David Duke: the former Ku Klux Klan leader at the centre of Scalise scandal

Republican Steve Scalise’s link to the former KKK Grand Wizard and presidential hopeful has proved politically toxic. But over the course of a two-hour conversation with the Guardian, Duke insisted he’s not a racist

The Guardian, UK/December 31, 2014

By Nicky Woolf

“Woolf,” David Duke said. There is an awkward pause. “... is a Jewish name?”

It is, I say. I am. There is another pause. “What is your position?”

David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, is asking me about my position on Israel.

I said I don’t think about it very often.

Duke’s core belief – which he reiterated many times over the course of our nearly-two hour conversation – is that there is a systematic Zionist-Jewish conspiracy to control the other races.

It is a belief that has driven him since he was about 14 years old, according to Tyler Bridges, a journalist based in New Orleans and the author of The Rise of David Duke. In Bridges’ view, the Klan was a political vehicle for Duke, a publicity stunt, to further the dissemination of that idea.

Duke is back in the news because of Steve Scalise, the current House majority whip, who a Louisiana blogger revealed had attended a 2002 conference of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, which was founded by Duke.

Duke himself was not even present for the conference – he addressed it via video link from Moscow. But even this connection, discovered years later, was enough to be politically toxic for Scalise.

Duke was born in Oklahoma, the son of an oil company engineer. His family life was unhappy – is mother was an alcoholic, and his father distant – but it is unclear how Duke arrived at his extreme worldview. Bridges speculated that perhaps neo-Nazism gave order to his life, and somebody to blame for the unhappiness of his childhood.

As Duke told it, he simply became aware of the “unfairness” of what he calls “racist Jewish” control over history. He talked animatedly and at length on the subject, ranging from the Soviet Gulags to Hollywood, both of which he ascribed to Jewish control.

He was particularly animated about the films of Quentin Tarantino, especially Inglourious Basterds. “Isn’t that a horrific movie? Doesn’t it promote torture of ordinary German soldiers? Torturing people, murdering people? And [the protagonists] were portrayed as Jews, so that was portrayed as a good thing?”

I grunted noncommittally, which he took as a signal to move on to his critique of Django Unchained.

As a student at Louisiana State University in the 1960s, with the civil rights movement swirling around him, Duke became infamous on campus for wearing swastika armbands and giving pro-Nazi speeches. When the civil rights activist William Kunstler gave a speech at Tulane University in New Orleans, Duke attended in a Nazi uniform.

But Duke was also ambitious. “He got into politics and realised that the neo-Nazi image was not a winning policy,” said Lawrence Powell, professor emeritus in history at Tulane university in New Orleans and author of a book about Duke. “He joined the Klan in order to mainstream Nazism.”

In 1967, after graduating from LSU, Duke founded a Ku Klux Klan splinter group, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK), and became Grand Wizard. But, conscious of the image the Klan projected, Duke attempted to modernise the group, discouraging violence and discarding the robes and hoods.

His involvement with the Klan is something Duke said he regrets. “I’m a human being, I made mistakes,” he told me. In his reading of the situation, his history with the Klan is a storm in a teacup, something the media only brings up to discredit his current criticism of international Zionism.

He ran for the Louisiana state senate in 1975, and again in 1979. By then, cracks between Duke and his Klan group were starting to show; other members accused him of stealing money from the organisation. Distancing himself, he founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People, another white nationalist association, in 1980.

Duke also developed a reputation for being a womaniser. “He’s a bit of a sexual rogue,” Powell said. “He’s notorious for hitting on women.” He reportedly even co-wrote a sex manual for women under a pseudonym – Dorothy Vanderbilt – which included advice on anal sex and fellatio. (Duke claimed this was another media lie; he only helped a college friend write it, he said, and “I didn’t write any of those sex parts.”)

In 1988, Duke ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. After failing to win any primaries, he won the nomination of the rightwing and white nationalist populist party, and ended up with just over 47,000 votes on election day.

The following year, he switched affiliation to the Republican party, and successfully ran for a seat in the Louisiana house of representatives in a special election.

“He was appealing to a sense of white grievance in a part of the country where racism has been a fact and condition of life for a long, long time,” said Powell.

“It became really like a scab he could pick when the economy cratered in the mid-1980s and a lot of people fell out of work,” Powell continued. “A lot of people like to scapegoat. He knew how to play the affirmative action card, how to blame it all on black people.”

As Duke got more and more into politics, he began to re-sculpt his public image, and – as Powell revealed in an article in the New Republic in 1990 – he also underwent plastic surgery.

In 1990, he quit his seat in the state legislature to run for senator; when that failed, in 1991 he ran for governor of Louisiana against the incumbent, Edwin Edwards. Edwards had been mired in scandal – his supporters printed bumper stickers that read: “Vote for the crook, it’s important.” Duke came in second, with almost half a million votes, and lost to Edwards in a run-off.

In the years that followed, he would run for president again in 1992, the Senate in 1996 and the House of Representatives in 1999, all unsuccessfully. In 2002 Duke went to prison for tax fraud, serving 15 months.

After that, he began a period of globetrotting, but the political positions he espoused were evolving. In the US he may still be best-known for being in the Klan, but it was his anti-Jewish position that became his focus, according to Heidi Beirich, the director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“His antisemitism has become stronger – he’s talking about Zionist Jews more and more now,” Beirich said. “If you hear him talk today it’s mostly about the horrors of the Jews.”

The reception he has received around the world has been mixed. He was expelled from Italy, ejected from the Czech Republic, and banned from Switzerland. He was arrested in Germany in 2011, and unceremoniously kicked out.

He lived in Zell am See in Austria for several years, and co-chaired an anti-Zionist conference in Ukraine in 2005. At a 2006 Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, at which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the keynote speaker, he received a warm welcome.

Despite this, he claimed not to consider himself a racist, and told me he had “a lot of friends who are Jewish”.

“I call myself a human rights activist,” he said.

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