In our second episode, Daniel tells Jack all about former KKK Grand Wizard, "king of the angry Facebook grampas", and man who wrote an autobiography that it then took him 42 hours to record himself reading, 'Dr' David Duke. * Show Notes Richard Spencer Errata: On Spencer's connections On the plausible domestic assault allegations against RS David Duke: http://www.renseradioarchives.com/dduke/ Southern Policy Law Centre: Extremist Files entry on DD Book: Blood and Politics Duke on Donahue 1992 Duke leaves the Kan 1980, founds NAAWP (National Association for the Advancement of White People) David Duke is talking over everyone My Awakening (DD's autobiography) (PDF) My Awakening audiobook version Dating David Duke David Duke wrote a sex-help book called "Finders Keepers" in 1976. David Duke and Mike Enoch speak at Unite the Right David Duke sentenced for tax and mail fraud, serves 15 months in 2003 Book: The Rise of David Duke
Greetings fellow Cucks, Snowflakes, Soyboys and Antifa super soldiers and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the podcast in which I get Daniel Harper, internet lefty person, and my friend and colleague to tell me what he learned and heard during more than two years of listening to and reading What the alt-right, which is really the far-right, say to each other in their safe spaces, their podcasts, their YouTube videos, etc.
This is episode two.
Last week we talked about one of the better-known representatives of the so-called alt-right, Richard Spencer, and we're actually recording this episode two on the anniversary of the day he got punched, I think.
But we need to, yeah I know, but we need to revisit Richard Spencer a little bit, which in what might be sort of a regular feature of this show, which is that the stuff that we didn't get to talk about last time.
So, Daniel, take it away.
What was it that you wanted to talk about Richard Spencer that we didn't cover last time?
Well, I don't know if I really wanted to talk about Richard Spencer some more, but I did.
There were a couple of things I wanted to bring up, just things to highlight that I kind of missed in last week's show.
There are much better things that I could be doing with my time than following all these assholes, and that's just how it goes.
The first thing you asked me about the funding issues in terms of where Richard Spencer gets his money and where a lot of these guys get their money.
One detail that I do think I missed there was that Regnery Publishing, this is a sort of right-wing fringe book publisher.
They've published basically anybody and everybody over right-wing politics in the last 30 or 40 years.
It's run by this guy William Regnery II, and William Regnery actually started and funds the National Policy Institute, and he self-credits as having quote-unquote discovered Richard Spencer in 2011 or so.
So good for you, Regnery.
One of the issues is that Richard Spencer is kind of more overtly racist than a lot of the other people that Regnery publishes are comfortable with.
And so, uh, there's some friction there, but, um, you know, it does seem like Regnery's kind of right on board with that.
He is a billionaire, um, apparently, and this is sort of the, uh, source of a lot of the, you know, Richard Spencer is secretly Jewish stuff, is that, um, I think Regnery himself, I think there are some family connections, um, between down the Spencer line and down the Regnery line, and then there's a little bit of a, um, somebody is, uh, supposedly half Jewish or something, I forget all the details of that, but, um,
A lot of the lines of Richard Spencer as an imposter seeking to bring down the movement stuff that you see in kind of the fringier weird corners do go through that kind of rectory link.
Anyway.
Well, that sounds reasonable.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, you know, the thing you will, if you do decide to join the white nationalist movement, and I'm assuming that like half the audience is just going to be convinced they need to do that after every episode, but if you do decide to join it, know that you will be accused of being a Jew by someone.
That is, it's just par for the course.
The second thing I did want to mention was kind of just the weirdest Reference that I've kind of you know one of the one of the things is sort of the the question of like how connected are these guys to You know sort of the the respectable types the suit-and-tie types to the more You know violent You know kind of paramilitary groups.
It's really difficult to kind of know with Spencer as far as I can tell I have seen no kind of direct connection anywhere and Um, but there was this kind of one detail where after the MSU speech in, I think, May 2018, um, there was a, uh, I think it was a Unicorn Riot leak.
I was looking for the, uh, for the reference for this and I could not locate it, so I'll see if I can, I can dig it up and hopefully we can put it in the show notes, but...
Um, there was a, uh, an incident where, uh, after that, uh, after that speech, he goes back to this, uh, kind of undisclosed location, safe house somewhere in Michigan, um, somewhere in central Michigan, and, uh, with a whole bunch of, um, you know, kids, goons, um, fellow white nationalist types, and, uh, they were making Molotov cocktails out of tiki torch fuel and empty bourbon bottles.
Indifferent bourbon bottles, presumably.
Yes.
So we've got our first podcasting joke.
Sorry, go on.
The issue there for me is, you know, it's hard to tell from the description, because it's just this kind of, you know, kind of very vague kind of leak again.
Is, uh, you know, were these kind of, like, just kids kind of LARPing as revolutionary types?
Or was this, was this, uh, actually a more, like, hard attempt to, uh, you know, defend themselves against the, uh, oncoming Antifa hordes that they were sure were coming?
Um, and that's, it's just one of those weird details.
A, that they were, like, they were kids making Molotov cocktails and Richard Spencer is just kind of, You know, again, in his suit-and-tie nationalism, hanging out with all these people and, you know, doesn't seem to have any problem with it.
Which does kind of speak to some of what his day-to-day life is likely like.
But also, just, I find it's weirdly on-brand that it was Tiki Torch Fuel, right?
Yeah.
It does feel like, you know, they're really, I really feel bad for the Tiki Corporation.
I mean, you know.
So anyway, that's just one of those weird details I thought it was just amusing and kind of scary, but in that kind of, I don't really quite know how to place this way, but I thought it was worth bringing up.
And the third thing, and this is probably the one thing that I really felt bad about missing, because I meant to mention it, and I was kind of like, I almost put it in a sentence and then I kind of got distracted during the recording last week, is that He has been very credibly accused of domestic assault against his now ex-wife.
In fact, this morning as we were recording this, there was a piece in the Huffington Post where a reporter actually spoke to both his ex-wife and actually spoke with Richard Spencer.
Based on what I'm seeing, this does seem pretty legitimate.
does not deny sort of emotionally abusing his ex-wife and some of the, I mean, there are like violent texts and that sort of thing, but does overtly deny ever actually hitting her.
But there's pretty clearly a giant mountain of rage inside him that he keeps so well away from the cameras.
And I, you know, I think the Huffington Post piece, I mean, there's a lot of criticism going on, as there always is about, it seems to kind of let his ex-wife off the hook a little bit too much and that it kind of doesn't, because she has been like working with Spencer for, you know, the last, because she has been like working with Spencer for, you know, the last, you know, dozen or last several years, nine I think they got married in 2010 or so, eight years.
But there is, and, you know, his wife is like translated Alexander Dugan and, you know, was very involved in this movement as much as Spencer himself is.
So, yeah, no, it That is just kind of a detail that, again, I would have kind of kicked myself for not bringing up at some point.
