He is most famous as the man who took the KKK "out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms", but he was only leader for a short period of time.
In this episode, we look at the weird story of David Duke and his lifetime of selling hate.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:10] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of this mini-series looking at the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:00:25] In the last episode, we looked at the three major historical phases of the KKK: its birth and rise in the post-civil war south during the Reconstruction Era, its anti-immigrant resurrection in the 1920s, and its final wave against the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.
[00:00:45] Today, in part-two, we’re looking at what came after that third and final wave, and what the Klan, or more specifically, what one man and his leadership did as it declined.
[00:00:57] Before this man took over, the Ku Klux Klan had always operated in secrecy, hidden behind hoods and robes and the cover of night.
[00:01:06] But as the Klan began its slow and steady decline, one man tried to change this.
[00:01:12] He tried to make the Klan - and its ideas - more mainstream, relatable, and family friendly.
[00:01:19] He was clean cut, ran for and even won political office, and appeared on television.
[00:01:26] But behind that public face was the racist, anti-semitic, white supremacist ideas common to the Klan throughout its history.
[00:01:36] I am talking, about David Duke - America’s best salesman of racial hate, the man who tried to take the KKK mainstream.
[00:01:45] So, let’s get right into it.
[00:01:49] David Duke sat in his New Orleans office at the headquarters of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:01:56] His phone rang.
[00:01:58] He leaned forward, and picked it up.
[00:02:02] On the other end of the phone, a man introduced himself as Ron Stallworth, a new Klan applicant from the Colorado Springs Chapter.
[00:02:12] The phone to his ear, Duke began looking through paperwork until he found the man’s application.
[00:02:19] “There’s been a delay in getting things processed,” Duke said, apologising profusely.
[00:02:24] In fact, Duke promised that he would personally process the application himself.
[00:02:32] For a man hoping to join the Klan, this was some honour - David Duke was famous, a celebrity of sorts.
[00:02:41] Shortly after, Ron Stallworth’s membership card arrived in Colorado Springs.
[00:02:47] He was now a fully-fledged member of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and would go on to speak on the phone with its leader, David Duke, once or twice a week.
[00:02:58] The only problem?
[00:03:00] Ron Stallworth was black, and David Duke had no idea.
[00:03:06] David Ernest Duke was born in 1950, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
[00:03:11] His father was an engineer for the Shell Oil Company, and his mother an alcoholic who was often disorientated and distant towards her son.
[00:03:22] Because of his father’s job, the young Duke spent some time living abroad, before the family eventually settled in New Orleans, in Louisiana, in the mid-1950s.
[00:03:33] Duke, therefore, was a teenager in the 1960s, the height of racial tensions in 20th century America.
[00:03:42] Though it’s true that his father was often away and his mother a distant drunk, it’s hard to pinpoint, or specify, exactly where or when Duke’s white supremacist worldview came from.
[00:03:57] One biography of Duke suggests that it had already begun to form when he was just 14 years old, when he wrote an essay arguing against integration for a class project.
[00:04:09] In order to research the paper, Duke went down to the New Orleans Citizens Council, one of many anti-integration groups across the American south at the time.
[00:04:19] It was there that he read a book that argued racial integration was doomed to fail, and after reading more and more white supremacist literature he developed the idea that race and genetics were the most important aspects of society.
[00:04:37] As Duke grew older, the New Orleans Citizens Council became like his second home, and he became interested in Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:04:47] One neighbour of the Duke family later said that the teenage David Duke even had the Nazi flag on his bedroom wall.
[00:04:57] The boy then fell under the influence of a man called Jim
[00:05:01] Lindsay,
[00:05:02] a Klan leader who stepped in as a father figure while his own father, David Duke Sr. was abroad.
[00:05:11] By the time he left high school - an integrated high school, by the way, a school with black and white pupils - Duke was already a fully-fledged member of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:05:23] In 1968, he enrolled at Louisiana State University, and first came to public attention for starting something called the White Youth Alliance and for his many racist and anti-semitic speeches on campus.
[00:05:38] He became well-known for wearing a Nazi swastika,
[00:05:42] and
[00:05:42] Alastair Budge: when a civil rights campaigner called William Kunstler gave a speech at another university in New Orleans, Duke travelled there for the event, dressed in full Nazi uniform and carrying a sign with the message: "Kunstler is a Communist Jew”.
