The Wizardry of David Duke
Ferguson, Andrew
Andrew Ferguson THE WIZARDRY OF DAVID DUKE The making of a "conservative Republican." Metairie, Louisiana David Duke does not hesitate to talk about what he invariably calls "my controversial...
...They get a—you know—bigger check this way...
...in 1905...
...but he has the baby-boomer's debility of punctuating his sentences with "I mean" and "you know" and the stand-up comic's technique of ending them with "ladies and gentlemen!' When he reaches a surefire applause line he dips his head and wraps his mouth around the microphone, overloading the p.a...
...That's why, as a candidate, Duke brings up his past every chance he gets—and why his opponents' attempts to alarm the voters with it are supererogatory, if not counterproductive...
...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 and for the benefit of Louisiana voters, this brief interlude has been transformed into life-threatening "service of our country in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam conflict...
...I asked...
...of Henry Ford's The International Jew, Racial Hybridity ("Survey of dysgenic results of race mixing"), Klan encomiums, the diaries of Goebbels, Racial Differences...
...The local press usually obliged his hunger for attention, with interview shows and a few seconds on the nightly news...
...To manage his campaign he called on Ralph Forbes, an old pal and a former leader of the American Nazi party, and enlisted his financial backers from Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby, considered by the ADL to be the country's leading anti-Semitic organization...
...Nice work, if you can get it...
...Even so, he ran as a moderate conservative, complaining, as he does today, about busing, welfare freeloaders, and affirmative action...
...By that time his standing as a "conservative Republican" had becomemore widely accepted, and there are so few conservative Republicans who sell The Holy Book of Adolf Hitler that he looked . . . well, conspicuous...
...Leave it alone," one supporter told me impatiently...
...The crowd was his, begging for it . . . but like the high-school stud on his first date, he wasn't quite sure what to do...
...and his rally had all the charge of a weekend real-estate sales seminar, dozens of which had probably been held in that very room...
...What happened to the rest of the money no one knows...
...Zatarain calls his biography "unauthorized," but he had Duke's full cooperation in putting it together, and long passages of it fit better into the convivial "astold-to" genre favored by athletes, movie stars, and—of course—budding pols...
...Instead, Duke galumphed along, and closed his forty minutes with a mincing "I love you all very much...
...you could sense it...
...I had earlier spent several hours with Duke, and his material was much the same in public as in private—the cassette tapes unwound without a break...
...Duke has the poll numbers, but not the passion...
...He has solemnly renounced his youthful "indiscretions," and declares himself a "good conservative Republican...
...and on to the "Nazi society" of Israel, where, he now claims, the Mossad tried to poison him with (what else...
...He quit the Klan in 1980...
...The rest, as they don't say in Louisiana, is silence...
...Is this what demagoguery has cometo...
...But does this buffoon's lunge for legitimacy mean, as he himself says, that "the long sleeping tiger of the American majority is awakening...
...Duke allied himself with the LSU chapter of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Liberation Front before forming the White Student Alliance, the first of a long string of organizations of which he appointed himself commander-in-chief...
...the government's demotion of productive working people to second class citizenship...
...Consider, he said, one welfare mother he'd heard about...
...In David Duke's America every social ill is subordinate to—and almost always symptomatic of—the problem of the "rising welfare underclass" and its amazing reproductive capacities...
...He "lectured" (as his campaign literature grandly puts it) at any college willing to pay $1,200, plus expenses...
...Listen to what he's saying now...
...Duke will go to Washington...
...It was a stupid teenage prank," he says now, "and I've paid for it all my life...
...All day, Duke staffers had prepared me for the excitement to come: "The charisma is just incredible," one lady said...
...For the less bookish, Duke also peddled movies, records, and tapes—everything, it seems, but the sheet music for "Springtime for Hitler...
...I attended a Duke rally one evening in a banquet room of the Holiday Inn in Kenner, a suburb outside New Orleans that sprung up almost overnight during the white flight of the '60s...
