The NEW YORKER Discovers Sam Francis
01/12/2017
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The New Yorker's fascination with us in the era of Trump continues.

Evan Osnos wrote up Jared Taylor.  Richard Spencer and Company may soon be a cover illustration (giving Nazi salutes, I presume, sigh)

And in the January 9 edition, Kelefa Sanneh (half-white, half-African, English-reared, Harvard-degreed) drills down to the godfather, Sam Francis.

It is true, too, that Trumpism draws on a political tradition that has often been linked to white identity politics. One Journal author suggested that the true progenitor of Trumpism was Samuel Francis, a so-called paleoconservative who thought that America needed a President who would stand up to the “globalization of the American economy.” In Francis’s view, that candidate was Pat Buchanan, a former longtime White House aide who ran for President in 1992 and 1996 as a fiery populist Republican—and in 2000 as the Reform Party candidate, having staved off a brief challenge, in the primary, from Trump. Francis and Buchanan were united in their disdain for the Republican élite, which seemed to them too cozy with international business interests and too removed from the concerns of everyday Americans. Both also saw themselves as defenders of an American culture that was implicitly white, or even explicitly so. Francis once wrote that he wanted to fight for “the survival of whites as a people and a civilization.” (The Journal article that cited Francis also made passing reference to his “undeniable lapses in judgment and decency.”) [Intellectuals for Trump , January 9, 2016, links added]
The "Journal" in question is the short-lived, slightly tongue-in-cheek Journal of American Greatness.

I'll give it to the New Yorker.  Their obsession with Trump (one edition had, by accident or design, every single cartoon about Trump) has at least steered its readers toward actual sources of the National Question, white advocacy, race realism and alt-rightism.

Sam Francis rightly believed that races differed in inherited intelligence and behavior, and that this unchangeable fact doomed the multiracial society to failure.  Clashing cultures, languages and religions radiate out from this iceberg of reality, but the point remains the same:  neither government policy nor changed attitudes can melt the iceberg, so it's best to steer the ship clear of it.

Francis' point was social and political, but biological at its root, and should transcend the left-right divide.  Including the distraction of Nazi salutes.

 

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