[00:05:59] One contemporary, one colleague from Duke’s time at university, would later say that Duke "would talk about 'Mein Kampf" - Hitler’s political manifesto.
[00:06:09] "He would describe how he was going to become mainstream and get elected to the legislature,” he said.
[00:06:16] It seems that even back then, in college, Duke already had plans to take his vile views mainstream, and into the world of politics.
[00:06:27] After graduating from university, Duke remained involved in fringe white supremacist groups and protests.
[00:06:34] In 1974 he founded an organisation called “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan”, a rebranded, offshoot group that appealed to traditional Klan members but also tried to modernise the organisation.
[00:06:49] As you may remember from the last episode, throughout the Klan’s history there have been several offshoots, such as the Knights of the White Camelia and the White Brotherhood, that all existed under the loosely connected Klan name, and Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is best understood as another iteration, another form of this, rather than a separate or rival group.
[00:07:15] The name might have been slightly different, but the hate was the same. And Duke continued to make no secret of his vile views.
[00:07:26] That same year, he and a Klan colleague dressed in blackface - that is, they painted their faces black - and they interrupted the unveiling of a statue of a man called P.B.S. Pinchback, a black man who was governor of Louisiana in the Reconstruction era.
[00:07:44] Two years later, at the age of 26, Duke became Grand Wizard, the big boss, the youngest ever in Klan history, and he developed a reputation as an efficient salesman of Klan ideology and literature.
[00:08:00] Crucially, he knew about the Klan’s violent history and viewed it as baggage, or a distraction, stopping him from taking his white supremacist agenda into the political arena.
[00:08:13] During his time as leader, he tried to change and modernise the group, making it more palatable - more tolerable - to a mainstream middle-class audience.
[00:08:25] Although he was an unashamed racist and anti-semite, in public Duke tried to project an image of a well-dressed, educated, and family-friendly type of Klansman, one less associated with the traditional symbols and behaviour of the organisation’s past iterations.
[00:08:44] Under Duke’s leadership, Klan members were instructed to - and I'm quoting directly - "get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms.”
[00:08:55] Think less rural south, more suburban middle-management.
[00:09:01] Duke renamed the position of Grand Wizard "National Director" to give it a more official sounding name, and began calling cross burnings "illuminations."
[00:09:13] As the director of the Klanwatch project of the Southern Poverty Law Centre put it: "He used tactics that had never been used before -- throw away the robe, put on a three-piece suit, cut your hair, and get yourself on TV."
[00:09:29] Clearly, David Duke was trying to take white supremacy mainstream.
[00:09:35] And not just mainstream TV, he was making a bid for political power.
[00:09:41] In 1975, he had run unsuccessfully for the Louisiana Senate, gaining just 11,000 votes.
[00:09:49] Although he lost, Duke’s speeches, rallies and television appearances gently normalised white supremacist views as legitimate political positions, with nice suits and haircuts in television studios and debates.
[00:10:05] By 1980, however, Duke rather suddenly left the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:10:12] He gave up his position as Grand Wizard after a dispute with another Klan leader, Bill Wilkinson, who believed that Duke had sold a list of Klan members.
[00:10:23] You might remember from the last episode that by this time Ku Klux Klan groups across the country had been infiltrated by a targeted campaign of FBI undercover agents, and as Klan membership declined in the 1970s, what was left of it became increasingly distrustful of one another.
[00:10:44] After leaving, Duke founded a white civil rights group called the National Association for the Advancement of White People and tried to recover his image, distancing himself from the KKK and presenting himself not as anti-black, or anti-semitic, but pro-white and pro-Christian, a tactic to try to normalise his ideas of racial superiority.
[00:11:09] Although he would forever be associated with it, Duke was in fact the leader of the KKK for just four years, from 1976 to 1980.
[00:11:19] Though his tenure was short, it would prove to be a very useful stepping stone for what was coming next, the political aspirations he had held ever since his days at university.
[00:11:31] In 1988, Duke put himself forward for the Democratic party presidential nomination but he failed to win any primaries.
[00:11:42] Instead he won the nomination of the white nationalist Populist Party but won just 47,000 votes on election day.
[00:11:51] The next year, in 1989, however, Duke finally made his jump into the mainstream and finally got, in his eyes, his political reward.
[00:12:03] He left the Democrats and joined the Republican party, and won a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives by a very narrow margin - taking 50.7 percent of the vote.
[00:12:16] Just like Klansmen before him, Duke capitalised on, or took advantage of, times of social and economic unrest.
