5 - David Duke
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2010
Summary
David Duke is perhaps the only person interviewed in this volume who needs no introduction. For an American audience, at least, he has what political scientists call “high name recognition,” which is attributable largely to his controversial incursions into electoral politics. Duke stunned the Republican political establishment when he was elected a State Representative from Louisiana in 1989 despite intense opposition to his candidacy from virtually all mainstream Republican figures from President George Bush and Republican National Chairman Lee Atwater on down. He also caused tremors among more mainstream Republicans by his subsequent statewide bids for the U.S. Senate and Louisiana governor's office, which, though they did not succeed, resulted in Duke's winning the support of a clear majority of Louisiana's white voters. What shocked the Republican establishment was not so much Duke's spirited opposition to racial preference policies, widespread welfare dependency, and Louisiana's rising crime rate, but the focus on such race-sensitive issues by someone with Duke's extensive and well-publicized background as an activist for various white nationalist and white racist causes. Duke began his involvement with racial issues as a student at Louisiana State University in the late 1960s. At LSU he founded a white protest group called the White Youth Alliance and published a newspaper called The Racialist. Duke's activities at this time were largely concerned with celebrating the heritage and achievement of white people, drawing attention to black/white racial differences, and exposing what he believed to be the Jewish domination of American government and the news media and the vast Jewish involvement in domestic and international communism.
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- Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America , pp. 166 - 183Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003