In his first intellectual incarnation as a conservative, Sam fell under the spell of one-time Communist James Burnham, then writing for the conservative journal National Review. In retrospect, it’s difficult to ignore the materialist, if not Marxist, nature of the categories both men employed in trying to understand the hidden grammar of American political life. Sam, as a result, saw politics not as part of a universal logos according to which “human beings can order their common life through rational deliberation, but as an arena in which they seek to dominate one another or escape domination by others.”

Leviathan and its Enemies, Francis’s posthumous work, does not describe his own development because Francis wrote it in the early 1990s, long before he was expelled from the synagogue of mainstream conservatism. Instead, “Leviathan describes the historical process by which American liberalism captured the institutions of government, education, and media, rendering itself invulnerable to conventional conservatism—but exposed to nationalist populism.” According to Francis, the managerial revolution was “one of the major inflection points in postwar American politics” and as such comparable to world-historic events like “the neolithic transition from subsistence hunting to farming.”

The bourgeois elites which dominated American life from the Civil War until World War II were replaced by the new managerial elites who showed more competence in running the gigantic industries and corporations which the American Empire now required. Liberalism was the ideology which rationalized and justified the rule of the new oligarchic minority, which ruled through a “homogenization” which set out to destroy all of the intermediary structures which protected the individual from the Leviathan liberal state.

In Leviathan and its Enemies, Francis confronts not only the managerial elites who rule via liberalism, but also the conservative opposition which proved too obtuse or too feckless to oppose their tyrannical rule effectively. Abandoning the American conservatism which had become little more than “the obsolete ideology of a vanquished class,” and “an anachronism whose only function is to provide a veneer of ideological diversity to American public life,” Francis placed his hopes in a group he referred to as “Middle American Radicals” (MARs), a term he borrowed from sociologist Donald Warren, whose analysis of “voter surveys in the 1970s had produced a profile of a group of voters, then making up about a quarter of the electorate, who had not been closely studied before.” MARs were:

white and earned incomes in the middle and lower-middle income brackets. They had not attended college, and they held jobs in skilled and semi-skilled professions. Warren found that their political views, though consistent across elections, did not correspond to the platforms of either major party. On the one hand, these voters defended entitlements and union membership and were skeptical of large corporations and free trade. On the other hand, they opposed welfare and school busing and held conservative views on social issues, especially those involving race.

Francis spends a good deal of time trying to define this group of people because he saw them as the avant garde of the revolution against the tyranny of the managerial elites. In order to identify a group which he claimed was “defined principally by its ideology,” Francis had to specify definite “socio-economic correlates” based on objective criteria like income levels, education, and, most importantly, religion: “MARs had an annual family income of $3,000 to $13,000.” Warren went on to claim “that northern European ethnics and Italians were strongly represented among them, that they were nearly twice as common in the South as in the north central states, that they tended to have completed high school but not to have attended college, were more common among Catholics and Jews than among Protestants and among Mormons and Baptists than among other Protestant sects, and were likely to be males in their thirties or their sixties.

Kevin Phillips had to make use of similar criteria to define the same group, which Ronald Reagan inherited from Richard Nixon. Reagan’s coalition, according to Phillips:

coincides with the traditional populist and anti-elitist component of U.S. political geography. . . . Moreover, the coalition’s critical new religious adherents—Northern Catholic right-to-life and Southern fundamentalist Protestant—represent constituencies whose traditionalist morality, over the last fifty years, has been complemented by support for the New Deal and economic activism.

Similarly:

The “New Majority” of which Nixon wrote had “its roots mainly in the Midwest, the West, and the South,” and included “manual workers, Catholics, members of labor union families, and people with only grade school educations” who “had never before been in the Republican camp” and “had simply never been encouraged to give the Eastern liberal elite a run for its money for control of the nation’s key institutions.”

More recently, Matthew Rose attempted to describe the same group in his own words:

MARs feel they are members of an exploited class—excluded from real political representation, harmed by conventional tax and trade policies, victimized by crime and social deviance, and denigrated by popular culture and elite institutions. Their sense of grievance points both upward and downward. They believe they are neglected, even preyed upon, by a leadership class that favors simultaneously the rich and the poor over the middle class.

These “working-class whites” were not necessarily conservative and so they found no easy fit in the political system in which conservatism as “measured by the orthodoxies of conservative think tanks and the Republican donor class,” because that group attempted to define their identity by fiat so that they could control them rather than by trying to identify them as they are so that they could represent their needs and aspirations.

