by Randall S. Frederick

White Supremacy is part of the fiber of New Orleans. It is not something that the city is especially shy about. Pick up any history book about the city and, flipping through, you will see the requisite words flying across the decades — slavery, quadroons, miscegenation, trafficking, Jim Crow, suppression, racism. Like many places in the South, it is part of our architecture. Schools and streets named after Confederate generals, generation after subsequent generation of elected officials proudly bearing the names of deceased family members who fought in the Lost Cause, a myth many schools across the region taught for over a century. The South would rise again, we were promised. If we ever forgot or lost faith, our neighbors and cousins from Mississippi or Alabama, from the panhandle of Florida, from Tennessee or Georgia would be there to reassure us. They were taught similarly. We would encourage one another with these words: The South Will Rise Again, My Friend. After all, there was only so much injustice we could endure before the frayed bonds of liberty would snap.

I was born in Metairie, an affluent borough in the GNO, the Greater New Orleans area. My family, like many other white families, left “the city” for the North Shore in the early Eighties. The North Shore at that time was an undeveloped expanse. The affluent had small mansions in Mandeville, the middle class worked farmland and cut timber, and the poor navigated the marshy swamp for alligators and crawfish. When my parents moved to Slidell, the parish seat of the North Shore, model homes had begun to populate cleared land. A mall appeared. Then a Walmart. Culdesacs and forced proximity made neighborhoods. These were the staples of white flight from “the city”, away from the blacks with their crime, the Jews with their superiority and education, and the Koreans whose very existence was an insult to veterans. Which is to say, I grew up in the shadow of David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

As the son of an engineer for Shell Oil Company, Duke had an unstable childhood. He frequently moved with his family to various places around the world. In 1954, they lived a short time in the Netherlands before settling in an all-white area of New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1955. By this point, he has written, his mother had become an alcoholic. When his father left in 1966 for a job with United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and was stationed in Laos, Duke became the “man of the house” with an absent father. Attending Clifton L. Gaus, a conservative Church of Christ-sponsored school, he had something of a segregationist awakening as he worked on an eighth-grade project. In some tellings, he read a book. In others, he was given a pamphlet by someone in his neighborhood or found one on the ground. In some versions, there were older men who educated him. In others, Duke was self-taught. In all versions, he began visiting a private library of racist literature that expanded his understanding of the white race throughout history and consistently discussed the past in terms of white success. White people had directed the Egyptians to build the pyramids. They had helped Asia develop rice farming. They had given the world the Reformation. Their greatest failure came with the laziness and intellectual inferiority found when assisting Africans. They tried, after all. They tried to give them God. They tried to help by exposing them to wealth and power. These lazy blacks wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t work, so we had to enslave them and force them to the plow with whips and chains. White people were the consistent race of philosophical inspiration and material success, guiding other nations when possible and asking so very little in return. When he finished eighth grade, Duke had already been radicalized. The white race, he maintains to this day, have been benefactors and not enslavers; the violence of the white race only comes when other races fail to recognize the great debt they owe white people.

After his freshman year, Duke transferred to Warren Easton Senior High in New Orleans. In his own account, Duke had begun to express the anxiety and frustration of a teenager. He had, he says, become a rival to his father, David Sr. His mother and sister favored his leadership to that of his father. In biographies of Duke, there are conflicting accounts: Duke’s racist views and the enthusiasm of the newly converted didn’t sit well in an integrated school. He was often in fights and had become a disturbing force. His emotionally and situationally detached father briefly appeared in the home to exile his son. For Duke’s junior year, he attended Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia. Apparently, the move worked or had at least tempered some of his enthusiasm because the following year, Duke was back in New Orleans, at the integrated John F. Kennedy High School. By the time he graduated, he was already a card-carrying member of the Klan.

Let’s look a little closer. White supremacy excels at both bad readings of history as much as glossy, vague, and superficial readings. Duke’s own life is an example of this.

