All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 26, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
58:28
Race and the American Right - Sam Francis
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
It's my pleasure and privilege to introduce Sam Francis.
Sam Francis.
Well, I see I needn't even continue here.
I did plan to say a few things about Dr. Francis.
He's the syndicated columnist, as you all know, and he writes undoubtedly the most popular column in Chronicles magazine.
Principalities and Powers.
He's the author of Beautiful Losers, which is a collection of essays on the failures of American conservatism, and most recently, a collection of short pieces called Revolution from the Middle.
He has also recently been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the In Citizens Informer, which is the newspaper that counts the conservative citizens.
Also, I'd like you all to know that his twice-weekly columns are available by email subscription.
There are forms somewhere in the room for those of you who would like to get them.
I might also add that Dr. Francis is one of the rare people who has been on every single program, all four of the American Renaissance Conferences, and it is only fair that we should invite him back.
Because no one else has paid quite so high a price as Dr. Francis for having spoken at an American Renaissance conference.
Some of you with somewhat longer memories will remember that he had a very highly regarded role as staff columnist for the Washington Times, a job from which he was bounced because of having addressed the first American Renaissance conference,
and I might add for having said a number of extremely insightful and intelligent things.
Now, punishment of that kind, unfortunately, are the rewards for a man who, in a saner society, would be one of our nation's most honored journalists.
Let me present Samuel Francis.
Thank you very much, Jared.
Thank you.
The day after the New Hampshire primary, neoconservative Bill Crystal, the editor of the Weekly Standard, published an op-ed in the Washington Post purporting to explain to us what had happened in the primary and what it all meant.
As is not uncommon with Mr. Crystal, he was quite wrong in his major conclusions, that John McCain and Bill Bradley were the harbingers of what Mr. Crystal termed a new governing agenda for a potential new majority.
The subsequent flop of both McCain and Bradley shows that whatever their agenda, neither one commands a majority even in his own party.
But for once, Mr. Crystal did say something in his column that was both true and important.
Leaderless, rudderless, and issueless, he wrote, the conservative movement, which accomplished great things over the last quarter century, is finished.
Leaving aside the rather painful question of what the actual accomplishments of the conservative movement may have been, there is little doubt that Mr. Crystal is entirely correct that the American conservative movement is no longer a serious political force at the national level.
As he remarked at the time, not one of the three presidential candidates regarded as being close to the conservative movement, Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes, and Steve Forbes, Mr. Crystal,
however, was by no means the first to write the epitaph of the conservative movement.
I myself have been writing about the irrelevance of the movement right in American politics for about ten years.
And indeed, the 2000 primaries were not the first occasion that that irrelevance became plain.
In 1996, conservative movement favorite Senator Phil Graham had to drop out of the race even before the New Hampshire primary, and other candidates favored by the movement, Forbes and Keyes again, as well as Lamar Alexander, also flopped soon after.
I will not go so far as to argue that the collapse of the mainstream right Occurred because it refused to deal with the issues of race, although it is quite true that it did so refuse.
Almost none of the movement candidates in 1996 or 2000 even mentioned race or any of the racial issues at all.
Affirmative action, immigration, multiculturalism, hate crime legislation, or the glaringly obvious and increasingly powerful emergence of militant anti-white political and racial movements.
In 1996, Robert Dole started out as a foe of affirmative action, but dropped the issue until late in the campaign.
His running mate, Jack Kemp, who is perhaps the most loathsome racial renegade ever produced by the conservative movement.
Thank you.
Both Dole and Kemp at once repudiated the anti-immigration planks that the Buchanan forces had inserted in the GOP platform in 1996, though both Dole and Kemp would return to affirmative action and at least illegal immigration as issues in the last desperate days of their campaign in California.
I will not argue that avoiding and even endorsing the wrong side of the racial issue is the main cause of the decline and fall of the conservative movement, but I think it is clear that the right's defection on race has played a major role in causing its own failure.
Indeed, it seems to be little noticed that ever since 1968, no Republican candidate has won a presidential election without at some point during his campaign emitting some kind of signal However, coded or masked, they communicated to white voters that he was really on their side and understood the reality of racial conflict in the United States.
In 1968 itself, Richard Nixon won the election essentially by stealing the rhetoric and issues of George Wallace on forced busing and law and order at a time when law and order rather clearly meant willingness to enforce the law against mainly black urban rioters and criminals.
