David Duke
Born: 1950
Ideology: White supremacism, anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism,
Holocaust denial
Extremist Affiliations:
• Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (founder, 1974);
• National Association for the Advancement of White People
(founder, 1980);
• European-American Unity and Rights Organization (founder,
2003);
• enjoys a following in Eastern Europe and Russia, where he
lived and toured as a speaker in 2001 and 2002.
Criminal record: Imprisoned for 13 months in 2003-2004 on mail
fraud and tax evasion charges relating to contributions to his
political campaigns.
Political campaigns: In 1989, Duke won a seat representing
Metairie, Louisiana, in the Louisiana State Legislature. Five
unsuccessful political campaigns followed: a 1990 bid for the U.S.
Senate, a 1991 campaign for the governorship of Louisiana, a bid
for the Presidency in 1992, another senatorial race in 1996, and a
1998 attempt to win a Congressional seat in Louisiana. In both the
1990 and 1991 races, he attracted a majority of Louisiana's white
voters.
Works:
• African Atto (1973, as Mohammad X), a street-fighting
manual avowedly written to help the Klan identify "radical" African-
Americans, who would buy the book;
• Finders Keepers (1976, as Dorothy Vanderbilt), a self-help
sex manual for women;
• My Awakening (1998);
• Jewish Supremacism (2002), an updated version of the
section, "The Jewish Question," in My Awakening.
Significance: Highest profile white supremacist of the last two
decades.
Young David Duke at work.
Perhaps America's best-known racist, David Duke was
instrumental in the Klan resurgence of the 1970s. He has since
continued to propagandize white supremacist views as a frequent
political candidate, with a variety of fringe organizations and, in
recent years, in Russia, Europe and the Middle East. Duke's
messages typically include conspiratorial depictions of Jewish
power and Jewish hatred for non-Jews, a combination he refers to
as "Jewish supremacism."
Duke pioneered the now common effort on the far right to
camouflage racist ideas in hot-button issues like affirmative action
and immigration, successfully appealing to race and class
resentments. Similarly, he was one of the first neo-Nazi and Klan
leaders to discontinue the use of Nazi and Klan regalia and ritual,
as well as other traditional displays of race hatred, and to cultivate
media attention.
Wanted on tax and mail fraud charges relating to contributions to
his political campaigns, he spent much of 2001-2002 in Russia and
the Ukraine promoting anti-Semitism. Returning to the U.S. late in
2002, he plea-bargained a thirteen-month prison sentence, which
he completed in May 2004. Upon his release he convened a white
supremacist conference attended by numerous far-right leaders.
While he seemed poised to re-establish himself as a significant
force on the domestic scene, by January 2005 he was again
touring Europe.
Wunderkind
David Duke’s preoccupation with racist ideology dates back to his
youth. At 17, he became active in right-wing extremist groups.
While attending Louisiana State University in the early 1970s, he
founded the White Youth Alliance, a group affiliated with the neo-
Nazi National Socialist White People’s Party in Arlington, Virginia.
To protest a speech by attorney William Kunstler at Tulane
University, Duke picketed wearing a Nazi brown shirt and a
swastika armband and carried a placard that said “Kunstler is a
Communist-Jew” and “Gas the Chicago 7” (referring to the well-
known leftist activists). Duke now describes the event as a folly of
youth.
Shortly after graduating in 1974, Duke covered his swastika with a
Klan robe and founded the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan. He first came to broad public attention during this time: the
young Imperial Wizard successfully marketed himself in the mid-
1970s as a new brand of Klansman – well-groomed, engaged,
professional: the Klan leader as a corporate manager. And as a
progressive: for the first time in the group’s history, women were
accepted as equal members and Catholics were encouraged to
apply for membership.
Duke’s efforts not only boosted membership, they also, to a
significant degree, made traditional Klan ritual obsolete. He urged
an overhaul of the organization at the grass-roots level,
encouraging his colleagues to “get out of the cow pasture and into
hotel meeting rooms.” In media appearances and political venues,
he skillfully exploited issues like illegal immigration, affirmative
action and court-ordered busing, and sanitized Klan vocabulary,
titling himself “national director” and referring to cross burnings
as “illuminations.” He also professed nonviolence and encouraged
members to become politically active; following his own advice, he
made an unsuccessful bid for the Louisiana State Senate in 1975,
receiving one-third of the votes cast. His already evident skill at
sublimating his bigotry led journalists to describe his style as
“rhinestone racism” and “button-down terror.”
Meanwhile, the Klan enjoyed a resurgence under his leadership. In
1976, he organized the largest Klan rally the nation had witnessed
since the 1960s in Walker, Louisiana, with an estimated
attendance of 2,700. In addition, he built up local organizations in
other states, including California, Florida and Texas. Although he
publicly shunned violence, he was convicted in 1979 of inciting a
riot in connection with a Klan rally in suburban New Orleans.
White Rights Advocate
In 1980, Duke’s days as a Klan leader ended abruptly. Bill
Wilkinson, who had left Duke’s organization five years earlier to
organize the Invisible Empire Knights of the KKK in Louisiana, told
the press he had forced Duke’s resignation from the Knights of the
KKK by secretly videotaping a meeting during which Duke offered
to sell Wilkinson his membership lists for $35,000. Duke denied
the allegation but nonetheless left the Klan and established the
National Association for the Advancement of White People
(NAAWP), which he described as “primarily a white rights lobby
organization, a racialist movement, mainly middle class people.”