...They wish...
...But he has been in politics, generously understood, all his adult life, as a member of the small brotherhood of kooks and consultants, activists and pamphleteers, who, having outfitted themselves with a post office box, a letterhead, and a mailing list, pursue no definable profession save that furnished by their peripheral engagement with public affairs and all the press coverage they can rouse...
...It seems likely, too, that the candidates will then be Johnston and David Duke...
...Thence to India, where he saw what happens when the Aryan race goes squishy-soft and submits to "mongrelization...
...Bookish and withdrawn as a youngster, Duke found companionship at last as a high school student, in the offices of the local White Citizens Council, where the concerned citizens loaded him up with books about "racial science" and the perils of intermingling.' Duke calls this the beginning of his "intellectual odyssey," but to an outsider it looks more like a puddle jump...
...Jackson, whose phenomenal success Duke often cites, with the slightest touch of envy...
...I stopped selling books," he told me, "because I knew that if there was even a controversial paragraph in a book I sold they would use it against me...
...They were all pregnant by the same man...
...The NAAWP News, with a mailing list of 25,000, also afforded Duke the opportunity to operate his "bookstore," a curious mail-order enterprise aimed at scholars and idiot savants who specialized in "racial science," Nazi and Klan history, eugenics, and David Duke studies...
...Like the other media events, Duke's various political campaigns (five in all) have served to keep his name before the public, thus allowing him to beef up the mailing lists and invent different institutional rubrics under which to raise funds...
...His stump speech, refined over these fifteen years, includes all the necessary whoop-whoop, with cannon fire for the media and the liberals and the Washington politicians and rose petals for the purity and comfort and assurance of an earlier America...
...Or that, as the Nation magazine suggests, "It can happen here...
...At Louisiana State University he served the cause by handing out pamphlets by the martyred George Lincoln Rockwell...
...I came to feel our race was being overcome by the nonwhite world...
...Duke failed, he says, because the Klan's "negative media image" was insurmountable...
...Both sides deserve a word of caution: chill out...
...At least my past shows that I've always had the courage of my convictions," he says...
...I came to believe that race was the most important thing to civilization in building a society and a nation," he said later...
...Metairie, Louisiana David Duke does not hesitate to talk about what he invariably calls "my controversial past"—his past as a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, his neo-Nazi past, his race-baiting ambulance-chaser past...
...I mean I was too strident, too intolerant as a younger man on the racial issue, no question about it, there are things I regret . ." But David Duke is a politician these days, and he has learned the professional pol's trick of turning his mind into a tape deck, sliding in one prerecorded cassette after another until his controversial past glides into his glorious present and the campaign that's scaring hell out of the big boys—the Republican National Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the Republican party of Louisiana, and, preeminently, J. Bennett Johnston, the three-term Democratic senator whose statewide unpopularity has done much to lift Duke to a strong second place in the polls...
...With his over-the-ears haircut, artificial-fabric suits, and soft-spoken manner, Duke thought he could modernize the Klan's message, adapt it to younger tastes, make it hip—the same doomed optimism, endemic to the '70s, that led the producers of God-spell to trick out the Twelve Apostles in baggy pants and fright wigs...
...Richard Gephardt couldn't have put it better...
...The intensely documented book that demolishes the "Holocaust" fraud...
...In his stump speech he admits he's "made mistakes," and asks anyone in his audience "who's without sin to go ahead and cast that first stone at me...
...In fact, he usually raises the subject himself, and then the question quickly becomes whether he'll ever shut up...
...The murder of a white marine by black marines brought him to Camp Pendleton...
...Many state Republicans are therefore proceeding according to their party's single deeply held principle: If you can't beat him, join him...
...By the strange alchemy of campaign rhetoric 'For an account of Duke's early life, see Michael Zatarain's new biography, David Duke Evolution of a Klansman (Pelican, $19.95...
...the turncoat tenure of Bennett Johnston...