If Nixon himself did not always make that message clear, his running mate Spiro Agnew certainly did.
Similarly, in 1980, Ronald Reagan beat the drum about the welfare queen and earned sufficient hatred of blacks that when he was shot in 1981, many blacks actually celebrated.
In 1988, George Bush's campaign ran the famous Willie Horton ads, careful to make sure that by displaying Horton's picture, That viewers knew the convict was not just a paroled rapist, but a black paroled rapist.
The Republican candidates who sent these signals won the elections, although most of them immediately betrayed the white voters they had gulled by instituting affirmative action in the case of Nixon or failing to do what they had promised to do during their campaigns.
The converse is also true.
Gerald Ford sent no such racial signal that I can recall in his campaign of 1976.
And he lost Jimmy Carter.
George Bush not only sent no such signal in 1992, but actually sent the wrong signal, his inept response to the Los Angeles riots and his administration's prosecution of the white police officers who had subdued Rodney King.
While Bill Clinton sent the right signal by upgrading Sister Soulja in the presence of Jesse Jackson for her endorsement of black genocide against whites.
Perhaps I read too much into these incidents, but it seems to me the pattern is clear.
Every successful Republican and at least one successful Democratic presidential candidate has sent a subliminal racial signal that tells white voters, not always and perhaps not ever truthfully, that he understands the racial issue and is on their side of it.
I suspect that the signal cannot be sent in any way but a subliminal one.
And it will be interesting to see if George W. Bush sends one during this election.
I rather doubt that he will do so.
The larger pattern is also clear.
When the right runs with the racial issue, it wins.
When it abandons it, as it has done in recent years, it loses.
But the American right has not always been on the wrong side of race.
As James Lubensky shows in a forthcoming article in American Renaissance, Conservative organs in the 1950s and 60s, especially National Review, were racially conscious and were explicitly on the side of whites.
National Review, he finds, and I concur, quote, was a voice for white Americans.
And while innate racial differences were not a major theme of the magazine or of conservative thought in general, they were openly addressed and endorsed by sociologist Ernest Vanden Haag, columnist James Kilpatrick, and others.
It is quite true that race was not at the core of American conservatism in that era, and it's also true that race itself, apart from the civil rights movement, was not a major political issue of the era in the way that it is now.
But the mainstream American right of the 1950s through the 1960s and 70s did recognize the reality and significance of race.
Today it does not, and a small book could be written to document the defection of leading Republicans and conservatives on any issue having to do with race.
I myself first became aware of the defection in 1982, when most Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, endorsed and voted for the renewal of the Voting Rights Act.
But in subsequent years, the defection became a flood.
In 1983, both Gingrich and Jack Kemp voted for and even took a leading role in the debate over the Martin Luther King holiday.
In 1984, Gingrich Kemp and their ally, Representative Finn Weber, led a growing following among Republican congressmen, endorsing imposing sanctions on South Africa if apartheid were not ended.
In the Senate in 1985, Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and William Roth actually sponsored sanctions legislation.
Immigration ceased to be an issue for most conservatives at all during the 1980s.
And by the 1990s, the right had actually become pro-immigration and was denouncing as racist anyone who opposed it.
While Republicans in California won office by supporting Proposition 187 in 1994, both Kemp and Bill Bennett, at the behest of Bill Kristol, incidentally, openly denounced the ballot measure as xenophobic and racist.
Because Dole and Kemp won only some 21% of the Hispanic vote in 1996, Conservatives at once frightened themselves into abandoning support for any restrictions on immigration at all.
By 1997, House Republicans were sponsoring legislation that would have allowed Puerto Rico to become a state for the sole purpose of attracting Hispanic votes.
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...
And given the status of King as the patron deity of the new reconstructed America, the prayer is actually appropriate.
I've argued elsewhere that once the King holiday had been established in 1983, King became the major icon of the national pantheon.
And it is perfectly logical that the rest of the country has to be reconstructed to fit King and his cult.
In an important sense, then, King and the King Holiday are the precursors or even the architects of what we now know as political correctness and multiculturalism.
Given that new reconstruction, it was only a matter of time before conservatives signed on to it as well as the left.
By the 1990s, also, even conservative opposition to affirmative action, long a no-brainer for most on the right, was beginning to wither.
In 1998, House Republicans, by then in the majority, actually rejected a bill that would have effectively ended affirmative action in higher education.