In a letter to his followers, he wrote that the NAAWP “avoids the
Hollywood stereotypes and misconceptions about the Klan” and
maintained that the messages of the two groups were “essentially
the same.” Indeed, the NAAWP was housed in the former
headquarters of the Knights of the KKK, and Duke used the
facilities to produce the NAAWP newsletter. From that office, he
also produced the Louisiana edition of The White Patriot, a
periodical of the Knights of the KKK, while Don Black, his
successor as the Klan’s leader (and later founder of the
pioneering racist Web site Stormfront.org), served a three-year
federal prison term for conspiring to overthrow the government of
the Caribbean island of Dominica. Although he no longer has an
official role in the NAAWP, Duke maintains close ties with many in
the group, and its agenda closely parallels his. Furthermore, he
has often been a guest speaker at NAAWP events, such as a 1996
rally in Baton Rouge.
Chasing the Kingfish
By the late 1980s, Duke had become “America’s most renowned
‘white rights’ advocate,” according to The Spotlight, the nation’s
leading far-right publication
In 1988, he ran for the Presidency, first as a Democrat, and then as
a third-party candidate on the ticket of the Populist Party, founded
four years earlier by Willis Carto to provide far-right radicals with a
platform for political office.
Duke eventually appeared on the ballot in 11 states and received
47,047 votes – one-twentieth of one percent of those cast.
Undaunted by the low totals, in January 1989 he joined a field of
seven Republicans contesting a seat in the Louisiana State
Legislature in Metairie. Despite the opposition to Duke expressed
by national Republican leaders, including then-President Bush,
voters elected him by a narrow margin. Until the middle of that
year, when the practice was publicly exposed, Duke sold
extremist literature (including Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries)
from his Metairie legislative office.
The following year, Duke aimed significantly higher, running
against Democratic incumbent J. Bennett Johnston for a United
States Senate seat. In a state wracked by the depressed oil and
gas industries, Duke’s politics of resentment achieved some
resonance. Decrying “welfare systems that encourage illegitimate
births” and “set-asides to promote the incompetent,” Duke’s
chances appeared sufficiently favorable to prompt eight
Republican United States senators to endorse Johnston and to
urge the repudiation of Duke, who was running as a Republican.
Johnston won with 53.9 percent of the vote to Duke’s 43.5 percent,
but Duke gained a surprising 60 percent of the white vote.
On March 13, 1991, Duke launched a campaign for the
governorship of Louisiana. Because of his more-than-respectable
finish in the previous year’s Senate race, his bid attracted
enormous publicity, and his long record of bigotry came under
heightened scrutiny. In response, Duke claimed to have discarded
his racist beliefs and to have undergone a religious rebirth. His
claim was belied, however, by a number of recent statements.
During his senatorial campaign, for instance, he had said, “Jews
are trying to destroy all other cultures…as a survival mechanism.”
Moreover, during the last week of the race his state campaign
coordinator, Bob Hawkes, resigned, saying that the candidate’s
recent professions of faith were a political ploy. Hawkes
subsequently noted that an adjoining room in Duke’s campaign
office remained the headquarters of the NAAWP. Duke lost the
election but again won nearly 700,000 votes. The following day,
Duke, by now something of a professional campaigner, formed a
presidential exploratory committee and eventually mounted an
uninspired and short-lived campaign; in this fourth campaign in
four years, both his supporters and the media had probably begun
to suffer from “Duke fatigue.”
Consequently, his surprisingly candid January 17, 1992, interview
with The Dallas Morning News may have been more of a public
relations stunt than a scoop — among other things, he told the
paper that, with regard to his Klan career, “the things that I
accomplished under that motif were pretty substantial,” and that
“fundamentally, yes, I haven’t changed.”
By mid-1992, with his gubernatorial loss and collapsed
presidential campaign starting to erode his support base, Duke
began to retreat from the political arena. He concentrated instead
on raising money, with a brief stint as a co-owner of an Irish pub in
Metairie and a failed attempt at securing a job as an insurance
agent. He also tried to raise money by starting up a new
publication, the David Duke Report, and, in 1993 and 1994, he
hosted a radio talk show – “David Duke Conservative hotline” – on
WASO AM 730 in Covington, near New Orleans.
Clearly happiest in the spotlight, in September 1996, Duke again
competed in Louisiana’s United States Senate “open” primary,
placing fourth among 15 candidates, with 140,910 votes, and
carrying several rural parishes.
Coming Out (Again)
Even though Duke’s ability to win office seemed to have waned, he
still found himself able to create political turmoil. For the second
time in his career, he became embroiled in a scandal concerning
the sale of a mailing list – this time to Louisiana Governor Mike
Foster. Foster was found by the state Board of Ethics to have failed
to report a $103,000 payment to Duke during the 1995 governor’s
race, and again in 1997 when he paid $52,000 for the right to
continue to use the list. Foster said that he tried to keep the
purchase secret, because “it ain’t real cool to put out there that
you’re buying something from David Duke.”
Although the political scandal left Duke twisting in the wind,
uncertain as to whether any investigations would affect him
personally, he soldiered on. He essentially ended his dalliance with
“moderation” in late 1998 with the self-publication of a 700-page
autobiography, My Awakening. In this magnum opus, Duke
attempted to prove that blacks are genetically inferior to whites,
while devoting almost 250 pages to anti-Jewish themes. Duke
wrote that Jews “thoroughly dominate the news and
entertainment media in almost every civilized nation; they control
the international markets and stock exchanges; and no
government can resist doing their bidding on any issue of
importance,” and he noted that Jews and Gentiles are “in a state
of ethnic war,” predicting that “the ultimate clash between these
two diametrically opposed genotypes and cultures fast
approaches with the new millenium.” In its unabashed racist
animosity, the book seemed to represent a conscious decision by
Duke to abandon his two-decade long attempts to obfuscate,
repackage, intellectualize and dress up his opinions and ideas.