[00:12:26] The American economy was struggling in the mid-1980s. Duke blamed this on affirmative action - or positive discrimination - and capitalised on the fears of white voters to win election.
[00:12:39] Now, Duke didn’t really do anything of note during his time in office, preferring to focus on his personal brand and further trying to normalise white supremacist views.
[00:12:51] In 1990, however, he decided that a lowly state legislature wasn’t enough for his ambition and he ran for Senator.
[00:13:02] He lost, and the following year, in 1991, he ran for Governor of Louisiana.
[00:13:09] Though he did lose the election, Duke’s white supremacist platform won him almost half a million votes.
[00:13:17] Between the two elections - for Senator and Governor - Duke won almost 60 percent of the white vote.
[00:13:25] And just like another more recent divisive figure in American politics, Donald Trump, David Duke found himself initially somewhat cast out by the Republican Party.
[00:13:36] Some of the biggest Republican figures in American politics, including Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush, publicly criticised Duke and tried to distance the party from his abhorrent views.
[00:13:50] But like with Trump, his supporters backed him anyway, and anyone who criticised him was branded an establishment liberal, part of the status quo.
[00:14:01] I should add here that his political views weren’t the only unusual, unorthodox, things in David Duke’s life.
[00:14:09] It might not surprise you, but Duke was an incredibly strange man, and engaged in many unusual activities, typically with the aim of either sowing racial division or personal enrichment, making money. Normally both.
[00:14:26] In the 1970s, he wrote a martial arts guide for black militants under the pseudonym, or fake name, "Mohammed X."
[00:14:35] Years later Duke would say that it was an attempt to collect a database of black people who were potentially anti-white.
[00:14:43] During the 1980s, after his divorce, he wrote a self-help sex manual for women - writing under the name of Dorothy Vanderbilt.
[00:14:53] He was also implicated in a bizarre plot to establish a white supremacist regime on the island of Dominica and attended "white leadership" training sessions to prepare.
[00:15:06] And in 1989, while he was a Member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, he reportedly sold Nazi literature from his office, and it was around this time that reports emerged that for many years he had celebrated Hitler’s birthday - cake included, of course.
[00:15:24] Yet perhaps the most remarkably strange thing from Duke’s life, and an incredible story that inspired Spike Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman, was Duke’s relationship with this man called Ron Stallworth.
[00:15:38] Now, if you haven’t seen BlacKkKlansman, by the way, I thoroughly recommend it because that initial phone call we touched on in the introduction was just the beginning.
[00:15:48] As you heard at the start, Ron Stallworth was African-American, he was black, he was not your typical member of the KKK.
[00:15:58] What I didn’t mention was that he was also a police officer - the first black undercover police officer in the history of the Colorado Springs police department.
[00:16:08] Incredibly, Stallworth managed to infiltrate the Colorado Springs Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:16:16] Now, it almost goes without saying that it would have been incredibly dangerous - perhaps even fatal - for Stallworth to infiltrate the group in person.
[00:16:27] So how did he do it?
[00:16:29] Well, after making initial contact over the phone, Stallworth built up a rapport - a relationship - with local Klan members over the phone, and sent one of his white - and very brave - colleagues along to the meetings.
[00:16:45] As Stallworth would later write in his memoir none of the Klan members were ‘the brightest bulbs in the socket,’ meaning particularly clever, and nobody noticed nor asked why Ron Stallworth had one voice on the phone and another in person.
[00:17:02] Incredibly, and this is where it gets really good, after that initial phone call with Duke, Stallworth began a phone correspondence, or relationship, with David Duke himself - the national leader of the Klan.
[00:17:18] According to Stallworth, the two got on very well and spoke once or twice a week - Duke still having absolutely no idea that Stallworth was black.
[00:17:30] In his memoir Stallworth even said that, “As a matter of fact, when you took away the topic of white supremacy and K.K.K. nonsense from discourse with Duke, he was a very pleasant conversationalist.”
[00:17:43] In other words, if you didn’t think about the fact that he was the country’s most famous racist, he was quite a nice man to talk to.
[00:17:51] When Stallworth asked Duke if he was worried that somebody might play a trick on him, and pretend to be white on the phone, Duke confidently told him: “I can tell that you’re white because you don’t talk like a black man… you talk like a very smart, intellectual white man, and I can tell by the way you pronounce certain words.”
