The canceled prophet of the racial Right  Sam Francis made the way for Nick Fuentes

The Republican Party thought it had solved its Sam Francis problem. It had not. It had only deferred it. When Francis — the erudite, caustic Washington Times columnist and paleoconservative theorist — delivered a speech at the 1994 American Renaissance conference that the conservative establishment found unacceptably racist, the response was swift and decisive. His column was terminated. His Washington career was destroyed. The gatekeepers congratulated themselves. The fever swamps, they believed, had been drained.

Three decades on, Nick Fuentes — a 27-year-old livestreamer who has praised Adolf Hitler, dined with a president, and attracted what one conservative columnist estimates to be between 30% and 40% of Republican staffers under the age of 30 as covert sympathizers — is broadcasting to millions on Rumble and X (formerly Twitter), and provoking a civil war inside the Heritage Foundation. The gatekeepers are gone. The gates went with them.

To understand why Francis matters today, one must understand what he was actually advocating. The surface-level story — that he descended into explicit white nationalism and was rightly shown the door — is true but incomplete. Beneath it lies a more durable intellectual structure that has outlasted every attempt at suppression.

Samuel T. Francis was born in Tennessee in 1947, attended Johns Hopkins, and earned a doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina. Rather than pursue an academic career, he took up politics and journalism. He was a staffer at the Heritage Foundation and then served as a staffer for a trio of conservative senators — John East, Jesse Helms, and Jeremiah Denton — before turning fully to journalism. He joined the hyper-conservative Washington Times in 1986, moving further to the Right, becoming a fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and publishing at Right-wing outlets such as Modern Age and Chronicles. He embraced the “paleoconservative” label and, by the 1990s, threw his lot with overtly white-nationalist organizations and outlets. 

Francis built his framework on the foundation of James Burnham’s thought. Burnham, the ex-Trotskyist-turned-National Review editor, argued that modern societies were increasingly governed by a technocratic administrative class, rather than by either capital or democratic will. Drawing on these ideas, Francis developed an analysis of what he called Middle American Radicals, or MARs.

He defined MARs as a class of white, non-college-educated workers whose defining political conviction was, as he put it, that “the rich give in to the demands of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill.” They were not a purely economic category or a conventional interest group, but a civilizational constituency — people who felt that the culture, institutions, and country they had inherited were being deliberately dismantled above their heads.

In his 1994 collection, Beautiful Losers, Francis delivered his verdict on the mainstream conservative movement: “American conservatism is a failure. Virtually every cause to which conservatives have attached themselves for the past three generations has been lost.” The culprit, he argued, was not liberalism, but conservatism’s own capitulation — its willingness to fight on terrain defined by its enemies, using arguments its enemies had already won.

He was anti-interventionist in foreign policy, fiercely hostile to mass immigration, contemptuous of free-trade orthodoxy, and equally contemptuous of movement conservatism’s alliance with corporate capital. Sound familiar? 

He believed neoconservatism was a mirror-image liberalism wearing a different badge. He became increasingly convinced that culture — and behind culture, ethnicity — was the decisive terrain of political life. This last conviction led him, by the mid-1990s, to positions that cost him his career, but not his influence.

At the 1994 American Renaissance conference, Francis called on those present to “reassert our identity and our solidarity … in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.” He said the quiet stuff out loud. No dog whistle. The Washington Times moved against him shortly after. He was pushed out, socially and professionally. The establishment declared the matter closed.

The matter, however, was not closed. Francis’s 1996 essay in Chronicles magazine, “From Household to Nation,” articulated virtually the entire Trump playbook more than two decades before Trump descended the golden escalator. He had privately advised Pat Buchanan to stop calling himself a conservative: “Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’ It doesn’t mean anything anymore.” Buchanan largely ignored the advice. That advice seemed to skip time. Trump seemed to receive the message. 

When First Things revisited Francis’s Chronicles essay in 2019, the conclusion was that it read like a manifesto written for the recently inaugurated President Donald Trump. Francis had been dead for 14 years. His ideas had been in office for two. 

Nick Fuentes was born in 1998, seven years before Francis died. He has, to the best of public knowledge, never cited Francis directly. He does not need to. The intellectual inheritance is structural, not bibliographic.