The volume sold out a second edition and was republished in May
2000, while Duke allegedly began work on a second book, The
Ultimate Supremacism: An Examination of the Jewish Question, to
be followed by a third effort focusing on the “spiritual aspect of the
struggle to preserve and protect our heritage,” entitled For the
Love of My People. Duke also returned to speaking at white
supremacist rallies and conferences.
Yet his reversion to overt, as opposed to veiled, racism did not
douse his political hopes. In December 1998, Duke announced that
he would run for the Congressional seat being vacated by Robert
L. Livingston, in Louisiana’s First Congressional District. Achieving
this goal was not wholly implausible; Duke had carried this district
in his campaigns for United States Senate and governor in 1990
and 1991. Once again, he positioned himself as an anti-
government conservative who stood up for the little man against
programs such as affirmative action, minority set-asides and
welfare. And once again, Duke’s message seemed to hit a nerve
among some frustrated white voters who were willing to overlook
his past. He received one out of every five ballots cast in the
district and placed third in the election. These results apparently
validated his assertion that he would fly under the radar of public
opinion research, which projected him winning a far smaller
percentage of the vote. Indeed, despite the pre-election polling
numbers, both mainstream G.O.P. and local business leaders
feared a potential Duke victory. “We were sweating bullets,” said
Ken Johnson, an aide to Representative W.J. Tauzin, the
Republican dean of Louisiana’s Congressional delegation. On the
other hand, Duke’s showing seemed to indicate that, while he
could still stir contention and anxiety and had a reliable
constituency, this constituency was modest and unlikely ever to
expand. Moreover, Duke had increasingly come to be seen as both
enamored with the publicity and money of campaigns and
disinclined actually to win and serve.
Following his defeat, Duke stated that while he had no immediate
plans to stage another political candidacy, he was “absolutely
committed to spending the rest of my life as a spokesman for the
rights of European Americans.” He turned to a strategy that
several other racist organizations have also adopted, focusing on
ethnic themes designed to appeal to alienated whites, especially
minority crime rates, immigration and so-called “Confederate
heritage” issues such as flying the Confederate flag on state
property.
NOFEAR
Now a self-styled “civil rights activist,” in January 2000, Duke
announced the formation of a new organization, the National
Organization for European American Rights. Aping contemporary
civil rights groups, NOFEAR addressed “European American”
concerns. “Just as African Americans have the NAACP and
Mexican Americans have La Raza,” Duke said, “European-
Americans now have the National Organization for European
American Rights, to actively defend their rights and heritage in the
United States.”
NOFEAR was intended to be an antidote to the alleged “massive
discrimination” faced by whites from the nation’s growing
population of minorities. According to Duke, “European Americans
face a situation where we’re going to be outnumbered and
outvoted in our own country.” Low birthrates, interracial
marriages and immigration rates were cited by Duke as key
factors reducing the white share of the population. The NOFEAR
home pages on the davidduke.com Web site maintain that “the
civil rights of European Americans are being violated by affirmative
action, forced integration and anti-European immigration policies.
…We face cultural discrimination in the media and education.…An
example is the media hate crime hysteria that highlights and
publicizes any white crime against minorities.”
At the launching of NOFEAR, Duke told reporters at the National
Press Club that the alleged ongoing destruction of white people
was a “genocide.” In a January 26, 2000, letter to the Shreveport
Times rebutting a critical editorial, Duke described European
Americans as “internally displaced people” entitled to the same
consideration as refugees. In June 2001, threatened by a
trademark lawsuit, Duke renamed his group the European-
American Rights Organization.
Recent Themes:
Call to Arms
Duke repeatedly stresses the need for white Southerners and
European Americans generally to organize to preserve their rights
and heritage. “These minority activists are not only after Southern
heritage,” he warns, “Eventually they plan to erase the heritage
and history of European Americans in the United States and ... [we
plan] to stop them.” As evidence, Duke has cited black school
board members in New Orleans who called George Washington an
“immoral example” for children and voted to remove his name
from a public school, as well as the Richmond, Virginia, City
Council that removed a mural of General Robert E. Lee from a flood
wall in 1999.
Immigration
Another major focus for Duke has been nonwhite immigration to
the United States, both legal and illegal. In a well-known episode,
Duke was invited to Siler City, North Carolina, in February 2000, by
residents who claimed that their town was being overrun by illegal
immigrants from Mexico, thereby lowering wages, increasing
crime and destroying the quality of life. Hundreds of white parents,
and some blacks, packed school board meetings to protest the
new immigrant children’s effect on classrooms (there were also
unpleasant racist incidents, including the vandalism of a Hispanic
church). “Why should the people of Siler City, whose families
established the town and who have lived there for generations,
now have to live in a town that looks more like Mexico than
America?” asked Duke. He spoke at a rally and met with local
residents and community officials. Purportedly taking action on
behalf of residents, he castigated the local poultry plants for hiring
illegal immigrant labor at a huge cost to community services and
wrote to the North Carolina Immigration and Naturalization Service
requesting a full-scale investigation. He also campaigned against
local politicians who allegedly supported the illegal immigrants,
arguing for the removal of “politicians who have sold out the
heritage and interests of European Americans in favor of illegal
aliens.”
Hate Crimes
Duke has also focused on alleged hate crimes against whites.
