This week we are going to talk about the late Samuel Todd Francis, who is arguably the most influential man on American Renaissance, Vider, or what used to be called the Alternative Right, the Dissident Right.
For those of you who don't know much about him, I'm just going to go over some basic biographical stuff.
He was born in Tennessee in 1947.
He went to John Hopkins University and then got a doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He got that degree in 1979 and then he went to work for the Heritage Foundation which was brand new at that point and really making a name for itself as sort of the like the brain trust of the Reagan administration.
I know we think that think tanks are kind of like normal and sort of a given now, but
back in the 70s it was, you know, kind of brand new.
So the fact that San Francisco was in on the ground floor there is actually very impressive.
He did a lot of research on terrorism there and that's when he wrote his first monograph,
which is the Soviet Strategy of Terror, which was published in 1941.
He left the Heritage Foundation to...
81.
Forty-one.
Oh, geez, yeah.
Nineteen eighty-one, excuse me.
The Soviet strategy of terror was working well in forty-one.
Francis left the Heritage Foundation to work for the newly elected Senator of North Carolina, John East.
And at that time, John East was the junior Senator of North Carolina, the senior being Jesse Helms, and it was joked at the time That John East was so conservative that Jesse Helms was now the liberal senator from North Carolina.
Francis worked as the legislative assistant for national security to Senator East until Senator East actually committed suicide in 1986.
He had some kind of... Chronic disease, right?
Yeah, super debilitating, something super painful.
I forget exactly what it was.
If you're gonna go out, better...
Teach their own, I suppose.
At any rate, so after John East dies, that is when Francis pivots and starts working for the Washington Times, which at that point was also somewhat up-and-coming in kind of the Reagan era as being like the right-wing equivalent of the Washington Post.
Thank you, Reverend Moon, for giving us this fine institution.
That's right.
The Washington Times is financially backed by a somewhat eccentric, arguably cultish, Korean gentleman.
He is literally the descendant of Christ, and I will say whatever else he tells me to say.
I have never gotten any money from Reverend Moon, anybody listening.
So Francis worked in a number of different capacities for the Washington Times, but quickly distinguished himself for his really, really talented writing style and really insightful commentary.
So he became a syndicated columnist in short order.
But as the kind of Reagan revolution started to wane, George H.W.
Bush became president and started disappointing a lot of people with the signature Read my lips, no new taxes.
Francis became more and more interested in what was then the very beginnings of so much of what we talk about now.
Pat Buchanan, the Council of Conservative Citizens, etc.
In the early 90s you had this one period where these kinds of issues were mainstream.
This is when you had alienation, this is when you had the bell curve.
This is when you had the beginning of the American Renaissance, this is when you had Buchanan's runs, and it seemed like after the Cold War this was going to be the direction where the USA was going to go, at least the American right was going to go, but alas, it was not to be.
Yeah, the rest, as they say, is history.
So Francis became increasingly controversial as time went on, despite his origins in the mainstream and his impressive pedigree and educational background.
Somewhat famously, he spoke at the 1994 American Renaissance Conference, which was the first ever American Renaissance Conference, and one attendee of that conference was Dinesh D'Souza, who was there as a journalist when he was writing his book, The End of Racism.
And in that book, he talked about how American Renaissance was one of the last holdouts of genuine racism, and as such, it was to be deplored.
So, it was Dinesh D'Souza talking about Francis' attendance and speech at that conference that put Francis kind of on the defensive at the Washington Times, and he was fired about a year later for making fun of one of the Baptist denominations formally apologizing for having Existed while there was slavery.
Yeah, and we'll get into that more But of course what he was specifically talking about was the Southern Baptist Convention Which of course now is going out of its way to come to terms with its own past and its own racial reckoning and everything else Everything that he predicted back in the 90s.
It's going through now put a black guy in charge They constantly are on the page of the New York Times berating themselves.
And of course they're losing I think, what is it, like 3% of their membership every year.
Something like that.
For a long time, that particular denomination was supposedly immune from the bleeding members that hit all the other Christian denominations, but now they've become just like every other Christian denomination, so they're going through the same thing.
Yeah, so that was really like a line of demarcation in Sam Francis' career.
He kind of ended having anything to do with the mainstream after he got fired from the Washington Times in 1995.
After that, he really got to focus on issues that were more relevant outside of the conservative movement.
He started writing a lot for American Renaissance, Videre, the Occidental Quarterly, etc.
Unfortunately, he died well before his time in 2005.
At a very young age, and we've been missing him ever since, but he's been an enormous influence on basically everybody in our movement.
I mean, I can't think of... I have never met a white identitarian who said that they haven't read Francis, or that Francis was not an influence on them.
He's just so often... I mean, he's the foundation.
Yeah, and just sort of like the intellectual compass for a lot of us.
And there were really, as you say, there were really like three stages to his career.
There was the first where he was, again, and there's always going to be people like this, a product of the conservative movement.
And at a certain point, and I think it comes for everybody in the conservative movement, if you're at a certain level of intelligence.
You decide you're going to either consciously shut up and just keep repeating slogans so you can get a paycheck or you're gonna start talking about these things which matter in which case the purge is coming.
And he was part of the latter.
I should note that Mr. DeSouza was acting in a capacity as a journalist in the sense that he misquoted him such that I think the entire first edition of that book was pulped.