[00:18:12] Duke then visited Colorado Spring for the fake Ron’s initiation to the KKK, and the real Stallworth was assigned to be Duke’s personal protection officer for the day.
[00:18:25] Now, it might sound like a Hollywood movie, and of course it was made into one, but I assure you, this is a true story.
[00:18:34] When Stallworth - the real one - arrived, he told Duke that although he didn’t respect the KKK he would do his professional duty and protect him.
[00:18:46] Incredibly, Duke never made the connection that the black man standing in front of him was the real Ron Stallworth, the man that he had talked to for hours over the phone - he didn’t even recognise his voice.
[00:19:00] Duke never realised who Stallworth was and the story came out decades later.
[00:19:06] So, for someone who thought he was the face of what he called the ‘master race’, perhaps Duke wasn’t quite as intelligent as he thought.
[00:19:15] And it turned out that, aside from being a famous racist and not as good as he thought at deciding the colour of people’s skin from their voice, like many American politicians, he also wasn’t very good at paying his taxes.
[00:19:31] In December of 2002 Duke was convicted of tax fraud and served 15 months in prison.
[00:19:39] When he got out, he spent time travelling around Europe giving lectures and making connections with European neo-nazi groups.
[00:19:47] Duke’s focus now was not on the Klan or racism towards black Americans, but he developed an obsession with anti-semitic conspiracies about Judaism and Zionism.
[00:20:00] He mingled with Holocaust deniers, travelling around the world speaking at anti-Zionist conferences, which is what he is still doing really to this day.
[00:20:10] So, to wrap things up, David Duke was only leader of the Ku Klux Klan for a few years in the late-1970s, during a period when its membership declined and never really recovered.
[00:20:23] Until he became Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, it had generally tried to operate in secret to some extent, and as a result its leaders weren’t often in the spotlight.
[00:20:34] David Duke tried to change all that.
[00:20:37] He put himself front and centre of the Klan’s activities and white nationalist ideas, and tried to cultivate, create, a more professional and clean cut image for the group.
[00:20:49] He swapped white robes and pitchforks for smart suits and television screens.
[00:20:54] The beaming smile, the well-groomed hairdo, he looked and behaved like tens of millions of other American businessmen.
[00:21:03] But beneath the surface, and not even that far beneath the surface, he shared the same hateful ideas as his predecessors.
[00:21:13] Fortunately, he seems now to be further than ever from any real political power himself, but his political success, although it was never really a great success, did a great deal to legitimise white supremacy on a national level.
[00:21:28] And the consequences of this are indirect, far-reaching, and unfortunately may not be clear for many years to come.
[00:21:39] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on David Duke, “America’s most well-known racist and anti-Semite”, and not a very nice man indeed.
[00:21:49] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about Duke, or this was the first time you’d heard anything about him, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:21:58] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:22:01] What impact and influence do you think David Duke really had?
[00:22:06] What do you think the relative political success of a man like David Duke says about American society?
[00:22:12] And have you seen the Spike Lee film, BlacKkKlansman?
[00:22:15] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:22:19] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:27] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:32] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:10] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of this mini-series looking at the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:00:25] In the last episode, we looked at the three major historical phases of the KKK: its birth and rise in the post-civil war south during the Reconstruction Era, its anti-immigrant resurrection in the 1920s, and its final wave against the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.
[00:00:45] Today, in part-two, we’re looking at what came after that third and final wave, and what the Klan, or more specifically, what one man and his leadership did as it declined.
[00:00:57] Before this man took over, the Ku Klux Klan had always operated in secrecy, hidden behind hoods and robes and the cover of night.
[00:01:06] But as the Klan began its slow and steady decline, one man tried to change this.
[00:01:12] He tried to make the Klan - and its ideas - more mainstream, relatable, and family friendly.
[00:01:19] He was clean cut, ran for and even won political office, and appeared on television.
[00:01:26] But behind that public face was the racist, anti-semitic, white supremacist ideas common to the Klan throughout its history.
[00:01:36] I am talking, about David Duke - America’s best salesman of racial hate, the man who tried to take the KKK mainstream.
[00:01:45] So, let’s get right into it.
[00:01:49] David Duke sat in his New Orleans office at the headquarters of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:01:56] His phone rang.
[00:01:58] He leaned forward, and picked it up.
[00:02:02] On the other end of the phone, a man introduced himself as Ron Stallworth, a new Klan applicant from the Colorado Springs Chapter.