It is easy to say that Republicans behave this way because they need to avoid alienating black and other non-white voters.
But the fact is that most Republicans already represent largely white districts, and they have obtained majorities in both the House and the Senate, and won the presidency.
By rallying white majorities.
Nor does their behavior win many black votes.
The black vote for Republican presidential candidates has remained almost constant at between 9 and 12 percent since 1980.
Moreover, it is not just office-seeking Republicans who avoid racial issues.
It is also conservatives in journalism.
National Review, while John O'Sullivan was editor in the 1980s, It was definitely anti-immigration and was somewhat open to discussions of race, publishing Phil Rushton, for example.
But since O'Sullivan's departure a couple of years ago, the magazine has fallen entirely into the hands of pro-immigration, colorblind conservatism.
In a symposium on the bell curve in National Review in 1994, under O'Sullivan's editorship then, much of the commentary was hostile.
If I said 1984, I meant 1994.
Much of the commentary on the bell curve was hostile, and one contributor, neoconservative Richard John Newhouse, a former speechwriter for Martin Luther King, wrote that even if the bell curve thesis were true, it shouldn't be discussed publicly.
In stark and direct contrast to the National Review of the 1950s and 60s, the National Review of the 1990s is based on the premise that race either does not exist or is not important as a determinant of behavior and performance and should not be important in any social relationship.
The same is true of Human Events, the Weekly Standard, Commentary Magazine, the American Spectator, and need I add, the Washington Times.
While most of these periodicals still denounce multiculturalism, bilingual education, affirmative action, and similar anti-white movements and institutions, they do so almost entirely because these forces are themselves seen as racism in reverse.
Contemporary conservatism may exhibit the virtue of consistency in denouncing racial identity and consciousness among blacks and non-whites, as well as among whites.
And in that respect, It might be morally superior to the left, which denounces white racism while smugly condoning anti-white bigotry, but in perpetuating the myth of race neutrality, abandoning white racial identity and consciousness and interests,
and ceasing to be a voice for white Americans, today's conservatism has effectively betrayed the race from which the vast majority of its supporters and adherents come.
If it is easy It is easy but unpersuasive to blame the racial defection of the Republicans on political expediency,
it is also easy but unconvincing to blame the racial defection of the journalistic and academic right on infiltration by the neoconservatives.
It is quite true that neoconservatives like Bill Kristol Father Newhouse, the current crop that runs National Review, Kemp, Gingrich, Bennett, etc., are now the dominant force on the American right.
And all of them have played major roles in liberalizing the right's view of race.
But the prevalence of neoconservatives merely raises the further question why the right tolerates and even welcomes them into its movement and allows them to become dominant.
The answer lies, I believe, in what is a fundamental characteristic of the conservative mentality in America, specifically in its craving to be accepted by the forces that define respectability and acceptability in the dominant culture.
Those forces, as we all know, are essentially liberal to left wing, meaning in the broader sense that they are committed ideologically to the basic worldview of the left of egalitarianism and anti-hereditarian.
Environmentalism. And as I argued in my speech to the American Renaissance Conference in 1996, those forces possess a powerful interest in preserving the dominance of egalitarianism and environmentalism.
If egalitarianism and environmentalism are not true, Then most of the federal and state apparatus for managing the social environment in favor of equality, all of the civil rights and equal opportunity bureaucracy, and most of the academic,
legal and political investment in egalitarian environmentalist social science are at best useless and at worst socially dangerous and ought to be abolished.
But there is a vast amount of power, money, and professional status invested in this apparatus.
So the elites that depend on it for their own power and income and status cannot countenance its abolition or any questioning of the ideology on which it rests.
Instead of challenging the ideology of the left, the conservative right has increasingly chosen to seek respectability and therefore a degree of political and cultural influence by buying into it.
Indeed, I've argued before that this eagerness to join the dominant culture rather than reject and resist it has been true of the American right from its effective beginnings in the 1950s.
At the very beginning of National Review, William Buckley wrote to a colleague that while it was the intellectual class that had, quote, midwived and implemented the revolution, we have got to have allies among the intellectuals.
And we propose to renovate conservatism and see if we can't win some of them around.
The renovation of conservatism consisted in making conservatism more palatable and less threatening to the intellectual class that had adopted liberalism and its egalitarian and environmentalist assumptions.