I didn't want the listeners to feel like I was letting that slide or didn't care about that issue or whatever.
You know, that was something that I just missed in the conversation, just forgot to kind of bring back up again specifically.
Yeah.
I'm sure, you know, there are lots of people thinking now, you know, how can we criticise Richard Spencer for punching his Nazi wife if we think it's alright for people to punch him if he's a Nazi?
Surely that's exactly the same thing, isn't it?
Yeah, no, it's exactly... Aren't we massive hypocrites now?
Yeah, it's clearly, it's absolutely, you know, it's just one for one, exactly the same thing on both sides, you know?
Yeah, A is A.
But are we quoting Ayn Rand or are we quoting Plato on that one?
That's really the question.
That's too meaty for us.
OK, so having dispensed with our unfinished business from last week, this week we're going to go back in time a bit.
Well, not really go back in time, because unfortunately he's still around.
And look at one time Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, David Duke.
So Daniel, tell me about David Duke.
Sure.
David Duke was born in 1950 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
He moved around a lot.
His father was a petroleum engineer, so he did kind of move around a lot in his childhood.
He briefly lived in the Netherlands when he was about three, before they eventually settled in New Orleans in, I think, 1954 or 1955.
He describes he had an African-American housekeeper who he dearly, dearly loved as a child.
who was like a second mother to him.
He can't be a racist then.
He can't be a racist then at all.
He describes in his autobiography, which we'll get to that, he does have lots of purple prose about, you know, his basically Andy Griffith-like upbringing in Louisiana.
In fact, he says, you know, as a child we often saw The Andy Griffith Show and thought that just looked like our lives.
Other people who have written about his past have slightly different views about that.
Apparently he was often bullied and called Puke Duke, you know, for one detail.
But so anyway, he describes being very kind of liberal and very open to racial integration and like everyone around him In Louisiana in the late 50s and early 60s was clearly very interested in moving forward on the race question and being progressive etc etc.
And he was assigned a school book report or a kind of a debate club kind of thing in 1963 when he was 13.
And it was to he said I would love to talk about segregation and I'm because I am fully against it and I want to Discuss it and that's what I want to do this project about and his teacher, you know, very clearly said well No, I because this is a rhetoric class.
We're going to you're gonna have to take the other side young man and That's the only way you're gonna be able to do this report.
Oh and Duke says, I can't find any material anywhere about, like, this actually pro-segregation in New Orleans in 1963, until he finds the Citizens Council building downtown.
And they had not just one book, but a whole library of books.
Among these titles was Race and Reason by Carlton Putnam.
It's called Race and Reason colon A Yankee View.
And basically this book transformed David Duke's life.
He becomes a committed white nationalist at the age of 13 based on what Well, I think one day we may actually cover some of these books.
I have read this book.
It is filled with basically every racist on Twitter uses some revamped version of the same kind of basic bullshit.
So he becomes a committed racist at the age of 13.
He meets William Luther Pierce, who is the guy who's best known for writing the Turner Diaries and who kind of founded the National Alliance.
A straight-up Nazi type.
This is a detail that Duke leaves out of his autobiography, interestingly enough.
He joins the Klan at 17 in 1967, goes on to basically become a full-fledged Nazi as a college student in the 70s, from about 1970 to 1974.
He does spend a year in Laos with his father, which he does instead of serving in Vietnam.
He was a top in his class in the ROTC, but could not join the military to fight in Vietnam because of his racism.
Even at that time, he was too well-known to be able to actually join the military.
So he goes off and has a long and distinguished career as a basically professional racist.
The details of that, I mean, it kind of gets kind of messy and contested.
We can kind of go into some of that, but, you know, the high points are by 1978 he appears on, like, the Phil Donahue Show.
He does a ton of stuff basically mainstreaming the Klan, also Nazifying the Klan, which is kind of an interesting detail.
He runs for office a few times.
He actually serves a term in the Louisiana House of Representatives between 1988 and 1991.
He runs as a Democrat in the 1988 primary, basically on the I'm-going-to-attack-Jesse-Jackson ticket, fails utterly.
He had previously worked on the George Wallace campaign, and there's some contested history there about like there was an arrest and he claims one thing and the authorities claim another.
But he did join the populist party, try to run in their primary in the 88, 89 era, and then kind of becomes a Republican after that.
And has run for president a few more times in 92, 96, and in 2000, attempted to gain the reform party nomination and kind of failed at that.
And then I kind of came back to the Republicans and he had attempted to run I believe as governor of Louisiana in 2016.
Most people know David Duke in that kind of like late 80s, early 90s period.
Um, that's kind of the height of his Kind of era in the kind of public eye but the reason I really wanted to do him second after Richard Spencer was calls and He David Duke in like the late 70s and early 80s reminds me a lot more of sort of where Richard Spencer is now, although David Duke was in his late 20s at that point.
Richard Spencer is 40 years old, but at least sort of the sort of the strategies and sort of the connections that he's making.
And so I think Duke's later career gives us a sense of where Richard Spencer might go in the next, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 years, assuming he remains active in the movement, which there's no reason to think he will leave it.
The other big salient detail in David Duke's life after the year 2000, he does spend about five years living in Russia, feeding on Russian right-wing media money.
He goes to prison from 2003 to 2005 for tax fraud and mail fraud.
He was pretending to be penniless to his base of supporters and he actually got prosecuted for it.
So he did serve a prison term.
He does have a doctorate, so he calls himself Dr. David Duke.
It's basically a right-wing racist diploma mill in the Ukraine that awarded him that, published his book My Awakening, which is his autobiography, in 1998, and another book, you know, The Jewish Roots of Communism, I think is the title, in like 2002 or so.
Oh, that sounds charming!
Yeah, no, it's, and believe me, it's basically an expansion of a section of My Awakening, and you know, if you Yeah, we're definitely going to talk about My Awakening.
Today he runs a, he does have a radio show without an RSS feed or I would like spend more time listening to it.
But it's basically unlistenable.
You know, we're podcast hosts, we kind of understand the The process of becoming a podcaster is often just kind of the process of, you know, I feel like I have things to say and, you know, certainly I'm not going to pretend that, you know, as sort of a vainglorious lack of self-enjoyment to a certain degree.
But no man, I think, in history has loved the sound of his own voice more than David Duke.
He talks and talks and talks and talks.
I listen to he does a ton of like particularly after 2016 he does a ton of guest hosting on other people's podcasts and he appeared on one show once where the some you know I think this was like right before Charlottesville right before right after Charlottesville.
And what was the kid you know ask him one question so you know how's it going david duke you know welcome to the show something of that nature and david to continue to speak for a full hour.
Well i hate to draw comparisons but i don't fit was also famous for that.
He used to just talk and talk and talk endlessly.
He used to keep people up all night at the dinner table just talking at them, and then they'd all be allowed to go to bed when he finally finished at 3 a.m.