In 1964, Duke began his involvement in radical right politics after attending a Citizens’ Councils Association meeting. The Citizens’ Councils were an associated network of white supremacist, segregationist organizations in the United States, concentrated in the South and created as part of a white backlash against the US Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. He may have certainly found a flyer or pamphlet, but the kindly older men he writes about? That was the CCA. There, he began reading Carleton Putnam’s pro-segregation books. It’s not hard to make the connection. Duke began citing Race and Reason: A Yankee View (1961), as being responsible for his “enlightenment.” He even named the book in literature during his time with the Klan and throughout his time in politics. Putnam’s books asserted the genetic superiority of whites, an idea already familiar to Duke from the CCA. Many critics point to a photo of Duke from his time at Louisiana State University, where he wore a Nazi uniform. Duke defended the outfit as something he had done since he was a boy. This isn’t a stretch, either. Many Americans were Nazis or held Nazi sympathies before World War II. In fact, the Nazis hosted a “Pro-American Rally” in 1939 at Madison Square Garden with one of their social groups, the German American Bund. Most Americans have no idea that this happened because of the — pardon the expression — whitewashing of history around our long history of Antisemitism. Again, this is another example of white supremacy both reading history poorly and then rewriting it in glossy, vague, and superficial ways. In May 1933, Nazi Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess gave German immigrant and German Nazi Party member Heinz Spanknöbel authority to form an American Nazi organization. Shortly thereafter, with help from the German consul in New York City, Spanknöbel created the Friends of New Germany by merging two older organizations in the United States, Gau-USA and the Free Society of Teutonia, which were both small groups with only a few hundred members each. The FoNG was based in New York City but had a strong presence in Chicago, two major cities of finance and banking in America at the time. Male members wore a uniform of a white shirt, black trousers, and a black hat adorned with a red symbol. Female members wore a white blouse and a black skirt. Both outfits evoke the fashion of National Socialism. It is entirely possible that my own grandparents had outfits like these, believing their association with the group was a way to identify with their German ancestors. If they had known the violent and coercive activities of the group, they would have outright rejected it. The organization, led by Spanknöbel, was openly pro-Nazi, engaging in activities such as storming the German language New Yorker Staats-Zeitung and demanding that it publish pro-Nazi articles. The group also infiltrated other non-political German-American organizations. One of the Friends’ early initiatives was to use propaganda to counter the Jewish boycott of German goods, which was started in March 1933 as a protest against Nazi anti-Semitism. This group, operating under various names and titles to create the illusion of expansive and far-reaching and multifaceted German identity in America, was at all times the German American Bund. Under various names, their intended goal was to influence American identity and socio-political activity.

During his adolescence, Duke began to read books about Nazism and the Third Reich, and his speeches at CCA meetings began to be more explicitly pro-Nazi. This was enough to gain him disapproval from some members not because they disagreed with him, but because their intention was anti-black racism rather than antisemitic. Duke, educated by the expansive activity of the Nazis a generation earlier, saw racism as a larger activity than disapproving of black people and barring them from small neighborhoods.

As for Duke’s father, David Sr., yes, there was friction there too, but not because David Sr. felt threatened by his son. Rather, Sr. was concerned. His son was part of a social group for adults. What business did he, a child, have with a group focused on “protecting” the housing, schooling, and zoning of the neighborhood when they had lived such a mobile life anyway? And now, Sr. came to understand, his son was using the group to give speeches against the Jews, expressing views similar to the Germans they had just fought against in World War II. To say nothing of the fights the boy was getting into at school. To say nothing of the arguments he made with teachers and other students when the school’s flag was lowered after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. To say nothing of the boy’s alcoholic mother who he was supposed to help but who was now bed-ridden. To say nothing of the boy’s sister he was supposed to help raise. No sir, this would not stand. He needed to straighten his son out before he got into any more trouble. If his son wanted to dress up in military regalia, so be it. He sent the boy to Gainesville.

Tragically, Duke Sr. only helped fuel his son’s anger. While attending Riverside Military Academy, Duke’s class was disciplined after David was found to be in possession of a Nazi flag. This proved the final straw. Once more, his father had to get involved. This time, almost every biographer claims, Duke Sr. simply gave up. He could not keep returning to the States simply to bail his wastrel son out of more Nazi bullshit. It was too embarrassing. Maybe one day a penitentiary would do the work he had not been able to accomplish. Instead of the jailhouse, Duke Jr. went in another direction.

