NR's Kevin Williamson Mentions Sam Francis—Favorably!
10/24/2014
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I almost hate to mention this because it might lead to Kevin Williamson deleting it, or, at best, him taking it as a sign that he should never mention Francis again. But then, the work of the late Sam Francis is so important (and ironically, so fundamental to the way the American conservative movement operates, even as the Beltway Right ignores his most important lessons) that have to promote his work every chance we get.

Williamson's column, Meet The New Serfs: You, touches on a theme that's become increasingly common in the Beltway Right, protesting the trend towards the militarization of police and the unaccountability of government officials. Of course, however worthy this sentiment, protesting it sometimes does more harm than good. Many conservatives and libertarians rant against the all powerful state while ignoring the government's refusal to enforce the laws it is supposed to, like those regulating immigration.

Williamson, to his credit, avoids this trap. He recounts the experience of one Joseph Adams, who had his house raided by a SWAT team. Unfortunately for him, the SWAT team was raiding the wrong house. This didn't stop them from terrifying his family and destroying his property. The next day, when Adams attempted to receive compensation for the damage state employees inflicted on his home, he was told the police had no record of what they had done. Suddenly, he was the one who had done something wrong.

Williamson writes,

In a sane world, the New Haven authorities would have shown up at Adams’s house with a check, flowers, and an apology, and a certificate exempting him from taxes for the rest of his life. In this world, people in his situation get treated by the government like they are the ones who have screwed up. And of course they’d say they had no record of the episode — getting information about your situation from any government agency, especially from one that is persecuting you, requires an agonizing effort. Keeping people in the dark is part of how they maintain their power. For fun sometime, call the comical New York State tax department and note the intentionally garbled phone numbers on the recording about how to get in touch with a tax agent’s superior to complain or ask a question.

The strange flip-side — the second half of Samuel Francis’s “anarcho-tyranny” — is that the brunt of government abuse falls on the law-abiding. Illinois, for example, makes it difficult for an ordinary citizen to legally carry a gun for self defense — up until a couple of years ago, doing so was categorically prohibited. But Illinois police seize thousands of illegal guns from criminals each year, and the state prosecutes practically none of those weapons cases. The law-abiding — by definition law-abiding — citizens applying for concealed-carry permits get treated like criminals, and the actual criminals do not. If you follow the law and inform Illinois authorities that you have a gun in the home, you invite all sorts of intrusion and oversight. If you don’t, nobody’s really looking. Meanwhile, the streets of Chicago are full of blood, going on 1,600 shootings this year and it’s not even Halloween. Nobody is held responsible for that carnage, but if you put an eleventh round in your legally owned rifle in Oak Park, you’re looking at jail time. [Emphasis added]

[Meet the New Serfs:You by Kevin Williamson, National Review, October 23, 2014]

Good for him. But... (sorry, Mr. Williamson, but I have to keep picking on you) there's something important Williamson leaves out.

Anarcho-tyranny isn't something that just arises, it's where multiculturalism leads. The militarization of police isn't something that just happened—it's the result of the stupefying levels of violence in black communities like Chicago. As Alexander Hart has shown, the militarization of police is done in partnership with advancing ideological multiculturalism.

Furthermore, as we see with immigration law, the law is suspended for certain groups and certain crimes not just because this is the way Big Government works, but because certain ethnic groups essentially function as clients of a political regime. Thus, illegals can operate without fear because La Raza thinks of itself as a group with common interests, organizes (or has somebody else organize them) behind those common interests, and win concessions from those who are less ethnocentric and less likely to vote as a bloc (i.e. the historic American nation.)

Blacks burning down convenience stories and demanding lynch mob justice results in concessions from the political establishment and respectful treatment from the media, whereas white people trying to hold a conference leads to government repression and reporters moonlighting as commissars. Even Asian-Americans are quite comfortable speaking in blunt terms about their group interest when they express opposition to racial preferences, whereas whites have to come up with some kind of a principled, universalistic argument that no one besides themselves takes seriously.

Finally, many of those government employees are recipients of affirmative action and quotas, which is really just another form of a tax. When you have rent seekers in government positions instead of dutiful servants of the state, you get incompetence, indifference, and indeed outright scorn for citizens. It's not just the DMV—look at how Obama's Department of Justice operates.

For that reason, if you oppose anarcho-tyranny or the managerial state in general, you have to oppose multiculturalism explicitly. And you have to be willing to say that as long as we do have this kind of system, European-Americans are allowed to organize and act as a group, the same as everyone else. Otherwise, you end up either talking about the margins of the problem—or, like Rand Paul, you end up switching sides.

If you want to solve the problem, you have to attack the problem. And the best place to start in identifying what happened to this country is to begin with Sam Francis.

 

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