Although hate crimes against whites actually do form a substantial
percentage of the country’s overall total, Duke’s twist was to label
all black-on-white crime as falling into the “hate” category. Though
initially Duke and his associates stated that they were opposed to
hate crime laws and to the very concept of hate crimes, which
they considered discriminatory to whites, the advantages of
claiming victimhood led them to shift their position. Thus, in May
2000, Duke attempted to call attention “to an epidemic of hate
crimes committed against white Americans…and to expose the
lack of coverage that exists on this issue.”
“I don’t call myself a white supremacist,” said Duke. “I’m a civil
rights activist concerned about European-American rights.”
Prophet Away from Home
The most recent and interesting development in Duke’s career as
a professional racist has been his growing infatuation with Russia.
In September 2000 Duke traveled to the country at the invitation of
Alexander Prokhanov, the editor in chief of Zavtra, an
ultranationalist newspaper, and Konstantin Kasimovsky, the head
of an anti-Semitic organization called Russian Action. Duke
reportedly made an impassioned speech in Moscow, telling a
crowd that they should take action against “the Aryan race’s main
enemy — world Zionism” and calling for all “dark-skinned people
to be forced out of Moscow.” The crowd responded with cries of
“glory to Russia” and “white power.”
After spending three months in Russia in 2000, he returned again
in 2001, ostensibly to build further connections with right-wing
nationalists. He held a rally at a respected literary museum; signed
autographs at the Russian Writers Union; and met with members
of Parliament, including a retired Soviet general, Albert Makashov,
who is known for anti-Semitic remarks. While thoroughgoing anti-
Semites apparently constitute only three or four percent of the
Russian population, the history of Jew-hatred in the country is
centuries old, violent and deeply rooted, and there appears to be
increasing cooperation between Russian extremists and their
ideological counterparts abroad. Duke seeks to promote that
relationship even if, as some observers speculate, his visits have
been related to the ongoing investigation of his activities in the
United States, where his home was searched in November 2000
by federal agents looking for evidence of tax fraud, tax evasion
and money laundering.
DAVID DUKE: IN HIS OWN WORDS
“White people don't need a law against rape, but if you fill this
room up with your normal black bucks, you would, because
niggers are basically primitive animals.”
—The Sun (Wichita, Kan.), April 23, 1975
“Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and
separation of the white and black races. This goal must include
freeing of the American media and government from subservient
Jewish interests.”
—“Klan Code of Conduct,” Duke Speaks Out, a column in the
Crusader (newspaper of the KKKK, then led by David Duke),
November 1978
“Am I an alarmist? Is my vision unreal? All one has to do is look
around this globe and see the Third World reality. Are whites
holding every one of the nonwhite countries down, or are we in
fact pumping billions of dollars into them along with every
technological aid that the West can produce? And now the West
itself is gradually being enveloped by nonwhite immigration. The
exploding numbers of nonwhites are slowly wrapping formerly
white nations in a dark human cocoon. Shall a butterfly emerge, or
the beast that has haunted the ruins of every great white
civilization that submitted to invasion by immigration and racial
miscegenation?”
—NAAWP News, Issue no. 24, signed article by David Duke, April
1983
"...Immigration along with nonwhite birthrates will make white
people a minority totally vulnerable to the political, social, and
economic will of blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Orientals. A
social upheaval is now beginning to occur that will be the funeral
dirge of the America we love. I shudder to contemplate the future
under nonwhite occupation; rapes, murders, robberies multiplied a
hundred fold, illiteracy such as in Haiti, medicine such as in
Mexico, and tyranny such as in Togoland.
—NAAWP News, Issue no. 24, signed article by David Duke, April
1983
"What we really want to do is to be left alone. We don't want
Negroes around. We don't need Negroes around. We're not asking
–– you know, we don't want to have them, you know, for our
culture. We simply want our own country and our own society.
That's in no way exploitive at all. We want our own society, our
own nation...."
–-Duke interview with doctoral student Evelyn Rich, who traveled
around the country with Duke while conducting research for her
dissertation on the KKK, March 1985
"These Jews who run things, who are producing this mental
illness –– teenage suicide...all these Jewish sicknesses...that's
nothing new. The Talmud's full of things like sex with boys and
girls."
––Evelyn Rich interview, March 1985
"Did you ever notice how many survivors they have? Did you ever
notice that? Everybody — every time you turn around, 15,000
survivors meet here; 400 survivors convention there. I mean, did
you ever notice? Nazis sure were inefficient, weren't they? Boy,
boy, boy!...You almost have no survivors that ever say they saw a
gas chamber or saw the workings of a gas chamber.... they'll say
these preposterous stories that anybody can check out to be a lie,
an absolute lie."
––Evelyn Rich interview, March 1985
“The Jews are trying to destroy all other cultures…as a survival
mechanism…the only Nazi country in the world is Israel.”
—Ros Davidson interview, May 13, 1990 (quoted in the San
Francisco Examiner, November 13, 1991)
“We Aryans are those of European descent who are racially
conscious and who have committed our lives to our people’s
survival and evolutionary advancement. We shall do our duty. We
shall not surrender our freedom and our very existence to Jewish
or any other power. We shall preserve our heritage and our hard-
won rights and freedoms. We shall guide our people up the
evolutionary stairway to the stars.”
—My Awakening, p. 469 (1998)
“Russia’s biggest problem is organized crime and its leaders are
influenced by the Russian mafia,” Duke said. “But it’s not right to
call it a Russian mafia, it’s a Jewish mafia.”
—The Moscow Times, October 16, 1999
Ideology: White supremacism, anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism,
Holocaust denial
Extremist Affiliations:
• Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (founder, 1974);
• National Association for the Advancement of White People
(founder, 1980);
• European-American Unity and Rights Organization (founder,
2003);
• enjoys a following in Eastern Europe and Russia, where he
lived and toured as a speaker in 2001 and 2002.