Yeah, well it wasn't just misquoting, it was also, I mean he was misquoting American Renaissance to make American Renaissance look, you know, uncouth.
And he also, I mean this is like the very first galley copy of The End of Racism.
He did what more or less amounts to plagiarism, because as much as he was denouncing Jared Taylor and Sam Francis, he was also lifting really generously from a lot of their arguments about race relations in America and affirmative action and crime and such, so that the first run, the galley run, which is kind of like the Like the rough draft of any book is called the galley, it's just sent out to editors of magazines and journalists and people who can promote it and stuff.
All of those were destroyed and de Souza had to redo large sections of it or risk a lawsuit from Jared Taylor in the American Renaissance.
But he did get people to his right fired, so in that sense he was acting in the finest tradition of journalism, which is paddletailing on people and making stuff up.
Yeah, he was something of a pioneer in doing that.
Francis is one of the first people to have really been purged by the mainstream conservative movement.
I mean, really, anyone who's worth reading who's come out of the conservative movement was somebody who got purged.
Yeah, granted.
It's almost like, or who has been downgraded.
John O'Sullivan, I think, still has some sort of an official role at National Review, but he got hit.
After he did the thing with Peter Brimlow and immigration.
Peter Brimlow, of course, then you had Joe Sobrin and I don't even think Mark Stein was there.
He got kicked out and Coulter got kicked out.
I mean, if you're there and you're good, you're not going to be there much longer if you're saying anything.
It's a long list.
It's a long list.
And so this is it.
I mean, he was a product of that movement.
He was a staffer.
He was in at the beginning at the Heritage Foundation.
And this is one of the things that the conservative movement always kind of Lies about or at least prefers not to talk about, which is that all these people who kind of built our movement came out of that movement.
To me, it's the logical conclusion.
If you take these ideas seriously, this is where you're going to end up.
That's how that's always been my stance that I just took what I was hearing in the conservative movement seriously, and this is where I am.
The second part of him, of course, was when he was a columnist and just how good he was in terms of his wit, in terms of just the absolutely devastating one-liners.
And the third, I think, is probably the most important, and that's something that people are only coming to terms with now, which is him as James Burnham's successor.
Now, we talked about Burnham last week, and Burnham talked a lot about the nature of power.
And the way that the ruling class uses language to maintain and perpetuate its power.
And Francis took that to the next level.
And unfortunately, his book Leviathan and Its Enemies, which is the closest thing we have
to an updated version of James Burnham's work, I mean, it was completed in the late 90s.
And there's kind of a weird story about how it was found and printed.
Yeah, so it was.
They found some floppy drives and that was it.
That's right, that's right, that's right.
It was floppy copies that were found like in 2014, 2015.
The book was only.
Francis doesn't even know what a floppy drive is.
Yeah, the book Leviathan and Its Enemies wasn't published until 2016, unfortunately.
And it is a great book, but it's a bit of a slog at.
There's actually a left-wing writer at The Guardian mentioned it in this big piece he did on the Trump phenomenon in 2016.
The writer is Timothy Schenk and he described it actually quite well.
He said, It is a sprawling text, more than 700 pages long, digressive, repetitive, and in desperate need of an editor.
It is also one of the most impressive books to come out of the American Rite in a generation, and the most frightening.
It is a searching diagnosis of managerial society, written by an author looking for a strategy that could break it apart.
Right.
And that's... I mean, I actually don't think it's too digressive.
I liked it the way it is, but I kind of dig into this stuff and...
Actually, just today I got a copy of Thinkers of Our Time, James Burnham by Sam Francis, which is another one of these obscure academic texts, but I think his first version of this was in 84.
And Burnham himself was the theorist on the American right that leftists were most afraid of, but as we discussed last week, he died in relative obscurity.
The conservative movement itself didn't really talk about him.
Francis When he became popular it was because Rush Limbaugh had quoted him on the air and that got people looking into it.
I remember I wrote an article about it over at WND about that when I was like, this is it!
He's getting introduced to a mainstream audience.
That's right.
But now I'd say he's even more influential because Well, let's back up real quick.
Regarding Trump, one of the things that, building on James Burnham, that Sam Francis talked about was this idea of the middle American radicals.
The middle American radicals are people who are not traditional conservatives, but they're white, often ethnic white, working class to lower middle class voters who are not What the conservative movement would say is conservative on economic issues.
They think there are things in life that are higher than tax cuts for Jeff Bezos and things like that.
They're also not particularly concerned with social issues the way the religious right might be.
They're more concerned with quality of life, they're more concerned with political correctness, they're more concerned with jobs being kept in the country, they're more concerned with immigration.
Yeah, and crime especially.
Yeah, well Francis drew a lot from a sociologist named Donald Warren, who first wrote the book about middle American radicals.
Yeah, the class of people with the least political representation in the United States because they're not devout free marketeers like you were saying, but they do have very nationalistic instincts and although they're not necessarily like Christian right levels of obsessed with like certain wedge issues such as gay marriage, they are Very conservative relative to like the cosmopolitan left in terms of crime or even just, I mean, just cultural values.
I mean, you're talking about sort of small town, you know, middle class America.
And these are people that are like so many of the issues that the mainstream conservative movement is obsessed with, you know, like eliminating the import-export bank or, you know, imposing sanctions on Iran.