And without this renovation, the intellectual class in Buckley's strategy could not be won over.
Although Buckley was correct on the importance of having intellectuals as allies, he was, I think, entirely wrong in seeking to enter a dialogue with the dominant intellectual establishment and in diluting conservative ideas in order to attract intellectuals.
The strategy of renovating conservatism to win over the intellectual class in the 1950s It's precisely the same strategy that we have heard from conservatives more recently about the need to renovate traditional conservative positions on civil rights legislation,
affirmative action, and immigration, and thereby trying to win over blacks and Hispanics committed to them.
It is always the right that renovates its ideas to suit its opponents, never the left that renovates its ideas to suit the right.
It is always the right that is conceding territory, not the left.
Neither the intellectual class nor the vast majority of politically active blacks and Hispanics can be won over precisely because their power as groups is entirely dependent on the egalitarian environmentalist ideology and on the government apparatus based on it.
And both the apparatus and the ideology are diametrically opposed to any kind of serious conservative view.
Is the pull of the left in the dominant culture that most conservatives who enter into a dialogue with it will, instead of winning over allies from it, will almost invariably be sucked into it themselves.
That indeed is precisely what happened to Mr. Buckley as well as to Mr. Kemp.
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.
their newspaper.
Their newspapers and periodicals, their TV shows, their university faculties, if they simply ape what the liberals say and think about race.
Because the mainstream right craves acceptance by the dominant culture, it also accepts, at least unconsciously, the moral legitimacy of the dominant culture and of its liberal left premises.
During this year's presidential primaries, although both Al Gore and Bill Bradley It never occurred to Bush or McCain to challenge the moral legitimacy of Gore and Bradley by denouncing them for their cozy meetings with Al Sharpton.
Not only did they not initiate a challenge to Gore and Bradley for meeting with Sharpton, but they never even responded to the Gore-Bradley attacks on them by denouncing them in return.
Instead, McCain initiated attacks on Bush for speaking at Bob Jones University.
Only in the last few weeks has the Republican Party launched a counterattack on Sharpton himself.
They did so by denouncing him as an anti-Semite and comparing him to David Duke.
This has actually led to a backfire since the Anti-Defamation League promptly announced that Sharpton, in fact, is not an anti-Semite.
The Republicans launched that accusation.
Because they wanted to sound liberal.
It sounds liberal when you accuse someone of anti-Semitism.
They should have accused Sharpton simply of being anti-white.
But to accuse him...
Which would have covered both Jews and whites.
But to be anti-white is not a thought crime in Reconstructed America.
And to accuse someone of being anti-white...
Sounds like you are racist yourself, which is the last thing in the universe the stupid party wants to sound like.
Having thus ceded moral legitimacy as well as cultural dominance to the left, the Republicans and most conservative leaders are no longer able to defend themselves against liberal attacks on them when they act more or less like conservatives, when, for example, they defend the Confederate flag or fail to denounce it,
or when they speak at Bob Jones University.
And they're even unable to counterattack the left for acting like the left.
Having ceded moral legitimacy to the left, the so-called right now plays almost exclusively by rules written and enforced by the left, and yet is perpetually amazed when it finds itself playing entirely defensively and continuing to lose.
We can expect for the remainder of this presidential campaign for Governor Bush to continue to avoid any indication that he does not accept the liberal claim to exclusive moral legitimacy and thereby to remain on the defensive throughout the campaign.
That is exactly what George Bush Sr. did in 1992 and Dole in 1996.
That is essentially why the Republicans are and remain the stupid party.
They lose.
They lose and the right loses because they cede moral legitimacy and cultural dominance to the left, and they thereby render themselves vulnerable merely to being pushed farther and farther to the left themselves.
That is why they accepted and were so easily conquered by the neoconservatives, who to this day remain mainly liberal in their basic worldview and values.
I very clearly recall when I worked for the Heritage Foundation in the late 1970s, When the neoconservatives were first emerging into public view, conservatives at the foundation were eager to have neoconservatives work with them because they kept saying they possessed credibility.
The neoconservatives possessed credibility, you see, not because they had stronger academic credentials than conservative intellectuals, in fact they do not, but because they had reputations as liberals.
If conservatives worked with them, some of the legitimacy and credibility they possessed might rub off on the right.
It did not occur to movement conservatives then, and it certainly does not occur to them today, to challenge the liberal claim to moral legitimacy and to establish their own claim to it from the right.