Criminal record: Imprisoned for 13 months in 2003-2004 on mail
fraud and tax evasion charges relating to contributions to his
political campaigns.
Political campaigns: In 1989, Duke won a seat representing
Metairie, Louisiana, in the Louisiana State Legislature. Five
unsuccessful political campaigns followed: a 1990 bid for the U.S.
Senate, a 1991 campaign for the governorship of Louisiana, a bid
for the Presidency in 1992, another senatorial race in 1996, and a
1998 attempt to win a Congressional seat in Louisiana. In both the
1990 and 1991 races, he attracted a majority of Louisiana's white
voters.
Works:
• African Atto (1973, as Mohammad X), a street-fighting
manual avowedly written to help the Klan identify "radical" African-
Americans, who would buy the book;
• Finders Keepers (1976, as Dorothy Vanderbilt), a self-help
sex manual for women;
• My Awakening (1998);
• Jewish Supremacism (2002), an updated version of the
section, "The Jewish Question," in My Awakening.
Significance: Highest profile white supremacist of the last two
decades.
Young David Duke at work.
Perhaps America's best-known racist, David Duke was
instrumental in the Klan resurgence of the 1970s. He has since
continued to propagandize white supremacist views as a frequent
political candidate, with a variety of fringe organizations and, in
recent years, in Russia, Europe and the Middle East. Duke's
messages typically include conspiratorial depictions of Jewish
power and Jewish hatred for non-Jews, a combination he refers to
as "Jewish supremacism."
Duke pioneered the now common effort on the far right to
camouflage racist ideas in hot-button issues like affirmative action
and immigration, successfully appealing to race and class
resentments. Similarly, he was one of the first neo-Nazi and Klan
leaders to discontinue the use of Nazi and Klan regalia and ritual,
as well as other traditional displays of race hatred, and to cultivate
media attention.
Wanted on tax and mail fraud charges relating to contributions to
his political campaigns, he spent much of 2001-2002 in Russia and
the Ukraine promoting anti-Semitism. Returning to the U.S. late in
2002, he plea-bargained a thirteen-month prison sentence, which
he completed in May 2004. Upon his release he convened a white
supremacist conference attended by numerous far-right leaders.
While he seemed poised to re-establish himself as a significant
force on the domestic scene, by January 2005 he was again
touring Europe.
Wunderkind
David Duke’s preoccupation with racist ideology dates back to his
youth. At 17, he became active in right-wing extremist groups.
While attending Louisiana State University in the early 1970s, he
founded the White Youth Alliance, a group affiliated with the neo-
Nazi National Socialist White People’s Party in Arlington, Virginia.
To protest a speech by attorney William Kunstler at Tulane
University, Duke picketed wearing a Nazi brown shirt and a
swastika armband and carried a placard that said “Kunstler is a
Communist-Jew” and “Gas the Chicago 7” (referring to the well-
known leftist activists). Duke now describes the event as a folly of
youth.
Shortly after graduating in 1974, Duke covered his swastika with a
Klan robe and founded the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan. He first came to broad public attention during this time: the
young Imperial Wizard successfully marketed himself in the mid-
1970s as a new brand of Klansman – well-groomed, engaged,
professional: the Klan leader as a corporate manager. And as a
progressive: for the first time in the group’s history, women were
accepted as equal members and Catholics were encouraged to
apply for membership.
Duke’s efforts not only boosted membership, they also, to a
significant degree, made traditional Klan ritual obsolete. He urged
an overhaul of the organization at the grass-roots level,
encouraging his colleagues to “get out of the cow pasture and into
hotel meeting rooms.” In media appearances and political venues,
he skillfully exploited issues like illegal immigration, affirmative
action and court-ordered busing, and sanitized Klan vocabulary,
titling himself “national director” and referring to cross burnings
as “illuminations.” He also professed nonviolence and encouraged
members to become politically active; following his own advice, he
made an unsuccessful bid for the Louisiana State Senate in 1975,
receiving one-third of the votes cast. His already evident skill at
sublimating his bigotry led journalists to describe his style as
“rhinestone racism” and “button-down terror.”
Meanwhile, the Klan enjoyed a resurgence under his leadership. In
1976, he organized the largest Klan rally the nation had witnessed
since the 1960s in Walker, Louisiana, with an estimated
attendance of 2,700. In addition, he built up local organizations in
other states, including California, Florida and Texas. Although he
publicly shunned violence, he was convicted in 1979 of inciting a
riot in connection with a Klan rally in suburban New Orleans.
White Rights Advocate
In 1980, Duke’s days as a Klan leader ended abruptly. Bill
Wilkinson, who had left Duke’s organization five years earlier to
organize the Invisible Empire Knights of the KKK in Louisiana, told
the press he had forced Duke’s resignation from the Knights of the
KKK by secretly videotaping a meeting during which Duke offered
to sell Wilkinson his membership lists for $35,000. Duke denied
the allegation but nonetheless left the Klan and established the
National Association for the Advancement of White People
(NAAWP), which he described as “primarily a white rights lobby
organization, a racialist movement, mainly middle class people.”