It just doesn't do much for them.
Right, and this is like the way to get a leg up when you start, is you find some issue and like, hey Gen Z conservatives, let me tell you about import-export banks.
Because that's what the donors want to hear about, and they want to imagine that there are these young people really psyched up about this stuff, but that's not really where the votes are.
And Francis was talking about where basically, and even though they're kind of unrepresented, they're also the most important battleground in American politics and have been for a long time.
I mean, these were the hard hat voters who came out for Nixon.
These were some of the guys who were behind Wallace when he moved outside of the South.
These were arguably some of the people that Bill Clinton was able to win back.
That's right.
These were the people behind Perot.
These were the people behind Buchanan.
And so you can't even really pin them down as being on the right or the left.
This is a constituency that can be won over by any politician or any cultural leader that's actually willing to address them with respect and saying, I am going to fight for you.
That's right.
Fundamentally, Francis saw himself as a defender of those people.
Those were the people that Francis wanted to make America a better place for.
And he, like us, felt that they had just been completely abandoned by both political parties and also by...
By most intellectuals.
I mean, these just weren't people, and they still aren't.
They still aren't.
Much more now.
I mean, remember, this will seem like ancient history, but remember it was Howard Dean who famously said, I want to be the candidate for the guys with the pickup trucks and the Confederate flag.
And he just got absolutely lit up because he had mentioned the Confederate flag as somebody who has that on their pickup truck.
They shouldn't just be shot on sight.
You might actually need to talk to them.
Right, well, and as much trouble as Governor Dean got into for saying that in 2004, it's still nothing.
I mean, he would have had to have, like, withdrawn from the race immediately after making that comment if that had been in 2020.
A Democrat running for the presidential nomination in 2020 had said, you know, I want guys with pickup trucks that have Confederate flags on them to vote for me.
I want them to understand that I have their best economic interest in mind and who cares about And it would be the Republicans, like, leading the way.
The other thing about Francis, too, and this also kind of gets to, I think, his real importance and why you shouldn't just look at him as a polemicist or as a columnist, but why it's worth reading Leviathan, why it's worth reading what he had to say about James Burnham, is that he looked at America in terms of social forces, and he looked at it in terms of class, and he looked at it in terms of how is power structured in this society.
And the conservative movement almost doesn't want to ask those questions because I've often thought the thing with the conservative movement is The followers at least, and probably many of the leaders too, really do believe they're on propaganda.
They really do believe, well we're all just individuals and you can just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and I don't understand why we all just can't unite under the flag and capitalism and everything will be fine.
And so when you start talking in terms of, well this lower middle class group that's being hit by globalization or something else, or we might have a social base for like advancing our political goals by appealing to this group of people.
That's just a foreign language to the way the conservative movement talks.
But to the left, and frankly to serious academics who are looking into sociology and saying, how is power structured?
This is how power works.
This is how society works.
And Francis is one of the very few on the American right who has ever dealt with these kinds of things.
Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
His first major book was Beautiful Losers, which was published in 1992, which is a collection of essays.
If it's not his best, it's his second best, is what I would say.
How old were you when you first read Beautiful Losers?
College, probably.
That was definitely when I was starting to get into the whole paleo-libertarian thing and everything else.
And this kind of gets into, I don't know, the alternative right before the alternative right.
And it really What it was, and what I think even the journalists and academics who write books about it still don't fully understand, is that it wasn't like a group of people who were organized around some core doctrine, and it wasn't even really about race.
It was just about, hey, the conservative movement is going in this direction on all these issues, and we think that it's wrong.
But the people who were in opposition weren't necessarily united around any one thing.
Yeah, and didn't always have that much in common.
That's still somewhat true today.
Right.
I mean, there's a famous gathering that Francis was a part of, and supposedly Rothbard was there, and Sobrin, and this was when Buchanan was deciding whether to run.
And you had a group of people talking about what he was going to do and everything else.
And if you actually break down this list of people, you've got libertarians, you've got social conservatives, you have Francis.
Who, in his analysis at least, was a thoroughgoing modernist.
By no means was he a traditionalist in the Russell Kirk sense of appealing to some divine law or anything like that.
It was very much about power in this world and very much that, nope, there's this managerial elite that's using this kind of language to maintain power.
We don't need to talk about divine sources of authority or anything like that.
This is how it is.
And there's nothing necessarily uniting all those groups other than We don't like what's happening with George W. Bush conservatism or George H. W. Bush conservatism before that.
And this particularly applies to foreign policy.
I mean, I think one of the introductions that a lot of mainstream conservatives had to San Francis, who, I mean, he had been a columnist and I think he had won even the Pulitzer for opinion columns, I think in 95 or 96, maybe both years.
But he was denounced by name in David Frum's Unpatriotic Conservatives article about the Iraq War.
That's right.
Oh, he was politically incorrect on race, and that's the sum total of it.
It was like, no, there was a lot more going on there.
And he was also writing for a number of different publications, including Chronicles, as well as doing, I think, The Council of Conservative Citizens.
He was doing The Citizen's Informer at the time.
That's right, he edited The Citizen's Informer.
And then, of course, now we've got Essential Writings on Race, which has some of the stuff that he wrote for American Renaissance under a pen name, which I think has some of his most penetrating work.