In the late 1960s, Duke met William Luther Pierce, the leader of the neo-Nazi and white nationalist National Alliance, who would remain a lifelong influence on him. In 1967, Duke joined the Ku Klux Klan. In 1968, he enrolled at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge where he and my father briefly crossed paths in “The Alley”, a strip of LSU’s campus known for allowing free speech. Feminists, Black Panthers, aspiring politicians, environmentalists, vegetarians, even actual Nazis were, it turns out, allowed to air their views on LSU’s campus. Duke, like many aspiring celebrities, took to exaggerated theatrics when attention began to wane, yelling racist remarks at black students and taunting them to attack him. Shocking as this may have been, it got people’s attention and raised his profile by singling him out — the Nazi on campus. In hindsight, these theatrics were not meant to entertain. They were not even the true expressions of mental and emotional dysregulation. Rather, Duke was going public and actively recruiting. Like evangelist John Wesley once said, “Light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles to watch you burn.”

While a student at LSU, Duke traveled to an American Nazi Party conference in Virginia with white supremacists Don Black, who would later found the white supremacist website Stormfront and become a leader in the Ku Klux Klan himself, and Joseph Paul Franklin, who would later be convicted of multiple acts of racial and antisemitic terrorism and executed for serial murder. Don’t overlook the tension here. This was a fated trip. These three figures became the public, private, and violent faces of white supremacy in America. In 1970, Duke formed a white student group called the White Youth Alliance, which was affiliated with the National Socialist White People’s Party. In case you missed that, National Socialists are Nazis.

Duke was emboldened. His tirades in the Alley may have been written off as youthful ignorance, rebellion, or even provocation. In hindsight, they should have been seen as an escalation. Duke appeared at a demonstration off campus in his Nazi uniform carrying a sign reading “Gas the Chicago 7” (a group of left-wing anti-war activists Kunstler had defended) and “Kunstler is a Communist Jew” to protest lawyer William Kunstler’s appearance at Tulane University in New Orleans, which has a long and storied history with Jewishness as much as Antisemitism. Picketing and holding parties on the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth, he became known on the LSU campus for wearing a Nazi uniform and, slowly, developed a small group of followers who then followed him to Klan rallies. They may have been reluctant to wear Nazi uniforms with him because of the stigma attached, but they were apparently content to don the anonymity of white robes and hoods. Whatever worked. Duke knew how to play a long, expansive game.

Did he, though? It is curious to see how convincing a lie can be, especially one about a person pushed by that person. Duke insisted he was above-average intelligence. In turn, his followers repeated this. Yet all the intelligence and gamesmanship ascribed to him would prove dubious over the next two decades. Yes, he became the head of the Klan and very much its public face, but then again his departure for politics revealed corruption and a failure to secure leadership once he left. Yes, he would eventually win a seat in the state legislature, but then he accomplished nothing and his colleagues refused to work with him. Yes, he evaded justice for a long time but he was eventually sentenced to prison. Whatever long, expansive game he was playing, it appears everyone else lost interest.

Take this story for example: In 1970, Duke tried to restore his relationship with his father. Before we go any further, the story already begins to collapse. Duke routinely spoke about this brief period when he was the head of the Klan as though he was actively enlisted with the American military. He called it a “normal tour of duty” in an attempt to secure commonality with returning servicemen after Vietnam. Curiously, there is no record of military service for David Duke, nor would there have been. His public and photographed appearances in Nazi uniforms and his discharge from a military academy (again, because he was in possession of a Nazi flag) would have disqualified him. Further, an alcoholic mother and younger sister may have proven compelling narratives to keep him from the draft. Even further, his father worked in Laos with an oil company. No part of these complementary narratives would have made him a candidate for service. Nevertheless, in 1971, he appears in Laos in order to repair relations with his father. However he got there — publicly, privately, or on active service to America — it was a rather convenient “stationing” to the very place where his father had been living for the last decade. In Laos, Duke joins his father, who helped him get a job teaching English to Laotian military officers. Tragically, even shamefully, David screws up. He was dismissed after six weeks from his “service” when he drew a Molotov cocktail for his students on the blackboard. His father was once again ashamed, publicly embarrassed by his son. It gets worse. In January 1972, some months after he returns home to New Orleans, Duke was arrested for inciting a riot. Several racial confrontations broke out that month in the city, including one at the Robert E. Lee Monument involving Addison Roswell Thompson, a perennial segregationist candidate for governor of Louisiana and mayor of New Orleans, and his 89-year-old friend and mentor, Rene LaCoste. Thompson and LaCoste dressed in Klan robes for the occasion and placed a Confederate flag at the monument. The Black Panthers began throwing bricks at the two men, but police arrived in time to prevent serious injury. Duke was arrested with them. Later that year, he was arrested again and charged with soliciting campaign funds for presidential candidate George Wallace, then keeping the proceeds. Later, Duke was also charged with filling glass containers with a flammable liquid, banned under a New Orleans ordinance — again, the Molotov cocktails. For all of his intelligence, had he truly learned nothing from the shame he continued to bring to his family at every turn?

