David Duke
Based on Wikipedia: David Duke
In 1989, the President of the United States personally endorsed a candidate in a minor Louisiana state legislative race. So did a former president. So did labor leaders and business executives who almost never agreed on anything. All of them united against one man: a thirty-eight-year-old former Ku Klux Klan leader running for a suburban New Orleans seat in the state House of Representatives.
He won anyway.
David Duke's political career represents one of the most troubling case studies in American democracy—a man who openly wore Nazi uniforms in college, who led a Klan faction for years, who devoted his life to promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, yet who still managed to win elections and come alarmingly close to winning several more. His story reveals uncomfortable truths about the persistence of white supremacist ideology in American politics and the tactics extremists use to gain mainstream acceptance.
The Making of a White Supremacist
David Ernest Duke was born on July 1, 1950, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His father worked as an engineer for Shell Oil Company, which meant the family moved frequently during Duke's childhood. They spent time in the Netherlands in 1954 before settling in an all-white neighborhood in New Orleans the following year.
The household was troubled. Duke's mother struggled with alcoholism. In 1966, when David was sixteen, his father left the family permanently, taking a job with the United States Agency for International Development in Laos—about as far from Louisiana as one could get.
Duke attended a conservative Church of Christ-sponsored school in New Orleans, where he later claimed his "segregationist awakening" began during research for an eighth-grade project. But the transformation went far beyond opposition to integration. As a teenager, Duke devoured books about Nazism and the Third Reich. He attended meetings of the Citizens' Councils of America, a network of organizations that fought desegregation, and his speeches at these gatherings became explicitly pro-Nazi—enough that even some members who were comfortable with anti-Black racism found his antisemitism too extreme.
While attending Riverside Military Academy in Georgia, his class was disciplined after Duke was found with a Nazi flag. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Duke loudly protested against the lowering of flags in his public school to honor the civil rights leader.
He joined the Ku Klux Klan in 1967, at seventeen years old.
College Years in Nazi Uniform
Duke enrolled at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in 1968. He did not try to hide his beliefs.
He founded a group called the White Youth Alliance, affiliated with the National Socialist White People's Party—"National Socialist" being the full name of the Nazi Party. When the civil rights attorney William Kunstler came to speak at Tulane University in New Orleans, Duke appeared at a demonstration wearing a full Nazi uniform and carrying signs that read "Gas the Chicago 7" and "Kunstler is a Communist Jew." The Chicago Seven were left-wing antiwar activists whom Kunstler had defended.
Duke became known on the LSU campus for wearing his Nazi uniform to picket events and for hosting parties celebrating Adolf Hitler's birthday. During his college years, he took a road trip to Virginia for an American Nazi Party conference with two fellow white supremacists: Don Black, who would later found the notorious white nationalist website Stormfront, and Joseph Paul Franklin, who would eventually be executed for serial murder after committing multiple acts of racial and antisemitic terrorism.
These were not youthful indiscretions Duke later disavowed. They were the foundation of his life's work.
The Laos Interlude
Duke claims he spent nine months in Laos in 1971, calling it a "normal tour of duty." The reality appears more mundane. His father, still working there, invited his son to visit during the summer. The elder Duke helped him get a job teaching English to Laotian military officers.
He was fired after six weeks—allegedly for drawing a Molotov cocktail on the blackboard.
Duke later embellished his time in Southeast Asia considerably, claiming he went behind enemy lines twenty times at night to drop rice to anti-communist insurgents in planes flying just ten feet off the ground, narrowly avoiding shrapnel wounds. Two Air America pilots who were actually in Laos at the time said the planes flew only during daylight and never lower than five hundred feet. One pilot suggested Duke might have gone on a safe "milk run" once or twice, but certainly nothing more dramatic. Duke could not recall the name of the airfield he supposedly used.
Grand Wizard
After graduating from LSU in 1974, Duke founded the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. By 1976, at twenty-six years old, he had become the organization's "grand wizard"—the highest leadership title in Klan hierarchy.
Duke understood something his predecessors had not: the Klan's traditional image was a liability. Hooded figures burning crosses evoked domestic terrorism. Violence associated with the organization made it toxic to mainstream America. If white supremacy was going to gain political traction, it needed a makeover.