After describing this group in his book The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Philips got them to leave the Democratic Party and support Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. Patrick Buchanan attempted to mobilize them in his unsuccessful bids to become president in 1992 and 1996. Buchanan, however, was successful in resurrecting the term “America First” from what Richard John Neuhaus referred to as the “fever swamps” of isolationism and anti-Semitism, and it was Steve Bannon, who used a now rehabilitated version of America First to propel Trump into the White House in 2016.

But who are these people in reality? Did they have an identity independent of the attempts of various politicians trying to identify them as a way of harnessing them to their political agenda? In a speech he gave on November 3, 1969 Richard Nixon referred to them as the “silent majority.” Ten years later, the Zionist preacher Jerry Falwell founded a group known as the “Moral Majority” as his way of mobilizing the same group of people to support Israel. In September 2016, Hillary Clinton referred to the same group as “a basket of deplorables,” a comment which cost her the election. In 1995, Sam Francis referred to the same group as “Disaffecteds” and described them as having “widespread sympathy for the New York ‘subway vigilante’ Bernhard Goetz.” (Goetz, it should be noted, made a cryptic cameo re-appearance as the incel [involuntary celibate] anti-hero of Joker, incels being the Millennial reincarnation of “Disaffecteds/Deplorables” in our day.)

At this point we need to ask whether universal terms like “Disaffecteds” and “Deplorables” have any connection to the people these categories purport to describe or whether they are simply figments of the imagination which reside in the minds of the people who want to exploit them for political purposes, and this question brings us back to the nominalist crisis of the late Middle Ages and the issue of whether universals exist in the mind or in reality. William of Ockham (1285-1347), the man most commonly associated with the school known as nominalism, felt that universals existed only in the human mind. This meant not only that the mind of God was beyond any logos of explanation, it also meant that there could be “no causal demonstration of His existence,” which meant that the existence of God as well as his essence could be posited only by “a leap of faith,” a term which Protestants confected under Ockham’s indirect (and Luther’s direct) influence. Under the influence of the nominalists:

Medieval logic became increasingly a logic of terms and of propositions and the relations between them. That is to say, it became clear to the medieval logicians that they were dealing not with extra-mental substances, nor even with concepts such as psychical realities, but with terms and propositions.

If universals were, as Ockham maintained, “mere concepts of the mind or common names,” then “even an imperfect knowledge of the nature of things” becomes impossible. And if the Logos of God becomes inaccessible, then our only option as creatures was blind submission to his will. Ockham, in other words, was proposing nothing less than a return to the God of Islam. Even admitting that “Ockham does not think of the divine will as expressing simply power,” Rev. Frederick Copleston, S.J. (known for his influential multi-volume A History of Philosophy, and his debate on the existence of God with Bertrand Russell) is forced to admit that he “represents the divine will as the ultimate source of norms rather than as subject to norms which hold good independently.” In his zeal to defend God’s absolute freedom, Ockham claims that God “by his absolute power . . . could will what He has in fact forbidden,” which is what prompted St. Thomas Aquinas to accuse the nominalists of his day of blasphemy. Years later, that same charge forced Ockham to seek refuge from the Inquisition in Munich, where he died of the Black Death on April 10, 1347.

The Ultimate Source of Norms

Nominalism recapitulated in the West the same trajectory which Logos had taken in the Islamic world after the triumph of al-Ashari and al-Ghazali in spite of Averroes’s attempt to contain its corrosive anti-intellectual effects. In spite of Siger of Brabant’s defeat at the hands of Aquinas, Averroism returned in the wake of Ockham’s reintroduction of the God of Islam: Human freedom becomes a datum of consciousness which we accept by reason while at the same time accepting divine foreknowledge as an article of faith without any attempt to reconcile the two. As a result, “philosophy and theology tend to fall apart,” and the “new way” becomes synonymous with Averroism’s doctrine of two truths.

The evolution of Sam Francis’s political views and his ability to determine who his constituents, and more importantly, his enemies were, was clouded by precisely this confusion between extra-mental substances and psychical realities. It should be obvious, at this point, that the term “Deplorables” described nothing but a figment of Hillary Clinton’s imagination. But what about terms like “Middle American Radicals” or, more importantly “working class whites”? Did that term describe an extra-mental substance or a psychic reality?

In order to answer that question, we have to turn to a closer examination of ethnicity, because that is the repository of social life half-way between the family and the state. In America that means an examination of the Triple Melting Pot, which played a crucial role in Sam Francis’s development largely because he gave no indication that he knew what it was. Because he failed to understand how ethnicity worked in America, Sam Francis could not identify the group he chose to lead. Instead of dealing with extra-mental substances, Sam began a life-long pilgrimage from one universal to another, all of which existed in the mind alone. The result was an increasingly unreal series of revolutionary fantasies based on phantasms of the mind which had only a tenuous connection to reality.