Conservatives tend to concede moral legitimacy to the left, not just on the issues of race, but also on a wide variety of other issues that have little to do with race.
Gun control, for example, comes to mind.
But this tendency is most noticeable on race and racial issues.
And it is most dangerous on these issues precisely because today and for much of the next generation, race and racial issues are going to be the major issues around which politics revolves.
As non-whites increasingly invade the country through immigration and the racial balance turns against whites, we will see an increasing level of interracial crime and violence directed against whites.
An increasing level of discrimination against and outright persecution of whites for any challenge or resistance to nonwhite domination.
And an increasing level of barbarization of our culture as immigrant and indigenous nonwhites challenge and displace white civilization.
Conservatism is not going to protect us, and in many respects will be as much our outright enemy as liberalism.
Let me remind you.
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.
Bill Kristol, then, whatever else he's wrong about, is right that the conservative movement is finished.
And certainly, for those who want to rebuild white racial consciousness and solidarity, That movement has long since become both useless and harmful.
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 coopted or assimilated by the dominant culture of the left, Neither can it hope to alter that culture except through radical and even revolutionary measures.
The strategy proposed by William Buckley of trying to move into the mainstream and wean a handful of left-wing intellectuals over to the right has failed, just as much as the myth of racial neutrality has failed.
The strategy of a racially conscious movement must be one of antagonism and opposition to the mainstream.
With the ultimate goal, quite frankly, of discrediting and destroying the mainstream defined by our racial and cultural enemies and replacing it with one defined and constructed by ourselves.
applause
We are not going to simply amend or reform the existing establishment because it will not allow itself to be amended in the direction and the way we want.
We cannot expect the existing establishment simply to incorporate The current establishment is simply far too dependent on its own myths of egalitarianism and environmentalism to accept as legitimate a movement that categorically rejects and condemns those myths.
When I say we must seek the destruction of the existing establishment, The dominant culture or the mainstream, I'm not, of course, suggesting that we throw bombs at it or shoot at it or resort to violence in any way.
What I am suggesting is that we deny the system the moral legitimacy it demands and which conservatism has all too easily conceded to it.
That we never miss the opportunity to point out the moral fraudulence and hypocrisy of the system in gabbling about equality, tolerance, and racial reconciliation, even as it does all it can to entrench racial discrimination against whites through affirmative
action, to demonize whites in school curricula and in the media, to encourage hatred of and violence against whites, to legitimize anti-white bigots like Sharpton, and to ignore or extenuate the anti-white hatred that is transparent
among black and Hispanic racial activists.
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.
Thank you.
Do you want to just select your questions?
I will take some questions, if anyone has any.
Marion? Yes.
Sam, I agree with you that the right is easily mowed-mowed by the left.
After all, the left is opposed to people who are willing to accuse anyone who disagrees with them of personally murdering Anne Frank.
So it's pretty hard to stand up to after a while.
But don't you think that in terms of practical policy, Perhaps spearheaded mostly by governors and mayors, but also somewhat in Congress,
that there has been a shift to the right of mainstream politics.
I think in terms of school vouchers, standards of learning that are increasingly being put in place in states.
The ideas of privatizing Social Security, welfare reform, zero tolerance policing, much higher incarceration rates.
Don't you think that maybe in an unglamorous, non-revolutionary, but very practical and real way, actually things are moving in our direction slowly?
I haven't noticed it.
Most of those things don't have anything to do with the racial issue.
I mean, not directly, anyway.
I think it's quite true that many white voters who vote Republican think that the Republicans are much farther to the right than they are, much more pro-white than they actually are.
Buchanan told me after the 1992 Republican convention that the thing that people said to him the most often at the convention was that their dream ticket was a Buchanan-Jack Kemp ticket.
And I recall last fall when the quadrennial demonization campaign against Buchanan started up again.
Bill Kristol said on television that he was amazed.
I mean, Kristol was one of the main people attacking Buchanan for anti-Semitism and extremism and all that.
Kristol said that he was amazed that so many of his readers at the Weekly Standard wrote in to defend Pat Buchanan.
Well, what that indicates, both Buchanan's comment and Kristol's comment, indicate that the rank-and-file Republicans don't see any difference between...
Crystal or Buchanan and Kemp, it seems to me.