Yeah, I can't imagine that being with him personally is anything more than that.
I mean, he sounds like an absolutely insufferable human being.
He is now 68 years old.
He appears on these radio shows all the time.
He is regularly a guest on Je Publique Space, the public space, which is JF Gary Eppie's show, which we've mentioned before.
And there is, I'm going to give you this link, there is a very cute little three minute video of You know, David Duke saying like, Oh, no, let me let me stop you for a second.
I just need to I need to get something out before you can move on to your point.
And then continues to speak for long enough that JF is clearly, clearly made uncomfortable.
So even the other people in the white nationalist movement don't really like him too much.
Some of the leaked Unite the Right planning documents, like the texts that they were receiving, it's pretty clear that Richard Spencer was planning on ditching David Duke after the rally and not telling him the place that the afterparty was going to be and that sort of thing.
You mentioned that the era he's best known for with the public is the 80s and early 90s.
That's the era.
I mean, firstly, the famous Donoghue appearance was in 92, wasn't it?
He actually appeared on Donoghue twice, once in 92 and once in 78.
The 92 appearance includes clips from the 78 appearance.
I cannot find the full 1978 interview anywhere online.
If somebody has that, please let me know.
Yep and he became known in the 80s this kind of the the new face of the clan didn't hear unless I've got this wrong.
He was the guy that was making the clan respectable supposedly.
Yeah that's a little bit more in the 70s because he actually left the clan in 1980 and he found something called the National Association for the Advancement of White People.
Guess where he got that name from?
This is a pattern that you see over and over again even the term white power itself was a misappropriation of the black power rhetoric of the sixties and seventies well i mean you know how can you object to it how can you say something wrong with white power if you don't think there's something wrong with black power because it is a it's the same thing isn't it all lives matter.
So David Duke was all lives mattering the NAACP in 1978-1979.
It's almost as if, you know, there's only so many ways you can package the same old bullshit.
Almost, almost.
Okay, so I got my facts a bit wrong then.
It's more the 70s when he was looked upon as the guy revamping the Klan.
Right, that's a little bit earlier, but it's funny, like, even those kind of later appearances during the 80s would, you know, kind of refer to him as, like, ex-Grand Wizard, you know, or even Grand Wizard of the KKK.
But at that point, he had kind of ditched the robes in favor of, you know, the suit and tie, and, you know, he put on this very presentable appearance.
You know, he's he's very well known for the, you know, in the mid to late 70s, up to about 1982, he did a ton of like radio interviews, you know, kind of actively, you know, kind of pushing the Klan is sort of this new, you know, new and improved, you know, we're not the.
We're not the bad guys, we're not the kind of inbred yokels and hicks that, you know, the media tells you, you know, we're just a civil rights organization interested in the rights of white people.
He also, and again this is something I kind of mentioned a second ago, he is kind of credited in this book Blood and Politics by Leonard Zeskand.
If there is one book on the white nationalist movement I would recommend, it is that one.
It is an amazing, amazing text.
David Duke features heavily in it.
I was gonna kinda reread the sections of the book in preparation for this episode and then realized very quickly that now he's in 300 pages of this thing. - It would basically just be rereading the book. - It would basically be rereading the book, right.
But he's got his fingers in a lot of pies and he's a really, really important figure in that kind of period.
And then kind of later on when he was reaching for a more mainstream political office.
So, I mean, you kind of get these two separate eras of David Duke, one of which is kind of working with the Klan in terms of doing kind of more straightforwardly classic white nationalist organizing, like kind of building a membership list and that sort of thing.
Um, working directly with the Klan and other organizations, um, some campus politics and that sort of thing.
And then, um, kind of later on when he becomes a, you know, quote unquote mainstream political candidate when he's actually trying to achieve, uh, ordinary political office.
And so those are the kind of two separate like kind of moments that that we kind of remember David Duke for and He often is sort of they get they get confused I think sometimes in terms of what kind of people Kind of think they're it's all kind of the same thing But no there's kind of a Klan period and then there's kind of a later like seeking you know trying to become governor of Louisiana trying to seek the presidency trying to run for the the Senate and I think he tried to run for the Senate.
He ran for a bunch of offices and kind of got nowhere.
His biggest claim to fame, definitely in terms of his electoral career, was he did run for governor of Louisiana in 1991.
He was repudiated by his own party.
He was too toxic even for the Republicans at that time, but it did come down to a definitely closer than expected vote.
He ends up with, again according to Wikipedia, hands up about 38.8% of the total vote.
But he did win over half of the white vote in Louisiana in that year, which is kind of terrifying, right?
Yeah, well that's the incident in which I ran into David Duke and my researchers into, you know, libertarians and Murray Rothbard wrote a thing about that where he says, oh, everybody scandalized that David Duke did so well in that election, you know, and then he goes on to basically defend him and say, well, you know, there's very little in David Duke's ideology that runs counter to libertarianism, you know.
Right.
I mean, you know, because Duke definitely was kind of running under a sort of, you know, would couch it as, you know, kind of white civil rights is sort of like anti-affirmative action, anti, you know, kind of civil rights laws, like, you know, freedom of association laws, states' rights, that sort of thing.
And that plays directly into sort of that libertarian ethos.
You see a lot of the Political organizing around that time in particular in the kind of like particularly going into sort of the more Kind of the libertarian libertarian Republican politics of the 90s Rests on that same kind of that same kind of language that same kind of logic So, you know, David Duke was was seen as well We don't necessarily want to be quite that racist, but uh, we definitely support his right to be racist.
Yeah You mentioned not defying the KKK perhaps you could speak about that a bit Sure.
This is, again, is something that is covered in a lot more detail in Blood and Politics, but the basic idea is that the Klan was always sort of an anti-African American organization in sort of its early days.
You know, from the, in the 1860s and then in the 1920s, they were, they kind of didn't like Jews in the 20s, but they were much more, that was just kind of down their list of complaints, right?
It was a side issue for them.
It was a side issue.
And what they were looking to do was to engage in sort of a more kind of white supremacist vision in which, you know, African-Americans kind of lived under the same government as white people, but were subjugated.
You know, Jim Crow laws, segregated housing, you know, it was like, you know, we still want them to be laborers.
We just want them to be away in their own little like crappy places.
And we don't want them voting.
We don't want them having political power.
When, um, Duke kind of takes over the Klan when he starts, uh, you know, just, you know, notifying it.
Um, he's looking much more in terms of sort of the, the modern, you know, the more modern idea of this kind of ethnostate concept of we want to, um, you know, have a government separate from Africa.
You know, we don't want them near us.
We don't want the crime.
We don't want the, you know, et cetera.
Um, and so it looks a lot more like sort of an eliminationist and, uh, Much more of an eliminationist rather than segregationist party, right?