...A gaggle of Republican leaders in Louisiana—now putative supporters of the party-endorsed candidate, state senator Ben Bagert—have agreed to endorse Andrew Ferguson is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service...
...W hich makes Duke a kind of Ror- schach blot for his public, liberals and conservatives alike, a blank screen onto which the left projects its perpetual alarm over impending fascism, and the right its frustration and anger at liberal lunacy...
...if, as seems likely, none of the seven candidates receives a majority, the two top finishers will meet in a run-off in November...
...Such great material...
...He has proposed strict limits on the amount of foreign investment in the United States, and when I asked him about Louisiana's economic troubles —the state has been in recession for most of the decade—he blamed an uneven distribution of federal aid among the states (Louisiana ranks 47th in return on federal revenue) and emphasized the need for high tariffs "to keep American jobs here...
...After being arrested for parading without a permit in Forsyth County, he established a "Forsyth County Defense Fund," raised nearly $20,000 through the NAAWP News, and promptly pled guilty, with a fine of $55...
...the drugs brought in by illegal immigrants—each degradation, each insult administered to hard-working Americans by a world gone wacky, each led back, as in a maze, to the rising welfare underclass...
...always attractive qualities in a politician, because so utterly implausible...
...in Mental Growth and Achievement...
...he said flatly...
...It's getting easier all the time...
...D uke has every reason to be protective of his present position...
...The brimstone of the message and the banality of the delivery made for a disorienting combination, like listening to Pat Sajak recite "Horatius at the Bridge...
...In foreign affairs he is fastidiously isolationist...
...His reception was so grand that he once again turned to electoral politics, running for President in 1988...
...This whole welfarething, getting it under control," she said...
...But all you think about is we're racists...
...He says nothing today, as a "conservative Republican," that he didn't say as the Grand Wizard when he first ran for public office in 1975...
...For the others, who are drawn to him more by his unexceptionable "conservatism" and their own disenchantment with Bennett Johnston, it reveals him to be vulnerable, humble, contrite...
...Always a small-time operator, David Duke is even yet a man too small for the forces he would exploit...
...Duke seems uncomfortable with issues that he can't trace to the underclass, and when questioned about them he often arrives, foundering, at positions more commonly associated with liberal Democrats...
...He most resembles the actor Richard Chamberlain, another showpiece of the cosmetic surgeon's art...
...Itremble to think what Bilbo or Cot- ton Tom could have done with such a story...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 17 cent of Louisiana's budget goes to AFDC, or that the average AFDC mother spends less than twenty-two months on the dole, or that her fertility rate is about the same as the general population's, or that, in the country at large, the underclass constitutes about 1.5 percent of the population...
...That's not ex-actly the upshot of Buchanan's column, but it's close enough for politics...
...The rising welfare underclass is the biggest issue facing Americans," he says...
...Duke even uses it himself in TV ads...
...His opponents have blanketed the state with the infamous Nazi photograph...
...PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION —Zionists claim it is a forgery, but it is uncannily accurate since pub...
...On and on: Our Nordic Race, The Best of Instauration, the complete set (four volumes...
...It may not make much sense, but in Louisiana, where unemployment is over ten percent and quite a few white folks still can't figure out how the government started siding with the black folks, it makes a nice sound...
...The showhorse of this breed is the Rev...
...But his positions here are perfectly unexceptionable for almost any Republican...
...There was Tilumph of the Will (along with a soundtrack of its "speeches, marching songs, and inspiring orchestral music"), a complete set of George Lincoln Rockwell's recorded discourses, and videos of the conservative Republican himself, "considered by most to be the most articulate spokesman on race and race-related issues in the Western world today," who, moreover, "through the power of his presence and his eloquence, wins the audience over to a basic racial understanding...
...and for workfare in place of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC...
...It gives him a chance to grimace slightly and shake his head more in sorrow than in anger`a stupid teenage prank"—and besides, this is Louisiana: there's always the chance that out there in the backcountry some voter may see it on the television and holler, "That's my man...