Rose claims that Francis was crippled by the materialist and Marxist categories which he unconsciously adopted from Burnham’s analysis of the managerial elite. By confining himself to understanding power without reference to Logos, Francis ended up deceiving himself because he failed to see:

how thoroughly he shared the philosophical assumptions of managerial liberalism. Its denial of transcendence, its rejection of natural law, its anthropological materialism, its skepticism about reason, and its reductive psychology—Francis accepted every one of these doctrines. In his mind, Francis was engaged in a struggle to save civilization. But in opposing the materialism of the left with a racial bio-politics of the right, he discarded one of the central beliefs of the civilization he claimed to defend: that man is a rational being, capable of knowledge and love, who bears the image of God.

Ultimately, Francis failed “because his ideology prevented him from seeing that our culture’s greatest achievements have come in pursuit of ideas that transcend human differences. Francis’s failure of gratitude and wonder made him more than incompetent about power. It made him an outsider to his civilization.”

Rose is right in faulting Sam’s materialism, but as its antidote, he ends up proposing a false universal as well as a false dichotomy. The human race is not the name of a group which answers the question Who am I? Similarly, we should not be forced to choose between racial particularism and an ideology which espouses transcending human differences. Herberg’s understanding of the Triple Melting Pot provides a welcome alternative to this false dichotomy because, as he puts it, “Neither the assimilationists of the [single] ‘melting pot’ nor the ethnic champions of ‘pluralism’ gauged aright the dynamics of American life.” This is so because:

The ethnic “pluralists” were backward-looking romantics, or else they were shrewd opportunists intent on exploiting the present without interest in the shape of things to come. In either case they were out of touch with the unfolding American reality. The enthusiasts of the “melting pot” were right in foreseeing continuous and increasing racial fusion among the American people, but this racial mixture through intermarriage turned out to be not general and indiscriminate but largely channeled along certain lines. . . . Our cultural assimilation has taken place not in a “melting pot,” but rather in a “transmuting pot” in which all ingredients have been transformed and assimilated to an idealized “Anglo-Saxon” model. Despite widespread dislike of various aspects of British culture.

What we need is a hermeneutic that allows us to identify human groups accurately, not one that dismisses them as unnecessary or infra dignitatem (beneath one’s dignity) for the true believer in either Christianity or America. The crucial issue is not the terms that sociologists or politicians use to define any particular group, the crucial issue is whether those universals exist in the mind or in reality. Only after we answer that question can we solve “the problem of self-identification and self-location.” Ignorance of the distinction between psychic and extra-mental reality (at least in some implicit sense) makes it impossible to answer the question What am I? even to myself.

Mary Eberstadt has her own take on “the problem of self-identification and self-location.” Sixty-five years after Herberg raised the identity question, Mary Eberstadt raised it again, describing “the preeminent psychic howl of our time” as “Who am I?”

Eberstadt describes the destruction of the bourgeois social order which Burnhan and Francis lay at the feet of the managerial elite and their program of social engineering as the “Great Scattering,” and goes on to claim that the engine which brought about this scattering is “the sexual revolution,” an event involving “the widespread social changes that followed the technological shock of the birth control pill and related devices delivering reliable contraception en masse for the first time.”

Eberstadt’s book is in many ways the sequel to Herberg’s. In 1954, religion led to belonging; by 2019 secularism and sexual liberation has led to isolation. But that is not the end of the story because the lack of identity which the sexual revolution has created has led to an intolerable vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. Since the real identity which religion confers now seems a distant memory, identity politics arises to fill the vacuum that the loss of real identity has created.

After secularization led to the demise of religion, race took its place as the prime signifier of identity. This, however, set up a trajectory which eventually confounded itself in a way that Hegel would describe as the cunning of reason. The rise of Black Power in the 1960s led to “white” identity movements two generations later. Jesse Jackson’s attack on Western culture at Stanford on January 15, 1987 led inexorably to the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally which took place in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11, 2017.

Eberstadt blames the sexual revolution ultimately for both events because the sexual revolution has created “a crisis of identity” by destroying the family, from which everyone derives the first sense of who they are. The sexual revolution, in other words, created identity politics because “The more people feel themselves adrift in a vast, impersonal, anonymous sea, the more desperately they swim toward any familiar, intelligible, protective life-raft; the more they crave a politics of identity.” The young white guys who showed up to claim an identity at Charlottesville were born into a world “in which the human family has imploded, and in which many people, no matter how privileged otherwise, have been deprived of the most elementary of human connections” creating a need for identity politics.