And of course the idea of the ethnostate as opposed to the segregationist version of the same racism is very integral to racism today, isn't it?
Right.
In fact, the modern day guys will say, I'm not a white supremacist.
They'll say white supremacist as a sort of a mocking.
White supremacist?
I'm not a white supremacist.
You just want to call me a white supremacist, right?
Because they're like, no, I don't want to live with black people.
I want them to live in their own place away from me.
I don't believe I should be supreme.
I want separation, and so that rhetoric ends up being used a lot.
I mean, of course, it's a different version of the same thing, ultimately.
Yeah, exactly, because the justification for Jim Crow was separate but equal, wasn't it?
It's just the same principle extended, and then they pretend it's a completely different thing.
Right.
We should probably mention actually for context that we're recording this just I think a couple of days after representative Steve King asked why it was offensive now to call yourself a white supremacist?
Yeah, come on, you know, why can anybody possibly think is wrong with saying, you know, I think white people are supreme, you know?
It's like, white people, we're just people with sour cream on us and tomatoes.
That's a terrible joke there.
Apologize for that one.
There's only so much you can do for humor.
Well, here's a funny detail that I skipped over there.
During the sort of fallow period in between when he was kind of openly doing open Nazi shit versus Klan shit versus political stuff, he often had trouble making money.
And one of the things he did, he wrote a bunch of stuff under pseudonyms.
And he did write a book called Finders Keepers in 1976, which is, and I'm gonna take, I cannot find a copy of this book, I would love to read it.
The book contained, I'm taking this from a Washington Post article from 1990, so I'll give you the link to this.
The book contained instructions on oral sex, foreplay, and vaginal exercises.
It also encouraged women to have sex with married men because they make better lovers.
Dukas said he only checked for grammatical errors in the sexual content of the book, but did not write those chapters.
Apparently the bulk of that was just lifted wholesale from Cosmopolitan Magazine and those kinds of places.
He's literally just plagiarizing Cosmo and writing a book and using that to make money.
Duke is also an inveterate womanizer.
He was very well known in the clan circles in the 70s and presumably up to, I'm hoping not present day.
You see a lot of people in the clan groups who say keep your wife away from him.
He's somebody who gets handsy and he's perfectly happy to cheat on his wife with whatever pretty young thing.
He's hanging around with the clan guys in the 70s.
You know, definitely keep you away from him and keep yourself away from him and just keep away from him, basically, for various reasons, let alone the ones just stated.
He did marry Chloe Harden in the 70s.
Chloe Harden, they eventually divorce, and the details of the courtship are well covered in My Awakening.
Why she left is not so much, but she does eventually leave him and then she marries Don Black.
Who would go on to found Stormfront and also has his own little shitty radio show without an RSS feed.
Don Black is a truly despicable piece of shit who went to prison for a few years for trying to take over the island of Dominica in the Caribbean and basically kind of an open imperialist attempt to form a white nationalist state.
Well, like a private act of imperialism.
Right.
Yeah, there's a there's a very good book I actually just read called Bring the War Home, which kind of goes into the.
That's a Kathleen Billu is the woman who wrote that, but it's a very good book that goes into the.
That kind of history the kind of history of the kind of Vietnam veterans coming home and you know how they get involved in you know white nationalist white supremacist clan groups and that and you know sort of the Ideological connections there and that leads all the way up into the Timothy McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing in 1996 And that's a really interesting book that got that put me thinking in some some different directions about about that stuff, which I'm still kind of
Figuring out the way some of this fits in, but we don't have to cover that necessarily.
David Duke is mentioned a couple of times in the book, but he's definitely not the focus because he was... it's more people that he used to hang out with went on to do other things.
In fact, you can often find that a bunch of David Duke's second-in-commands end up being... A, they end up not liking him very much.
And B, they end up kind of going on to form other organizations.
Tom Metzger, who eventually is going to form White Aryan Resistance, who is still alive, who produces, believe it or not, audio CDs of white nationalist radio programs that you can subscribe to for $20 a month.
He will mail you audio CDs of himself talking, which I'm sure is incredibly effective.
I've heard of him.
Yeah.
He's also in...
Tom Metzger is also in the Louis Theroux and the Nazis documentary.
He's kind of a central figure in that.
He does occasional appearances on some of the more Frenchy white nationalist podcasts.
I've heard him speak a little bit.
Anyway, so Tom Metzger is one guy, Don Black is one guy, and a bunch of people have peripheral connection to David Duke's work in the 70s, who went on to do more overtly violent things than David Duke did.
But yeah, also he's well known for embezzling money from the people around him, and there's some evidence he probably informed on some of his underlings to the FBI.
What I find fascinating is just how much of a clown he is today, and because I describe all this like not defying the Klan, like let's make the Klan worse.
You know, let's take the thing that was already terrorizing people and find a way to make it worse.
David Duke does that.
You know, people know him as kind of this, you know, pretty, you know, bright, whip-smart person, you know, with, with, you know, kind of You know what nationalist leanings he does a lot of the, you know, you see a lot of the coverage of David Duke in the 70s and 80s looks a lot like 10 of the way people, you know, the, the dapper young Nazi, you know, Richard Spencer stuff.
And so there's this kind of clear link there I mean a lot of these kind of more current guys are clearly trying to kind of figure out where Duke went wrong but kind of.
You know, engage in the same kind of mainstreaming of, you know, these kind of far right, you know, openly genocidal ideas into, you know, kind of open political discourse.
In 1970, when he was a college student, he was well known for having actual Nazi posters on his wall in his dorm room.
A bunch of his roommates, you know, people who were there at the time will kind of attest to that.
And he used to kind of go around campus wearing an SS uniform complete with swastika armband.
And there are some photos, widely circulated photos, of him in 1970 protesting the appearance, protesting the Chicago 7, who are the protesters who were arrested at the 1968 Democratic Convention.
He's protesting the appearance of one of their advocates in 1970 when he appeared at the university at Louisiana State, where Duke was a student at the time.
And, you know, again, David Duke wearing Nazi shit, being straight up Nazi.
And, you know, that's again something he does not mention in his autobiography.
He also, in the late 70s, 1978 when he was kind of part of the Klan, He did a bunch of, you know, kind of public attention stunts, one of which was he did the Klan Border Patrol, where he actually went down to the US-Mexico border and basically did sort of like a militia-like stunt to, you know, to stop the illegal immigration kind of coming in.
And seeing that repeated again, it's just lovely, you know?
Yeah, yeah, it's nice.
Yeah, it's always nice to see these old standards come back, isn't it?
As they have done.
So I mean, he's this legitimately scary figure.
I mean, he's just legitimately nasty little piece of work.
But I think the thing that amuses me is just how unseriously most of the kind of modern guys take him.
Like they'll kind of, you know...
think, oh, he did great work back in the day, but nobody wants to hang out with him.
In particular, he's a huge fan of health food and fasting.