Um, one thing we should talk about when we talk about his being popular today is how he was the one who came up with the term anarcho-tyranny.
And this is why I think he's arguably more important now than he ever has been, and why people should have his name on the tips of their tongues.
Because the whole concept of anarcho-tyranny, and this is something that he said multiculturalism must inevitably lead to.
Here, let me interrupt you here.
You know, when I was preparing for this podcast, there were so many great quotes and explanations from Francis, but unfortunately the man wrote in paragraphs exclusively.
He would not have been any good at Twitter.
So I actually wanted to read his original definition of anarcho-tyranny, which comes from an essay he wrote for Chronicles magazine in July of 1994.
You can find the whole thing on pdf on unz.com.
Listeners will bear with me.
It is somewhat long, and remember that this was written in 1994, so a few of the examples are a bit outdated.
But here we go.
In the United States today, the government performs many of its functions more or less effectively.
The mail is delivered, sometimes.
The population, or at least part of it, is counted, sort of.
And taxes are collected, you bet.
You can accuse the federal leviathan of many things, corruption, incompetence, waste, bureaucratic strangulation, but mere... excuse me, uh, bureaucratic strangulation, but mere anarchy, the lack of effective government, is not one of them.
Yet at the same time, the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duties of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect, its failures do bring the country or important parts of it close to a state of anarchy.
But this semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state.
The result is what seems to be the first society in history in which elements of both anarchy and tyranny pertain at the same time and seem to be closely connected with each other and to constitute more or less opposite sides of the same coin.
This condition, which is...
This condition, which in some of my columns I have called anarcho-tyranny, is essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites, the combination of oppressive government power against innocent and law-abiding citizens, and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection of public safety.
And it is characteristic of a narco-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order, but also criminalizes the innocent.
That at the same time that the governor of North Carolina grotesquely fails to uphold his famous oath to protect the citizens of his state by keeping convicted felons in prison, he has no problem finding the time to organize a massive waste of his time and the taxpayers' money to hound and humiliate a perfectly innocent citizen for the infraction of a trivial traffic law.
In fact, we criminalize the innocent all the time in the United States today.
Through asset-seized laws that confiscate your property even before you're convicted of possessing illegal drugs.
Through mandatory brainwashing programs designed to reconstruct your mind with sensitivity training, human relations, and rehabilitation if you display politically incorrect ideas on certain occasions.
Through prosecuting people like Bernard Goetz, who use guns to defend themselves, and through gun control laws in general.
Under anarcho-tyranny, gun control laws do not usually target criminals who use guns to commit their crimes.
The usual suspects are non-criminals who own, carry, or use guns against criminals, like the Korean store owners in Los Angeles, or like Mr. Goetz, who spent several months in jail after picking off three hoodlums who were making ready to liberate him from life and limb.
Indeed, the government response to crime is by far the best illustration of a narco-tyranny.
On the one hand, police forces are better equipped, better trained, and more expensive than ever before in history.
Police routinely use computers, have access to nationwide information banks, and carry weapons and communication gadgets that most tyrants of the past would drool over.
Yet the police seem utterly baffled by the murder rate.
None of their high-tech whiz-bang helps much to catch serious criminals after they have struck, to stop them before they strike, or to keep them off the streets after they are caught.
But while the police cannot do much about murderers, rapists, and robbers, they are geniuses at nabbing less serious lawbreakers.
They can crack down on tax dodgers and speeders, jaywalkers and pornography patrons, seatbelt non-bucklers, And of course, obviously, a lot of this rings true just today.
In fact, Joe Biden, by executive order, announced a whole new measure for gun control, saying that you're not allowed to sell guns without background checks.
Now, this is a very marginal thing, of course.
I mean, most people, if you buy a gun, I think when President Biden was talking today, he said, oh, well, you can just go to a gun show and buy a gun and there won't be a background check.
And it's like, well, that's not really true at all.
I mean, every gun I've ever bought at a gun show, they run a background check.
Just like they do practically everywhere, but it would criminalize private gun sales
Which of course are only going to be a problem to law-abiding citizens
Because they're the only ones who are gonna have a record made of these transactions and these are the only people
are gonna be punished The illegal guns which are the ones used in most crimes are
being Bought or acquired illegally anyway, but we're not gonna do
anything about that. Just like we're not gonna do anything about the nationwide
Spike in crime we've seen over the last Year and a half I would say yeah arguably before that in
places like Chicago and Philadelphia New York City, especially yeah, and
Obviously, the greatest example of anarcho-tyranny, and something that I think we all saw with fascination and horror with the George Floyd riots, was the lockdowns combined with mass Black Lives Matter protests, where some poor guy would open up a shop that he depends on for his livelihood, and police would burst in and gleefully arrest him, and they would shut it down.
You'd have people calling in reports of saying, there are too many people at this place.
They're not social distancing.
We need to get the police on them right away.
The police would burst in.
They'd get everybody.
Then you would have mass riots, which reporters with a straight face would tell us, do not spread the disease.
Like, magically, that doesn't happen here.
Destroying public property, tearing down statues that, frankly, our civilization just isn't capable of creating anymore in terms of pure technical skill.
Destroying property, killing people, everything's going nuts, and the police just sat there and took it.
If you say the wrong thing on Twitter, they're all over you.