In a letter to his followers, he wrote that the NAAWP “avoids the
Hollywood stereotypes and misconceptions about the Klan” and
maintained that the messages of the two groups were “essentially
the same.” Indeed, the NAAWP was housed in the former
headquarters of the Knights of the KKK, and Duke used the
facilities to produce the NAAWP newsletter. From that office, he
also produced the Louisiana edition of The White Patriot, a
periodical of the Knights of the KKK, while Don Black, his
successor as the Klan’s leader (and later founder of the
pioneering racist Web site Stormfront.org), served a three-year
federal prison term for conspiring to overthrow the government of
the Caribbean island of Dominica. Although he no longer has an
official role in the NAAWP, Duke maintains close ties with many in
the group, and its agenda closely parallels his. Furthermore, he
has often been a guest speaker at NAAWP events, such as a 1996
rally in Baton Rouge.
Chasing the Kingfish
By the late 1980s, Duke had become “America’s most renowned
‘white rights’ advocate,” according to The Spotlight, the nation’s
leading far-right publication
In 1988, he ran for the Presidency, first as a Democrat, and then as
a third-party candidate on the ticket of the Populist Party, founded
four years earlier by Willis Carto to provide far-right radicals with a
platform for political office.
Duke eventually appeared on the ballot in 11 states and received
47,047 votes – one-twentieth of one percent of those cast.
Undaunted by the low totals, in January 1989 he joined a field of
seven Republicans contesting a seat in the Louisiana State
Legislature in Metairie. Despite the opposition to Duke expressed
by national Republican leaders, including then-President Bush,
voters elected him by a narrow margin. Until the middle of that
year, when the practice was publicly exposed, Duke sold
extremist literature (including Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries)
from his Metairie legislative office.
The following year, Duke aimed significantly higher, running
against Democratic incumbent J. Bennett Johnston for a United
States Senate seat. In a state wracked by the depressed oil and
gas industries, Duke’s politics of resentment achieved some
resonance. Decrying “welfare systems that encourage illegitimate
births” and “set-asides to promote the incompetent,” Duke’s
chances appeared sufficiently favorable to prompt eight
Republican United States senators to endorse Johnston and to
urge the repudiation of Duke, who was running as a Republican.
Johnston won with 53.9 percent of the vote to Duke’s 43.5 percent,
but Duke gained a surprising 60 percent of the white vote.
On March 13, 1991, Duke launched a campaign for the
governorship of Louisiana. Because of his more-than-respectable
finish in the previous year’s Senate race, his bid attracted
enormous publicity, and his long record of bigotry came under
heightened scrutiny. In response, Duke claimed to have discarded
his racist beliefs and to have undergone a religious rebirth. His
claim was belied, however, by a number of recent statements.
During his senatorial campaign, for instance, he had said, “Jews
are trying to destroy all other cultures…as a survival mechanism.”
Moreover, during the last week of the race his state campaign
coordinator, Bob Hawkes, resigned, saying that the candidate’s
recent professions of faith were a political ploy. Hawkes
subsequently noted that an adjoining room in Duke’s campaign
office remained the headquarters of the NAAWP. Duke lost the
election but again won nearly 700,000 votes. The following day,
Duke, by now something of a professional campaigner, formed a
presidential exploratory committee and eventually mounted an
uninspired and short-lived campaign; in this fourth campaign in
four years, both his supporters and the media had probably begun
to suffer from “Duke fatigue.”
Consequently, his surprisingly candid January 17, 1992, interview
with The Dallas Morning News may have been more of a public
relations stunt than a scoop — among other things, he told the
paper that, with regard to his Klan career, “the things that I
accomplished under that motif were pretty substantial,” and that
“fundamentally, yes, I haven’t changed.”
By mid-1992, with his gubernatorial loss and collapsed
presidential campaign starting to erode his support base, Duke
began to retreat from the political arena. He concentrated instead
on raising money, with a brief stint as a co-owner of an Irish pub in
Metairie and a failed attempt at securing a job as an insurance
agent. He also tried to raise money by starting up a new
publication, the David Duke Report, and, in 1993 and 1994, he
hosted a radio talk show – “David Duke Conservative hotline” – on
WASO AM 730 in Covington, near New Orleans.
Clearly happiest in the spotlight, in September 1996, Duke again
competed in Louisiana’s United States Senate “open” primary,
placing fourth among 15 candidates, with 140,910 votes, and
carrying several rural parishes.
Coming Out (Again)
Even though Duke’s ability to win office seemed to have waned, he
still found himself able to create political turmoil. For the second
time in his career, he became embroiled in a scandal concerning
the sale of a mailing list – this time to Louisiana Governor Mike
Foster. Foster was found by the state Board of Ethics to have failed
to report a $103,000 payment to Duke during the 1995 governor’s
race, and again in 1997 when he paid $52,000 for the right to
continue to use the list. Foster said that he tried to keep the
purchase secret, because “it ain’t real cool to put out there that
you’re buying something from David Duke.”
Although the political scandal left Duke twisting in the wind,
uncertain as to whether any investigations would affect him
personally, he soldiered on. He essentially ended his dalliance with
“moderation” in late 1998 with the self-publication of a 700-page
autobiography, My Awakening. In this magnum opus, Duke
attempted to prove that blacks are genetically inferior to whites,
while devoting almost 250 pages to anti-Jewish themes. Duke
wrote that Jews “thoroughly dominate the news and
entertainment media in almost every civilized nation; they control
the international markets and stock exchanges; and no
government can resist doing their bidding on any issue of
importance,” and he noted that Jews and Gentiles are “in a state
of ethnic war,” predicting that “the ultimate clash between these
two diametrically opposed genotypes and cultures fast
approaches with the new millenium.” In its unabashed racist
animosity, the book seemed to represent a conscious decision by
Duke to abandon his two-decade long attempts to obfuscate,
repackage, intellectualize and dress up his opinions and ideas.
