David Duke
David Ernest Duke is an American politician, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, conspiracy theorist, and former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. From 1989 to 1992, he was a Republican member of the Louisiana House of Representatives. His politics and writings are largely devoted to promoting conspiracy theories about Jews, such as Holocaust denial and Jewish control of academia, the press, and the financial system. In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League called Duke "perhaps America's most well-known racist and anti-Semite".
Duke unsuccessfully ran as a Democratic candidate for state legislature during the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in his campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. After failing to gain any traction within the Democratic Party, he gained the presidential nomination of the minor Populist Party. In December 1988, he became a Republican and claimed to have become a born-again Christian, nominally renouncing antisemitism and racism. He soon won his only elected office, a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives. He then ran unsuccessful but competitive campaigns for several more offices, including United States Senate in 1990 and governor of Louisiana in 1991. His campaigns were denounced by national and state Republican leaders, including President George H. W. Bush. He mounted a minor challenge to President Bush in 1992.
By the late 1990s, Duke had abandoned his pretense of rejecting racism and antisemitism, and began to openly promote racist and neo-Nazi viewpoints. He then began to devote himself to writing about his political views, both in newsletters and later on the Internet. In his writings, he denigrates African Americans and other ethnic minorities, and promotes conspiracy theories about a Jewish plot to control the United States and the world. He continued to run for public office through 2016, but after his reversion to open neo-Nazism, his candidacies were not competitive.
During the 1990s, Duke defrauded his political supporters by pretending to be in dire financial straits and soliciting money for basic necessities. At the time, he was in fact financially secure and used the money for recreational gambling. In December 2002, Duke pleaded guilty to felony fraud and subsequently served a 15-month sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Big Spring, in Texas.
Early life
David Ernest Duke was born on July 1, 1950, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Maxine and David Hedger Duke, the younger of two children. As the son of an engineer for Shell Oil Company, Duke frequently moved with his family around the world. During 1954, they lived a short time in the Netherlands before settling in an all-white area of New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1955. His mother was an alcoholic; his father permanently left the family in 1966 for Laos taking a job with United States Agency for International Development. While in New Orleans, Duke attended the Clifton L. Ganus School, a conservative Church of Christ-sponsored school. He said his segregationist awakening started during his research for an eighth-grade project at this school. After his freshman year, Duke transferred to Warren Easton Senior High in New Orleans. For his junior year, he attended Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia. His senior year, he attended John F. Kennedy High School, and by the time he graduated was already a member of the Ku Klux Klan.In 1964, Duke began his involvement in radical right politics after attending a Citizens' Councils meeting and reading Carleton Putnam's pro-segregation books, later citing Race and Reason: A Yankee View as responsible for his "enlightenment". Putnam's book asserted the genetic superiority of whites. Also during his adolescence, Duke began to read books about Nazism and the Third Reich, and his speeches at CCA meetings became more explicitly pro-Nazi. This was enough to gain him disapproval from some members, who were more anti-black racists than antisemitic. While attending Riverside Military Academy, his class was disciplined after Duke was found to be in possession of a Nazi flag and, in public school, he vociferously protested against the lowering of the flag after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In the late 1960s, Duke met the white supremacist William Luther Pierce, who became an influence on him. Duke joined the Ku Klux Klan in 1967.
In 1968, Duke enrolled at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. In 1970, he formed a white student group called the White Youth Alliance that was affiliated with the National Socialist White People's Party. He appeared at a demonstration in Nazi uniform carrying a sign reading "Gas the Chicago 7" and "Kunstler is a Communist Jew" to protest Kunstler's appearance at Tulane University in New Orleans. Picketing and holding parties on the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth, he became known on the LSU campus for wearing a Nazi uniform. While a student at LSU, Duke took a road trip to an American Nazi Party conference in Virginia with white supremacists Joseph Paul Franklin and Don Black.