[00:02:12] The phone to his ear, Duke began looking through paperwork until he found the man’s application.
[00:02:19] “There’s been a delay in getting things processed,” Duke said, apologising profusely.
[00:02:24] In fact, Duke promised that he would personally process the application himself.
[00:02:32] For a man hoping to join the Klan, this was some honour - David Duke was famous, a celebrity of sorts.
[00:02:41] Shortly after, Ron Stallworth’s membership card arrived in Colorado Springs.
[00:02:47] He was now a fully-fledged member of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and would go on to speak on the phone with its leader, David Duke, once or twice a week.
[00:02:58] The only problem?
[00:03:00] Ron Stallworth was black, and David Duke had no idea.
[00:03:06] David Ernest Duke was born in 1950, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
[00:03:11] His father was an engineer for the Shell Oil Company, and his mother an alcoholic who was often disorientated and distant towards her son.
[00:03:22] Because of his father’s job, the young Duke spent some time living abroad, before the family eventually settled in New Orleans, in Louisiana, in the mid-1950s.
[00:03:33] Duke, therefore, was a teenager in the 1960s, the height of racial tensions in 20th century America.
[00:03:42] Though it’s true that his father was often away and his mother a distant drunk, it’s hard to pinpoint, or specify, exactly where or when Duke’s white supremacist worldview came from.
[00:03:57] One biography of Duke suggests that it had already begun to form when he was just 14 years old, when he wrote an essay arguing against integration for a class project.
[00:04:09] In order to research the paper, Duke went down to the New Orleans Citizens Council, one of many anti-integration groups across the American south at the time.
[00:04:19] It was there that he read a book that argued racial integration was doomed to fail, and after reading more and more white supremacist literature he developed the idea that race and genetics were the most important aspects of society.
[00:04:37] As Duke grew older, the New Orleans Citizens Council became like his second home, and he became interested in Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:04:47] One neighbour of the Duke family later said that the teenage David Duke even had the Nazi flag on his bedroom wall.
[00:04:57] The boy then fell under the influence of a man called Jim
[00:05:01] Lindsay,
[00:05:02] a Klan leader who stepped in as a father figure while his own father, David Duke Sr. was abroad.
[00:05:11] By the time he left high school - an integrated high school, by the way, a school with black and white pupils - Duke was already a fully-fledged member of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:05:23] In 1968, he enrolled at Louisiana State University, and first came to public attention for starting something called the White Youth Alliance and for his many racist and anti-semitic speeches on campus.
[00:05:38] He became well-known for wearing a Nazi swastika,
[00:05:42] and
[00:05:42] Alastair Budge: when a civil rights campaigner called William Kunstler gave a speech at another university in New Orleans, Duke travelled there for the event, dressed in full Nazi uniform and carrying a sign with the message: "Kunstler is a Communist Jew”.
[00:05:59] One contemporary, one colleague from Duke’s time at university, would later say that Duke "would talk about 'Mein Kampf" - Hitler’s political manifesto.
[00:06:09] "He would describe how he was going to become mainstream and get elected to the legislature,” he said.
[00:06:16] It seems that even back then, in college, Duke already had plans to take his vile views mainstream, and into the world of politics.
[00:06:27] After graduating from university, Duke remained involved in fringe white supremacist groups and protests.
[00:06:34] In 1974 he founded an organisation called “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan”, a rebranded, offshoot group that appealed to traditional Klan members but also tried to modernise the organisation.
[00:06:49] As you may remember from the last episode, throughout the Klan’s history there have been several offshoots, such as the Knights of the White Camelia and the White Brotherhood, that all existed under the loosely connected Klan name, and Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is best understood as another iteration, another form of this, rather than a separate or rival group.
[00:07:15] The name might have been slightly different, but the hate was the same. And Duke continued to make no secret of his vile views.
[00:07:26] That same year, he and a Klan colleague dressed in blackface - that is, they painted their faces black - and they interrupted the unveiling of a statue of a man called P.B.S. Pinchback, a black man who was governor of Louisiana in the Reconstruction era.
[00:07:44] Two years later, at the age of 26, Duke became Grand Wizard, the big boss, the youngest ever in Klan history, and he developed a reputation as an efficient salesman of Klan ideology and literature.
[00:08:00] Crucially, he knew about the Klan’s violent history and viewed it as baggage, or a distraction, stopping him from taking his white supremacist agenda into the political arena.
