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david duke kkk

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02/03/2025 RWW

by

Kyle Mantyla

Now it appears that [Ed] Martin is positioning himself to “investigate the investigators,” as Trump and his minions have promised, perhaps looking for words in charging documents that he can twist into a false narrative of prosecutorial malfeasance on the part of the government lawyers who charged the insurrectionists.

Engineers between 19 and 24, most linked to Musk’s companies, are playing a key role as he seizes control of federal infrastructure.

The ADL has condemned appointing Darren Beattie, who invoked the antisemitic trope that George Soros orchestrated efforts to oust President Trump

At his confirmation hearing, Kash Patel — President Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI — was grilled over his association with Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer Stew Peters. On a Friday livestream, Peters denied being a white supremacist, shortly before introducing former Klan leader David Duke as a “living legend.”

We might need to update that famous saying by German Lutheran theologian Martin Niemöller. First they came for the Episcopalians … then they came for the Catholics … then they came for the Lutherans.

This week, the Idaho House of Representatives passed a “joint memorial” (i.e. resolution) of the Legislature calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark decision that in 2015 established a constitutional right to marry for same-sex couples and insisting that “the issue of marriage and enforcement of all laws pertaining to marriage” be returned to the states. The state Senate is expected to take up the memorial shortly.

"Isn't she Jewish?" an unapologetic state Rep. Nico Rios asked when reached by phone. "Why is it wrong that I state a fact?"

12 24 rww

On his Rumble and YouTube show, Fight Back, MMA fighter-turned-antisemitic podcaster Jake Shields interviewed ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. During the show, Shields denied being a “white nationalist” while declaring that “we’re doing way too much immigration,” and that “we should stay a majority-white country.”

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backs ingraham racist rant 818

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https://theintercept.com/2019/11/30/david-duke-and-his-twitter-nazis-got-mad-at-me-twitter-took-their-side/

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https://archive.thinkprogress.org/how-russia-wooed-american-white-supremacists-and-how-it-fell-apart-8a8cf6e3b814/

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Russian attempts to woo American white supremacists have backfired

A quarter-century after American neo-fascists began looking to Russia for support, the relationship is on its heels.

CASEY MICHEL

APR 20, 2018,

The National Rifle Association (NRA) doesn’t want to talk about its relationship with Russia. For months, the gun lobby has avoided questions from lawmakers on its ties to Russian officials specifically sanctioned by Washington — all the more after the NRA’s primary contact in Russia, Alexander Torshin, was named in the latest round of U.S. sanctions.

But the NRA is only one facet of a nexus of strange links between the American far-right and those close to the Kremlin. From Christian fundamentalists swooning for Russian President Vladimir Putin, to American secessionists repeatedly traveling to Moscow, to far-right media mouthpieces finding a home on Russian propaganda outlets, these ties have only grown — and grown more notorious — over the past few years.

Indeed, no foreign entity has provided as much support for these far-right causes recently as those in Moscow, where those with conspicuous ties to the Kremlin worked to cultivate and coalesce these American movements that, in the age of Trump, have gained new credence.

[A photo shared by Russian Deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin (right), then under U.S. sanctions, which appears to show him standing alongside the NRA's Joe Gregory, Pete Brownell, and David Keene in Moscow in Dec. 2015. (CREDIT: TWITTER)]

The NRA tried to dodge questions about its ties to Russia, but Congress isn’t done yet

Sen. Wyden sends another letter to the NRA after the gun advocacy group dodged his previous queries about ties to Russia.

However, the recent scrutiny on the relationship between Russian officials and the NRA demonstrates how this attempt to make inroads with far-right groups in the U.S. can backfire. And that backlash is even starker when it comes to the cooperation Kremlin-linked figures have pursued with American white supremacists. After an embarrassing series of setbacks in 2018, America’s young white supremacists — the new generation of white nationalists who burst forth during the Trump campaign — are on their heels, battered by bad press, and, in certain cases, facing significant jail time.

The ties between American white nationalists and Russians extend beyond the past few years. And those ties haven’t produced anywhere near the success many expected. In fact, over the past few months, they have effectively imploded.

Great White North

Despite reports that Putin’s intimates routinely referred to former President Barack Obama as the n-word or “monkey,” American white supremacists had connected with Russians long before his presidency. The first significant ties between white supremacists and neo-fascists in Russia and the U.S. can be traced to the immediate aftermath of World War II, when a number of American far-right figures — including noted fascist Harold Keith Thompson — built up contacts with Soviet agents.

KGB operatives also recruited Americans in the 1970s to deface synagogues in Washington and New York, while further paying them to “desecrate Jewish cemeteries,” as one KGB general wrote in his memoirs.

Since Vladimir Putin's return to power in 2012, the Western far-right has looked to Russia for support. (CREDIT: AP/MIKE STEWART)]

Inside Russia’s alliance with white nationalists across the globe

Given that the Soviet Union was the great boogeyman for much of the American far-right, these initial connections were only explored to a limited extent. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Russian fascists surged amidst the Soviet rubble, American white supremacists took a fresh look at Moscow.

The first, most prominent neo-fascist to travel to a newly independent Russia appears to be Lyndon LaRouche. A font of anti-Semitic conspiracy, LaRouche found fertile ground in Russia.