The same is a fortiori true of women. Deprived of their roles as wife and mother by the sexual revolution and reproductive technology, they created a faux identity for themselves as feminists, which Eberstadt describes as resulting from “identity erasure.” The source of this identity crisis is secularization because only religion can give the complete answer to the question Who am I? Identity erasure becomes, as a result, one of the inevitable “social consequences of religious decline.”

^[49] Eberstadt, Primal, p. 58.

Who Am I?

After surveying the sequelae of secularization and the sexual revolution, Eberstadt is forced to come to the same conclusion Herberg arrived at 65 years earlier: no religion equals no identity. The eclipse of religion has led to the disappearance of historical “behavior codes” which are the source of moral action and, therefore, identity, but the main source of the problem goes deeper than that. The disappearance of a “transcendental horizon” removed “one more way of answering the question Who am I? that religion has traditionally supplied: I am a child of God.”[49]

Eberstadt jumps too quickly here to a theological answer that can be found only at the end of The Book. The most pertinent question which comes to mind after asking Who am I? is Who made me? The answer to that question is “God made me.” If God made me, He knows who I am because He made me what I am. Our identity, in other words, is dependent on God and the human nature he implanted in us when He created us. That human nature involves free will, which means we must choose the good according to who we are. This means that religion involves behavior in a way that race, which is a purely biological phenomenon, does not. There is no such thing as white values, but there are Christian values, Jewish values, and Muslim values. One of the main motivations for becoming “white” is avoidance of the moral law. This allows for easy subversion of the white pseudo-identity.

There is an element of subjective ratification. We can deny God’s existence but only at the price of losing our own identity in the process. This means that we can answer the question Who am I? only by referring to our relationship with the ultimate, ultimate reality which all men call God. The social engineers understood very clearly that pseudo-identities proliferate when the idea of God evaporates from the mind. They also understood that the surest way to ensure that the idea of God evaporates from the mind is by promoting sexual liberation. Wilhelm Reich created the program of “sexual revolution,” a term he himself coined, based on that insight. So once again we are forced to Herberg’s conclusion: no religion equals no identity. Secularization followed by the sexual revolution destroyed the only ethnic identity that Americans ever had.

Eberstadt’s conclusion corresponds uncannily with the conclusion which Herberg derived from his analysis of the Triple Melting Pot. Those without religion in America have no identity. The ethnic parish, to specify the engine of Catholic assimilation in America, provided an identity that was faithful to both the old country and the new America precisely because religion transcended their geographical boundaries. The ethnic group, according to Herberg, was “the primary context of identification and social location” for the first wave of immigrants. Yet:

The first concern of the immigrants, we may remember, was with their churches. As the ethnic group began to emerge, so did the ethnic church, the church that transcended “old country” particularisms and grouped believers according to the newly relevant ethnic (linguistic, cultural, “national”) lines.

The ethnic parish was equally helpful for the second generation of “doubly alienated, marginal men” because it provides a form of identity even after “they refused to identify themselves any longer in terms of their ethnic background, but no new form of identification had yet emerged.” In America, “one had to be ‘something.’” Because their parents deprived the second generation of that something by migrating to America, the second generation found themselves “in an intolerable position, consumed with ambition, anxiety, and self-hatred” that could be ameliorated only by the ethnic parish. Religion became even more important to the third generation because having abandoned “nationality, language, culture,” the only thing he had left was his religion, and this he was “not expected to change.” As a result, “it is religion that with the third generation has become the differentiating element and the context of self-identification and social location.”

Sam and I, as I pointed out in my talk at his memorial service, came from two different ethnic groups. I was a Catholic from the North, and he was a Protestant from the South who had abandoned his religion at an early age. As a result, Sam did not know who he was. He filled that vacuum by becoming a conservative, but after getting fired from the Washington Times, Sam abandoned conservatism in favor of white identity. In doing so he became the posthumous father of the Alt-Right, a white nationalist or separatist movement which formed in the wake of the identity vacuum created by the sexual chaos practiced by their parents. The white boys are needy. Their “primal cry,” according to Eberstadt is “Mine!” They yearn for an “ethnostate” as compensation for the lack of identity which comes from “domestic dispossession.” White nationalists, Eberstadt tells us, “are much more likely to be divorced than married or never married.”

Rose characterizes Sam’s racism as an “open secret. . . his vision of America as a nation inextricably bound up with white supremacy.” Race displaced religion in a way that would become paradigmatic for Sam’s Alt-Right followers:

Though raised in a Protestant family, Francis was not a believer, and he wrote critically of conservatives who thought Christianity could provide philosophical and institutional resistance to liberalism. . . . Modern Christianity was no friend of white Americans, Francis concluded. “Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it.”