The volume sold out a second edition and was republished in May
2000, while Duke allegedly began work on a second book, The
Ultimate Supremacism: An Examination of the Jewish Question, to
be followed by a third effort focusing on the “spiritual aspect of the
struggle to preserve and protect our heritage,” entitled For the
Love of My People. Duke also returned to speaking at white
supremacist rallies and conferences.
Yet his reversion to overt, as opposed to veiled, racism did not
douse his political hopes. In December 1998, Duke announced that
he would run for the Congressional seat being vacated by Robert
L. Livingston, in Louisiana’s First Congressional District. Achieving
this goal was not wholly implausible; Duke had carried this district
in his campaigns for United States Senate and governor in 1990
and 1991. Once again, he positioned himself as an anti-
government conservative who stood up for the little man against
programs such as affirmative action, minority set-asides and
welfare. And once again, Duke’s message seemed to hit a nerve
among some frustrated white voters who were willing to overlook
his past. He received one out of every five ballots cast in the
district and placed third in the election. These results apparently
validated his assertion that he would fly under the radar of public
opinion research, which projected him winning a far smaller
percentage of the vote. Indeed, despite the pre-election polling
numbers, both mainstream G.O.P. and local business leaders
feared a potential Duke victory. “We were sweating bullets,” said
Ken Johnson, an aide to Representative W.J. Tauzin, the
Republican dean of Louisiana’s Congressional delegation. On the
other hand, Duke’s showing seemed to indicate that, while he
could still stir contention and anxiety and had a reliable
constituency, this constituency was modest and unlikely ever to
expand. Moreover, Duke had increasingly come to be seen as both
enamored with the publicity and money of campaigns and
disinclined actually to win and serve.
Following his defeat, Duke stated that while he had no immediate
plans to stage another political candidacy, he was “absolutely
committed to spending the rest of my life as a spokesman for the
rights of European Americans.” He turned to a strategy that
several other racist organizations have also adopted, focusing on
ethnic themes designed to appeal to alienated whites, especially
minority crime rates, immigration and so-called “Confederate
heritage” issues such as flying the Confederate flag on state
property.
NOFEAR
Now a self-styled “civil rights activist,” in January 2000, Duke
announced the formation of a new organization, the National
Organization for European American Rights. Aping contemporary
civil rights groups, NOFEAR addressed “European American”
concerns. “Just as African Americans have the NAACP and
Mexican Americans have La Raza,” Duke said, “European-
Americans now have the National Organization for European
American Rights, to actively defend their rights and heritage in the
United States.”
NOFEAR was intended to be an antidote to the alleged “massive
discrimination” faced by whites from the nation’s growing
population of minorities. According to Duke, “European Americans
face a situation where we’re going to be outnumbered and
outvoted in our own country.” Low birthrates, interracial
marriages and immigration rates were cited by Duke as key
factors reducing the white share of the population. The NOFEAR
home pages on the davidduke.com Web site maintain that “the
civil rights of European Americans are being violated by affirmative
action, forced integration and anti-European immigration policies.
…We face cultural discrimination in the media and education.…An
example is the media hate crime hysteria that highlights and
publicizes any white crime against minorities.”
At the launching of NOFEAR, Duke told reporters at the National
Press Club that the alleged ongoing destruction of white people
was a “genocide.” In a January 26, 2000, letter to the Shreveport
Times rebutting a critical editorial, Duke described European
Americans as “internally displaced people” entitled to the same
consideration as refugees. In June 2001, threatened by a
trademark lawsuit, Duke renamed his group the European-
American Rights Organization.
Recent Themes:
Call to Arms
Duke repeatedly stresses the need for white Southerners and
European Americans generally to organize to preserve their rights
and heritage. “These minority activists are not only after Southern
heritage,” he warns, “Eventually they plan to erase the heritage
and history of European Americans in the United States and ... [we
plan] to stop them.” As evidence, Duke has cited black school
board members in New Orleans who called George Washington an
“immoral example” for children and voted to remove his name
from a public school, as well as the Richmond, Virginia, City
Council that removed a mural of General Robert E. Lee from a flood
wall in 1999.
Immigration
Another major focus for Duke has been nonwhite immigration to
the United States, both legal and illegal. In a well-known episode,
Duke was invited to Siler City, North Carolina, in February 2000, by
residents who claimed that their town was being overrun by illegal
immigrants from Mexico, thereby lowering wages, increasing
crime and destroying the quality of life. Hundreds of white parents,
and some blacks, packed school board meetings to protest the
new immigrant children’s effect on classrooms (there were also
unpleasant racist incidents, including the vandalism of a Hispanic
church). “Why should the people of Siler City, whose families
established the town and who have lived there for generations,
now have to live in a town that looks more like Mexico than
America?” asked Duke. He spoke at a rally and met with local
residents and community officials. Purportedly taking action on
behalf of residents, he castigated the local poultry plants for hiring
illegal immigrant labor at a huge cost to community services and
wrote to the North Carolina Immigration and Naturalization Service
requesting a full-scale investigation. He also campaigned against
local politicians who allegedly supported the illegal immigrants,
arguing for the removal of “politicians who have sold out the
heritage and interests of European Americans in favor of illegal
aliens.”
Hate Crimes
Duke has also focused on alleged hate crimes against whites.
Although hate crimes against whites actually do form a substantial
percentage of the country’s overall total, Duke’s twist was to label
all black-on-white crime as falling into the “hate” category. Though
initially Duke and his associates stated that they were opposed to
hate crime laws and to the very concept of hate crimes, which
they considered discriminatory to whites, the advantages of
claiming victimhood led them to shift their position. Thus, in May
2000, Duke attempted to call attention “to an epidemic of hate
crimes committed against white Americans…and to expose the
lack of coverage that exists on this issue.”