ACCORDING TO HIS MAGAZINE, LYNDON LAROUCHE’S IDEAS REACHED MOSCOW IN A TIME OF “TROUBLES.”

In October 1992, LaRouche’s Schiller Institute joined with the Russian State Humanitarian University to organize a conference on “Alternative Approaches to Economic Reform.” As LaRouche’s magazine would later relate, his ideas had “reach[ed] Moscow in time of troubles,” with his teachings, according to one conference participant, “open[ing] for us a new world.” The American fascist even managed at one point to speak in front of the entire Russian parliament.

LaRouche also partnered with Sergei Glazyev, a one-time Minister of External Economic Relations of the Russian Federation who later joined the opposition against President Boris Yeltsin.Glazyev’s patronage, as researcher Anton Shekhovtsov would write, allowed LaRouche to become “an opinion maker and commentator on political and economic issues in Russia — a status that LaRouche could not enjoy in his home country where he has remained a fringe political figure.”

Russia presents “an unmatched opportunity to help protect the longevity of the white race,” said David Duke.

LaRouche was soon superseded in Russia by another American white supremacist, however — one who gained newfound prominence decades later during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. It’s unclear how David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan leader and anti-Semitic white supremacist extraordinaire, first ended up in Russia. Regardless of how he landed there, Duke says that his five years in Russia were some of the most productive in his life.

Duke sold his books in the Russian parliament and attended numerous white supremacist conferences in the country, often as the lone American representative. Toward the turn of the century, Duke began saying that Russia presented “an unmatched opportunity to help protect the longevity of the white race.” He clarified that Moscow — a city he said had “the largest number of [w]hite people of any city in the entire world” — was the “key to white survival.”

Along the way, Duke brought other American neo-fascists to Moscow, including Preston Wiginton, a Texas white supremacist who courted Russian skinheads in his own right.

Duke never managed to build the official ties LaRouche amassed. However, one photo hints at the types of audiences Duke attained while in Russia. In a black suit and maroon tie, Duke stands next to a man with a scraggly beard, a dark blazer, and drooping eyes — a man who would, in years to come, be referred to as “Putin’s Brain,” and who would become one of the primary nodes between Russian circles and American white nationalists.

David Duke (left) and Alexander Dugin (right) pose in an undated photo.

DAVID DUKE (LEFT) AND ALEXANDER DUGIN (RIGHT) POSE IN AN UNDATED PHOTO.]

The rise of Eurasianism

Before detailing the features and fascism coursing Alexander Dugin’s history and writings, a necessary caveat: It’s easy to overstate the importance of Dugin, the man in the undated photo with Duke. Despite the catchy descriptors, Dugin’s direct ties to Putin appear, at best, scant. We know of only one official meeting between the two, in 2000, shortly after Putin rose to the presidency.

Still, that one meeting paid dividends. “Dugin refuses to discuss the meeting,” wrote Charles Clover, a journalist who has covered Dugin in depth. “[B]ut it would change his career. Soon there were sponsors, contacts, and open doors.”

While Putin may have kept Dugin at an arm’s length, security officials had no problem catering to him, and allowing him to teach a new generation of Russian military officers. As his profile rose, Dugin began lecturing at Russia’s General Staff Academy and his material was eventually assigned to every member of the academy.

Alexander Dugin, the leader of the Eurasian Movement, left, and his supporters sing during a rally of Russian nationalist groups in central Moscow, Sunday, April 8, 2007. CREDIT: AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev]

The frightening common ground between a Trump adviser and white nationalism’s favorite philosopher

Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, sees Dugin’s ideology as an ally against liberalism.

Much of that comity from Russian officials stemmed from Dugin’s theories, which center primarily on “Eurasianism,” itself a geopolitical theory that was little more than soft cover for Russian imperialism.

Dugin’s theories are buried in fabricated history. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder notes, Dugin is a “[c]ontemporary Russian fascist,” one whose “references are German Nazis and postwar West European fascists.” Dugin’s primary theory, positing Russia as a country eternally at war with the U.S., builds upon the work of Lev Gumilev, himself a resounding fraud.

To be sure, Dugin’s theories were easy to mock. As Clover wrote, Eurasianists’ theories “are barely credible and are best understood as a sort of metaphor.” But as one researcher on the Russian right said about Dugin’s 1997 Foundations of Geopolitics, “There has probably not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period which has exerted a comparable influence on Russian military, police, and statist foreign policy elites.”

Alexander Dugin, the leader of the Eurasian Movement (far right) takes part in a Russian nationalists’ rally in support of Serbia in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, April 27, 2008. CREDIT: AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel]

The white nationalist movement’s favorite philosopher

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Dugin’s connections to America’s racist circuit is well established.

For many in Moscow, particularly within the Russian security services, Dugin’s theories offered a way back for the Kremlin and Russian imperialism writ large. Ignoring Dugin’s own fascism — he named his alter ego after a Nazi official in charge of paranormal research, after all — officials during the Putin years lapped up Dugin’s teachings. During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin appeared to be doing little more than following Dugin’s own ideas for Ukrainian fracture.

As Marlene Laruelle, a professor at George Washington University, wrote, “The influence of [Dugin’s] personality and his works must not be underestimated.”

A new world

In 2014, Russia appeared ascendant, boasting a successful Olympic Games, a stronger post-2008 economic recovery than many Western states, and the perceived ability to out-dance the U.S. at every step, from Edward Snowden to events in Syria.