Tom Fleming’s attempts to sanitize Sam’s articles of their racial content for publication in Chronicles boomeranged and led to charges of hypocrisy when David Frum denounced both men in National Review as “unpatriotic conservatives.” The main weapon he wielded in decertifying the moral legitimacy of paleoconservatives was their advocacy of white supremacy, and the man who put that weapon into Frum’s hands was Sam Francis, who gave an “overtly racialist speech” at the “white-supremacist American Renaissance organization” in 1994. The fact that a Jew leveled this accusation was, of course, the unkindest cut of all because Jared Taylor, who was the head of the American Renaissance, was the main person responsible for spreading confusion among culture warriors like Sam by claiming that Jews were white.

Race, Frum opines, “was not in those days central to conservative thinking, if only because, as Francis himself noted, the early conservative movement was so urban and northern. For the paleos, however, race and ethnicity were from the start essential and defining issues—and so they remain to this day.”

Frum then goes on to smear the paleocons by associating them with Kevin MacDonald, who, Frum is forced to admit “does not quite belong to the paleoconservative club.” No matter, any club is good enough to beat the uppity goyim who think they can define their own political movement without the help of Jewish commissars like Frum.

There are, however, certain ironies here which are too big to ignore. I began my talk at the Sam Francis memorial by quoting Sam’s question “Are Jews white?” because all of the paleocons from Tom Fleming to Jared Taylor had gone out of their way to avoid the Jewish Question. By rejecting any kind of theological definition of what a Jew is (see The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit), Francis, Taylor and the paleos settled for an incoherent racial explanation, that blinded them to what was really going on by claiming that Jews were white. In return for that favor, Frum expelled them all from the synagogue of conservatism. When I brought up this issue, the paleocons who had gathered to honor Sam’s memory directed their ire at me, not at the Frums who had betrayed them. Tom Fleming, who was not in the room, expelled me from the minor shul known as the Rockford Institute for bringing up the Jewish issue, even though it was Frum who had expelled him from the larger synagogue six years earlier. All in all, it was a stunning performance in which self-loathing united with intellectual cowardice to silence the voice of the only man in the room who was willing to state that Sam Francis had once asked the question, “Are Jews white?”

The same Peter Brimelow, editor of V-Dare.com, who panicked at being labeled an anti-Semite because he happened to be in the same room where I gave my speech, had already been outed by Frum in National Review.

On March 17, 2003, for example, V-Dare.com prominently posted on its homepage an anonymous letter celebrating [Kevin] MacDonald’s work and quoting his allegation that the Iraq war “is being fomented by Jewish neo-conservative activists based in the Bush administration, congressional lobbying organizations, and the media.” More generally, MacDonald said—and V-Dare.com repeated—“the most important Jewish contributions to culture were facilitated not only by high IQ but by closely cooperating, mutually reinforcing groups of Jews who were centered around charismatic leaders and excluded dissenters.”

Again ironies abound! Frum accuses the paleocons of being anti-Semites when they spent all of their time trying to convince their constituents that Jews were white, as a way of defusing the Jewish issue. The paleocons were easy targets for David Frum because they could not articulate a coherent critique of the Jewish subversion of American culture. Alienated from religion, they based their critique on race by default, and at that point they lost the argument. When I articulated the traditional religious position that the Jews by killing Christ had rejected Logos and by rejecting Logos they became revolutionaries, the white boys all ran screaming from the room, their eyes full of fear of the Jews.

After faulting Francis for his nativism. Frum then had the chutzpah to say that Pat Buchanan “permitted a dual loyalty to influence him” in a discussion of a war—the attack on Iraq in 2003—that was driven entirely by the Israel First agenda of the Neoconservatives and to a large extent by people in the US government (including David Frum) who possessed dual American/Israeli citizenship. This wasn’t a momentary lapse on Frum’s part. Attacking the paleoconservative resistance to NATO’s war on Serbia, Frum criticized the America First mote in Tom Fleming’s eye while ignoring the Israel First beam in his own: “To an uncharitable eye, Fleming and his magazine appeared to have succumbed to what George Washington might have condemned as a ‘passionate attachment’ to a foreign country.” Does anyone have a more “passionate attachment” to a foreign country than neoconservative Israel Firsters like David Frum? Hypocrisy is too mild a term when it comes to describing chutzpah of this magnitude. And yet the white boys who called themselves conservatives couldn’t bring themselves to understand what was going on, much less act on their understanding, because as soon as you claim that being “white” is the most important issue, the Jew, who is driving the real agenda, becomes invisible.