Duke says that he spent nine months in Laos, calling it a "normal tour of duty". He joined his father, who remained working there, and had asked his son to visit during the summer of 1971. His father helped him gain a job teaching English to Laotian military officers, from which he was dismissed after six weeks when he drew a Molotov cocktail on the blackboard. He also claimed to have gone behind enemy lines 20 times at night to drop rice to anti-communist insurgents in planes flying off the ground, narrowly avoiding a shrapnel wound. Two Air America pilots who were in Laos at that time said that the planes flew only during the day and no less than from the ground. One pilot suggested that it might have been possible for Duke to have gone on a safe "milk run" once or twice but no more than that. Duke was unable to recall the name of the airfield he had used.
1972 arrest in New Orleans
In January 1972, Duke was arrested in New Orleans for inciting a riot. Several racial confrontations broke out that month in the city, including one at the Robert E. Lee Monument involving Duke, Addison Roswell Thompson—a perennial segregationist candidate for governor of Louisiana and mayor of New Orleans—and his 89-year-old friend and mentor, Rene LaCoste. Thompson and LaCoste dressed in Klan robes for the occasion and placed a Confederate flag at the monument. The Black Panthers began throwing bricks at the two men, but police arrived in time to prevent serious injury.In 1972, Duke was charged with soliciting campaign funds for presidential candidate George Wallace and keeping the proceeds. He was also charged with filling glass containers with a flammable liquid, banned under a New Orleans ordinance. Both charges were eventually dropped.
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
In 1974, Duke founded the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, shortly after graduating from LSU. He became the KKKK's "grand wizard" in 1976. Duke first received broad public attention during this time, as he endeavored to market himself in the mid-1970s as a new brand of Klansman: well-groomed, engaged, and professional. He also reformed the organization, promoting nonviolence and legality; also, for the first time in the Klan's history, women were accepted as equal members and Catholics were encouraged to apply for membership. Duke repeatedly insisted that the Klan was "not anti-black" but rather "pro-white" and "pro-Christian". He told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that he left the Klan in 1980 because he disliked its associations with violence and could not stop members of other Klan chapters from doing "stupid or violent things". In April 1992, Julia Reed wrote in The New York Review of Books that Duke was forced to leave the Klan after selling a copy of its membership records to a rival Klan leader who was a Federal Bureau of Investigation informer.Political and ideological activities
Early campaigns
Duke first ran for a seat in the Louisiana State Senate as a Democrat from a Baton Rouge district in 1975. During his campaign, he was allowed to speak on the college campuses of Vanderbilt University, Indiana University, the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and Tulane University. He received 11,079 votes, one-third of those cast.Duke ran for a seat in the state senate again in 1979, losing to the incumbent, Joe Tiemann.
In the late 1970s, several Klan officials accused Duke of stealing the organization's money. "Duke is nothing but a con artist", Jack Gregory, Duke's Florida state leader, told the Clearwater Sun after Duke allegedly refused to turn over proceeds from a series of 1979 Klan rallies to the Knights. Another Klan official under Duke, Jerry Dutton, told reporters that Duke had used Klan funds to purchase and refurbish his home in Metairie. Duke later justified the repairs by saying most of his home was used by the Klan.
He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination during the 1980 presidential election. Despite being six years too young to be president, Duke attempted to place his name on the ballot in 12 states, saying he wanted to be a power broker who could "select issues and form a platform representing the majority of this country" at the Democratic National Convention. In 1979, he pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace when he led 70 to 100 Klansmen to surround police vehicles in a Metairie hotel parking lot in September 1976, and was fined $100 and given a three-month suspended sentence. Duke and James K. Warner had originally been convicted on that charge in 1977, but the Louisiana Supreme Court had reversed the ruling because the state had introduced inadmissible evidence. Duke was arrested for illegally entering Canada in order to discuss third-world immigration into Canada on a talk show.
He left the Ku Klux Klan in 1980, after he was accused of trying to sell the organization's mailing list for $35,000. He founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People and served as its president after leaving the Klan. Using the group's newsletter, he promoted Holocaust denial literature for sale such as The Hoax of the Twentieth Century and Did Six Million Really Die?
Duke allegedly conducted a direct-mail appeal in 1987, using the identity and mailing-list of the Georgia Forsyth County Defense League without permission. League officials described it as a fundraising scam.