After the annexation of Crimea, nationalists — white nationalists, especially — across the U.S. looked to Putin for guidance. He was, said one, now the head of the “last great White empire.” All the while, Dugin acted as the lynch pin binding Russia’s growing ties with the Western far-right.

These new ties between Moscow, Russian nationalists, and America’s neo-fascists over the past few years centered on the two most prominent young American white supremacists the 21st century has produced.

Richard Spencer’s wife called Dugin a “well-educated scholar” with a “rare intellectual caliber.”

The first is Richard Spencer, the infamously dubbed “dapper white nationalist.” In 2014, Spencer managed to organize a conference in Budapest, Hungary, for like-minded fascists. “The Future of Europe,” he called it. The keynote speaker was slated to be none other than Dugin.

Unfortunately for them both, Hungary barred Dugin’s entry, citing sanctions, while Spencer was detained and eventually expelled from the country. But shortly thereafter, Spencer would be writing for Dugin’s site, sharing Dugin’s thoughts with his own followers, and pushing pro-Russian policies.

The purpose and meaning of the alt-right movement https://t.co/P0iQHMfIhV

— Alexandr Dugin (@A_G_Dugin) December 19, 2016

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While Buzzfeed in 2014 reported that Spencer said he knew Dugin “personally,” it’s still unclear how Dugin first came across Spencer’s radar: Spencer doesn’t speak Russian, and Dugin’s English remains broken.

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However, in the final days of the American presidential campaign, a series of clues emerged tying the two together.It turned out that Spencer had married a woman named Nina Kouprianova, who had, over the few years prior, pushed a steady stream of pro-Russia, and pro-Dugin, material to her own followers.

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Originally from the Soviet Union, Kouprianova — writing under the name “Nina Byzantina” — had whitewashed Putin’s regime at every turn, appearing on Russian propaganda networks as an “independent scholar” and claiming that Russia had “chosen the path… of healthy debate.” (Spencer, as it is, also appeared on RT multiple times, described by the channel as the editor of an “online culture journal.”)

Kouprianova also acted as one of Dugin’s translators. With her fluency in both Russian and English, she helped introduce Dugin’s writings and theories into English — some of which would later be published via Spencer’s own publishing house. Rather than point to his fascism, chauvinism, or sheer fraudulence, Kouprianova claimed Dugin was a “well-educated scholar” with a “rare intellectual caliber.” He was, she said, “one of the greatest minds of our time.”

All of this, as Spencer began referring to Russia as the “sole white power in the world.”

Traditional voices

But the Spencer-Kouprianova tandem wasn’t the only pair tying directly back to Dugin, or recruiting American white supremacists toward the Kremlin’s perceived court philosopher. Matthew Heimbach acted as Russian nationalists’ other twin American pole, around whom people like Dugin could expand their following.

As the presidential campaign started, Heimbach was already one of the leading figures among the young white supremacists backing Trump; in 2016, he was arrested for shoving an anti-Trump protester at a Trump rally.

But where Spencer relied on his supposed intellect, Heimbach preferred grassroots organizing — acting, in a sense, as the brawn to Spencer’s brain. By 2015, Heimbach had decided the he would form his own organization, which he would call the Traditionalist Worker Party.

The Traditionalist Worker Party didn’t hide its bigotry. In time, it would grow into a “major energizing and motivating factor for young racists,” as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Ryan Lenz told ThinkProgress. And at its launch party, there was only one logical voice to christen them: Dugin.

“I see Russia as kind of the axis for nationalists,” Heimbach said.

In a speech — this time by video, as Dugin was barred from entering the U.S. — Dugin issued a “common message” to his “American friends,” exhorting Heimbach and his followers to success. “I’m very glad that I can address you,” Dugin said. “The actual modern world is losing its identity — the cultur[e], the civilization, is in great danger, and I think, maybe, it’s the greatest danger in all our human history.”

According to Heimbach, Dugin’s speech was “amazingly well-received, and exciting for the American white nationalist movement.” (Dugin would later present a similar speech at Texas A&M University, this time at the behest of none other than neo-Nazi Wiginton.)

Heimbach didn’t stop with Dugin. Soon thereafter, he announced plans to travel to Russia for the second annual conference — organized by the Russian Imperial Movement, itself an outgrowth of efforts from Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin — focused on gathering leaders of the West’s white nationalists under one roof in St. Petersburg. (The 2015 conference had featured, among dozens of others, a former KKK lawyer and white supremacist Jared Taylor, one of Spencer’s ideological mentors.)

“I see Russia as kind of the axis for nationalists,” Heimbach said. During the Soviet period, he added, “there was the Comintern, the Communist International. And in the modern era, it’s almost like a nationalist version — or the Traditionalist International.”

The conference was postponed, but in 2017, Heimbach welcomed a representative from the Russian Imperial Movement to the U.S. — the first summit on American soil between an American white supremacist and an official representative of a notorious Russian nationalist movement. The Russian Imperial Movement, apparently impressed with Heimbach’s hospitality, said that, moving forward, “the task is to share the experience of political [and] information warfare,” as well as “joint squad tactics training.”

