An interesting read, with the news, etc., some abroad may find this story of interest. Duke generally, has not been the vulgar-language type of racist we might think of as having existed in past times. Debating in a civil enough manner, just with the same mode of ideas as before.
HISTORY
David Duke’s America
What the former Klan leader saw at Forsyth County, and how it sparked his political rise. Introducing Slow Burn: Season 4.
By JOSH LEVIN
JUNE 10, 202010:07 AM
In the 1970s, David Duke became America’s best-known white supremacist. The twentysomething racist created a new image for the Ku Klux Klan, spewing bigotry on talk shows while decked out in a suit and tie. But by the end of the decade, he’d hit a ceiling, and he quit the KKK amid accusations he was stealing money from his followers. (Duke denied those claims, saying, as he tended to, that a Jewish group was trying to smear him.) He then pivoted to a more white-collar brand of racism, launching the National Association for the Advancement of White People. But Duke’s “white civil rights organization” attracted just 1,000 members. When the NAAWP founder went out to dinner, Tyler Bridges reported in The Rise and Fall of David Duke, he “would order the most expensive steak and then go from table to table asking for money.”
The fourth season of Slate’s podcast Slow Burn begins here, with Duke desperate to carve out a path to relevance and power. He’d find that path in 1989, in a race for the Louisiana House of Representatives. For Duke, this was the election that changed everything, that gave him the platform he needed to pursue much bigger goals. A year later, he’d receive nearly 60 percent of the white vote in Louisiana in a losing bid for the U.S. Senate. And in 1991, he’d make the runoff in his campaign to become Louisiana’s governor, nearly taking control of the state.
I was an 8-year-old kid in New Orleans when Duke won that state House race in 1989. Back then, I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would vote for a candidate who argued that black people were inferior to white people, and who said the Holocaust never happened. I’m revisiting the David Duke story today because I want to understand what I lived through, and how it helped shape the world we’re living in now. How much cover do some white Americans need to vote for a racist? How helpless were party institutions to manage Duke? And who stepped up to stop him?
More with podcast: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/david-dukes-political-rise-started-in-forsyth-county.html
