Washington Examiner Op-Ed on Sam Francis...

The following is an op-ed that had been available on-line until recently. It is reproduced here so as to give people a chance to locate this editorial.

Francis re-fought immoral battles of 1964
Washington Examiner (originally located at http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/02/22/opinion/op-ed/01agoped.txt)
February 22, 2005
Byline: David Mastio

One of the last columns written by former Washington Times columnist Sam Francis, before his death last week, decried the positive portrayal of sex between men and women of different races. A commercial for Monday Night Football was really "an act of political-cultural subversion."

Francis went on, "Breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon of cultural destruction because it means the dissolution of the cultural boundaries that define breeding and the family, and ultimately, the transmission and survival of the culture itself."

"Breeding"? Those sentences define Francis as a man still fighting for causes in 2004 that were obviously immoral and rightly lost in 1964. Francis never understood that the idea of America crossed racial and ethnic boundaries and made "from many, one."

That inability to recognize equality between the races destroyed the potential for an influential career. In 1989 and 1990, Francis won Distinguished Writing Awards from the American Society of Newspaper Editors for his Washington Times editorials. Within a few years, Francis was being eased out of the Times and was ultimately fired in a flap over his writings about race.

His obituaries have pretended this never happened. Pat Buchanan calls Francis "a brilliant scholar, who had the courage of his convictions." A Washington Times editor called Sam a "scholarly, challenging and sometimes pungent writer."

In reality, Sam Francis was merely a racist and doesn't deserve to be remembered as anything less.

Having come up in academia, where he studied national security issues, Francis' first big Washington job was on the staff of North Carolina Sen. John East. From there he worked his way into the apparatus of Washington political advocacy, eventually landing in the opinion department of The Washington Times. He got his big break in 1991, when Buchanan resigned his syndicated Times column to run for president and hand-picked Francis to take over his column.

All this time, Francis kept his more vile racial ideas carefully under wraps, knowing that the organized conservative movement would kick him out the moment it learned what he really was. But, while he was writing his nationally syndicated column, he also quietly contributed to underground white supremacist publications, like the ominously named racist newsletter "American Renaissance." He led a double life -- by day he served up conservative, red meat that was strong but never quite out of bounds by mainstream standards; by night, unbeknownst to the Times or his syndicate, he pushed white supremacist ideas.

He wrote that whites should embark upon a "reconquest of the United States," though he was careful to say it should be a "cultural" rather than armed reconquest. He wanted to "end the political power of non-white minorities." He wanted to mandate birth control for welfare recipients in order to control the increase in the black population.

As time went on, he also began to push the limits in his syndicated column. He raised eyebrows in 1995 when he attacked the Southern Baptist church's official public repentance for having once supported slavery.

It was not long after this that Francis was finally exposed and disgraced. Conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza uncovered Francis' double game while doing research on racist groups, and noted it in his widely debated book "The End of Racism." Few liberals bothered to read D'Souza's book before denouncing it, but some influential conservatives did read it, and they began pressuring the Times to drop Francis. Before long, it did, as did virtually all the papers carrying his column.

Francis, apparently unrepentant to the end, continued to publish intellectual fodder for racists, mostly in obscure outlets, up until his death. Samuel Francis was the intellectual tribune of the remnant of America's white supremacists. America is a better place without him.