[CREDIT: Facebook

Russian, American white nationalists raise their flags in Washington]

“When we went to the White House, we took a photo with a Russian imperial flag,” Heimbach told ThinkProgress. “Hopefully before too long, when we’re able to meet in D.C., it will be on the terms of the Russian Imperial Movement [and] the new imperialist tsarist Russia meeting with the delegates from a free and independent white homeland.”

Implosion

In late 2016, everything seemed right: for Russia, for America’s white supremacists, for the marriage between the two. Trump had been elected, promising good times and glad tidings to Moscow and the young white nationalists buoying his campaign. The future appeared bright.

As Dugin reveled to extreme right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, “Anti-Americanism is over! Now the people of free America, free Russia, all anti-globalists of the world, should build a new world — a new architecture!”

A year later, however, that bright future has dimmed.

Trump still refrains from criticizing Putin, and has undercut American efforts at propping up human and civil rights globally. But his election hasn’t proven to be nearly the panacea Russia expected, as Ukraine, Syria, and the ongoing sanctions regime illustrate.

For the young white supremacists riding Trump’s coattails, matters appear even worse.

Matthew Heimbach, along with Richard Spencer, have suddenly left young white supremacists without a clear leader.CREDIT: GETTY / SCOTT OLSON]

With their leadership knocked out, young white supremacists face a directionless future

Following the collapse of Richard Spencer and Matthew Heimbach, the question of leadership rocks young white supremacists.

After last summer’s violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, membership among the young white supremacist cohort became more toxic than ever before, with any number of websites and platforms kicking off Spencer, Heimbach, and their ilk. Suddenly, no one showed up at Spencer’s events — at his nationwide tours, at his college appearances. He was, as Trump’s first year closed, now a bully without a pulpit. In March, he announced he would be rethinking his entire strategy, slinking back into the shadows.

Heimbach’s fall, meanwhile, has been even more spectacular. He was recently arrested in his trailer after — in a twist as ludicrous as any over the past few years — having an affair with his mother-in-law, and battering his father-in-law when the latter found out. It was a bizarre ending for a man ThinkProgress had dubbed the “most important white supremacist” of 2016. Given a prior arrest, Heimbach is facing the prospect of significant jail time. And his Traditionalist Worker Party, by all appearances, is no more.

White nationalists and mothers-in-law are never a good mix. CREDIT: THE WASHINGTON POST]

Leading white supremacist arrested following affair with mother-in-law

Battery charges and the likelihood of a lengthy prison sentence now await Matthew Heimbach.

And then there’s Dugin: The man who once had the Kremlin’s ear — or so he, and many, would claim — is out of a job, following his pro-genocidal comments aimed at Ukrainians. It’s unclear how, exactly, Dugin makes a living. But any interest in his teachings has effectively dried up.

As has Russia’s interests in American white supremacists — for the time being, at least. Dating from at least 2014, the ties seem to have peaked toward the end of 2016. But Trump’s victory, for both, appears increasingly hollow. And the dreams of a Traditionalist International, like the Comintern before it, appears all but dead.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/russia-accusations-a-distraction-from-tulsi-gabbards-actual-troubling-ties

no lnx docs?

Russia accusations a distraction From Tulsi Gabbard’s actual troubling ties

Written by Ari Paul / FAIR October 26, 2019

When 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (Campaign HQ, 10/17/19) accused Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a long-shot Democratic primary candidate, of being a Russian-groomed foil, the media reverberations were sweeping. Coverage of the row prompted more coverage, with some takes defending Gabbard’s moral compass and others prolonging the obsession with the idea that Russia is interfering in American politics.

Lost in the noise is the reality that Gabbard’s most troubling attribute is her documented connection to the far-right Hindu nationalist, or Hindutva, movement known as Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent organization of India’s ruling BJP party.

There is no evidence that Gabbard, who rarely polls above 3%, is any kind of Russian agent, plucked by Moscow to sway the 2020 election toward the reelection of Donald Trump. But those silly accusations eventually mix into the media as they look to explain how an idiosyncratic candidate like Gabbard can gain the support not only of anti-war leftists who see her as a champion of nonintervention, but also of far-right white nationalists like David Duke and Richard Spencer.

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/former-kkk-imperial-wizard-david-duke-doxxed-anonymous

stormer

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tucker carlson and horowitz use dd as cover: i disagree w/ DD thus i am not a racist? 7/18

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David Duke

He is also known for his avid pursuit of women and, especially, money — so much so, in fact, that he finally went to prison in 2002 for using cash raised to support white supremacist causes to pay for his own gambling and home improvements. Since then, Duke has become an itinerant anti-Semitic salesman, traveling regularly to Europe to sell his books while his latest white supremacist organization, EURO, remains almost entirely inactive.

In His Own Words

"Racial idealism, or racialism, is the idea that a nation's greatest resource is the quality of its people. It means examining all questions of government on the basis of whether the proposed measure is good or bad for our race. … Neither Communism, Capitalism, nor any other materialistic doctrine can save our race; our only racial salvation lies in a White racial alliance uniting our people with the common cause of racial idealism."

— September 1970 article in The Racialist

"When it's America's time to go totalitarian,we should pray that we get a Kemal [Ataturk, former president of Turkey who modernized that country in the 1900s], who was more aware than any other great public figure of modern times that national resurrection depends first and foremost on the distillation process of racial separation."