[00:08:13] During his time as leader, he tried to change and modernise the group, making it more palatable - more tolerable - to a mainstream middle-class audience.
[00:08:25] Although he was an unashamed racist and anti-semite, in public Duke tried to project an image of a well-dressed, educated, and family-friendly type of Klansman, one less associated with the traditional symbols and behaviour of the organisation’s past iterations.
[00:08:44] Under Duke’s leadership, Klan members were instructed to - and I'm quoting directly - "get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms.”
[00:08:55] Think less rural south, more suburban middle-management.
[00:09:01] Duke renamed the position of Grand Wizard "National Director" to give it a more official sounding name, and began calling cross burnings "illuminations."
[00:09:13] As the director of the Klanwatch project of the Southern Poverty Law Centre put it: "He used tactics that had never been used before -- throw away the robe, put on a three-piece suit, cut your hair, and get yourself on TV."
[00:09:29] Clearly, David Duke was trying to take white supremacy mainstream.
[00:09:35] And not just mainstream TV, he was making a bid for political power.
[00:09:41] In 1975, he had run unsuccessfully for the Louisiana Senate, gaining just 11,000 votes.
[00:09:49] Although he lost, Duke’s speeches, rallies and television appearances gently normalised white supremacist views as legitimate political positions, with nice suits and haircuts in television studios and debates.
[00:10:05] By 1980, however, Duke rather suddenly left the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:10:12] He gave up his position as Grand Wizard after a dispute with another Klan leader, Bill Wilkinson, who believed that Duke had sold a list of Klan members.
[00:10:23] You might remember from the last episode that by this time Ku Klux Klan groups across the country had been infiltrated by a targeted campaign of FBI undercover agents, and as Klan membership declined in the 1970s, what was left of it became increasingly distrustful of one another.
[00:10:44] After leaving, Duke founded a white civil rights group called the National Association for the Advancement of White People and tried to recover his image, distancing himself from the KKK and presenting himself not as anti-black, or anti-semitic, but pro-white and pro-Christian, a tactic to try to normalise his ideas of racial superiority.
[00:11:09] Although he would forever be associated with it, Duke was in fact the leader of the KKK for just four years, from 1976 to 1980.
[00:11:19] Though his tenure was short, it would prove to be a very useful stepping stone for what was coming next, the political aspirations he had held ever since his days at university.
[00:11:31] In 1988, Duke put himself forward for the Democratic party presidential nomination but he failed to win any primaries.
[00:11:42] Instead he won the nomination of the white nationalist Populist Party but won just 47,000 votes on election day.
[00:11:51] The next year, in 1989, however, Duke finally made his jump into the mainstream and finally got, in his eyes, his political reward.
[00:12:03] He left the Democrats and joined the Republican party, and won a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives by a very narrow margin - taking 50.7 percent of the vote.
[00:12:16] Just like Klansmen before him, Duke capitalised on, or took advantage of, times of social and economic unrest.
[00:12:26] The American economy was struggling in the mid-1980s. Duke blamed this on affirmative action - or positive discrimination - and capitalised on the fears of white voters to win election.
[00:12:39] Now, Duke didn’t really do anything of note during his time in office, preferring to focus on his personal brand and further trying to normalise white supremacist views.
[00:12:51] In 1990, however, he decided that a lowly state legislature wasn’t enough for his ambition and he ran for Senator.
[00:13:02] He lost, and the following year, in 1991, he ran for Governor of Louisiana.
[00:13:09] Though he did lose the election, Duke’s white supremacist platform won him almost half a million votes.
[00:13:17] Between the two elections - for Senator and Governor - Duke won almost 60 percent of the white vote.
[00:13:25] And just like another more recent divisive figure in American politics, Donald Trump, David Duke found himself initially somewhat cast out by the Republican Party.
[00:13:36] Some of the biggest Republican figures in American politics, including Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush, publicly criticised Duke and tried to distance the party from his abhorrent views.
[00:13:50] But like with Trump, his supporters backed him anyway, and anyone who criticised him was branded an establishment liberal, part of the status quo.
[00:14:01] I should add here that his political views weren’t the only unusual, unorthodox, things in David Duke’s life.
[00:14:09] It might not surprise you, but Duke was an incredibly strange man, and engaged in many unusual activities, typically with the aim of either sowing racial division or personal enrichment, making money. Normally both.
[00:14:26] In the 1970s, he wrote a martial arts guide for black militants under the pseudonym, or fake name, "Mohammed X."