They probably see more difference now than they did in 1992, but it's very hard for most people to tell the difference between the counterfeit conservatism of somebody like Kemp or Bennett or Crystal and someone like Buchanan.
I just don't think there has been that much progress.
I just don't take any comfort from most of the things you mentioned, to tell the truth.
When the country is going to go non-white, but then by the time I'm an old man, I just can't be very happy about those things.
Yes, yes.
Terry? Some people are now saying that we've undergone a silent coup in this country in the last ten years.
It's no longer run by European-American Christians who founded it and have defended it and built it up.
And I'm also hearing that it's too late for a political solution.
And I'd like you to comment on whether you believe it's too late, really too late for a political solution.
And if so, what is plan B?
I definitely think there has been a silent coup.
I don't think it's been so silent.
I think they advertise it pretty openly and loudly.
I think that there is a political solution still possible, but as I hope my speech indicated, not through the Republican Party or the mainstream right.
I think, in part, it is a political but also a cultural solution, which is part of Plan B, to build up a grassroots movement from the right Culturally can begin to displace and challenge the cultural apparatus that's in place and at some point will become political and
will become a new party or a new movement or something of that nature that can then essentially replace the existing one.
I think it was Karl Marx, actually, who compared this process to a snake shedding its skin.
The new skin builds up underneath the dying skin, and at one point the dead skin simply falls away and it's replaced by the new skin.
That's essentially the metaphor, the process that I would envision.
In American Renaissance, the Council of Conservative Citizens and certain other groups are...
I think leading that fight today.
I think the victory of 187 in California is an indication of that.
It's not happening everywhere because not everybody sees the problem yet.
But increasingly, in the next generation, people are going to see that problem.
The great question is whether it can happen in time or not.
And the sooner it happens, the better.
Some other question?
I have in my hand a $20 check and an application for one year of the Sam Francis column by email.
Would you care to comment on the wisdom of my action?
You take your life in your hands, John.
Thank you very much.
When you give me the check, I will thank you again.
Thank you.
Yes, sir.
I'm back in the back here.
I have a question.
In the early 90s, with things like the Crown Heights riots, the LA riots, even into the mid-90s with Million Man March, the OJ trial, people like Irving Kristol, Norm Podhoritz, even Ed Koch were making noises that were very close to the noises that AR made.
That seems to have abated a little bit, but even people like David Horowitz sometimes read his book, Hating Whitey.
He makes noises that sound very much, in some ways, like AR.
Do you think as things get worse and if they ever do realize that non-whites don't really care about them or their American ideals or the Constitution or anything, do you think just that jolt of reality may make them come our way?
It might, especially if we are out there and available and accessible to them.
But I think the thing I noticed, I remember the Weekly Standard at the time of the O.J. Simpson verdict had an entire issue, I think, devoted to that.
And they were outraged at it and beat their breasts and jumped up and down and whined and moaned about it and how wicked it was.
But if you saw my review of Horowitz's book in the recent issue of American Renaissance, I just don't think that they really...
They can have any solution to this.
They can deplore it.
What they deplore about that sort of thing is that blacks themselves are racially conscious.
What they want is colorblindness.
They want the denial of race for blacks and whites.
That's why they like Martin Luther King so much because that's what he, at least overtly, claimed to believe in.
You know, the whole significance of the O.J. Simpson trial is that it shows that blacks reject that.
The blacks themselves have a racial consciousness.
And that's perfectly normal and natural.
I mean, most groups and races do have racial consciousness and should have them.
It's not blacks who are sick, it's whites who are sick for not having a racial consciousness of their own.
And that's what the neoconservatives...
Cannot stand.
And they have a great deal of trouble with that.
Yes, sir.
Jim? Sam, I think your analogy about the snake shedding its skin is very appropriate.
The problem is that what you have is a new snake.
And I think what we need is a new political animal.
One that is openly, racially aware.
Not a new political snake.
Okay. That's a racial and political snake.
Close, Sam.
I've enjoyed reading your articles in the Washington Times in the early 1990s when I was a student at the George Washington University.
There are so many people out there, a lot of whites, who feel the same way.
They're just too timid to talk about it publicly.
That's the whole political correctness problem.
Diversity has to be exposed for what it is.
It is anti-white.
It is racist.
It is a movement that celebrates bringing whites into the minority in this country.
That's what the motivation is, and that's what has to be exposed.
Yes. You're absolutely right.
Yes. Yes, sir, down here.