He spends a ton of time talking about how, in fact, this hour-long thing I told you about in that podcast episode was really not about how terrible the Jews are, although he will tell you how terrible he thinks the Jews are at a moment's provocation.
Although he'll usually say things like, instead of Jewish, he'll say the Zio-media.
He's big into that.
The Zio-left.
The Zio-media.
They're coming after white people.
Uh, he, uh, basically describes his fasting routine and his exercise routine and he's like, you know, if you wanna be, you know, you're a young guy and if you wanna be, uh, whip smart and you really wanna, you know, be the best you can be, you really gotta start, you really gotta try fasting and I've got this, uh, health food in my, in my bag here and you should definitely try some of that apparently in, like, the van in Charlottesville.
When they were driving around as part of the Unite the Right rally.
He did give a small speech, it is online, I'll give you the audio of that.
He and someone who we'll definitely be talking about in the future, Mike Enoch, there's one video where they each give a five minute speech.
But apparently he was pushing health food on people in the van in Charlottesville.
So in the post-Charlottesville, in the post-Unite the Right podcast, you'll hear There's a lot of that in this subculture in various forms.
on the shows and they will mock David Duke specifically for that, you know?
Yeah.
Because he's like, you know, you've got to eat pea soup and, you know, bran muffins and, you know, fast, fast every day.
And, you know, it's complete, complete nonsense.
But that's what he's into now.
He's basically like natural news but, you know, with like a racial agenda.
There's a lot of that in this subculture in various forms.
There's a lot of obsession with, you know, diet and health foods and healthy living and supplements and stuff like that to vary – I mean, a lot of it's hucksterism, but right.
Well, even in sort of like, you know, alt light circles, I mean, you know, the brain brain force plus and, you know, all that, all that kind of stuff.
There is this um one of the things that you know sort of this like a biological view of humanity is that you know that we are essentially our bodies that we are you know that that you know society and social you know socialization and you know like uh those kind of things don't count it's all just biology and so they get really obsessed with uh you know making sure that they're eating the right things and making sure that they're um kind of behaving properly as men, you know, so they work out constantly, or at least they say they work out constantly.
That stuff happens a lot.
You get a lot of, like, talk about, you know, how you're supposed to eat and what you're not supposed to eat.
And, oh, there are phytoestrogens in beer and you can't have beer.
Although, like, beer is a European thing.
It's like a European tradition.
We as women can absorb...
Yeah, isn't that one of the great achievements of, you know, European culture?
We can absorb alcohol where the other races just don't do as well, particularly, you know, Native Americans and East Asians.
And, you know, it's because of our unique genetic heritage, which leads to a culture which allows us to absorb alcohol responsibly.
And then the other half is like, you know, but it's got photoestrogens and it's gonna be, like, turn you into a soyboy faggot cuck or whatever, you know?
Apologies for the language there.
Do you want to talk about his appearance on Donoghue?
Is that worth talking about or have we covered that enough already?
I mean it's definitely worth watching if you're kind of interested in kind of seeing what the previous media environment is like and in particular kind of looking at the old.
I mean it's a I find him, at the time, you look at that appearance, and you kind of look at the way that Donahue does and what Donahue does and doesn't challenge.
Because Donahue can't...
So David Duke, again, if you look at what he's done, He bases a lot of his justifications on this like very strong pseudoscientific kind of genetic, you know, argument, right?
And, you know, sort of like the ideas of race and IQ and then, you know, sort of like, you know, he claims to have been like interested in biology from a very young age.
And so, you know, David did come out and say, you know, well, there are kind of clear IQ differences.
And, you know, this comes from, you know, this like unique generic genetic heritage or whatever.
And, um, you know, talk show hosts, um, and Donahue just, he doesn't have the, uh, he doesn't have the rhetorical ability to really kind of combat that directly, and so, um, it ends up being like, it's kind of the source of that, like, facts not feels thing, right?
Um, this is actually more, um, I can't remember if that kind of happens, uh, if David Duke actually gets him on that kind of argument in 92, um, but in the, um, He had a Donahue had an episode on directly about Holocaust deniers and that comes up over and over and over again One of the things that I think it is This is kind of just kind of a general challenge of kind of dealing with this stuff is you know?
How do you kind of deal with the arguments that they're making?
You know because the whole point of you know being able to say look I've got all this genetic evidence And I've got all this you know William Shockley the inventor of the transistor and the Nobel Prize guy and you know James Watson today They'll talk about James Watson You know, the discoverer of DNA believes that black people are inferior.
He's the Galileo of our time.
And, you know, responsible scientists do not want to challenge that because they don't want to kind of give it airtime.
But when they make these claims to people who don't know the science, they're very easily tripped up because they've got, like, rhetorical moves planned in advance, you know?
And so it's a real challenge in you know combating this stuff um because they sound like they know what they're talking about even when um they're they're actually speaking like clear nonsense that anyone with the basic knowledge of genetics should be able to refute but then i've got you know kind of these big names that they you know say oh agree with our side you see this a lot like creationism which i you know i think everybody listening to this knows that i used to kind of hang out in those circles and you know battle the creationists and um oh yeah i mean you see those same kind of strategies over and over again
it's the same with anything you go into a debate about uh you know 9 11 with a truther if you don't know anything about engineering and metallurgy and stuff they'll beat you despite the fact that they're talking complete rubbish right Right and just by the fact that they can sound like they know what they're talking about sounds like you know.
Oh, well, have you ever looked at the IQ data?
They've got the jargon down enough to flimflam, essentially, and that's kind of the really dangerous form of pseudoscience.
The interview is famous.
What do you think the overall effect was?
Did it make him more respectable?
It's hard to know i mean certainly because he seems to be quite influential despite the fact that almost everybody including all the people on his own side view him with contempt.
Because he comes across well in these interviews, because he's polite, because he can distance himself from the sort of stereotype of the Klan, I think he has an ability to sort of become the respectable face of this stuff in a way that a few other people do.
And so just – so the Donahue interview itself, I mean that was after his kind of failed run.
That was kind of him on the downward slope in terms of sort of like any kind of mainstream respectability.
Basically, he lost enough political races that he started to look like a loser instead of a winner, you know, because in the in kind of the early days, he looked like, oh, this upstart, he can kind of come up and and win electoral victories.
And, you know, it's going to be kind of the new face of, you know, the Republican Party in some ways.
And by 92, I mean, I don't know that it necessarily was obvious at that time that that was kind of his peak.
Um, but, uh, certainly in retrospect, we can see that, that, you know, he, he really kind of, he was never higher and, uh, kind of public esteem or in his, his public face than he was, uh, in November 91 when that election happened.
But would you say then that the, the main way in which he's been influential, I mean, you said earlier that, uh, Richard Spencer reminds you a bit of David Duke at this period.