Duke presented himself as a new kind of Klansman: well-groomed, articulate, professional. He promoted nonviolence and legality within his organization. For the first time in the Klan's history, women were accepted as equal members. Catholics—historically excluded from the Protestant supremacist group—were encouraged to apply.
Most significantly, Duke reframed the Klan's message. Rather than being "anti-Black," he insisted, his organization was "pro-white" and "pro-Christian." This rhetorical sleight of hand—emphasizing what he claimed to be for rather than what he opposed—became a template that white nationalists would use for decades to come.
Duke left the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1980. He told one newspaper it was because he disliked the organization's associations with violence. Another account, published in The New York Review of Books, claimed he was forced out after selling the Klan's membership records to a rival leader who turned out to be an FBI informant.
Throughout his time leading the Klan, Duke had a pattern of financial impropriety. Several Klan officials accused him of stealing the organization's money. His Florida state leader called him "nothing but a con artist" after Duke allegedly kept proceeds from a series of 1979 rallies. Another official claimed Duke used Klan funds to renovate his home in Metairie, Louisiana.
Rebranding for Electoral Politics
Duke's first foray into electoral politics came in 1975, when he ran as a Democrat for the Louisiana State Senate from a Baton Rouge district. He received one-third of the votes cast. He ran again in 1979 and lost to the incumbent.
In 1980, Duke sought the Democratic presidential nomination—despite being only twenty-nine years old, six years too young to legally serve as president. He attempted to get on the ballot in twelve states, claiming he wanted to be a "power broker" at the Democratic National Convention who could shape the party's platform.
That same year brought a guilty plea for disturbing the peace, stemming from an incident in 1976 when Duke led seventy to one hundred Klansmen to surround police vehicles in a Metairie hotel parking lot. He was fined one hundred dollars and given a suspended sentence. He was also arrested for illegally entering Canada, where he had planned to appear on a talk show to discuss third-world immigration.
After leaving the Klan, Duke founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People, a name deliberately designed to evoke the NAACP. Through this organization's newsletter, he promoted Holocaust denial literature—books with titles like "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century" and "Did Six Million Really Die?" that falsely claimed the Nazi genocide of Jews was fabricated or exaggerated.
In 1987, Duke allegedly ran a fraudulent fundraising scheme using the identity and mailing list of a Georgia organization without permission.
The 1988 Pivot
Duke initially ran in the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries. His campaign went nowhere, though he won New Hampshire's vice presidential primary simply by being the only candidate on the ballot for that obscure contest.
Failing to gain traction as a Democrat, Duke secured the presidential nomination of the Populist Party, a fringe organization founded by Willis Carto, a Holocaust denier and white supremacist publisher. Duke appeared on the ballot in eleven states and received about forty-seven thousand votes nationally—less than one-twentieth of one percent.
Then, in December 1988, Duke made a calculated move. He switched his party registration from Democrat to Republican. He also claimed to have become a born-again Christian and announced that he was renouncing antisemitism and racism.
Nobody who had followed his career believed this conversion was genuine. But it gave Duke rhetorical cover—and it put him in a party where his appeals to racial resentment found a more receptive audience.
Victory in Metairie
In early 1989, a special election was called for a Louisiana state House seat in Metairie, a predominantly white suburb of New Orleans, after the incumbent resigned to become a judge. Duke entered the race.
The Republican establishment mobilized against him with an intensity rarely seen in local legislative contests. President George H.W. Bush endorsed Duke's opponent, John Treen. So did former President Ronald Reagan. The president of the Louisiana AFL-CIO, a major labor organization, and the president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry both backed Treen—a remarkable convergence of labor and business interests against a single candidate.
It did not matter.
Duke finished first in the initial primary with thirty-three percent of the vote. In the runoff against Treen, he won with just over fifty percent—about two hundred twenty-seven votes more than his opponent. Duke criticized Treen for suggesting openness to higher property taxes, which proved more decisive in that suburban district than the united opposition of the American political establishment.
When Duke arrived at the Louisiana House, freshman legislator Odon Bacqué attempted to deny him his seat on technical grounds—Duke had allegedly resided outside his district at the time of the election. The challenge failed. Other lawmakers who opposed Duke said they had to defer to his constituents, who had chosen him as their representative, however narrowly.
The Short-Lived Legislator
Duke served in the Louisiana House from 1989 to 1992. By all accounts, he was an ineffective legislator. A colleague described him as "so single minded, he never really became involved in the nuts and bolts of House rules and parliamentary procedure."