“I don’t call myself a white supremacist,” said Duke. “I’m a civil
rights activist concerned about European-American rights.”
Prophet Away from Home
The most recent and interesting development in Duke’s career as
a professional racist has been his growing infatuation with Russia.
In September 2000 Duke traveled to the country at the invitation of
Alexander Prokhanov, the editor in chief of Zavtra, an
ultranationalist newspaper, and Konstantin Kasimovsky, the head
of an anti-Semitic organization called Russian Action. Duke
reportedly made an impassioned speech in Moscow, telling a
crowd that they should take action against “the Aryan race’s main
enemy — world Zionism” and calling for all “dark-skinned people
to be forced out of Moscow.” The crowd responded with cries of
“glory to Russia” and “white power.”
After spending three months in Russia in 2000, he returned again
in 2001, ostensibly to build further connections with right-wing
nationalists. He held a rally at a respected literary museum; signed
autographs at the Russian Writers Union; and met with members
of Parliament, including a retired Soviet general, Albert Makashov,
who is known for anti-Semitic remarks. While thoroughgoing anti-
Semites apparently constitute only three or four percent of the
Russian population, the history of Jew-hatred in the country is
centuries old, violent and deeply rooted, and there appears to be
increasing cooperation between Russian extremists and their
ideological counterparts abroad. Duke seeks to promote that
relationship even if, as some observers speculate, his visits have
been related to the ongoing investigation of his activities in the
United States, where his home was searched in November 2000
by federal agents looking for evidence of tax fraud, tax evasion
and money laundering.
DAVID DUKE: IN HIS OWN WORDS
“White people don't need a law against rape, but if you fill this
room up with your normal black bucks, you would, because
niggers are basically primitive animals.”
—The Sun (Wichita, Kan.), April 23, 1975
“Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and
separation of the white and black races. This goal must include
freeing of the American media and government from subservient
Jewish interests.”
—“Klan Code of Conduct,” Duke Speaks Out, a column in the
Crusader (newspaper of the KKKK, then led by David Duke),
November 1978
“Am I an alarmist? Is my vision unreal? All one has to do is look
around this globe and see the Third World reality. Are whites
holding every one of the nonwhite countries down, or are we in
fact pumping billions of dollars into them along with every
technological aid that the West can produce? And now the West
itself is gradually being enveloped by nonwhite immigration. The
exploding numbers of nonwhites are slowly wrapping formerly
white nations in a dark human cocoon. Shall a butterfly emerge, or
the beast that has haunted the ruins of every great white
civilization that submitted to invasion by immigration and racial
miscegenation?”
—NAAWP News, Issue no. 24, signed article by David Duke, April
1983
"...Immigration along with nonwhite birthrates will make white
people a minority totally vulnerable to the political, social, and
economic will of blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Orientals. A
social upheaval is now beginning to occur that will be the funeral
dirge of the America we love. I shudder to contemplate the future
under nonwhite occupation; rapes, murders, robberies multiplied a
hundred fold, illiteracy such as in Haiti, medicine such as in
Mexico, and tyranny such as in Togoland.
—NAAWP News, Issue no. 24, signed article by David Duke, April
1983
"What we really want to do is to be left alone. We don't want
Negroes around. We don't need Negroes around. We're not asking
–– you know, we don't want to have them, you know, for our
culture. We simply want our own country and our own society.
That's in no way exploitive at all. We want our own society, our
own nation...."
–-Duke interview with doctoral student Evelyn Rich, who traveled
around the country with Duke while conducting research for her
dissertation on the KKK, March 1985
"These Jews who run things, who are producing this mental
illness –– teenage suicide...all these Jewish sicknesses...that's
nothing new. The Talmud's full of things like sex with boys and
girls."
––Evelyn Rich interview, March 1985
"Did you ever notice how many survivors they have? Did you ever
notice that? Everybody — every time you turn around, 15,000
survivors meet here; 400 survivors convention there. I mean, did
you ever notice? Nazis sure were inefficient, weren't they? Boy,
boy, boy!...You almost have no survivors that ever say they saw a
gas chamber or saw the workings of a gas chamber.... they'll say
these preposterous stories that anybody can check out to be a lie,
an absolute lie."
––Evelyn Rich interview, March 1985
“The Jews are trying to destroy all other cultures…as a survival
mechanism…the only Nazi country in the world is Israel.”
—Ros Davidson interview, May 13, 1990 (quoted in the San
Francisco Examiner, November 13, 1991)
“We Aryans are those of European descent who are racially
conscious and who have committed our lives to our people’s
survival and evolutionary advancement. We shall do our duty. We
shall not surrender our freedom and our very existence to Jewish
or any other power. We shall preserve our heritage and our hard-
won rights and freedoms. We shall guide our people up the
evolutionary stairway to the stars.”
—My Awakening, p. 469 (1998)
“Russia’s biggest problem is organized crime and its leaders are
influenced by the Russian mafia,” Duke said. “But it’s not right to
call it a Russian mafia, it’s a Jewish mafia.”
—The Moscow Times, October 16, 1999
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| PORTRAIT OF |
| Yound David at work in the 60s protesting against the Seven Vietnam veterans's protest against the Vietnam war |
| A billboard advertising company in Texas has turned down People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' attempt to run an ad featuring David Duke with a photoshopped milk mustache. Duke is currently serving time in a federal prison in Big Spring, Texas, for mail and tax fraud. |
| David Duke at the Tehran conference on the Holocaust in December 2006 |