editorship (1992–2008), The Washington Times regularly printed excerpts from racist hard-right publications including VDARE and American Renaissance, and from Bill White, leader of the American National Socialist Workers' Party, in its Culture Briefs section. In 2013, the Columbia Journalism Review reported that under Pruden's editorship The Washington Times was: "a forum for the racialist hard right, including white nationalists, neo-Confederates, and anti-immigrant scare mongers." Between 1998 and 2004, the Times covered every biennial American Renaissance conference, hosted by the white supremacist New Century Foundation. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, "the paper's coverage of these events—which are hotbeds for holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis, and eugenicists—was stunningly one sided", and favorably depicted the conference and attendees. In 2009, journalist David Neiwert wrote that it championed, "various white-nationalist causes emanating from the neo-Confederate movement (with which, until a recent housecleaning, two senior editors had long associations.)" A page in The Washington Times Sunday edition was devoted to the American Civil War, on which the Confederacy was several times described with admiration. In 1993, Pruden gave an interview to the neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan, which has been called "arguably the most important neo-Confederate periodical" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, where he said: "Every year I make sure that we have a story in the paper about any observance of Robert E. Lee's birthday." Pruden said, "And the fact that it falls around Martin Luther King’s birthday," to which a Southern Partisan interviewer interjected, "Makes it all the better," with Pruden finishing, "I make sure we have a story. Oh, yes." Sam Francis controversy The Washington Times employed Sam Francis, a white nationalist, as a columnist and editor, beginning in 1991 after he was chosen by Pat Buchanan to take over his column. In 1995, Francis resigned or was forced out after Dinesh D'Souza reported on racist comments that Francis made at a conference hosted by American Renaissance the previous year. At the conference, Francis called on whites to: "reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites... The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people." Francis was an aide to Republican Senator John East of North Carolina before joining the editorial staff of The Washington Times in 1986. Five years later, he