...I'm a man who hasn't been afraid to stand up and say what I believe...
...It was a good ten minutes before he drew sustained applause from his partisan audience...
...Duke proudly offers reporters a newspaper column written by Pat Buchanan on the heels of the legislative victory last year...
...As late as last year, however, the Klan's phone number and his own were the same...
...Duke the day after the primary...
...But Duke's progress isn't limited to the party organization...
...Keeping people from stealing our jobs...
...livo reasons...
...Pall and thick-chested, with his famous blow-dried hair, he is bloodlessly handsome...
...Certainly I've made mistakes in my past," he said, "no question about it, I freely admit that...
...T he WSA evolved into the National 1 party, which preceded his very own Klan faction, which predated the National Association for the Advancement of White People, which still operates from the basement of his home here...
...The press, however, seldom had trouble finding him...
...The odyssey continued when Duke dropped out of LSU in 1971 to visit his father in Laos, where the elder Duke was stationed as a full colonel...
...Pregnant again, she already had four teenage daughters, each of whom was also pregnant...
...When racial tensions heated up in Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1987, the new Duke emerged more telegenic than the old Duke but with the same élan, hogging the cameras and sporting a "Keep Forsyth White" button on his lapel...
...I knew from an early age that the struggle would be long and difficult," Duke once said, back in the days when he still wore a bedsheet...
...I mean . . ." and his voice trailed off to tepid applause...
...There was no mention of racial science, no recounts of the six million, but long recitations on the debasement of America by affirmative action...
...The busing standoff brought him to Boston...
...But you need an angle, and from the beginning Duke's angle, like Jackson's, has been race...
...This was the candidate in full throttle...
...senator in a non-partisan primary...
...And you know what, ladies and gentlemen...
...the profligacy of foreign aid...
...I had no sooner settled onto the couch of his spartan office here than the confession commenced unbeckoned...
...D uke first sought elective office in 1975, when, as Grand Wizard of the Louisiana Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he unsuccessfully challenged a conservative state senator from Baton Rouge...
...The crowd rose and hollered and whistled when Duke walked in, and remained standing for the pledge of allegiance and a rousing version of Elvis's "American Trilogy," rendered to tape-recorded accompaniment by a local chanteuse with blinding blonde hair piled on her head in loops...
...Around the same time, he was photographed wearing a Nazi uniform during a one-man demonstration against William Kunstler, the radical lawyer (or, in Duke's phrase, "Communist Jew...
...Duke—Excellent booklet documenting the Zionist control of America's mass media, how the control was achieved and the ramifications of this alien domination...
...Left-wing alarmists and right-wing populists disagree with this assessment, of course...
...WHO RUNS THE MEDIA...
...Duke seems uncomfortable with issues that he can't trace to the underclass, and often arrives at positions more commonly associated with liberal Democrats...
...Yet Bagert, a forceful speaker with a long background in conservative causes, will almost certainly finish far behind Duke on October 9. Why does Duke prosper and Bagert languish...
...The banquet room was a long, low-slung affair papered in oil cloth and lit by brass-plated chandeliers...
...JEWS MUST LIVE, Roth—A Jew reveals shady business practices of Jews...
...They are shared, in fact, by his mainstream Republican opponent, Ben Bagert, who wrote Louisiana's landmark "workfare" law last year...
...Beginning in the early '70s, he engineered a series of media events of which the present senatorial campaign is the consummation...
...The rhetorical heights achieved by those earlier demagogues are beyond him...
...The author reveals the intense hatred and duplicity of Jews...
...So like Johnny—the father—he can have more money for his, you know, Friday night card game, ladies and gentlemen...
...polls show him moving beyond his base of blue-collar support into the ranks of the better educated and more affluent...
...Duke was selling each of these as late as July of last year—well into his first term as Louisiana legislator—when the book service was exposed in the newspapers...