In 1974, after graduating from LSU, Duke founded the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK). He became the youngest Grand Wizard ever in 1976. Duke first received broad public attention during this time, as he endeavored to market himself in the mid-1970s as a new brand of Klansman: well-groomed, engaged, and professional. Duke also reformed the organization, promoting nonviolence, legality, and, for the first time in the Klan’s history, women. Women were accepted as equal members and as further evidence of his progressive leadership, Catholics were encouraged to apply for membership as well. Duke would repeatedly insist that the Klan was not “anti-black,” anti-women, or anti-religion, but rather “pro-white” and “pro-Christian.” For all of this progress and the success of his leadership, Duke told the British Daily Telegraph newspaper that he left the Klan in 1980 because he disliked its associations with violence. He could not stop the members, he said, of other Klan chapters from doing “stupid or violent things”. It was asserted by Julia Reed in The New York Review of Books in April 1992 that Duke was forced to leave the Klan after selling a copy of its membership records to a rival Klan leader who was a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informer.

Duke sometimes lived on the North Shore in Mandeville, which had become similar to Slidell by the Eighties. Both cities were a half hour away from the city, depending on which bridge you used to flee the crime and dirtiness of the city. The Twin Span takes you to Slidell, the Lake Ponchatrain Causeway to Mandeville and Covington. Halfway to Baton Rouge along Interstate 10, the I-10, you can turn toward Hammond. Visualize a triangle. One corner is New Orleans, another Baton Rouge, the third Hammond. In the center of the triangle, Lake Ponchatrain keeps cultures comfortably cushioned from one another. You can’t hear the celebratory drunken jazz of New Orleans across the lake, but then again you can’t hear the eruptive cheer of LSU’s Tiger Stadium in the French Quarter either. The North Shore, where I grew up, is an expanse of farming but more accurately it is a reprieve from the city where the activities one participates in on weekends can be forgotten with midweek bible studies, potluck family dinners, or Klan rallies. Duke may have left the Klan, but he was still popular. As a child, my father would point him out sometimes when we were running errands or when my parents were simply refueling their cars.

Unemployment proved a productive experience for Duke. He wrote a marriage guide for women under a pseudonym, writing as a “failed Feminist.” He wrote another “exposing” the cultural rot of black people, again under a pseudonym — this time as a black man. He found audiences once again on college campuses, this time outside Louisiana at Vanderbilt, Stanford, and Indiana University, then the University of Southern California, before returning home to New Orleans. Some of these campuses have active white identitarian student groups even now because of Duke’s influence. Indiana University has held white rallies and proven a hotbed of racist activity. USC very publicly denounced Jews a few years ago and allowed other student groups to demean and degrade Jewish students. In 2021, a student tweeted “kill every motherf*cking Zionist” without penalty. Student groups denounced both Israel and Jewish students. Faculty stepped in and wrote a joint letter, denouncing these activities but again, no penalties to students for their activities. Many saw it as implicit support.

In the late 1970s, shortly before he was removed from the leadership of the Klan, Duke was accused by several officials of stealing the organization’s money. “Duke is nothing but a con artist”, Jack Gregory, Duke’s Florida state leader, told the Clearwater Sun after Duke allegedly refused to turn over proceeds from a series of 1979 Klan rallies to the Knights. Another Klan official under Duke, Jerry Dutton, told reporters that Duke had used Klan funds to purchase and refurbish his home in Metairie. Duke later justified the repairs by saying the Klan used his home for administrative meetings. The law and various legal loopholes proved something of a shield for Duke. It became a strategy familiar to many of us after the Trump presidency. He ran for the Democratic nomination during the 1980 presidential election. Later, he would change parties and run as a Republican candidate against George Bush in 1988. Running for the Office of the President was always going to be a failed effort but these campaigns continued to allow him a tax shelter to raise funds, evade litigation, and gain cultural legitimacy. He was too big for the Klan, he reasoned. His ideas were too progressive, too well-liked outside the rural ignorance of farmers and disgruntled whites with their anger and violence. But boy howdy, racism was profitable.