Would you say that David Duke's main influence then has been this idea of being polite and dapper and seeming respectable etc as a way into the mainstream?
No, I think there's a lot to that, and I think that this kind of gets into something that, you know, if you've been following these guys at all, kind of the modern, you know, alt-right movement, they're obsessed with their optics, quote-unquote optics.
Yeah.
uh you know the polo shirts and khakis you know the idea of like you know we're not gonna dress like slobs we're gonna kind of be like oh we're just kind of middle class working class guys you know kind of like the you know and kind of wearing like what you'd wear to work if you work in the tech industry which most of these guys do um gee i wonder what that says about the tech industry oh Oh, that's kind of an amazing question, honestly.
That's a whole other series of questions.
Yeah, no, that's a whole other thing.
But, you know, this idea of, like, you know, dressing it up and cleaning it up and, you know, making it... And I mean, ultimately, this is...
The reason that David Duke can do this is is in some sense because the sort of larger media again post World War Two I mean never really dealt with the.
The reality of like what the United States is a white supremacist nation, you know, we never really are in Western society in general, but I can speak specifically to the United States.
You know, we just kind of pretended it wasn't true.
Oh, no, we've always been multicultural, which we have always been a multicultural melting pot here in the United States.
We've always had people of many different races and many different societies and cultures who all joined together.
We can't pretend that that's not true, but we've done that in this kind of openly white supremacist way that privileged certain kinds of people over others.
I was going to say, it's just that American capitalism was built on some of those people being owned and used as farm machinery, as Kurt Vonnegut put it.
Exactly.
The fact that, you know, the rhetorical technique then was to paint the, you know, oh, you want to be, you know, sort of like sophisticated and polite.
You want to be like a better person and embrace a sort of multi-racial, you know, like reject open forms of racism.
And anybody who is a racist has got to be some inbred hillbilly from Alabama or Mississippi, which plays very much in terms of the way that the kind of resentment of the American South since the Civil War really, but particularly after World War II and sort of the way that which plays very much in terms of the way that the kind of resentment of the American South since the Civil War really, but particularly after World War II and
And this has both kind of an explicitly racial and a just sort of a cultural Christian kind of – all of this kind of gets played into – there's a big stew of this kind of stuff and different bits and bobs of it kind of pop up every now and then.
But there is this kind of – I grew up in the South.
I know how, how, you know, the attitude is, I mean, it's, it's, you know, when people say, look, the Confederate flag is about heritage, not hate.
I mean, now that there's a, there's a lot of bullshit there, but there are people in the South who, you know, kind of did me think like, you know, we were just rebelling against these like rich, rich guys who treated us like shit from this other part of the country.
And, you know, we were trying to kind of go off and do our own thing.
And like, they, they, they ignore that, like the thing we were trying to do was, you know, engage in, you know, a continued system of like exploitative labor and where people get to own other people over like explicitly racist lines, et cetera, You know, but there is kind of something to that in terms of the psychology, and someone like David Duke and Richard Spencer and sort of a lot of these guys on the alt right now have
basically play into this resentment that, you know, where, you know, if you live in this kind of rural area and maybe your life isn't going so well, and you feel like you're looked down on by, you know, again, coastal elites, and you can put parentheses around that if you like, then somebody like David Duke is saying, no, I'm speaking for your interests.
I'm speaking for white interest.
I'm speaking for, you know, the rural, you know, the people who live in these flyover states in this flyover country, who do not live in these kind of big cosmopolitan states, again, with or without parentheses.
Who have a legitimate interest, and that your interests are that you are white people, and I'm reaching out to you as white people.
And this, again, you can take that kind of 92 appearance, you can take the stuff that he was doing in the late 70s, this sort of mainstreaming, like making it nice and polite, and you can play that right into, I mean, we could do a supercut of like, you know, David Duke in 1978, David Duke in 1992, Richard Spencer in 2009 or 2010.
Right up into kind of the modern guys today, you know, we could do a supercut of like essentially one sentence.
It just runs all through that, and it's that same basic idea.
And that plays into, you know, everything that's been going on in American politics since the Southern strategy, at least.
Yeah.
This idea, you know, I mean, Nixon talking about, you know, oh, it's these New York elites.
I mean, privately he would say Jews, but you know.
You know, the idea that the liberal media is out to get you because you're conservative, because you're traditionalist, and, you know, this great silent majority rhetoric.
I mean, it's... We do get to this kind of thing of, like, it feels difficult to kind of take someone like David Duke seriously because, ultimately, he is this kind of very marginal figure, and even at his, like, greatest success, he was, you know, not really reaching that high.
He never really got that far in terms of, like, mainstream political success.
And now he does a really shitty radio show without even an RSS feed so you know it tells you like he's not a mainstream figure but he exists as sort of the tip of the spear that is playing with basically harder
Harder edged versions of what's going on in very very mainstream politicians of both political parties I mean this is in no way I'm no way trying to pretend that this is like a just a Republican thing It's just it's just making explicit what is implicit, you know And that's what I find kind of fascinating in a lot of ways about studying these guys Is that the whole thing that they're trying to do is just say, you know, stop saying You know
Working class americans and just say white people like you know which is what you really mean.
So yeah you wanted to talk about his autobiography.
Yes there is i and i have given a jack the links here so there is a you can buy it on amazon if you if you like i'm not gonna stop you but don't.
There is a PDF available.
It is on the Internet Archive.
It is Google-able, but again, I'll give Jack the link so you can have that.
I do have that PDF.
I did kind of go over that PDF.
I kind of skimmed a bunch of it while I was preparing for this podcast, but my initial experience of reading this book was not through the PDF or through the text copy, which I would not buy a text copy.
I'm not giving this guy any money.
He makes an audiobook freely available on his website through the Internet Archive.
He doesn't actually host the files himself, of course, because that's probably beyond his technical sophistication.
But he does link to the Internet Archive.
You can go and download an audio version that he recorded.
It's unclear to me when he recorded this.
Uh, but it was sometime after 98 and before 2016 when he was running for governor.
I mean, um, he does, so he not only reads the book, but he, uh, goes into and he does asides on the book.
So, for instance, he'll do a, uh, like a sequence talking about, like, uh, then current data and sort of the race and IQ stuff.
Uh, he'll quote, like, Russian from 1997.
And they go, and then he'll do an aside and say something like, and actually this was updated in 2004, there was an even better book that was edited, and then kind of go into, uh, that kind of nonsense.
So he's not even really reading the book as much as kind of meta-commenting on the book.
There are tables in the book, and he will just describe the table and say, and if you download the PDF you can have that table and look at that.
It is truly insufferable.
It is I think 42 hours long.
I listened to it at 2.0 speed.
I may give Jack some audio from this.
I was looking for, like, a really choice package.
Let me describe the contents of this book to you.
It's split into four basic units, four parts of the book, and each one has several chapters inside.