— 1984 article in the NAAWP News

"In modern America, Jews lead the effort to de-Christianize America. ... They share little of the heritage of the Old Testament people called the Israelites. … Communism and Zionism were born from the same Jewish soul. ... Jewish power is ubiquitous. ... It is not a [Jewish] conspiracy. It is simply two nations — Jew and Gentile — in a state of ethnic war."

— From Duke's 1998 autobiography My Awakening

"Israel makes the Nazi state look very, very moderate."

— 2005 interview with Syrian television

“Are facts racist too? Are white parents racist because they don’t want their children to go to school where their children are ten times more likely to be robbed or abused, intimidated, beaten, or even killed or raped? A school where obscenity, drugs and violence and gangster rap are the dominant culture? Where sexual intimidation, obscene or crude language, or even sexual assault is pervasive? Schools that academically resemble more the third world than America? I know some of you don’t worry about the white children in those environments. It’s considered noble to concern yourself with the well being of minorities even at the farthest ends of the earth. But if you’re white, and you concern yourself with the well being of your own people, even of your own children, you’re deemed racist. The real racism today is not by white people, it’s against white people.”

— David Duke, “Will the White Race Survive?” June 22, 2010

“Jewish groups lead the effort for Europe and America to take a catastrophic flood of non-European refugees slash terrorists slash rapists slash criminals.”

— David Duke, “Why the Jewish Elite Hates Donald Trump,” March 21, 2016

Criminal History

Duke was charged in 1972 with soliciting funds for the George Wallace for President campaign and then illegally pocketing the proceeds. He was also charged with breaking a New Orleans ordinance prohibiting filling glass containers with flammable liquid. Both charges eventually were dropped. In 1976, Duke was convicted of inciting a riot and refusing to disperse. The latter charge was overturned by Louisiana State Court, while he received a suspended sentence, a $500 fine and six months of probation on the inciting charge. In 1987, Duke was charged with reckless conduct and blocking a highway during an anti-integration march in Cumming, Ga. He was given a $55 fine and a one-year suspended prison sentence. In 2002, after spending two years abroad avoiding a feared arrest, Duke agreed to return to the United States andplead guilty to felony mail and tax fraud charges. He served 15 months in a federal prison and was fined $10,000.

Background

Since first making headlines for his neo-Nazi activities as an undergraduate at Louisiana State University (LSU) at Baton Rouge in the early 1970s, David Duke has built an international reputation as the American face of white nationalism and pseudo-academic anti-Semitism. In his various incarnations, Duke has been a neo-Nazi, a major Klan leader, a slick far-right politician and — most recently — a professional lecturer and author traveling the world to warn of a global Jewish conspiracy and seek the separation of the races. After winning a surprise upset in a Louisiana House of Representatives race in 1989, Duke got the attention of the world when, during the 1991 Louisiana governor's contest, he forced a runoff with the Democratic candidate, Edwin Edwards. Although he ultimately lost a fairly close race, that campaign marked the apex of Duke's career as a mainstream politician.

Duke was born in 1950 into a middle-class home in Tulsa, Okla. His father was an engineer for Shell Oil who took his family to the Netherlands before returning to settle in the all-white suburb of Gentilly Woods, La. As a child, Duke's home life was troubled. His mother battled alcoholism and pill addiction and his father traveled frequently. At school, Duke was known as a bookish loner and was taunted, he says, with chants such as "Puke Duke."

Duke's entrance into the world of far-right politics came at age 14, when he attended a local meeting of the Citizen Councils of America (CCA), an anti-integration group known informally as the White Citizens' Councils. He was soon reading racist tracts such as Race and Reason: A Yankee View by arch-segregationist Carlton Putnam, who argued for separation of the races and the genetic superiority of whites. Putnam's book, Duke would later write, "began my intellectual odyssey."

The adolescent Duke immersed himself in books about Nazism and the Third Reich. His increasingly pro-Nazi speeches at CCA meetings drew concern and disdain from less extreme members, most of whom were far more anti-black than anti-Jewish. When his father sent Duke to a military academy after his sophomore year of high school, he was caught with a Nazi flag and his entire class was punished. In retribution, his classmates beat him badly. The following year he returned to public school, where he argued loudly against lowering the flag when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and continued to proclaim the virtues of the Third Reich.

At LSU, Duke quickly earned a reputation as a loudmouthed neo-Nazi. He hung posters of Nazi officials and soldiers on his dorm room walls, telling acquaintances that George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the post-war American Nazi Party, was "the greatest American who ever lived." More important for his future development, he began taking advantage of a new venue on campus — "Free Speech Alley," a busy hangout where students were invited to stand atop a soapbox and declaim on issues of social and political import. While most students at Free Speech Alley spoke in favor of civil rights and against the Vietnam War, Duke issued daily harangues against integration and Jews. When the radical lawyer William Kunstler visited the LSU campus in 1970, Duke protested, carrying a sign that said "Gas the Chicago 7" (a reference to a group of anti-war leftists Kunstler had defended) and wearing a faux Nazi uniform, complete with swastika armband. Such activities kept him from being promoted by ROTC, even though he came in first in his class. 

Also in 1970, Duke founded the White Youth Alliance, a student group affiliated with the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP), a hard-line descendant of Rockwell's American Nazi Party.As a campus activist, he attempted to recruit his peers by tapping into the radical sentiments of the times. "Nazis also want to smash the system," he told his fellow students.

