Thursday, January 21, 2016

RUSH LIMBAUGH: EVEN HIS ASIDES ARE DISHONEST

A couple of days ago, Michael Brendan Dougherty of The Week published a piece in which he asserted that Samuel Francis, a little-remembered adviser to Pat Buchanan, predicted in 1996 that eventually Trump-style populism would emerge in American politics, in an essay titled "From Household to Nation."
[S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better…
Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh brought up the Francis essay on his show -- and if you think that Limbaugh only lies about big stuff, let me assure you that he lies about the small stuff, too:
RUSH: I want to read something to you. I want you to really listen to this. This was written back in 1996, written by a man named Samuel Francis, who later in life suffered the -- acquired the -- reputation of being a white supremacist. Undeservedly so, but there have been efforts undertaken to destroy his credibility and so forth.
"Undeservedly so"? So where did people get the idea that Francis was a white supremacist?

Oh, yeah -- from his own writings.
"[W]hites did not descend to their present pitiable condition because their racial purity was somehow diluted but because they conceptually surrendered their will and identity... . The conceptual surrender is leading to a situation where the biological survival of the race is threatened, and if that occurs, then -- because race is necessary, because no other race or people seems able to replicate or adopt the concepts on which white civilization is based — the conceptual surrender will not be remedied, and white civilization, the whole conceptual corpus, will die with the race."
-- "Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival," American Renaissance, 1995

"If whites wanted to do so, they could dictate a solution to the racial problem tomorrow -- by curtailing immigration and sealing the border, by imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites and encouraging a higher white birth rate, by refusing to be bullied into enduring "multiculturalism," affirmative action, civil rights laws and policies; and by refusing to submit to cultural dissolution, inter-racial violence and insults, and the guilt that multiracialists inculcate."
-- "Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival," American Renaissance, 1995

"At a time when anti-white racial and ethnic groups define themselves in explicitly racial terms, only our own unity and identity as a race will be able to meet their challenge. If and when that challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us as Robert Mugabe has threatened to do to whites in Zimbabwe, they will do so not because we are 'Americans' or 'Christians' or 'conservatives' or 'liberals,' but because we are white."
-- "Race and the American Prospect: An Introduction," VDARE.com, 2006 (published posthumously)
Also:
To combat what he saw as threats to American society posed by "nonwhite minorities and their white anti-white allies," [Francis] argued in a 1995 article for American Renaissance that "Whites must formulate a white racial consciousness that identifies racial and biological endowments as important and relevant to social behavior, and their own racial endowments as essential to the continuing existence of Euro-American civilization." To counter the demographic threat from "immigration, nonwhite fertility and whites' own infertility," he called for ending all immigration, deploying the armed forces at the border, deporting all illegal immigrants, ending all state subsidies for the "nonwhite birth rate," and encouraging "white fertility."
And see this 2000 column, in which Francis refers to the NAACP as part of "the Afro-racist lobby" because the group had the gall to want the Confederate flag removed from the statehouse grounds in South Carolina.

Francis was a U.S. Senate staffer who worked with North Carolina senator James East, a Jesse Helms ally, on efforts to prevent the approval of the Martin Luther King holiday. He went on to write for The Washington Times until his work became so inflammatory that even that paper found it too extreme. He later wrote for publications of the Council of Conservative Citizens, and edited Pat Buchanan's book The Death of the West, which he wanted to cll The Death of Whitey. He was so extreme that Dinesh D'Souza -- Dinesh D'Souza! -- said he embodied the "new spirit of white bigotry."

But to Limbaugh, Francis has merely "acquired the reputation of being a white supremacist undeservedly." Right. Got it.

2 comments:

gocart mozart said...

I remember a column Francis wrote back in the 90's decrying the unfair persecution of Byron De La Beckwith by the Justice Department. His racism was not well disguised.

sdhays said...

The other way to interpret it is that Rush Limbaugh doesn't think anything Samuel Francis wrote is actually indicative of racism, because he's also a white supremacist. He's not lying, he just rejects the label of racism (because it has "unfairly" picked up a bad connotation). Based on the evidence to date, I don't think a majority of his listeners would disagree.