Part one is essentially David Duke's childhood, where he describes how wonderful growing up in Louisiana was and, you know, the Andy Griffith stuff, and then how he discovered the race question and segregation.
All right, so part two is basically race and IQ, fraudulent pseudoscientific data, and so there's a lot of David Duke saying things like, you know, Blacks are more inherently inclined to crime, and we know this because of, you know, FBI crime data of such-and-such a thing, and I'm going to give you a citation, and again, if you want all the real data, I've got hundreds of references, and you can find it in the paper copy of my book, which you can buy at such-and-such.
Part three is on the Jewish question, which is essentially a long list of people that David Duke thinks are bad who are also Jewish.
I wish I was exaggerating this.
That reminds me of...
Nick griffin's pamphlet about how the the jews control the media in britain and it's basically just a list of people in british show business who are jewish you know.
That's basically it.
Literally in some places is like oh look at all the people in like uh you know lincoln's cabinet who uh were uh who had you know possible jewish ancestry look at all the people in uh.
You know, and I guess the book was written in, like, the Clinton administration, so he goes through and, like, lists all the Jews who are running such-and-such department.
Look at all the media Jews.
Look at, uh, and it literally is just a list.
It's just, like, a whole bunch of it is just, you know, and so it'll be, oh, and so-and-so and so-and-so, Jewish, and then, uh, this guy, his vice president, also Jewish.
It's, it's, you know, the text version is bad enough, but listening to him just, like, keep
The way he says Jewish over and over and over again and the like like every time it's like supposed to be like this stab in the face Towards his like rhetorical enemies is just it's it's absolutely You know if it wasn't like filled with You know the worst kind of anti-semitic hate it would be really amusing I mean, it's it's it's completely on the face of it ridiculous to basically just name a list of Jewish people that you think
It's just – it's such – it's not even like a correlation causation error like the sort of the race and IQ stuff and a lot of the pseudo-science around genetics is.
It's literally just look at some Jewish bad people and they're overrepresented because of such and such and such and such.
The Jewish roots of communism, Karl Marx, Jew.
Yeah, God.
Again, just, it's literally just like, parts of it are just a list of all the Jewish people who founded communism in Russia in 1917 and that sort of thing.
It's literally just that.
The hatred is so visceral.
The Russian Mafia is really the Jewish Mafia, don't you know?
All of these people coming over and committing crimes and doing the Russian mafia stuff, they're not Russians.
They're not real ethnic Russians.
They're Jews.
That's what makes them extra bad.
And they've got weird sexual proclivities and that sort of thing.
It's, oh God.
Hours and hours and hours and hours of listening to him just, you know, do this.
It was, I mean, I tuned out for big chunks of it because it's just, there's no reason to follow the details of this in any detail.
It doesn't sound like a page turner.
No, and then the fourth part, I'll just kind of finish up the description of the book is, you know, look at all the times I owned the liberals and the media and look at all the little edgelord activities I engaged in when I was a college student.
I mean, there's a lot of like, you know, the And then I asked my professor, well if you think that the egalitarian principles are right then how do you account for such and such?
And they had no answer because clearly I was right and they were just parroting their egalitarian bullshit.
Um, there's, it's, it's, it literally is that.
It's, look at all the times I owned the libs when I was in college and then when I, uh, you know, traveled the world.
Um, I went to India and everything was dirty and I, their, their food is so spicy because they don't wash their plates.
And, uh, then I went to Europe and everything was gorgeous.
And, uh, yeah.
Um, this is not, this is a rich kid.
He got to travel the world.
His dad was a petroleum engineer in the seventies.
It's, uh, We don't have that in Europe.
Another rich kid, like Spencer.
Yeah, I don't get the sense that he's come from old money the way that Spencer is, but these kids are very often pretty well off.
There's not a sense of real material uh material law lack in their lives in most cases um i will say there is a one detail that i you know the only thing i'm going to like empathize with him a little bit here is that his mother does appear to have been a really really awful alcoholic and a pill popper particularly after um his uh his
His aunt and uncle died when he was very young, and that kind of pushed his mother into this really, really awful alcoholism.
Every source agrees, yeah, this was really, really bad.
And so I will say, you know what?
Yes, David Duke, you had a really terrible experience with your mother.
That doesn't justify genocidal racism, but I will give him that.
Okay, so the other thing about David Duke is that he was at Unite the Right in Charlottesville, wasn't he?
He was, and in fact... As you've already mentioned.
The fact that David Duke agreed to go when, I guess, Jason Cassler, who organised Unite the Right, asked him.
The fact that David Duke agreed to go seems to have been essentially the reason that Richard Spencer said yes, for instance.
Because, again, we have text messages of Kessler texting with Spencer, and he said, you know, Duke and Enoch are both going to be there, and Spencer, like, agrees.
Okay, yes, I will come then, you know.
And so David Duke kind of does lend a certain like legitimacy to Unite the Right on the far right at that time, just because like, oh, we've actually got this, you know, this white nationalism 1.0 is kind of what they call it.
We've got this, you know, kind of a giant figure who's very well known in the movement, who's taking us seriously.
David Duke appeared on the Fash the Nation podcast in 2016, for instance, and it was really weird for me because I had been listening to that podcast for a couple of months.
And then hear David Duke come on and then using words like cock.
It was just like, what the fuck are we doing?
Like, you know, David, it's, you know, like, like when your grandpa starts, you know, trying to, you know, trying to play hip hop or something, it felt like a really strange thing to me at that time.
Well, this, this sort of image of the Facebook grandpa has kind of been recurring to me a lot during the, during our conversation.
Sure.
No there there's a lot of that there's a lot of that going on where david duke is i mean they they sort of respect him.
In the sense of like he's kind of been around forever and they sort of like give him a certain amount of space but again they don't seem to like him they don't think he really gets their means and he's coming again he's kind of a joke he's just.
You know, he's kind of the doddering old grandpa, and there are some figures who seem to have legitimate affection for him, but I think everybody kind of finds him insufferable, and they think that he's going to try to steal their wives, and he's going to try to steal their money.
And wants to talk to them about health food.
Yeah, about health food and the Jews.
It's just the Jews all the time.
Everything.
The Zio Media is out to get us, you know.
I really should give you some audio just to drop in at some point.
I think that people should listen to like 30 seconds of this guy talk at some point.
Pinky was my family's black housekeeper who seemed like part of our family.
She cared for me as if I were her own son, prepared many of my meals, tended my wounds, and listened to my dreams.
I was 11 years old when she died, and thinking about her now warmed my heart.
So how did it happen that despite my childhood love for Pinky, I became a spokesman today for what the postcard sender had called, quote, the politically incorrect European American?
As my life and thoughts unfold in this book, you will find out why.
I will lay bare the formative parts of my life, the experiences that stand out in my memories, and recount the search for truth that led to my awakening.
In telling my story, I will challenge the vital premises of the establishment and roast some sacred cows.