After a year visiting his father in Laos, Duke returned to Louisiana and graduated in 1974, whereupon he founded the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan (KKKK).

As national leader of the new organization, Duke achieved a remarkable shift in Klan targeting — from blacks to Jews — by recruiting NSWPP members such as Alabama hardliner Don Black. This effective Nazification of the Klan became apparent in the obsession with Jews found in the KKKK organ Crusader, which began to share bylines with the NSWPP's White Power.

Duke's attempt to mainstream his Klan led to a steep rise in membership. By opening up the organization to women, Catholics and teens, he expanded its ranks. Also crucial was Duke's successful courtship of the major media.That courtship began in 1974, when Duke challenged popular talk-show host Tom Snyder to invite him onto his nightly show on NBC. Snyder accepted the challenge and, at the age of 23, Duke made his first appearance on national television.

During the next few years, Duke would score several major coups by getting the media to cover Klan actions that were little more than stunts. These included "Freedom Rides North" during battles over school busing in Boston (only a small handful of Klansmen actually made it to Boston) and a much-hyped "Klan Border Watch" in Southern California that involved fewer than a dozen Klansman.

Duke's stewardship of the Klan faltered on his inability to retain top leaders. Frustrated by what they saw as Duke's boundless ego, his well-known womanizing, and repeated accusations that he was embezzling Klan funds, several high-level resignations crippled the organization in the late 1970s. These included the departure of Tom Metzger, who left the KKKK in 1979 and remains highly critical of Duke today. Metzger has called his former colleague a fraud, an egomaniac and a ripoff artist. Many former Duke colleagues continue to make similar charges.

In 1979, Duke began to distance himself from the Klan, running for a Louisiana state Senate seat as a conservative Democrat and winning 26% of the vote (9,897 votes). In 1980, he also made a halfhearted run for president.

As a professional racist activist and perennial failed politician, Duke needed either organizational dues or campaign contributions to pay his bills. In 1981, he founded a new organization, the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP) — a "Klan without the sheets," in the words of Duke biographer Tyler Bridges. In building up the NAAWP, he would denigrate the Klan as consisting of simple-minded "nigger haters" with no positive agenda or intellectual heft. But this didn't stop Duke from wooing old Klansmen into his new organization.

Although the NAAWP allowed Duke to make a modest living, the early to mid-1980s was a period in the relative political wilderness for Duke, with little media interest in his activities. Between 1980 and 1987, Duke would appear on national television only once — a stark contrast to his days as the national face of the Klan during its comeback in the 1970s. During this time, his ideology absorbed a bizarre component in the form of the New Age human potential movement, which Duke embraced in the 1980s. He also gambled heavily (Duke has a longstanding and well-known passion for craps) and began dabbling in the stock market. In the mid-1980s, membership for the NAAWP was stagnant at around 1,000.

In 1986, Duke visited Austria and the Mauthausen concentration camp. The visit deepened his interest in Holocaust revisionism, a field in which he today touts himself as an expert. 

The following year, Duke had a series of cosmetic surgeries, including a nose reduction, a chin enlargement, and a "chemical peel." He would soon dye his hair and shave his mustache. A well-covered appearance by Duke at an anti-integration rally in Forsyth County, Ga., helped put the "new" David Duke on the map that same year.

In 1988, Duke ran for president again. He claimed to lead his "Sunshine Coalition" in opposition to Jesse Jackson's "Rainbow Coalition." Duke won less than 5% of the vote in Louisiana and a negligible amount nationally.

The following year, Duke won his first elected office in a special election for the Louisiana State House. Running as an anti-tax, anti-busing Republican, Duke toned down his anti-Semitism and dodged questions about his neo-Nazi and Klan past. Fueling support for his campaign was fierce opposition to eliminating the state's highly popular homestead exemption, which eliminated property taxes for homes assessed at under $75,000. In unusually high turnout for a special election, Duke won 33% of the vote to his opponent John Treen's 19%. In the runoff that followed, Duke beat Treen by just 227 votes. Among the legislation unsuccessfully proposed by Duke while in office were bills to raise penalties for drug offenders in housing projects and to require drug testing for recipients of welfare and Medicaid.

In 1990, Duke announced his candidacy in the Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat. In the end, he raised an astonishing $2.4 million and won 607,391 votes (about 60% of the white Republican vote), but lost the primary. Undaunted, he ran in 1991 against incumbent Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, a scandal-dogged, Huey Long-style populist. Although the race was considered too close to safely call weeks before the election, a weak performance by Duke in the second debate — and political work including the famous pro-Edwards bumper sticker, "Vote for the crook. It's important" — helped tilt the balance to Edwards, who beat Duke by 22 percentage points in the Democratic primary vote. (Still, Duke once again took more than half of the white vote, racking up 671,009 votes in total.)

Duke almost immediately began laying the groundwork for another presidential campaign, in 1992, but white nationalist Pat Buchanan stole much of his thunder by running to the right of George Bush. Duke had virtually no impact on the overall race and the media showed scant interest in his campaign.