You've criticized, quite correctly, environmentalism, but to the extent that it will be very important for the day after a new movement to suggest to appeal to young people, don't you think it would be possible to use...
environmental concerns in the broadest sense as a source of strength to the new movement preserving the best of the past preventing further degradation of land
Yes, certainly.
When I was speaking about environmentalism, actually, I was warned about using this word by someone who had read my speech, but I'm talking about not concern for the natural environment, which I'm all in favor of.
I mean, they've positioned themselves in a very stupid, unlimited growth position that destroys the natural environment, and we should reject that.
When I'm talking about environmentalism, I'm talking about the belief, the theory that human beings are the product of their social environment.
That's a different kind of environmentalism.
People like Professor Len, Professor Rushton, whom we'll hear from, Dr. Levin, are hereditarians.
They believe in the nature side of human nature, whereas the environmentalists believe in the nurturer side, that human beings are simply the products of their environment.
And if that were true, then the government or social planners could manipulate the environment to make human beings into whatever they wanted to.
Communism is based on this, and this basically goes back to the enlightenment of Rousseau in the 18th century.
It's, to my mind, the characteristic belief of the left.
All left-wing movements, liberalism and communism, socialism, all believe in this.
The right, by definition, rejects it, I think.
Anyone who does reject that belief is, by definition, on the right.
Sam? I have a question about Buchanan.
Despite the fact that I'm an elected Republican official, and despite the fact that Buchanan has said some very unkind things about me, I'll put my personal feelings aside, and I plan to vote for Buchanan in this election because we need, obviously, to shake up the political system and shake up the two-party system,
the con job that's being done to the American people.
But my question is this.
He obviously accepted a black communist as a high position in his campaign.
And recently, in the national media, he made this statement when asked by some of our, I'd say, non-Christian media personnel, what about David Duke?
And Buchanan said specifically, I don't want his support or his supporters.
I don't want him to have any role in the campaign, nor do I want his support of the ballot box.
I'm concerned a little bit, although I plan to vote for Buchanan.
That he may be going the same way that you talked about earlier and some of these other conservatives like the National Review and many other conservative leaders and organizations.
And my question is trying to be constructive in the sense of what can we do here and what do you think we can do to help keep Buchanan in the right direction as far as the principles of our racial heritage and racial survival and evolutionary advancement.
What can we do to keep Buchanan on the right track and keep him true to the principles for which he will get the majority of his support?
Thank you.
David, I have to say I share your concerns about Buchanan and the campaign.
I've been critical of the Fulani decision myself.
The rationale for that is that Fulani supposedly has all this clout in the Reform Party and that Buchanan needed her help to get the nomination.
Neither one of them claims that they agree with the other one.
I think the whole Fulani appointment was mishandled, if not misconceived from the beginning.
I'm told by people in the campaign actually that she has been almost useless in helping them get the nomination.
All they do is sort of bicker over this position or that position.
And in some cases, actually, I believe in Alabama they were actually in opposition.
I have to say, Pat Buchanan is a friend and he's been very supportive and very helpful to me and I will certainly vote for him if he's on a ballot that I'm voting for.
And I agree with him on some issue, on many issues, most issues, but I don't think that he would agree with the ideas that we're hearing here today or with my view of race.
I've never talked about race explicitly with him.
I just don't think he has that much racial consciousness, or that's a big interest to him.
I think that...
If he won the presidency, which I wouldn't expect him to, but he probably would end immigration, and he would probably abolish affirmative action, but I don't think it goes much beyond that.
If that happened, I would be ecstatic.
That would be a great...
It's not a total victory, but it's a big step toward it.
Did you have another question?
I still do, really, my friend, even though I feel he's...
He thinks he's got to make certain public statements to appease the media, which, again, I think that's a very big mistake on our side.
That's how we compromise our rights away.
But I had a discussion with him about three years ago in Baton Rouge when he was going for the nomination, and he was seeking my support.
In fact, my supporters in Louisiana helped secure him his victory in Louisiana during that Republican primary.
And I talked to him about the bell curve.
And what I was shocked about is that he had no real understanding of what the bell curve was all about.
He thought the bell curve was about elites and how the bell curve was really against the common man because it stressed people of high IQ and encouraged excellence and so forth.
And he and his sister, Bay, both had no idea of what the bell curve was all about and understood the underlying principles.