Well, that's why anarcho-tyranny is actually finally making it into the mainstream.
You have even people like Kevin Williamson, who's certainly no fan of American Renaissance or Sam Francis, talking about anarcho-tyranny, along with Michael Anton, Michelle Malkin.
No, Kevin Williamson.
He's one of these guys who, you can tell, reads all this stuff and keeps up with it, but then takes care to overdo it on the insults so he can kind of grab some of the insights and then put it out there on his own.
Who is it?
Angelo Cotevilla, also, who wrote a lot of stuff about the ruling class.
I think he had a book by that name, which Rush Limbaugh talked about a lot.
And he also drew on a lot of Sam Francis' insights, although a lot quite more respectfully than I think Mr. Williamson has.
I mean, I think what makes Francis so powerful now and why people are finally coming around to him is because it gets to the question that politics is about who.
It's not about what.
And for so much of the conservative movement, we get into these abstract ideas about like, Oh, what does the constitution really mean?
What was the, what did the founding fathers really believe?
You know, what is the perfect, if we just write the correct words, we will have a form of society that will solve all our problems.
And furthermore, no matter where people come from or who they are, they'll be able to operate as good Americans, just like everybody else.
And San Francis kind of brings us back down to earth and says like, no, The Founding Fathers were able to do what they did because they had this base of social power.
They had these social forces working in their favor.
The reason things are happening the way they are is because these interests benefit from it.
Well, so, in his book Beautiful Losers, the title itself is a reference to conservatives, who he considered to be beautiful losers.
I dispute the beautiful part.
Yeah, I'm more charitable than you.
Anyway, in his introduction to Beautiful Losers, he talks about Richard Weaver's adage, ideas have consequences.
And Francis explicitly disputes that and says, well, some ideas have more consequences than others, and we have to ask ourselves why that is.
And we have to understand that just abstract ideas aren't just sort of battling each other in this void, devoid of any kind of context.
In which, like, the most, like, logical or the most rational one somehow just triumphs.
To go back to what we did with the Ayn Rand thing, like, two weeks ago, where it was like, oh, history is just philosophy playing out in real time.
Yeah.
I mean, and much of Beautiful Losers is Francis just critiquing this concept.
I mean, like, the book is really The sense of the book is captured in this dispute he takes with Richard Weaver, who wasn't a major figure in the conservative movement after World War II.
He was on the ground floor of National Review, much like James Burnham.
And you hear that.
I mean, if you've ever worked in the Beltway or worked in conservative politics, which probably for the best a lot of our listeners have not done, you do hear this phrase a lot.
People talk about this a lot.
Ideas have consequences.
and there's just this constant discussion of like how can we get the right ideas,
the right philosophical axioms, you know, yeah, into the university system or into the K-12
public school system, like how can we convince people of these ideas and they seem so unwilling
to take a step back and ask themselves like well different, you know, different ideas and
different structures of society will benefit different people.
And like, it's really hard to convince people who don't have anything to benefit from a set of ideas to adopt it and to just have that be their ideology.
White Americans, white conservatives specifically, seem to be the only people who are actually willing to act against their own self-interest, at least politically, based on abstractions.
Because they've been told, listen, you know, you could do this, but your principles say you got to take the L. And so we're going to take the L. I would argue a lot of what the conservative movement is, is kind of pacifying white conservatives to act that way.
Yes and no.
I mean, Again, I mean, and this is something I think Francis would have been willing to say, and something Francis saw in the Buchanan movement and then everybody kind of saw with Trump, and the white base of the Republican Party just doesn't really have anywhere to go.
It's easy to say, like, oh, well, they're suckers for voting for the GOP, which then just lowers the taxes of the rich, and...
You know, is like hawkish on these stupid Middle Eastern wars.
Right.
And Republican voters are dumb for just voting for politicians that support these things over and over again.
Republican voters don't have any other option.
And generally, like, when there is another option and another option does break through, a lot of them do flock to that, whether it be Buchanan or Donald Trump.
Yeah, let's, I mean, I definitely want to be clear on that.
I don't think Republican voters are dumb and I do not, I'm not among those who Share a kind of contempt for Republican voters like, oh, why are they still supporting Trump even though Trump didn't do X, Y, or Z?
I mean, where else are they going to go?
What my argument would be is that the type of people... There's an anecdote in one of the books about Francis after his death where, and I can't remember who put it, but it's not too important, but they would say at these conservative social gatherings, much like Burnham in fact, he would always kind of be outside the crowd.
So everybody else would be like drinking champagne and talking and mingling and he would just kind of be sitting in the back making sarcastic remarks about stuff.
But, by all accounts, people who were friends with him said he was really gregarious and really fun and great company to be around.
Unfortunately, I never got to meet him.
But I think Francis's anger, and you definitely see this in a lot of his columns, I mean, there's like some white-hot fury.
But it's not directed against Republican voters, it's directed against these Conservative Inc.
people who, I think he would argue, are knowingly misleading the base to their own destruction, or at least not giving them a chance to fight back.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
There's a really bitingness to, especially a lot of the columns Francis wrote in the 90s for Chronicles Magazine, just in reference to Republican head honchos.
I mean, people like Ralph Reed just...
It just seemed to just fill him with rage so much.