Frum’s article ends in a hysterical crescendo of hypocritical jingoism:

They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country. . . . War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen—and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

At some point between the time he finished the Leviathan manuscript in the mid-1990s and his death in 2005, Sam moved from class to race as the repository of political power. Sam was forced to conclude that social engineering led inexorably to the rise of identity politics. Herberg refers obliquely to the Burnham/Francis bourgeois/managerial dichotomy by talking about inner- vs. other-directed Americans. Like Sam, Herberg implies that the rise in religious identification may be the result of social engineering. Unlike Sam, Herberg feels that race does not answer the question Who am I? with two notable exceptions—“Negroes and those of Oriental origin.” Herberg then concludes that the only kind of “separateness or diversity that America recognizes as permanent, and yet also as involving no status of inferiority, is the diversity or separateness of religious community.”

Herberg wrote those words in 1954, the same year in which the Supreme Court handed down its Brown v. Board of Education decision, outlawing segregation in the classroom. What followed was the rise of racial consciousness in America. The big sociological question which flowed from the rise of racial consciousness is whether race made the Triple Melting Pot obsolete. Most agreed that it had:

During the 1960s, it became clear that the “triple melting pot” was too simple a view of America. Herberg had considered only in passing the fact that African-American Protestants were not part of the Protestant “melting pot,” and that Sunday morning remained the most segregated time of the week. He had skimmed over the Eastern Orthodox history and presence on the American scene, and had overlooked the rise of black Islam. As religious scholar Martin Marty noted in his introduction to the 1983 edition of the book, Herberg had not foreseen the revival of the “identity” issues that would be so pronounced within a few years. Marty writes: “A decade after he published, America had broken into a complex of identity-giving collectivities: Orthodox, black Protestant, multiethnic Catholic conflict groups, Jewish ‘sectarianism,’ feminist and generational causes and movements, Indian and Hispanic power fronts, Eastern ‘cults.’ Even Protestantism was drastically sundered by an unforeseen recovery of fundamentalism-evangelical-pentecostalism over against a dwindling ‘mainline’ in which Herberg has placed so much stock.” . . . Just a decade after the publication of Protestant, Catholic, Jew, the Immigration Act of 1965 was passed, launching a new phase of immigration that would make American ethnicity and religion more textured and more complicated than Herberg had ever imagined, with the growth of substantial Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sikh communities.

After reviewing Kennedy’s data, Peach concluded that “a racial/ethnic division of society into Black, Jewish and white Gentile would be a more accurate description of the New Haven data than Kennedy’s Protestant, Catholic and Jewish melting pots.” Unfortunately, the racial categories “Black, Jewish, and White Gentile” are not self-referential. With one exception—Jewish—they do not provide an answer to the question Who are you? If a Polish Catholic from Chicago were asked, who are you? It is unlikely that he would answer “I am a White Gentile,” because that designation is a purely negative way of saying that “I am not a Jew.” The term Jewish is the exception to that rule, but the term Jewish is, at least arguably, a religious identifier.

Born in 1946 at the beginning of the Baby Boom, Sam Francis mirrored the development we have just described. Whatever religious affiliation he was born into ceased early on to become a marker of his identity, getting subsumed first into conservatism and then into race, in a process that mirrored the secularization of the United States during the period of his lifetime.

The gist of my talk at the Sam Francis memorial was that the culture wars are simply not understandable in racial terms. The different sides in the culture wars may have used race as a pretext, but the identity of the antagonists was ethnic not racial in the sense commonly portrayed in the media. In applying the ethnic calculus to this period of history, we discover that the blacks, even if they were the most visible player in the civil rights phase of the culture wars of the ‘60s, were ultimately the pawn of other groups, which were just as white as the groups they attacked.

In his book Fatal Embrace, Benjamin Ginsburg confirms our suspicion that the racial conflicts of the ‘60s weren’t really racial at all by showing that virtually every major civil rights organization, including, or one might say especially, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was in some sense of the word controlled by Jews:

Jews served as major financiers and strategists for the civil rights movement. Jews served as well as the key liaisons between the civil rights movement and the government during both the Kennedy and Johnson eras. Jewish groups, organized through the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, had long worked closely with blacks in efforts to eliminate housing and employment discrimination from the 1950s and after.

White on White Racism?

Jewish contributions provided a substantial share of the funding for such civil rights groups as the NAACP and CORE. Jewish attorneys were at the forefront of the legal offensive against the American apartheid system. Stanley Levinson, a longtime official and fund-raiser for the American Jewish Congress, became Martin Luther King’s chief aid and advisor, having previously served as a major fund-raiser for Bayard Rustin. Harry Wachtel was a major legal advisor and fundraiser for the SCLC. Levinson and Wachtel were often called King’s twin Jewish lawyers. Jack Greenberg, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund was the most important single civil rights lawyer in the United States. Jews comprised a large segment—perhaps one-third of the whites who participated in civil rights marches and protests in the South during the 1960s.