I will anger those who worship fashion rather than independent thought.
Hopefully, a few of the more open-minded will pause to think.
In this book, I offer an eye-opening view of the world today, a revolutionary view to be sure.
I also offer my evolutionary vision of the new world that will be created tomorrow.
Yeah, so probably the only other thing I would mention is that since we mentioned Richard Spencer's disastrous personal relationships and violent activities, we should talk about, there is a piece, I've mentioned Chloe Harden, who he married in the 70s, but we do have a A little bit from a woman who did date David Duke in the 1909-2000 era.
It's actually a woman named Lori Eden who is a kind of former swimsuit model who I think was in her 40s at the time and dated David Duke.
There is a really nice little profile where she kind of describes the process of dating him and the fact that she thinks a lot of this kind of racism is put on.
At least she did at the time.
I haven't seen any kind of more recent stuff.
I did try to Google around.
I mean, she is still alive.
She is still kind of living her life.
As far as I know, she doesn't like talk about this stuff ever anymore.
There were some kind of like Facebook posts by her where she just kind of said, I don't talk about that anymore.
So I'm perfectly happy to let her have the rest of her life to not have to deal with it anymore.
Um, at the time in this interview, she apparently feels that the Duke is putting on some of this.
Um, she tells the story of, um, you know, one of his kids was playing in a pool where a black kid was, you know, on the other side of the pool, like, playing.
And David Duke was fine with it until, like, one of his flunkies shows up.
And then he's like, no, we have to protect, um, what, what did you do?
Let her be in the pool.
We've got to...
Keep her away from those monkeys.
That sort of activity, meaning that he's maybe not quite as explicitly racist as he pretends to be for his buddies.
I say you don't spend 50 years in the white supremacy movement and not actually believe this stuff.
But that's our perspective.
I think it's more likely, you know, suddenly there was somebody there that he wanted to impress.
Right, right.
Sorry, I'm rereading this profile.
She was 33 at the time that she and Duke dated exclusively, and said that Duke's racism seemed to depend on having an audience.
Once hanging around with his entourage, big men who had shot people before, men who would take care of him, he very publicly yanked her out of a large hotel swimming pool when a black child got in the other end.
But another time, at a small ice cream shop with Eden for her son's birthday, he got into a long and apparently friendly conversation with a black friend of hers.
His followers weren't there at that time.
It's, you know, there's a lot of talk about like how like humanizing these people, right?
And you know, what's the, you know...
That giving them any kind of ability to be like people at all is to like downplay the evil to some degree.
And I think it's important to note that these are human beings and to understand them as human beings as opposed to treat them as monsters all the time.
I think that treating them as monsters who are just fundamentally different from you and I Avoids the the real issue it avoids And the fact that this is that this is you know that these ideologies do not just come about because people are just like Always bad and it plays into the very thing that allows someone like David Duke who comes across as well He's very polite to that one black person.
He knows and therefore how could he possibly be racist?
You know it's that exact Failure of knowledge and imagination that allows these people places to grow and you know I think that getting a sense of like who he is as a person Even through you know kind of an ex-girlfriend who I think has her own issues with you know What she's willing to say and believe about him does give us a does give us a peek into
Seeing him as a person as opposed to as a villain gives us a sense of the reality that seeing him as kind of the cartoon cutout of just racist man bad does not.
And I think that we can acknowledge the evil and acknowledge the real harm that this man has done over his life while at the same time recognizing that those failures are human ones and not demonic.
Yeah.
Well, it's always better to understand things properly.
And the more you understand, the better it is.
Always, always, always.
And you know as you say if you think of these people as monsters the minute they turned up in a the minute they turn up in a smart suit and they're polite to you and they speak reasonably then you know you suddenly oh well maybe they're not so bad after all, where is the course they are it's the it's the it's being able to understand that they are humans that allows you to understand exactly how they are so terrible, because if you if you if you indulge in this sort of fantasy of these people is just just evil your.
I was going to say you're doing what they do.
You're not, even remotely.
But you are hobbling your own ability to understand, which is never good.
Right, and I feel like a lot of the... And also, if you understand them as humans, then you can understand how pathetic they are.
I mean, this is a pathetic individual you're describing.
He's obviously a raging narcissist.
Nobody writes an autobiography that takes 42 hours to read out loud, which he then does, and record it, and put it, you know, unless they've got serious problems with You know complete lack of self awareness and self knowledge and as i say raging narcissistic personality disorder or something like that it's.
There's something seriously wrong with this person right kind of if they if they if they if you haven't devoted his life to spreading racism it would be pitiful.
A lot of these guys feel like... you can imagine David Duke, the used car salesman.
The guy who owns a car dealership.
They are, aren't they?
They're just hucksters.
They're selling bullshit.
It's just a different kind of bullshit to a used car.
You gotta get that true coat, or else, you know, it's gonna rust, the underneath's gonna rust, and that's the, and that's the, that's the whole thing.
I mean, that's, it just, so many of these guys feel that way.
I mean, Donald Trump seems very much that way to me.
Like, if he had not been able to inherit $700 million over, over the course of his life from his father, you know, that's a guy who would, you know, like, own a car dealership somewhere, and he would be very, very good at that, and he would not be President of the United States.
Understanding the personalities is, and I feel like that's so much of what I just try to do, is to just try to understand who these people really are, as opposed to sort of the version of themselves that they put out there.
And trying to understand that through the, you know, through the misty lens of their propaganda is difficult, but also I think...
I think you can get real insights just from, you know, again, just knowing that he spent 42 hours reading this thing while he was traveling into a microphone.
You know, it's just, it's ridiculous.
It's silly.
I mean, look at his website.
I gave you the links to his website.
Go check...
The website where he posts his radio show.
It looks like it has not been updated since 1997 in terms of its style.
A bunch of these old school guys have that kind of problem where it looks old and junky and nasty and it's just like your racist grandpa.
He's just the king of the racist grandpas.
And that's a perfect place to end, I think, as long as you're happy to leave it there.
I'm perfectly happy to leave it there, yes.
OK, that's great, thank you.
Again, another great episode.
Do you know what you want to do next time?
I think we'll do Unite the Right next time.
Again, just kind of feed into something we sort of covered a little bit.
We'll kind of talk about Unite the Right and some of the issues that sort of – how that came about and what that meant and sort of the before and after because I feel like a lot of people have sort of asked – I think people think we should do that one soon.
And I was going to put it off for a while, but I think it's worth talking about now because I think so many of the things that we are going to talk about have a sort of pivot point around the Unite the Right rally.
So I think it's worth going ahead and getting out of the way.
OK, then our next episode will be about Unite the Right.
I have a feeling that one might run long, so we might split that into two episodes, but we'll see.
OK, so thanks for listening, everybody, and thanks for Daniel for being so informative again.
And that was the second episode of I Don't Speak German.