[00:14:35] Years later Duke would say that it was an attempt to collect a database of black people who were potentially anti-white.
[00:14:43] During the 1980s, after his divorce, he wrote a self-help sex manual for women - writing under the name of Dorothy Vanderbilt.
[00:14:53] He was also implicated in a bizarre plot to establish a white supremacist regime on the island of Dominica and attended "white leadership" training sessions to prepare.
[00:15:06] And in 1989, while he was a Member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, he reportedly sold Nazi literature from his office, and it was around this time that reports emerged that for many years he had celebrated Hitler’s birthday - cake included, of course.
[00:15:24] Yet perhaps the most remarkably strange thing from Duke’s life, and an incredible story that inspired Spike Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman, was Duke’s relationship with this man called Ron Stallworth.
[00:15:38] Now, if you haven’t seen BlacKkKlansman, by the way, I thoroughly recommend it because that initial phone call we touched on in the introduction was just the beginning.
[00:15:48] As you heard at the start, Ron Stallworth was African-American, he was black, he was not your typical member of the KKK.
[00:15:58] What I didn’t mention was that he was also a police officer - the first black undercover police officer in the history of the Colorado Springs police department.
[00:16:08] Incredibly, Stallworth managed to infiltrate the Colorado Springs Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:16:16] Now, it almost goes without saying that it would have been incredibly dangerous - perhaps even fatal - for Stallworth to infiltrate the group in person.
[00:16:27] So how did he do it?
[00:16:29] Well, after making initial contact over the phone, Stallworth built up a rapport - a relationship - with local Klan members over the phone, and sent one of his white - and very brave - colleagues along to the meetings.
[00:16:45] As Stallworth would later write in his memoir none of the Klan members were ‘the brightest bulbs in the socket,’ meaning particularly clever, and nobody noticed nor asked why Ron Stallworth had one voice on the phone and another in person.
[00:17:02] Incredibly, and this is where it gets really good, after that initial phone call with Duke, Stallworth began a phone correspondence, or relationship, with David Duke himself - the national leader of the Klan.
[00:17:18] According to Stallworth, the two got on very well and spoke once or twice a week - Duke still having absolutely no idea that Stallworth was black.
[00:17:30] In his memoir Stallworth even said that, “As a matter of fact, when you took away the topic of white supremacy and K.K.K. nonsense from discourse with Duke, he was a very pleasant conversationalist.”
[00:17:43] In other words, if you didn’t think about the fact that he was the country’s most famous racist, he was quite a nice man to talk to.
[00:17:51] When Stallworth asked Duke if he was worried that somebody might play a trick on him, and pretend to be white on the phone, Duke confidently told him: “I can tell that you’re white because you don’t talk like a black man… you talk like a very smart, intellectual white man, and I can tell by the way you pronounce certain words.”
[00:18:12] Duke then visited Colorado Spring for the fake Ron’s initiation to the KKK, and the real Stallworth was assigned to be Duke’s personal protection officer for the day.
[00:18:25] Now, it might sound like a Hollywood movie, and of course it was made into one, but I assure you, this is a true story.
[00:18:34] When Stallworth - the real one - arrived, he told Duke that although he didn’t respect the KKK he would do his professional duty and protect him.
[00:18:46] Incredibly, Duke never made the connection that the black man standing in front of him was the real Ron Stallworth, the man that he had talked to for hours over the phone - he didn’t even recognise his voice.
[00:19:00] Duke never realised who Stallworth was and the story came out decades later.
[00:19:06] So, for someone who thought he was the face of what he called the ‘master race’, perhaps Duke wasn’t quite as intelligent as he thought.
[00:19:15] And it turned out that, aside from being a famous racist and not as good as he thought at deciding the colour of people’s skin from their voice, like many American politicians, he also wasn’t very good at paying his taxes.
[00:19:31] In December of 2002 Duke was convicted of tax fraud and served 15 months in prison.
[00:19:39] When he got out, he spent time travelling around Europe giving lectures and making connections with European neo-nazi groups.
[00:19:47] Duke’s focus now was not on the Klan or racism towards black Americans, but he developed an obsession with anti-semitic conspiracies about Judaism and Zionism.
[00:20:00] He mingled with Holocaust deniers, travelling around the world speaking at anti-Zionist conferences, which is what he is still doing really to this day.
[00:20:10] So, to wrap things up, David Duke was only leader of the Ku Klux Klan for a few years in the late-1970s, during a period when its membership declined and never really recovered.