In 1998, after several years largely out of the political limelight, Duke published his autobiography, My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding, signifying a return to public anti-Semitism and racist activism. In 2000, while raising funds for Buchanan's ill-starred presidential campaign on the Reform Party ticket, Duke formed NOFEAR, or the National Organization For European American Rights. The following year he changed the name to EURO (European-American Unity and Rights Organization) because a clothing line already owned the name NOFEAR and was threatening a lawsuit. EURO remains Duke's primary organizing and fundraising vehicle, along with his books and personal website.

In 2002, more than two years after telling a girlfriend that he was leaving the country to avoid arrest, Duke made a deal to return to the United States and plead guilty to tax evasion and mail fraud; he was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Substantiating movement criticisms of him going back 30 years, Duke admitted to raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from his followers under false pretenses and spending the money on luxury goods, home improvement and gambling.

In 2004, David Duke published Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish Question. The manuscript, drawn heavily from Duke's Ph.D. dissertation, was written for Ukraine's Interregional Academy of Personnel Management and entitled "Zionism as a Form of Ethnic Supremacism." It has been translated into nine languages.  The university, also known as MAUP, is a center of anti-Semitic teaching.

Duke has found an audience for the book abroad, specifically in the former republics of the Soviet Union and in the Middle East. Since the end of the Cold War, Duke and far-right nationalists in Russia have held each other in especially high regard. Duke traveled to Russia for the first time in September 1995. There he met Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the bombastic neofascist. With his legal problems mounting at home, Duke brought his sales pitch back to Russia in August 1999. While in Moscow, he befriended several anti-Semitic leaders, including Gen. Albert Makashov, head of the ultranationalist wing of the Communist Party, who in 1998 proposed to murder all Jews ("I will round up all the Yids and send them to the next world!").Today, Duke spends much of his time as an international racist dilettante traveling in Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere to participate in junkets such as the June 2006 Moscow conference on "The White World's Future," where he praised his host city for having "the largest number of White people of any city in the entire world."

In April, 2009, it was reported that Duke, who had arrived in the Czech Republic at the invitation of Czech neo-Nazis to deliver three lectures in Prague and Brno to promote his book My Awakening, was arrested on suspicion of "denying or approving of the Nazi genocide and other Nazi crimes," and other rights violations charges punishable by up to three years in prison in the Czech Republic. The Czech police released Duke the following day and ordered him to leave the country by midnight. Duke was scheduled to give a lecture at Charles University in Prague but it was canceled after university officials learned that neo-Nazis were planning to attend.

In 2009, it was reported that Duke was living in Salzburg, Austria, on Lake Zeller, only the latest of the many European homes he has had since emerging from prison after his 2002 plea bargain. From Austria, he ran an Internet business taking and selling hand-tinted, postcard-like photographs of wildlife and landscapes and describing himself, in part, as an “artist.” Duke wrote of his new home, "I'm not in Austria for any political activities. I just come to Austria to relax – the mountains are beautiful. The Austrian Alps are just beautiful. There's beauty all over the world."

In 2010, Duke mulled a run for president on the Republican ticket but did not follow through. An article on his website claimed that after he made a video entitled “David Duke Speaks to the Tea Party,” Duke was urged by “thousands” of Tea Party activists to run. His program included calls to prosecute “the criminal International banks,” end affirmative action, and “no more foreign control over our foreign policy by the Israeli lobby.”

In 2011, Duke was arrested in Cologne, Germany, while on his way to address a group of rightwing extremists. German authorities detained him for a few days before deporting him back to Austria. The former Klan leader, they said, was “not entitled to stay in Germany” because of a travel ban in an unspecified European country, probably Switzerland.

In protest, Duke issued a self-righteous “Open Letter to the World” to set the record straight on his allegedly innocuous “basic beliefs and principles.” He was not a white supremacist but rather a supporter of every people’s “right to preserve their freedom and their identity.” He was not a Holocaust denier but “a Holocaust exposer.” He is also a man who, at Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2006 Holocaust denial conference, called the Holocaust “the device used as the pillar of Zionist imperialism, Zionist aggression, Zionist terror and Zionist murder.”

In late 2013, Duke was expelled from Italy after a court there deemed him “socially dangerous” and said he was trying to organize a Europe-wide neo-Nazi group. After entering the country in 2011 under “false pretenses” with a student visa, authorities near his home in the northern town of Belluno had moved to expel him, but Duke appealed. An Italian court ruled, however, that because Duke had been banned by Switzerland in 2009 (a decision that applied to the 26 European countries bound by the Schengen Treaty, but that was not widely known and only discovered belatedly by the Italians), he was also legally forbidden to enter or remain in Italy.

In recent years, Duke has remained close to Don Black, proprietor of Stormfront and Duke’s former Klan underboss in Alabama. (In fact, Black is married to Duke’s former wife, who now goes by Chloe Black.) He gave major speeches at Stormfront gatherings hosted by Black in 2011, 2012 and 2013 in Tennessee.

In January 2015, Duke was back in the national news after a Louisiana blogger revealed that U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), then the House Majority Whip and about to be reelected to the same post, had given a speech to Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) in 2002. Scalise claimed, improbably as a local politician and former neighbor of Duke’s, that he had no idea what EURO was or its connection to Duke, and survived politically. But the story gave Duke one more shot at appearing on major media, with interviews on CNN and Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor.” On both shows, he claimed he had “never supported white supremacism,” but it appeared that absolutely no one, including his interviewers, believed him.

