Author: Samuel Francis

2,110 words

Even the weariest presidential campaign winds somewhere to the sea, and this month, as the ever dwindling number of American voters meanders into the voting booths, the sea is exactly where the political vessels in which the nation sails have wound up. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. (more…)

Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ross Perot at a 1992 presidential debate

2,310 words

Perhaps the greatest irony of the periodic political revolutions that occur in American democracy is that most of the voters who make them possible have not the foggiest notion of what they are doing. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt won the White House by running on a platform that promised to balance the budget and reduce the scale and power of the federal government, and there is no doubt that most of the Americans who sent him to Washington supported him simply because of the desperate economic straits in which they found themselves and their country, not because of any passion they shared with him for the socialist and internationalist experiments that he and his brood immediately imposed. (more…)

A National Guardsman on patrol in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots.

2,076 words

“Revolutions often succeed,” wrote historian Lewis Namier, “merely because the men in power despair of themselves, and at the decisive moment dare not order the troops to fire.” For four days in May last spring, revolution or something frighteningly close to it rapped hard on America’s door. Not only did the “man in power” — namely, President Bush — dare not order the troops to fire, to judge from his remarks about the so-called “Rodney King verdict,” the country was lucky the President didn’t get out into the streets and start stealing furniture for his Camp David retreat. (more…)

Patrick Buchanan in 1992

2,003 words

Nothing churns the entrails of the professional democracy priesthood more than the rancid taste of a little real democracy. Since one of the main dishes on the 1992 political menu has been a generous serving of authentic popular rebellion, the sages have spent a good part of the last year lurching for their lavatories. (more…)

Wal-Mart on Black Friday, the free trade utopia

2,208 words

For all of the subtle grace that distinguishes Japanese civilization, the esoteric gabble of Western diplomacy seems to elude its leaders. Every few months, some titan of Tokyo pronounces his low opinion of America and Americans, unveiling his view that our schools are dreadful, our racial minorities backward, our politicians crooks, or our workers lazy. (more…)

President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, two leading figureheads of the globalist elite.

2,287 words

One of the redeeming features of imperialism is that it makes for great adventure stories. The works of H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling and the literature of the American West from James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L’Amour would not have been possible without the empires and imperial problems that provide the setting for their tales. The reason for the relationship ought to be fairly obvious.

Empires offer all the standard fare of blood, guts, intrigue, romance, and action: villains plotting to overthrow civilization, heroes striving to protect it; (more…)

1,867 words

With a whoop and a holler, politicians have suddenly discovered that there’s a wild animal called the American middle class prowling around the voting booths, and officeholders are pounding down the stairs to make sure the rough beast does no damage once it gets inside the house. (more…)

David Duke in 1989

2,243 words

The time has come, to paraphrase Caspar Gutman in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, for plain speaking and clear understanding. Last November, David Duke failed to win the  governorship of Louisiana, but he did gain some 39 percent of the popular vote and carried a majority — about 55 percent — of the white vote. (more…)

3,399 words

Editor’s Note:

It is a little-known — but entirely unsurprising — fact that Samuel Francis had a deep love and encyclopedic knowledge of H. P. Lovecraft. In honor of Lovecraft’s birthday, here is Francis’ review of S. T. Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Life and Lovecraft’s Miscellaneous Writings. — Greg Johnson

“The New Englanders are a people of God, settled in those which were once the Devil’s territories.”—Cotton Mather

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4,373 words

On August 2, 1983, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill creating a legal public holiday in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although there had been little discussion of the bill in the House itself and little awareness among the American public that Congress was even considering such a bill, it was immediately clear that the U.S. Senate would take up the legislation soon after the Labor Day recess. (more…)