Kevin MacDonald, America’s premier racial theorist, says pretty much the same thing as Ginsberg in the article on the Jewish-Black alliance which appeared in Race and the American Prospect, which Sam was editing before he died. MacDonald Writes:

The record shows quite clearly that Jewish organizations as well as a great number of individual Jews contributed enormously to the success of the movement to increase the power of blacks and alter the racial hierarchy of the United States.

He continues:

Jews played a prominent role in organizing blacks beginning with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The NAACP was founded by wealthy German Jews, non-Jewish whites and blacks led by W.E. B. Dubois. The Jewish role was predominant:

By mid-decade, the NAACP had something of the aspect of an adjunct of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee, with the brothers Joel and Arthur Spingarn serving as board chairman and chief legal counsel, respectively; Herbert Lehman on the exectuive commitee; Lillian Wald and Walter Sachs on the board (although not simultaneously); and Jacob Schiff and Paul Warburg as financial angels. By 1920, Herbert Seligman was director of public relations and Martha Greuning served as his assistant. . . . Small wonder that a bewildered Marcus Garvey stormed out of NAACP headquarters in 1917 muttering that it was a white organization.

The NAACP, in other words, was a Jewish organization that mobilized America’s blacks to fight racial discrimination insofar as this was congruent with Jewish goals. Benjamin Ginsberg is remarkably frank in discussing the terms of the Jewish-Black alliance:

By speaking on behalf of blacks as well as Jews. . . Jewish groups were able to present themselves as fighting for the abstract and quintessential American principles of fair play and equal justice rather than the selfish interests of Jews alone. This would not be the last time that Jewish organizations found that helping blacks could serve their own interests as well… Gains achieved on behalf of one, Jewish organizations reasoned, would serve the interests of both, while allowing Jews to project an image of unselfish pursuit of the public good. . . For Jews. . . gains achieved on behalf of blacks in terms of equality of opportunity also promised to serve their own interest in eliminating discrimination.

I tried to point out the religious dimensions of the culture wars in the speech I gave at the Sam Francis memorial by claiming that the real enemy, both here and in Russia was the revolutionary Jew. He was not our enemy, I said then, because of some occult racial inheritance. The revolutionary Jew is our enemy because he has rejected Logos:

What do Jerusalem under Simon bar Kokhba, the Soviet Union under Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamanev, and Radek, the short lived Soviet Republics of Bavaria under Kurt Eisner and Eugene Levine, and Hungary under Bela Kun, the racial Apartheid state known as Israel under terrorists like Menachem Begin or Itzhak Shamir, or the neocon never-never land known as a free and democratic Iraq have in common? Death is what they have in common. Lots of people have to die to bring about the revolutionary Jew’s version of heaven on earth.

The reaction of virtually everyone present was undiluted horror, followed by thinly veiled anger, both reactions were based on fear that they would be accused of anti-Semitism because of proximity to me. Taki summed up the reaction best when he cried out “We’re all going to be arrested.” Fran Griffin, the organizer of the event, had to calm everyone down by assuring them that my ideas were not contagious.

The most visceral reaction in the room, however, came when I announced that Sam Francis had converted to Catholicism on his death bed. It was tantamount to saying that Sam was a traitor to his race. But it was also a harbinger of things to come. Sam, along with Paul Gottfried, who was in the room when I gave my speech, went became posthumously godfather of the Alt-Right movement. “I can’t believe you actually gave that talk,” Gottfried said to me afterward, having read the advance copy I had sent him. That movement followed the racial path which Sam adumbrated toward the end of his life under the leadership of Richard Spencer, who was instrumental in publishing Leviathan and its Enemies, and it reached its apocalyptic culmination ten years after his death in Charlottesville. Like the Mahdi who inspired a number of followers to charge Kitchener’s Maxim Guns at the Battle of Omdurman, waving scimitars astride their camels, Sam Francis, with the help of Paul Gottfried, inspired Richard Spencer to hand out spears to the white boys and point them in the direction of the legal machine gun nest in Charlottesville, where they all got mowed down.

Expelled from the synagogue of conservatism by William F. Buckley, Sam became a race man. From the Introduction of Leviathan and its Enemies, we learn that “Sam was a thorough-going materialist and agreed with Burnham that rational social and political analysis of the behavior of elites could yield a ‘science of power’ and expose the workings of history.”

