making our way out to go find a place to eat lunch.
And as we went our way out, I began chatting.
I said, come on, join us for lunch.
So Sam pouted over a lunch where there were about eight people there.
And then they all headed back to the hotel.
He said, you stay, I want to tell you something.
So then he proceeded to chew me out.
He said, I invited you to eat lunch with me.
I did not invite you to gather up a gaggle of your friends to join us for lunch.
And here was the practical thing.
He said, I like to have sensible, purposeful conversation.
And he said, once you get past four people, you cannot have that conversation.
Now, how many people here knew that already?
Raise your hand.
Quite a few.
But quite a few didn't.
It never occurred to me in all the decades of laboring in the vineyards of racial nationalism, it had never occurred to me, but he's absolutely right.
Once you have five people at the table, you will not have a conversation because it will break down into individual conversations.
So I have made a rule since then, to the extent I can, to try to limit myself to lunch parties and dinner parties of four people.
The day came when I got the news of Sam's heart attack, and it was obvious that he had very little chance to live.
It was tragic that Sam lived in a rough neighborhood up in Washington because of financial circumstances.
And when he had this heart attack, he had to drive to the nearest hospital, which was an atrocious hospital staffed with third-world people.
And we were very worried that this would get out over the Internet and that this third-world...
Staff, Hosper, would find out about his activities against immigration and could potentially kill him.
I mean, that's not beyond conception.
Fortunately, that didn't happen, but he did die.
And I will still remember that I got the call, I think it was in February, from Louis Andrews saying very bluntly and abruptly, Sam is dead.
And I knew that somebody who was irreplaceable, someone whose kind would never come again, had been lost.
The Russians have a great phrase.
They say, Today such people do not exist.
And San Francis is not the kind of person you can replace.
He's not what they call a fungible, like nail.
I went to his funeral, and I met his delightful sister.
Knowing her and the family briefly filled in a lot of information about Sam.
He had gone to a prep school in Chattanooga.
You could see in his sister and his relatives the same qualities that Sam had as testimony to genetics.
I went to his sister's house, his sister's name is Julia, and is much older than Sam, and was very proud of her genius baby brother, who was her only other sibling.
And so the door was open.
It's an awkward thing when you go to a funeral and you're going into someone's house and you don't know them and you sort of feel, should I knock?
So the door was ajar and there was nobody around.
I could hear voices back in the back of the house.
So I walked in and there was nobody around.
I sort of looked around and then to my astonishment I looked and what should I see on the wall?
And I was looking at it and I heard a...
Beautiful voice with a lovely southern accent say behind me, and this woman had come from the back, she said,"Yes, it's Mary Todd Lincoln." And they had a picture of Mary.
It was Samuel Todd Francis.
Sam was a relative of Mary Todd Lincoln.
And his charming sister, not knowing yet who I was, she'd heard my name, I found later, but she didn't know.
She said,"You know, people say she was crazy." But if you were married to Abraham Lincoln, it stands to reason that if you were sane, you'd go crazy.
So that was Sam Francis.
Those of you who knew him, leave a little space in your heart of gratitude and love for him.
And those who did not know him, I'm sorry you did not.
I hope you will have people in your life.
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