Paleos Ascendant?

Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, leaned into paleo­conservative circles by praising Chronicles magazine and its founding editor, Paul Gottfried, after Gottfried backed Roberts in the fallout over Tucker Carlson’s ties to Nick Fuentes. Roberts had defended Carlson for hosting white nationalist voices. Now he’s helping Chronicles “expand its reach,” cementing a partnership that signals Heritage’s shift toward hard-right, “paleo” ideology. Gottfried pushed back on The Washington Post’s claim that Samuel Francis, a key paleo thinker once published in Chronicles, gave full-throated support to David Duke. He argued critics ignored Francis’s reservations about Duke’s personal baggage and limited political prospects. But Francis’s 1991 “Bad Moon on the Rise” column still urged Duke to build a nationwide movement, not as a mainstream candidate but as a gadfly wielding cultural power. In a separate piece titled “Respectable Racism?”, Francis praised Duke for branding racial appeal in a way mainstream conservatives shunned. He even suggested Duke’s focus on race might outperform conventional GOP messaging. Francis went further in 1985, writing about neo-Nazi groups like The Silent Brotherhood. He admired their “determination to act” and thought their myth-making could mobilize a mass right-wing revolt. His beliefs crossed into explicit white nationalism. In 1995 he was fired from The Washington Times after speaking at an American Renaissance conference, calling for whites to assert solidarity “in explicitly racial terms.” He had earlier defended the Southern Baptist Convention’s refusal to apologize for slavery and dismissed “slavery” and “racism” as non-sinful. These episodes underscore how deep Francis’s commitment to racial ideology ran—and why Robert’s embrace of paleoconservatism matters for Heritage’s trajectory.