His bid for office may have always been fated to fail, but only if one thinks his various campaigns were actually aiming for responsibility. Despite being six years too young to be qualified to run for president, Duke attempted to place his name onto the ballot in twelve states not because he thought he could win, but because, as he put it, he wanted to be a power broker who could “select issues and form a platform representing the majority of this country.” Power does not require a title.

In 1979, he pled guilty to disturbing the peace when he led “seventy to one hundred” Klansmen to surround police vehicles in a Metairie, Louisiana, hotel parking lot in September 1976. He was fined $100 and given a three-month suspended sentence, hardly commensurate with the crime. Can one imagine seventy to one hundred people of color surrounding police vehicles and the punishment that might follow? Holding this question in mind, look at a previous instance. Duke and James K. Warner had originally been convicted on that charge in 1977, but the Louisiana Supreme Court had reversed the ruling. Later that same year, Duke was arrested for illegally entering Canada in order to discuss third-world immigration into Canada on a talk show. He was guilty of the very thing he was going to speak on, yet he was allowed to continue on in flagrant violation of the law because he was recognizable as a racist leader. What is surprising is not the ways in which he was able to evade justice, but the ways in which each arrest only continued to validate him and avail him of new lines of support. 

Metairie, where Duke lived and set up camp after he left the Klan, shares a stretch of road, Veterans Boulevard, with sister city Kenner. The two are so close that the only visible marker of distinction is the I-10 overpass. While Metairie has a reputation for money and suburbanization, Kenner’s civic services have more financial resources because they house an international airport. Along the I-10, one can see their police compound, a tan tower with military vehicles parked behind a twenty-foot fence laced with barbed wire. It would be easy to mistake the police station with a small military base because, for practical purposes, that is exactly what it is. Kenner’s police force is — quite predictably — routinely investigated for race-related crimes, violations of citizens, drug trafficking, even murder. When Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, it was the Kenner police who were called in to secure the city until the Army, National Guard, and Corp of Engineers arrived, which is to say their police force is prepared for anything, they don’t play around, and there is a long history of doing whatever it takes to establish law and order. Duke had neighbors and sympathizers in Metairie, but he had a private army in Kenner. Which is why Duke’s arrest in a nearby hotel parking lot has always been curious, a statistical outlier. If you had been living in the area the day after he was arrested, you would have snorted in derision reading the headlines. “David Duke was arrested? Ha.” Whatever the charges were, they were never going to stick. To paraphrase Donald Trump, David Duke could have stood in the middle of Veteran’s Boulevard and shot someone, he wouldn’t have lost any supporters, okay? Police officers in Kenner and Metairie were overwhelmingly white well into the 2000s. Their standing policy was no blacks, no Jews, no Asians. Let New Orleans have them. Police in Metairie and Kenner were quite friendly with both Duke and his cause, many knowing him on a first-name basis socially. His arrest in 1979 was more of a formality, a guaranteed way to generate a headline leading into his next rally. Newspapers and the media in general — always overseen by “the Jews” — wouldn’t give him the time of day.

His arrest followed a script: get arrested for a small crime. After the arrest, Duke would be bailed out by his supporters. This minor inconvenience would generate a headline, Local Racist Arrested. The article would note that even though there was a crowd of supporters, none of them were arrested. Oh, and by the way, Duke would be holding a rally this week — can you believe it? — and if his quick release and the unprosecuted crowd (conveniently always available for an interview) were any indication, it would be very well attended. The implicit message of the script wasn’t that he was arrested, but that no one attending the rally would be. It was safe to attend. Bring a friend, if you like! The dirty Jews did Duke’s work for him and they didn’t even know it. He was too smart for them. In the days that followed the well-attended rally or fundraiser or speech or picnic or whatever, his detractors — Jews, Blacks, Asians, and assorted “others” — would watch the charges disappear into thin air.

