The Right’s Quiet Uncanceling of a Dead White Supremacist
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Right’s Quiet Uncanceling of a Dead White Supremacist
In September 1995, Pat Buchanan adviser and columnist Sam Francis was ousted from The Washington Times for virulent racism. It was, according to the Washington City Paper, the culmination of monthslong campaign carried out by young conservatives in Washington, DC, who wanted Francis to be removed not just from the Times but from the conservative movement as a whole. Francis had kept his white nationalism semiprivate—a feat easier accomplished in the pre-internet era, when his most extreme views, like calling for a “white reconquest of the United States,” could be circulated in more obscure publications without wide distribution.
But in May 1994, in the course of researching his book The End of Racism, Dinesh D’Souza, then a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, caught Francis saying (at a conference put on by white nationalist Jared Taylor, no less), among other things: “What we as whites must do is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.” When the galley for D’Souza’s book circulated the next summer, and some of the quotes D’Souza captured were featured in The Washington Post, what Francis had said and written were deemed beyond the pale and incompatible with conservatism. It didn’t help that earlier that summer Francis had written a column for the Times criticizing the Southern Baptist Convention for apologizing for slavery. Sample line: “neither ‘slavery’ nor ‘racism’ as an institution is a sin.” (D’Souza’s book was no anti-racist tract itself; highly controversial and panned by historians and critics, The End of Racism was considered so problematic by Black conservative intellectuals Glenn Loury and Robert L. Woodson that they announced they would no longer associate with AEI after its publication.) In today’s parlance, Francis was canceled; his career at the Times was over and he spent his final years largely confined to the fever swamps of explicitly white supremacist organizations before he died in 2005.
Now—nearly 30 years later—rising names in the Republican Party are trying to bring Francis back into the fold.
His name comes up in speeches at conservative conferences; at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference, Hillsdale College professor and former Heritage Foundation fellow David Azerrad cited Francis when arguing that American law unfairly targets conservatives while oppressed groups get a free pass. Peter Thiel protégée turned Donald Trump –backed Senate candidate Blake Masters has been promoting Francis’s ideas throughout his Senate campaign, going so far as to recommend his book of essays, Beautiful Losers, which Masters has cited as an influence on his style of conservatism, in an Instagram Story that was pinned at the top of his account. ( Vanity Fair reached out to Masters’s campaign for comment. They did not respond; the archived Instagram Story has since been removed.) Joe Kent, another Republican candidate endorsed by Trump this cycle, seems familiar enough with Francis’s writings to reference his work multiple times while running for Washington’s third congressional district seat. Francis is cited in articles by influential, and relatively mainstream, conservative writers working for publications like National Review; former Trump administration staffer and essayist of “Flight 93 Election” fame Michael Anton and founder of the Trump-promoted Compact Matthew Schmitz have also both referenced him.
Francis’s work started popping up again in 2016 as a way to understand the phenomenon that led to Trump. Michael Brendan Dougherty, then a senior correspondent for The Week and now a senior writer for National Review, wrote an article in 2016 calling Francis “the Rosetta Stone for Trumpism.” Dougherty cited a 1996 essay written by Francis in which he argued that white working-class resentment from economic globalization could be channeled into electoral success. (Dougherty also argues that Francis wasn’t a white nationalist until later in his career. When that transition occurred is debatable, but one thing is clear: It was well before 1996.) Shortly after Doughtery’s article was published, Rush Limbaugh read an essay of Francis’s on air. But while discussion of Francis in the early Trump days was oriented toward trying to understand how we got to Trump, now his ideas are cited not descriptively, but prescriptively.
What makes this of particular note is that if one’s interest is purely in class politics, there’s little reason to turn to Francis. His view of class politics was largely ripped straight from National Review editor and former Marxist James Burnham, a debt Francis acknowledged during his career. Rather, it’s an attempt to idea-launder Francis’s most noxious views into the mainstream under the cover of class politics.
While the Republican National Committee’s 2012 election postmortem saw the need to appeal to minority voters in order to grow the party’s base and continue to win elections, the GOP of 2022 had doubled down on white Americans as their base. In this worldview, white supremacists are tolerated, and perhaps even sought out as allies. Better to be ugly winners than beautiful losers, they argue. And so, there are few consequences when Kent takes a photo with a Nazi sympathizer and criticizes Twitter for banning a white nationalist. Or when Tommy Tuberville pushes a racist narrative. Or when Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene speak at a conference organized by a white nationalist. Or when Masters claims Black Americans are to blame for gun violence and says Democrats are trying to use immigration “to change the demographics of our country.” Such language about immigration-altering demographics is commonplace in today’s Republican Party, where “great replacement theory” rhetoric is used by everyone from Tucker Carlson to Elise Stefanik. Coming full circle, D’Souza—now a fringe figure himself for his election conspiracy theories, a racist tweet (that he later tried to walk back ) about Barack Obama, and a presidential pardon from Trump over campaign finance law violations—has said Democrats “want to sort of transform the demographics of America” through illegal immigration. Francis’s return is not a random occurrence, it’s part of an ongoing test of the limits.
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The implication is that the Republicans can win elections by appealing to white racism. So what does that make their voters?
Americans?
You've just confessed that your idea of an American is a white supremacist.
2020 National Vote:
Biden Trump
White 41 58
African-American 87 12
Hispanic 65 32
Asian 61 34
Other 55 41
Oh,okay. Next you can tell us what that means to you.
Not really. I don't see any Republicans appealing to white liberals.
They are Americans just as communists are Americans antifa members are Americans, blm members are Americans Nazis may be American and all of them have them same rights. You see unlike most if not all liberals and leftists I don't think that someone somehow loses their rights as an American just because I disagree with what they say or believe.
Oh, isn't it obvious? Trump got 1/3 of the Hispanic and Asian vote and close to half of the other. He even got 12% of the Black vote. Do you think that they all support white supremacists?
So I guess those that voted for Nikki Haley, Mia Love, Tim Scotty, Allen West, and the 81 black Republicans in this article from 538 and others were all white racist huh?
I don't waste my time reading his racist rants anymore