Consider the parallels. Fuentes positions his movement — America First — as a rejection of mainstream conservatism on the grounds that mainstream conservatism has been captured by globalists indifferent to ordinary Americans. He is explicitly anti-interventionist, virulently anti-immigration, contemptuous of free-market dogma, and convinced that culture, civilization, and above all race are the true stakes of political life. He loathes the Republican donor class precisely as Francis loathed it: as a cosmopolitan elite willing to sacrifice the nation’s particular character on the altar of capital. Even the Catholic traditionalism through which Fuentes frames his civilizational politics echoes Francis’s conviction about the decline of the West — though Francis himself, in his later years, explicitly attacked Christianity as an obstacle to white racial consciousness. 

Where Francis wrote dense analytical columns for a Washington audience steeped in the National Review, Fuentes livestreams nightly to young men on Rumble, performing a mixture of political sermon, ironic provocation, and adolescent theatrics that Francis would likely have found vulgar. The medium has changed almost beyond recognition. The message has not.

Fuentes has also adopted precisely the long-march strategy, borrowed from the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, that Francis commended to the right: infiltrating institutions from below rather than confronting them from without. He instructs his followers not to identify themselves publicly as Groypers, but to join local Republican committees, become precinct officials, and embed themselves in party infrastructure — shaping candidate selection and platform language from within. Whether or not this is succeeding electorally, it is undeniably shaping the cultural atmosphere of conservatism’s activist base.

When the conservative establishment marginalized Francis, it could do so because it controlled the infrastructure of conservative opinion. The flagship magazines, the think tanks, the television bookings, the donor networks: all of these gave gatekeepers genuine leverage. A writer expelled from that world was expelled into real obscurity.

That world is gone. The institutions that once enforced ideological discipline — the likes of National Review, The Weekly Standard, and the American Enterprise Institute — have either collapsed in influence, been ideologically conquered by the populist tendency they once policed, or rendered irrelevant by the collapse of the media economy that sustained them. Talk radio gave way to podcasting. Cable gave way to streaming. Elon Musk’s purchase of X restored to the far right a megaphone that deplatforming had partially silenced.

The numbers tell their own story. Fuentes’s Rumble livestreams now attract around a million views per episode. His October 2025 Tucker Carlson interview — a sympathetic two-hour conversation in which Carlson did not challenge a single position — was watched by more than 6.5 million people. When Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation responded to the subsequent controversy by attacking Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition of the globalist class” — a phrase widely understood as antisemitic code — the episode illustrated not merely Fuentes’s reach but the degree to which the institutional right no longer possesses the will, let alone the capacity, to enforce its own limits.

There is also a deeper sociological reason why the 1994 playbook cannot be replayed. When the Republican establishment marginalized Francis, it could rely on a substantial constituency within the party — moderate Republicans, old-fashioned Eisenhower conservatives, country-club traditionalists for whom explicit racialism was genuinely beyond the pale — to ratify the exclusion. That constituency has largely departed the GOP, or been reduced to irrelevance within it. The party Francis spent his career analyzing has become, in its composition and instinct, closer to the constituency he imagined than to the one that rejected him.

Francis spent his career insisting that the conservative movement was too compromised and too timid to fight the battles that actually mattered. He was pushed out. His framework stayed. His 1996 analysis — arguing that nationalism and populism, not free-market orthodoxy, represented the Republican party’s authentic future — has since become received wisdom across the MAGA movement.

Fuentes is not Francis. He is cruder, more theatrical, less analytically rigorous, and more explicitly antisemitic in ways that Francis — for all the darkness of his later positions — generally avoided in print. He is also digitally native and operating in an environment where the concept of a career that can be ended by institutional disapproval has largely ceased to apply. When there are no institutions left with the authority to excommunicate you, excommunication becomes impossible.

Francis died in 2005, the year YouTube was founded. He never saw the internet’s capacity to route around editorial gatekeepers — the technology that would have given him, in a different world, a platform of precisely the kind his ideas now reach through other mouths. There is a grim irony in the fact that the man who most accurately diagnosed the conditions that would produce Trumpism paid the conventional price for saying so and did not live to see his analysis vindicated.

That his ideas lived on without him is, in the end, the most telling verdict on the strategy of exclusion: it silenced the man and amplified everything he stood for. Sam Francis was pushed to the margins. Nick Fuentes inherited the center.

---