Later that same year,Duke was challenged to a debate by Alex Jones, the primary voice at InfoWars, a popular conspiracy based radio show, over Duke’s criticism of Jones’s delusional prophecies about FEMA concentration camps. Duke, who accused Jones of attempting to stifle political involvement among his listeners, was allowed to play clips during the two-hour debate to support his arguments.

After about an hour, the interview went predictably sideways over Duke’s anti-Semitism. Jones eventually deleted the video of the interview after Duke received overwhelming support from not only the predictably sympathetic white supremacists and anti-Semites, but also Jones’s own fan base. Duke took to his website to post several videos.

The attention hungry Duke made national headlines in February 2016 with an endorsement of Donald Trump for president. During his online show, Duke encouraged listeners to “get active” and “call the Republican Party … call Donald Trump’s headquarter, volunteer.” With typical hubris, Duke claimed that Trump had chosen his chief campaign issues from Duke’s own political career – chiefly immigration, national defense, and foreign policy. According to Duke, “Voting against Donald Trump, at this point, is really treason to your heritage.”

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https://www.splcenter.org/20140401/white-homicide-worldwide

A Lifetime of Hate

In many respects, Don Black resembles the prototypical killers that seem to be drawn to Stormfront. Black, 60, is a frustrated, unemployed white adult male living with an ideologically estranged wife, Chloe Hardin Black, who has publicly denounced the racist movement. She is the sole provider in the household.

Black spends hours every day online, utterly convinced of the supremacy of his race while expressing frustration with the inferiority of his outcomes. He occasionally complains about the sociopaths Stormfront seems to attract or laments that his only son, Derek, recently publicly denounced white supremacy.

A young Don Black (seen here in Klan robe) has known most key racist leaders in his life, including David Duke (in tie); Jerry Ray, the brother of Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray; and Joseph Paul Franklin, a racist serial killer who was executed last year.(The Tennessean / Jimmy Ellis)

Black’s 46-plus years of involvement with the racist movement started at the age of 15, when, like the fratricidal Ian Andrew Bishop, he began distributing racist fliers around his high school. That he was involved with a subculture of sociopaths would become quite obvious, given who Black met while on his very first “movement” road trip at the age of 16.

In the summer of 1969, Black traveled to a World Union of National Socialists meeting in Arlington, Va., in the back seat of a beat-up Chevy Chevelle, sitting next to a 19-year-old James Clayton Vaughn for more than 12 hours. Neo-Nazi and soon-to-be Klan leader David Duke was driving.As Black recollects, Vaughn was the very first person he met in the “white nationalist” movement to which he would devote his life.

Joseph Paul Franklin (AP Images/ Al Behrman)

Vaughn, who would change his name to Joseph Paul Franklin, later became probably themost prolific racist serial killer in U.S. history, targeting interracial couples and killing as many as 20 people in several states between 1977 and 1980 (he was convicted of eight murders). Franklin was executed last year.

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Black’s exposure to the worst of the racist movement continued the following year. He spent his 17th birthday in the hospital with a bullet wound in his chest after being caught trying to steal the mailing list of the racist National States Rights Party. The shooter, Jerry Ray, was the brother of Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray. Jerry Ray was prosecuted for attempted murder but acquitted after claiming self-defense. Black pleaded guilty and received one year of probation. 

Jerry Ray

By 1975, Black was a rising leader in the Alabama wing of David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,a position he kept for the next 12 years. But his ambitions went beyond the robe and hood. On April 27, 1981, Black was arrested with nine other white supremacists as they prepared to board a yacht to invade the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica, oust its black-run government, and transform it into a “white state.”

Black’s resulting three-year federal prison sentence was time well spent taking classes in computer programming. He eventually set up a dial-up bulletin board service for the radical right and, in March 1995, that service evolved into Stormfront.org, the Web’s first and best-known hate site. Black saw clearly that with this new technology, white supremacists might finally bypass the mainstream media and political apparatus he felt had long restricted the racists’ message.

“The potential of the Net for organizations and movements such as ours is enormous,” Black told a reporter in 1996. “We’re reaching tens of thousands of people who never before had access to our point of view.”

He was right.

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In January 2002, Stormfront had a mere 5,000 members. But only a year later, membership had more than doubled to 11,000; and a year after that, in early 2004, it had reached 23,000. By this year, membership had hit about 286,000 registered users, though most were inactive. These numbers didn’t include the many people who simply read Stormfront postings without actually joining up (becoming a member allows one to post messages and also to view personal information.) Stormfront also became home to other hate sites that shared its servers and advertised their wares.

After a life basically monetizing ethnic hatred and death, Don Black, who walks with a cane from a 2008 stroke, has become increasingly philosophical. On the Stormfront page eulogizing serial killer Franklin, he wrote: “I may be the only person here who actually knew Franklin. I’ve been contemplating how my life would have been different had he remained the only ‘White Nationalist’ I’d ever met. I’d have quit in disgust. I had just turned sixteen, and maybe I could have then led a ‘normal’ life.”

With nearly 100 bias-related homicides attributable to registered members of his site since 2009, a great many “normal lives” are no longer being led.

Still, Black remains defiant. The theme song for his daily radio program on the Rense Radio Network is a remake of Johnny Cash’s “I Won’t Back Down.”

His wife, his son, and those who cared for the victims of racist killers connected to Stormfront probably wish he would.

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