Samuel Todd Francis (April 29, 1947 – February 15, 2005) was an American writer and academic. Francis would later become a "dominant force" on the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The white supremacist Jared Taylor called Francis "the premier philosopher of white racial consciousness of our time".
The political scientist and writer George Michael, an expert on extremism, identified Francis as one of "the far right's higher-caliber intellectuals." The SPLC described Francis as an important white nationalist writer known for his "ubiquitous presence of his columns in racist forums and his influence over the general direction of right-wing extremism" in the United States. The political analyst Chip Berlet described Francis as an ultraconservative ideologue akin to Pat Buchanan, whom Francis advised. The anarcho-capitalist political theorist Hans-Hermann Hoppe called Francis "one of the leading theoreticians and strategists of the Buchananite movement."
Early life
Francis was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He received a bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1969, and a master's degree in 1971 and doctorate in 1979 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Career
The Washington Times
Francis was a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation and an aide to the U.S. senator John P. East before joining the editorial staff of The Washington Times in 1986.
In June 1995, editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden "had cut back on Francis' column" after The Washington Times ran his essay criticizing the Southern Baptist Convention for its approval of a resolution that apologized for slavery. In the piece, Francis asserted that, "The contrition of the Southern Baptists for slavery and racism is a bit more than a politically fashionable gesture intended to massage race relations" and that "Neither slavery nor racism as an institution is a sin."
After D'Souza's column was published, Pruden "decided he did not want the Times associated with such views after looking into other Francis writings, in which he advocated the possible deportation of legal immigrants and forced birth control for welfare mothers."
Francis became a "dominant force" on the Council of Conservative Citizens. Francis was the chief editor of the council's quarterly newsletter, Citizens Informer, until his death in 2005. and "oppose[d] all efforts to mix the races of mankind." In his writings, Francis advocated for a moratorium on all immigration, plus an indefinite suspension of all immigration from non-European and non-Western people. Francis was buried at the foot of Lookout Mountain.
Thought and legacy
Francis's term "" refers to armed dictatorship without rule of law, or a Hegelian synthesis when the state tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens' lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law. Commentators have invoked the term in reference to situations when governments focus on weapon confiscation instead of stopping looters. On Francis's death, the Rockford Institute magazine Chronicles dedicated its April 2005 issue to his memory and the concept. Francis had a significant influence on the paleoconservative movement.
Francis argued that the conservative movement was made of "beautiful losers", being either "rootless men" attracted to archaic things or crypto-liberals who sometimes resist progressive change before eventually caving in. He argued that the political right kept losing because it was too focused on ideas and less on power. According to Francis, the political left has dominated politics due to the ascendancy of a progressive managerial class, leading to more bureaucratization and more state power while eroding the power of other authorities in society. To combat the emergence of this new class, Francis argued that the political right needed a base for its goals, this base being the white middle class or "Middle American radicals." In order to capture this base for the political right, Francis argued in favor of emphasizing "crime, educational collapse, the erosion of their economic status, and the calculated subversion of their social, cultural, and national identity" to create a class identity for this group. In 2023, the historian Joshua Tait said that "Before a Trump-inspired resurgence in interest in Francis, he was a cautionary tale from conservative intellectual history."
During the 2022 U.S. elections, the Republican Party candidates Blake Masters and Joe Kent promoted Francis's writings.
Although Francis sometimes engaged with Christian thinkers and publications during his life, he was also harshly critical of Christianity in his later years and his worldview has been described as irreligious and materialistic. Francis wrote that "Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it" and suggested that the "religious wrong" operated under a "false consciousness" that prevented white Christians from recognizing their true interests. Because of this, he has been cited as part of a trend toward increasingly "secular, even pagan" ideas among certain segments of the American radical right.
According to Father Paul Scalia (son of Antonin Scalia), Francis died a Roman Catholic.
Works
- (1984) Power and History: The Political Thought of James Burnham. University Press of America
- (1994) Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism. University of Missouri Press
- (1996) "From Household to Nation." Chronicles, March 1996, pp. 12-16.
- (1997) Revolution From the Middle. Middle America Press
- (1997) "Classical Republicanism and the Right to Bear Arms," in Costs of War. Transaction Publishers, pp. 53–66
- (1999) James Burnham: Thinkers of Our Time. London: Claridge Press
- (2001) America Extinguished: Mass Immigration and the Disintegration of American Culture. Americans for Immigration Control Publishers
- (2003) Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future. Representative Government Press
- (2005) "Refuge of Scoundrels: Patriotism, True and False, in the Iraq Controversy," in Neo-Conned! IHS Press, pp. 151–60
- (2006) Shots Fired: Sam Francis on America's Culture War. FGF Books edited by Peter Gemma
- (2007) Essential Writings on Race. New Century Foundation
- (2016) Leviathan and Its Enemies. Washington Summit Publishers