...But the coverage more often than not was unkind...
...But beyond vague disclaimers of his earlier intolerance and stridency, he's unclear about what it is from his past that he's abandoned...
...for low taxes...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990...
...For Duke it matters not at all that less than one perAs late as last year, the Klan's phone number and his were the same...
...For a relatively small portion of his constituency, his Klan affiliation is a credential—a signal that he's a guy who means business...
...With some thick-necked colleagues he established a "Mexican Border Watch" to chase down immigrants, leaving after a few days—presumably once the borders were water-tight...
...The photocopied clip is from the New York Post, but Duke didn't like the headline so he had an assistant typeset one more agreeable to him: "How David Duke Shows GOP the Way...
...Immigration he sees as a kind of mucky swamp overtaking, rather than rejuvenating, our economy...
...He devoted himself to his new "civil rights organization," publishing the NAAWP News, enrolling in est, and, according to colleagues, indulging in some cosmetic surgery...
...Duke became boss of each and then, easily bored, abandoned each in its turn, making sure to grab the mailing list as he headed out the door...
...We can bring our troops home from Europe," he told me, "and put them all along the Mexican border...
...And what is that...
...THE HOAX OF THE 20TH CENTURY, Butz—The most important refutation of the "Holocaust" ever written...
...Duke was careful to carry a disclaimer in his catalogue—"It should be understood that this listing does not mean that this publication endorses or agrees with every book listed"—but the blurbs exhibited his salesmanship at peak form: THE GRAND DRAGON, Kurtz—Perhaps the most revealing book ever published exposing Jewish attitudes toward Aryans...
...his features could have been chiseled from ice...
...You all concentrate on just one thing he did when he was a kid," his wife chimed in...
...It's likely that Duke will emerge from the October primary as Bennett Johnston's sole challenger in the general election, the standard-bearer of the Republican party of Louisiana...
...The conservative movement also is beginning to be kind...
...The crowd at the Holiday Inn, about three hundred strong, looked reasonably prosperous: the men wore sport shirts and gimme caps, the women wore slacks, with costume jewelry dangling from every ear and wrist...
...Bar none...
...I am old enough to remember George Wallace in his prime, and have read a good deal about the other great Southern demagogues—Theodore Bilbo, Cotton Tom Heflin, the Longs—so I braced myself for a strong dose of the old-time religion when Duke took the microphone...
...Duke's other distinguishing characteristic as a candidate is, of course, that controversial past...
...He attributes his current standing in the polls to his "willingness to say what no other politician will say," and some conservatives are increasingly eager to see in Duke's "issues" a platform the Republican party has abandoned at its peril: against affirmative-action quotas and set-asides...
...But his voice is a high tenor and his manner is uneasy, and when he faces the audience he stands stiff-legged, his shoulders slumped, one arm frozen to his side, the other bent like a wooden doll's...
...More recently, Tyler Bridges of the New Orleans Times-Picayune disclosed that Duke's various campaign organizations had paid more than $120,000 to a company called BC&E—David Duke, prop.—for "mailing list maintenance" and rent on Duke's home in Metairie...
...On October 6, Louisianians cast ballots for their U.S...
...a chicken salad sandwich...
...This book is a must for all seekers of truth...
...The first is the salience Duke gives to welfare and affirmative action as campaign issues...
...It's possible, even, that Mr...
...I had also been warned that the folks at the rally would probably be unaccommodating if I asked about the controversial past, and indeed they were...
...In doing so they hope to forestall the intervention of the national party, whose chairman, Lee Atwater, enlisted George Bush and Ronald Reagan to campaign against Duke when he narrowly won a seat in the Louisiana legislature last year...
...and rendering himself incomprehensible...
...Duke has a 98 percent name recognition in the state—higher than Bennett Johnston's—and the voters know him as the ex-Klansman who sits in the legislature...
Vol. 23 • October 1990 • No. 10
