The immensely active Reason "Hit & Run" blog (resources make a difference, unfortunately) slipped in a characteristic sneer at the late Sam Francis last week: (Three-Fifths of a Man David Weigel January 16 2007)

Martin Luther King Day has come and gone; it's safe now to link to Michael Brendan Dougherty's essay on the late Sam Francis, from the America's Future Foundation magazine Doublethink

Reason gloats

It's striking how quickly Francis' work has receded from the public conciousness

Of course, the cause of any diminution of awareness of Sam Francis is exactly what destroyed his career in his lifetime: his relentless and ruthless eradication from all normal channels of conservative expression. Sam was by no means the only victim of this and it is still ongoing.

However, the forces of repression reckoned without the internet. VDARE.com sees persistent and quite heavy traffic on our archive of Sam Francis work, much of it from search engines.

Sam will certainly be remembered for a first class political joke (extremely relevant to the immigration debate today):

“IN AMERICA, WE have a two-party system.” There is the stupid party. And there is the evil party. I am proud to be a member of the stupid party." "Periodically, the two parties get together and do something that is both stupid and evil. This is called—bipartisanship."

And, of course, his principled opposition to the MLK holiday against the whole political culture stands to be resoundingly vindicated when/if the MLK archives are eventually opened.

It is on this subject that Reason’s blog is silliest

the King holiday didn't launch everything Francis said it would…The "egalitarian commandment" tide started rolling ashore in 1978, and it crashed in the 1990s. We've been taking MLK Day off, and our presidents have basically been consecrating it, and the push for racial preferences has been struggling since prop 209.

This is quite wrong. Sam Francis correctly saw where setting up a national holiday on the basis of a race-pandering lie would lead. The road to disgraces like the Duke atrocity is short and direct. Reason misrepresents the situation because of its House reluctance to accept the significance of ethnicity.

Michael Brendan Dougherty’s DoubleThink article (The Castaway - Jan 14 2007) is also weak on these issues and fails to account properly for the role of the Neoconservatives in the purging of Sam Francis and his kind. But it does have some useful and interesting material about a patriot who made huge sacrifices for his country.

UPDATE: click here to read about the new book collection of Sam Francis articles.