One of Duke's signature proposals was requiring welfare recipients to pass drug tests before receiving benefits—an idea that would later become law in various forms in many states. According to one colleague's memoir, Duke managed to pass only a single bill during his tenure: legislation prohibiting movie producers or book publishers from paying jurors for accounts of their court experiences.
But Duke was not in the state legislature to pass laws. He was there to build a platform for higher office.
The Campaigns of 1990 and 1991
In 1990, Duke ran for the United States Senate against incumbent Democrat J. Bennett Johnston. He was the only Republican in the race. Despite his party's official opposition to his candidacy, Duke received about forty-four percent of the vote—a shockingly strong showing for a former Klan leader running against a two-term incumbent.
Encouraged by this result, Duke ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991. He made it to the runoff election against Edwin Edwards, a former governor who had been indicted on federal racketeering charges, though never convicted. The choice facing Louisiana voters inspired a famous bumper sticker: "Vote for the Crook. It's Important."
Edwards won with sixty-one percent of the vote. But Duke received nearly thirty-nine percent—more than six hundred seventy thousand votes—in a state with a significant Black population that would never support him. Among white voters, Duke's support was even higher.
The National Republican Response
Throughout Duke's campaigns, national Republican leaders repeatedly denounced him. President Bush called Duke a "charlatan" and urged Louisiana voters to reject him. The Republican National Committee refused to support his candidacies.
But these denunciations created an awkward problem. Duke's campaign themes—opposition to affirmative action, criticism of welfare programs, tough-on-crime rhetoric, hostility to immigration—overlapped substantially with standard Republican messaging. Duke was saying out loud what some Republican strategists had long communicated through coded appeals.
In 1992, Duke mounted a brief challenge to President Bush in the Republican presidential primaries. He was not a serious contender, but his candidacy embarrassed the party by forcing mainstream Republicans to explain how their positions differed from those of an avowed white supremacist.
The Mask Comes Off
By the late 1990s, Duke had abandoned any pretense of having reformed. He returned openly to promoting racist and neo-Nazi viewpoints, devoting himself to writing newsletters and later internet content about his political views.
His writings denigrated African Americans and other ethnic minorities while promoting elaborate conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the United States and the world. The brief period of claimed moderation had served its purpose—it got him elected—but it was never genuine.
With Duke's return to explicit neo-Nazism, his electoral viability collapsed. He continued running for various offices through 2016, but none of these later campaigns were competitive.
The Con Artist
Throughout the 1990s, Duke conducted a fraud that perfectly illustrated his character. He sent appeals to his political supporters claiming to be in dire financial straits, soliciting money for basic necessities. In reality, he was financially secure.
He spent the money gambling.
In December 2002, Duke pleaded guilty to federal mail fraud and tax evasion charges. He admitted to defrauding his supporters of hundreds of thousands of dollars and lying about his income on tax returns. He was sentenced to fifteen months in federal prison and served his time at a facility in Big Spring, Texas.
Even Duke's most devoted followers were marks to be exploited.
The Lasting Questions
David Duke's career raises uncomfortable questions that Americans have never fully resolved. How did a man who wore Nazi uniforms and led a Klan faction win election to public office? How did he come within striking distance of a U.S. Senate seat and a governorship? Why did appeals to racial resentment prove so effective in a suburban district that the entire Republican establishment could not overcome them?
The Anti-Defamation League called Duke "perhaps America's most well-known racist and anti-Semite." That he achieved such notoriety not through street-corner ranting but through legitimate political campaigns—winning votes, taking office, appearing on mainstream news programs—reveals something troubling about the boundaries of acceptable political discourse in America.
Duke pioneered techniques that white nationalists continue to use: presenting racism as merely "pro-white" identity politics, claiming victimhood rather than supremacy, exploiting economic anxieties to smuggle in ethnic scapegoating. His political career demonstrated that explicit white supremacy remained electorally viable in at least some American jurisdictions well into the 1990s—and that thinly disguised versions could perform even better.
The story of David Duke is not ancient history. Many of the voters who supported him in 1990 and 1991 are still voting today. The rhetorical strategies he refined have been adopted and adapted by subsequent generations of far-right politicians. And the question of where mainstream conservatism ends and white nationalism begins remains as contested and consequential as ever.