Being a materialist turned Sam into an anti-intellectual who had more in common with James Burnham’s Marxist roots than fellow Southerner Richard Weaver. Sam ended Leviathan and its Enemes by pinning his hopes for revolution on the “psychic secession” of a group he calls “the post-bourgeois proletariat.” Sam’s wish reached posthumous fulfillment in the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. White, these deracinated Protestants had to learn the hard way, is not an identity which corresponds to extra-mental reality. By identifying as white, the crowd at Charlottesville internalized the commands of their oppressors and guaranteed their own demise.

Undeterred by the stupidity of the white boys, God took the evil that they had to endure at the hands of Jewish commissars like Roberta Kaplan and turned it into good. Realizing the hopelessness of their situation, many of the white boys who got mowed down by the Jewish legal system at Charlottesville are now turning to Catholicism, which provides not only a source of consolation in time of trouble but a real identity as well.

The War on Whites is Real

Anyone who has watched commercials on television knows that Hollywood/Madison Avenue has declared war on white people. Unfortunately, their perception, like Hillary Clinton’s term “Deplorables” does not correspond to extra-mental reality. Ethnic identity corresponds to reality, and in America, as Herberg pointed out, ethnos is defined by religion. Whenever the deracinated Catholics and Protestants in America define themselves as “white,” they play into the hands of their largely Jewish oppressors. This is what happened at Charlottesville. If you don’t believe me, ask Roberta Kaplan, the self-described “chubby lesbian kike” who is now trying to ruin the lives of the white boys with predatory lawsuits.

The conclusion is inescapable. Religious identity is the only bulwark against the identity politics of the Great Satan. The Arbaeen March in Dearborn in which thousands of Shi’a Muslims marched unhindered to Henry Ford Park shouting “Long Live Hussein” is one example of what I’m talking about. If Antifa had showed up at this rally, they would have had to field thousands of demonstrators to contest the Muslims’ right to assemble. We’re dealing with hypotheticals here, but judging from the size and composition of the crowd, Antifa would not have come out unscathed from this encounter. The same thing is true of the much smaller Christ the King procession which the SSPX organized in Post Falls, Idaho. Antifa was again a no show, not because the Lefebvrites drew a crowd as large as the Iraqi Shi’a in Dearborn, because the did not, but because their religious identity acted as a protective shield.

I feel compelled to end this story on a personal note. Over the course of the Spring of 2019, I became famous on the Internet. The Jews whose job it is to suppress all evidence of my existence thought that the millions who viewed YouTube videos, as well as the thousands of people who subscribed to my YouTube channel, had catapulted me from the realm of dynamic silence to the point where they had to attack me by name. The man who mentioned this explicitly is an employee of CAMERA, a Jewish propaganda outlet which purports to supply news on what is happening in the Middle East. Dexter van Zile, the recent convert and paid character assassin who volunteered (or was told) to attack me, now calls himself a Catholic, which may have something to do with what he did after everyone ignored his articles; Van Zile wrote a letter to Bishop Kevin Rhoades, the ordinary of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, informing his excellency that the time had come to deal with E. Michael Jones, who was in Van Zile’s eyes and the eyes of those who paid him his salary, a notorious anti-Semite, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that his main delict consisted in telling people to get baptized and then get married and have children.

For some strange reason, Bishop Rhoades didn’t immediately respond to Van Zile’s letter. This may be because there are certain infractions which lead to excommunication, and offending the sensibilities of the editorial staff at CAMERA is not one of them. Van Zile then published his letter to Rhoades as an open letter on the Internet, and once again the silence greeting it was deafening. But, the story didn’t end there. It just so happened that Van Zile’s attack on me corresponded with my 50^th wedding anniversary, which the diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend honored, along with those of other couples in the diocese, at a ceremony at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. The ceremony was presided over by none other than Bishop Rhoades, who was gracious enough to have his picture taken with me and my wife following the ceremony. We then posted the picture on my Twitter, and this time the deafening silence came from Mr. Van Zile and his employers at CAMERA.

Why do I mention this? Because, unlike “conservatism” or “whiteness” or any other confected identity, Catholicism confers an identity through baptism which cannot be taken away from its members by the self-appointed popes who, as recipients of oligarchic money, police the precincts of identity politics. Sam Francis was excommunicated from the synagogue known as conservatism by William F. Buckley, who with the help of Jewish money, had had himself named pope of that sect. The fact that the same thing didn’t happen to me at the hands of Dexter van Zile is proof of my contention that the Catholic faith is a category which exists in the mind of God. As such, it cannot be contradicted by men. It guarantees protection from the predations of Satan and his synagogue on earth that no other identity can provide.

Notes

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/10/the-outsider

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/10/the-outsider

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/10/the-outsider

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/10/the-outsider

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/10/the-outsider

Francis, Leviathan, loc. 7842

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