And that disturbed me.
But again, I'll say, I want to say this, I'm not up here to try to tell you not to vote for Buchanan or support him.
I probably will quietly.
I don't want to hurt his campaign either.
But the point is that, you know, I'm concerned about that and I would like to see and I hope that those of you here, like yourself, who have influence with Buchanan.
Make a tremendous effort to educate them fully on the race issue and really get down and hunker down with them and talk to them over dinner and go over the ideas and get it over to them and try to help steer them.
I don't think his campaign has been using a lot of intelligent political processes either.
I'm surprised.
For instance, instead of saying reduction of income tax, why doesn't he talk about a national sales tax and eliminate the IRS?
Those are the kinds of programs that will get a lot of support.
But he doesn't seem to have the political finesse that I wish that he did in some areas.
Okay. I should make it clear.
I should make it clear.
I'm not a spokesman for Pat Buchanan or the campaign.
I'm not going to stand here and defend Pat Buchanan necessarily, beyond what I've already said.
But I think that...
I think there are people in his campaign also, I'm not going to name any names, who have the kind of phobia of race that you would find on the mainstream right.
I know, I'm pretty certain of this, that last fall he was planning on giving a major speech on immigration in, I think, San Diego.
And it was canceled at the last minute.
Supposedly because campaign officials thought that he would sound racist if he attacked immigration.
Another official told a friend of mine in the campaign that Buchanan was not talking about immigration and affirmative action because those issues did not poll well.
Well, if you want campaigns that do things on the basis of polls, you have Gore and Bush to vote for.
Run by, you might as well vote for George Bush to tell the truth.
Yes, sir.
Excuse me, sir.
Sam, now this last gentleman, we're not a couple before Dave here, talked about there might be some timidity on parts of the whites.
I'm not so sure, I mean, to speak up, I'm not so sure it's much timidity as it is lack of leadership.
I mean, if the Republican Party's not there anymore, who...
Is it the American Renaissance?
Is it the CCC?
No, I agree entirely.
Who's going to do this on a national scale?
When this campaign official tells my friend that immigration doesn't poll well, it may not poll well as an issue because politicians and political leaders have not talked about it.
And societies are run by elites.
I don't care whether they call themselves democracies or whatever.
You always have an elite in any society, and if they don't define the issues and the values for the mass of the people, it's very, very unusual for the mass of the people to define them for themselves.
So if you don't talk about immigration as an issue, the immigration issue is going to die.
My question wasn't just about immigration.
My question was in general.
Yes. In general, if I don't have a Republican Party anymore, which I believe they're just like the Democrats, Who do I?
I'm from Kansas.
Who do my people back in Kansas rely on?
I mean, we have no choice but either Republicans or Democrats.
Is the American Renaissance the movement I should be looking for?
Is the CCC the movement?
Who is it?
All of the above, yes.
One more question.
Here. Last question.
It's pretty well accepted that the person who's elected in 2000 is going to appoint at least two and possibly as many as three new justices to the Supreme Court.
Justice Rehnquist is a World War II veteran.
Justice Stevens is over 80. Senator O'Connor is sick.
If racially conscious white voters throw away their vote on a third-party candidate and help elect Al Gore as president, are we any better off?
I think there are two questions.
I think there are two answers to that.
Number one, If you're assuming that George W. Bush is going to appoint good replacements for these Supreme Court appointments, there is no basis for that assumption.
Number one, the most damage that has been done on the Supreme Court has been done by Earl Warren and William Brennan, who are both Republican appointees.
The most liberal person on the Supreme Court today is David Souter, who was appointed by George Bush Sr.
There is no guarantee whatsoever of who George W. Bush would appoint to the Supreme Court.
Warren and Brennan were appointed for purely political reasons.
That's the way Republicans think, first of all.
You might get somebody as good as Clarence Thomas, who is actually the best.
The second answer to your question, I think, is that every four years we hear this.
Ever since 1992 when Buchanan started running, we hear this argument that we can't vote for Buchanan or go third party because of the Supreme Court and the judicial appointments.
As long as we buy into that, we're not going to go anywhere.
We're going to keep...
We're falling down one stair at a time until we hit the bottom, and there's not going to be any change or any progress.
And we're going to have to come up with an alternative to the Republican Party, even if it means we have to put up with the Democrats for a while.
I'm sorry.
That's just the way it is.
▲
Export Selection