The cops who arrested Duke? They were interviewed too. Duke, they said, was a great guy, smiling, friendly, someone you could get a beer with. They turned around and supported him. It was hard to make a case against him actually stick. This too became part of the playbook for other far-right candidates for office. Donald Trump’s rallies in 2016, for example, were riddled with violence. He even pledged to pay their legal bills. And sure, people got arrested, but to everyone’s confusion, nothing ever stuck. Trump supporters began to crow that the arrests were of paid actors, plants in the audience, entirely untraceable. The libtard media would print their headlines and do the work for him, keeping his name out there day after day, shocking event after shocking event all the way to Charlottesville, all the way to Washington. Trump, like Duke, would always be one step ahead of the bastards. Meanwhile, headline after headline and donation after donation kept Duke’s name public and profitable.

Duke ran for the state House of Representatives in the late Eighties and, not surprisingly, he won. Everyone knew him, his views, his politics. Later, he would run for the United States Senate (1990) and then for Governor of Louisiana (1991). In fact, while he lost a close race for the state’s capitol, it was his run for governor that changed the way Louisiana politics operates. During his campaign, the state turned elections toward a runoff system of election, an exhausting process where voters are asked to vote and then revote (even possibly revote a third time) to measure a candidate’s appeal. You can almost hear Louisiana’s political leaders on both sides of the aisle asking incredulously, eyebrows as high as their foreheads would allow, “You want him? The former Grand Wizard of the Klan? You’re sure about this?” Duke lost the campaign for Senate and again for Governor. And again for President. Twice. With each political defeat, he won a great deal more socially than he ever did running for office. 

It is not easy to separate the man from the culture. He won state office because he embodied the views that many people held and still hold. While he lost his bids for Senate and the Governorship, his campaigns were not failures; they were a proof of concept. “Yes,” voters said across the state, “We would vote for a Klan member. That’s not a problem for us.” His pleasant demeanor as he expressed vile things and his brief time in politics accurately reflected and represented the State of Louisiana. More, they emboldened others who held similar views. Even more, our state gave him a platform to promote those views across America.

As the former Grand Wizard of the KKK, there was no mistaking the views he held. Those were established, documented and photographed, and right there in his tracts and books and videos and interviews. Yes, he was a racist. Yes, he was proud to be white; he certainly wasn’t ashamed of being white. White people had built this country, indeed every great civilization! And yes, he may have a platform and stage but there were hundreds, even thousands of people who shared his views — socially, politically, and publicly — without shame or fear. In the minds of many Americans, he was normalizing hatred. In the minds of his supporters, Duke was saying what they were afraid to publicly. Like Trump supporters two decades later, this “basket of deplorables” began to learn that they didn’t have to be shy about their views. Even when they were challenged, they could diffuse their views behind the facade of political support and social responsibility. Trump, like Duke, only wanted to make America great again. Political signs appeared in yards, on utility polls, in baseball fields and basketball stadiums. This was Duke Country now.

It turns out, people liked Duke more as a social leader than a political one. State representatives refused to work with him on principle and would eventually lose their own seats for that reason. As Duke moved into the Nineties, he found a welcoming environment, one he had helped create. Views once thought shameful began to reappear and then were repeated on talk radio. At the national level, he lost an election but he kept winning Americans. America was too diverse, too mentally vacant as Reagan Republicans, to hear the politics of an avowed racist. But they were admittedly curious about white supremacy.

In the process, Duke burned an important bridge, the one back to the Klan. In his political aspirations, he had allegedly used the membership roster of the Klan to run his own campaign. Many Klan members felt Duke had steered them away from their core values of hate and made things too soft and palatable. In hindsight, you can almost see how Duke’s political career gave grit and substance to a new generation of racism and antisemitism, how he would become — in exile — a doting father and grandfather to sons of hate like Richard Spenser, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, who no longer had to wear a hood and robe. Duke had taken things mainstream. In this vacuum of intelligence, where everyone is an expert because nothing is verifiable and nothing matters, the baser tendencies of white supremacy, racism, and Antisemitism became more internally focused, more incestuous, more inbred. Duke wasn’t in charge of the KKK any longer, but he was still the figurehead of a well-oiled, well-funded apparatus for bigotry.