I mean, there was, it's easy to call it sort of jealousy, but it was much, you know, Francis's rage was much more righteous because, you know, not only, like, Francis wouldn't have minded if Ralph Reed was making more money than him if Ralph Reed had been doing something worthwhile, but it was just so clear to Francis that Ralph Reed was not doing anything with Ryle. And again,
per usual, Francis called it in the 90s. You fast forward to 2020 and Ralph Reed was one of the
people fundraising for campaigns to get like black and Hispanic evangelicals to vote for Trump,
which the final irony of that is that that worked and it still didn't matter. They did manage to
increase black and Hispanic support for Trump like ever so marginally. And what good did it do them?
It would have been better to revert back to the winning coalition of
What's funny is that if people like us were in charge of the Trump campaign and they gave us the explicit job of, hey, for whatever bizarre reason we're going to put you guys in charge of winning more Hispanic support for the GOP.
We would do it probably the way the Trump campaign did it in Florida, which is law and order.
You don't like this Black Lives Matter chaos engulfing your cities.
And that was what shocked everybody in this last round of elections, where they said, where did all this Hispanic support for President Trump come from?
It's like, well, because if you're Hispanic and you're seeing your businesses destroyed and your city go into chaos, you have common interests with other property owners who don't want to see this happen.
And that was another thing is that, we're going to get into Francis and white identity, but when we talk about middle American radicals, race matters, race exists, and I'm not going to...
I don't want to say that he denied this or anything like that, but it was bigger than race.
He also was explicitly against any kind of a white secessionist movement and also decried the idea of a white ethnostate.
Essentially what he called was a European-American reconquest of the United States.
Which by which he meant, you know, not demographically displacing people, but essentially a cultural reconquest combined with halts on immigration, abolishing affirmative action, really abolishing racial discrimination and law enforcement and job applications and everything else.
So, I mean, really what he wanted was essentially a fairly moderate form of conservatism by the standards of his day.
It only seems radical now just because of what's happened in the last 20 years.
This is a good example of the limits of the language when you talk about extreme right, extreme left, radical, non-radical, because I would say Francis was much more moderate than a lot of the Republican Party when it would come to stuff like, you know, spending.
Oh, yeah.
Right, or social welfare programs, or public schools.
I mean, you know, if you poll Americans, you know, you'll discover that it's a really, really radical position to believe something like, you know, we should abolish the Department of Education, just whole hog, or we should abolish Social Security.
You know, on those kinds of questions, Francis was much more moderate than the GOP or the Koch brothers, and much more in line with average American thinking, with just majoritarian opinions.
The thing that gets Francis labeled as, like, a radical is the fact that he was willing to talk about race really explicitly, that he believed in IQ.
But again, there's, you know... I mean, liberals were talking about that 20 years ago.
That's the thing.
I mean, they won't forgive him now.
But, I mean, again, there was this period in the 90s where people kind of poked their head up and said, hey, let's talk about things that actually mattered.
And eventually they were like, nope.
And then we're cast down again.
But still, even people like Andrew Sullivan, who were willing to talk about IQ, wouldn't have ever been willing to touch Sam Francis with a 10-foot pole.
It's one thing to sort of acknowledge certain biological realities, and it's another to
say that is true, and also whites must see themselves as a group and actively work, fight
for our own side, take our own side.
Right.
And this is the thing, I mean, this is from Why Race Matters, and this is Francis in the
United States.
And this really gets to the heart of our entire civilizational dilemma.
This goes for all of us.
In the United States today, whites exist objectively, but do not exist subjectively.
And that is, in my view, the fundamental racial problem they face.
The basic reason they, I should say we, are losing the racial war against us.
The very reason we are in a war at all.
It's funny, I wrote down that quote in my notes for this podcast as well, yeah.
Well, I mean, for ourselves and our posterity, I mean, this idea was implicit in the founding, but because it was not made explicit, we're in the situation we are now.
And at a certain point, it really does come down to something as simple as, will whites take their own side?
And Francis explicitly argued that because the movement against us is being waged in racial terms, it has to be answered in racial terms.
That said, he also got into, and this is the the kind of synthesis which he never, I think he just kind of ran out of time because he was beginning work on like the book that would unify all this stuff and he just never got to finish it.
If you get into Leviathan, you can see why managerial elites would oppose white identity, and you would see why certain whites, whites who again, don't think of themselves as white, would be opposed to white identity.
So it's not just so simple as like, hey, white people, they're coming after you.
Start acting like whites and band together, brothers, and together we'll win.
It's like, no, there are concrete reasons like why people are doing these things.
And we have to break down what those reasons are if we're going to defeat them.
But if you're a middle class white person, if you're a lower middle class white person, if you're a working class white person, especially now, much more than in his day, There's no getting away from the racial thing, because it doesn't matter what you call yourself, it doesn't matter what you identify as, you're just white.
Well, Francis wrote about that actually from the same essay that you just quoted from.
He said, 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 the challenge.
If and when that challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us, as the
Tutsi people have been slaughtered in Rwanda, they will do so not because we are Westerners
or Americans or Christians or conservatives or liberals, but because we are white.
Bye.
Can't make it more obvious than that.
We should point out that this was also, again, not necessarily explicit, but implicit in a lot of his work with the Heritage Foundation and got to an important debate on the American Cold War strategy.
And we touched on this a bit too, because Burnham also talked about these things, which is when he was talking about the Soviet strategy of terror, we should not forget that a lot of what he was talking about was the ANC and South Africa.
And basically Soviet support for third world nationalist movements directed mostly against Americans and Europeans.
That's right.
And the American governing class represented by people like Kissinger, but we should also say Richard Nixon, basically made the choice that we are going to try to appeal to the third world by opposing European imperialism or what's left behind, if you want to put that label on Rhodesia and South Africa.
And that strategy, from a Cold War perspective, failed.
And it failed pretty spectacularly.
Because now, in the aftermath, we find that the United States has been cut out of those markets pretty much altogether.
And China, which during that period held itself up as the champion of the Third World, is now who runs the show.
When you're looking at breaking down politics in these extremely complicated terms, and you're talking about social forces and classes and everything else, sometimes you do have to take a step back and look at the big picture.
James Burnham talked about knowing that the West was going downhill just by looking at a map and seeing the amount of territory that we controlled was going down.
And I think Francis saw things in much the same way.
You can break down all these social forces, but you can also just take a step back and say, look, the demographics are moving in this direction.
The territory we control is moving in this direction.
The rhetoric surrounding us is moving in this direction.
You don't have to be a genius to see how this movie is going to end.
It's right there.
And it takes quite an effort of will and quite a lot of misdirection to be ignorant about this.
Which is why I think we have such a hard time saying that these people are operating in good faith when they say, oh, there's nothing happening against white people.
This is all just part of your imagination.
I mean, all you have to do is go on Twitter for five seconds and it's pretty obvious.
Yeah, well, again, here's another quote I wanted to read, and it's another long one, but it's still worth it.
This was from a column he wrote for American Renaissance in 2000, when there was a brouhaha about the Confederate battle flag being on South Carolina's Capitol building.
Thank you, Nikki Haley, for solving that one for us.
And Francis wrote, What the racial assault on the Confederacy and other non-Confederate
symbols really shows, however, is not only the dangerous flaws of
multiracialism and the inexorable logic of the racial revolution of this
century, but also that today regional differences among whites, like many other cultural and
political differences, are no longer very It shows that Southerners and Yankees today face common enemies and common threats to their rights, interests, identity, and heritage as whites, and that the forces that have declared war on them and their heritage define themselves as well as their foes, not in political, regional, or cultural terms, but in terms of race.
Whites who have been indifferent to the fate of the Confederate flag and similar symbols in the recent controversies should not be surprised, therefore, when historical symbols important to their own identity come under assault from anti-white radicals in the future.
And it is as a race that whites must now learn to resist the war being waged on them.
So far from being a symbol of a lost and forgotten cause relevant only to a dwindling band of Confederate loyalists, the Confederate flag and the battles swirling around it today should serve as reminders to all white men and women of a simple lesson.
Unless they forsake the many obsolete quarrels and controversies that have long divided them and learned to stand, work, and fight together for their own survival as a people and a civilization, The war against them that their self-proclaimed racial enemies are waging will not permit them or their legacy as a people and civilization to survive at all.
National Review famously during the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter riots were saying, well, it's good if we take down the Confederate monuments, but it's bad if we take down George Washington or Thomas Jefferson and everything else.
The people who are pushing these things in motion do not see that distinction.
There is no argument that you can make against the Confederacy that you can't also make against the United States of America.
And that isn't already being made, and that will continue to be made as the quote-unquote debate surrounding reparations and things like that move forward.
It's actually not a debate at all.
I mean, if things keep going the way they're going, it's inevitable.
And conservatives will mumble some vague thing about like, oh, we're all just individuals, but they don't really have any ground to fight back on this.
If you're not willing to say like, no, actually, White's created this country and we don't owe anybody anything, if anything, You owe us for having created this. Yeah, well this gets
back to the power, you know, seeing things in terms of power that Francis, somewhat through Burnham, was
so good at noticing of like, you know, Conservatism Inc is trying to just rationalize
with these people who stand to gain so much, you know, from continuing on these riots and
continuing to call that, you know, say that everything is racist and to say that they're being
microaggressive, like...
All of that is just converted into PowerPoints for them.
I mean, it's the South African model, right?
Why would they just forego this opportunity at, you know, serious power for the long haul
just because they're being appealed to on some kind of abstract basis of like, oh well, you know, we're all
Americans or Yeah, it's the thing that
We can't just have a society I think they can get leftists to act like conservatism inkstaffers, where basically it's like, well, we could do this, but I'd feel bad, and so we won't.
And at the very beginning of Leviathan and Its Enemies, there's the famous Nietzsche quote from The Will to Power, the values of the weak prevail because the strong have taken them over as devices of leadership.
Now, you know, you could have an argument about whether the will to power was even what Nietzsche really thought.
That might have been, you know, just cobbled together by his sister.
But in terms of an outlook on politics, that's it.
Yeah.
I mean, whenever you hear somebody talking about equality, when somebody's telling you, you are not allowed to make a defense of your own interests because I have this moral creed, what they're really telling you is, I am telling you to disarm so I can take advantage of you.
Again, you always, when somebody is telling you something, you always have to ask yourself, what does this person gain if I believe what they're telling me?
Yeah.
Well, unfortunately, I know so many whites who are so naive and so good-natured that they want to see the best in that other side's argument.
Like, well, maybe I am implicitly biased.
Maybe I am being offensive.
Maybe we do need to find some kind of way of compromising and, again, just manipulating that You know interest in like harmony that so many whites just desperately want so this sort of whole chapter of like racial madness can be sort of wrapped up and it's like no this is the other side is playing the really long ball game.
Well this is one of the you could argue it's a strength or weakness but just one of the things that just is one of the things that Francis wrote was called The Roots of the White Man.
And he was talking about some of the things that distinguish us as a people and which you can see in different religions, different cultures over thousands of years, but the same patterns keep emerging over and over again.
And one of the things that he noted was the idea of a universal cosmic order that binds even God or the gods and that whites pretty uniquely Say that there is a morality that does or should bind all men and most other people don't see it that way.
And that could also be a limitation on one of the things that he's saying, that if you try to, because it's not like people haven't tried to do this, where you just get a bunch of white people together and say, hey, we're being attacked as whites, let's all band together and win.
It doesn't work that way.
Whites need to, you have to give a moral argument and say, like, this is why we are allowed to do this, and also why we're compelled to do this, and why it's a good thing.
You can't just say, it's in our self-interest, therefore we should do this.
Because whites, and especially Americans, Recoil from that kind of language.
It's kind of an American national characteristic that every conflict has to be waged as a sort of moral crusade Even if later we recognize that that kind of rhetoric was nonsense This leads us to probably the most divisive thing in the movement right now, which he took head-on, the Christian question.
Now, and this also gets to one of the debates about Sam Francis himself.
There's debate out there about whether he died in the confession of the Roman Catholic Church or not.
Now I've heard people give me different answers on that, and obviously I don't know.
Yeah, it is rumored that he had a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, which interestingly, James Burnham did.
Yeah, and it was supposedly Scalia's kid.
Father Scalia, who was the one who was his confessor, but that's between Really?
Yeah.
But that was what has been claimed.
I think it was in Chronicles.
I'd never heard of that part of it.
And this actually wouldn't be that.
I mean, Laurence Hoster did the same thing.
He was Jewish ethnically, Episcopalian in terms of what he believed, but then... But he converted to Episcopalianism pretty late in life.
I mean, he was an observant Jew for a long time.
But then he converted to Roman Catholicism at the end, supposedly.
Then again, so did Oscar Wilde, right?
I mean, there does seem to be this whole thing of people who fall back on tradition.
Ultimately end up looking to Rome in a lot of cases and this is something that is important because Francis had a essay talking about what he called the Christian question.
And this is actually the only quote that I can see was repeated twice in Essential Writings on Race, which is the Oswald Spengler quote that Christian theology is the godmother of Bolshevism.
And you have to ask yourself, well, why do whites have this moral sensibility?
Why do we have this thing within us?
And Francis sort of provides an answer in his review of James Russell's book, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation.
Now, this is a book that had a huge impact on me as well.
And the argument is essentially that the world-denying creed of early Christianity, when it was brought to Northern Europe, meant the world accepting folkways of the Germanic peoples.
Christianity was essentially turned into something a little different, where it became the kind of faith that a warrior king could adopt, because it would promise power and victory in this world, and would legitimate these things.
But at the same time, it would also give them certain moral strictures, where you're not just running around raping and killing everyone and saying it's a good thing because might is right.
Instead, you're supposedly serving a higher ideal and that's why it took so naturally to European man and you had what arguably was the great civilization of the Middle Ages that we're still kind of living out, Christendom, the Christian West.
And I think this is important because Francis by no means dismissed the importance of religion and by no means did he think that It was something that you could just explain away in material terms.
I mean he talked about power and he talked about, and I think he viewed history as a materialist himself, but he also understood the power of belief and the power of faith.
Yeah, absolutely.
And he understood that the reason Christianity took, a certain form of Christianity took with Western man was because it spoke to something inherent within us and that's why We got the civilization dead.
And that's, you know, one of the big questions today because, I mean, at any American Renaissance conference, at any Nationalist conference, or of anything else, I mean, the conversation is eventually going to come around to religion, to Christianity, or then what denomination of Christianity.
I'm not about to have us weigh in on this rather divisive subject here on our podcast.
I would just say that I would recommend... Well, I'm just saying that I think Francis kind of provides an answer for us with that essay that everybody, pretty much of every denomination, can kind of gather around, which is that this form of Christianity, whatever your personal beliefs, spoke to us as a people and this is why our ancestors were Christian.
And he did it in such a way that you can explain it in historical terms, not just appeals to faith or very cynically being like, oh, because people believed irrational things.
There was a lot going on.
Well, we're coming up at the end here, and I wanted to close actually not with a quote from Francis himself, but a quote from Nietzsche.
That apparently Francis had printed out and framed like an enormous lettering in his personal office up until the day he died and it's from Nietzsche's The Gay Science and it read I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all.
For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require one day, the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge, and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.
To this end, we now need many preparatory, courageous human beings.
Human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content, and constant in invisible activities.
Human beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity.
Magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding small vanities of the vanquished.
Human beings accustomed to command with assurance, but instantly ready to obey when that is called for.
Equally proud, equally serving their own cause in both cases.
More endangered human beings, more fruitful human beings, happier beings.
For believe me, the secret for harvesting from existence the great fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is to live dangerously.