[00:20:23] Until he became Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, it had generally tried to operate in secret to some extent, and as a result its leaders weren’t often in the spotlight.
[00:20:34] David Duke tried to change all that.
[00:20:37] He put himself front and centre of the Klan’s activities and white nationalist ideas, and tried to cultivate, create, a more professional and clean cut image for the group.
[00:20:49] He swapped white robes and pitchforks for smart suits and television screens.
[00:20:54] The beaming smile, the well-groomed hairdo, he looked and behaved like tens of millions of other American businessmen.
[00:21:03] But beneath the surface, and not even that far beneath the surface, he shared the same hateful ideas as his predecessors.
[00:21:13] Fortunately, he seems now to be further than ever from any real political power himself, but his political success, although it was never really a great success, did a great deal to legitimise white supremacy on a national level.
[00:21:28] And the consequences of this are indirect, far-reaching, and unfortunately may not be clear for many years to come.
[00:21:39] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on David Duke, “America’s most well-known racist and anti-Semite”, and not a very nice man indeed.
[00:21:49] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about Duke, or this was the first time you’d heard anything about him, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:21:58] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:22:01] What impact and influence do you think David Duke really had?
[00:22:06] What do you think the relative political success of a man like David Duke says about American society?
[00:22:12] And have you seen the Spike Lee film, BlacKkKlansman?
[00:22:15] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:22:19] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:27] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:32] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:10] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of this mini-series looking at the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:00:25] In the last episode, we looked at the three major historical phases of the KKK: its birth and rise in the post-civil war south during the Reconstruction Era, its anti-immigrant resurrection in the 1920s, and its final wave against the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.
[00:00:45] Today, in part-two, we’re looking at what came after that third and final wave, and what the Klan, or more specifically, what one man and his leadership did as it declined.
[00:00:57] Before this man took over, the Ku Klux Klan had always operated in secrecy, hidden behind hoods and robes and the cover of night.
[00:01:06] But as the Klan began its slow and steady decline, one man tried to change this.
[00:01:12] He tried to make the Klan - and its ideas - more mainstream, relatable, and family friendly.
[00:01:19] He was clean cut, ran for and even won political office, and appeared on television.
[00:01:26] But behind that public face was the racist, anti-semitic, white supremacist ideas common to the Klan throughout its history.
[00:01:36] I am talking, about David Duke - America’s best salesman of racial hate, the man who tried to take the KKK mainstream.
[00:01:45] So, let’s get right into it.
[00:01:49] David Duke sat in his New Orleans office at the headquarters of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:01:56] His phone rang.
[00:01:58] He leaned forward, and picked it up.
[00:02:02] On the other end of the phone, a man introduced himself as Ron Stallworth, a new Klan applicant from the Colorado Springs Chapter.
[00:02:12] The phone to his ear, Duke began looking through paperwork until he found the man’s application.
[00:02:19] “There’s been a delay in getting things processed,” Duke said, apologising profusely.
[00:02:24] In fact, Duke promised that he would personally process the application himself.
[00:02:32] For a man hoping to join the Klan, this was some honour - David Duke was famous, a celebrity of sorts.
[00:02:41] Shortly after, Ron Stallworth’s membership card arrived in Colorado Springs.
[00:02:47] He was now a fully-fledged member of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and would go on to speak on the phone with its leader, David Duke, once or twice a week.
[00:02:58] The only problem?
[00:03:00] Ron Stallworth was black, and David Duke had no idea.
[00:03:06] David Ernest Duke was born in 1950, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
[00:03:11] His father was an engineer for the Shell Oil Company, and his mother an alcoholic who was often disorientated and distant towards her son.
[00:03:22] Because of his father’s job, the young Duke spent some time living abroad, before the family eventually settled in New Orleans, in Louisiana, in the mid-1950s.
[00:03:33] Duke, therefore, was a teenager in the 1960s, the height of racial tensions in 20th century America.
[00:03:42] Though it’s true that his father was often away and his mother a distant drunk, it’s hard to pinpoint, or specify, exactly where or when Duke’s white supremacist worldview came from.
[00:03:57] One biography of Duke suggests that it had already begun to form when he was just 14 years old, when he wrote an essay arguing against integration for a class project.
[00:04:09] In order to research the paper, Duke went down to the New Orleans Citizens Council, one of many anti-integration groups across the American south at the time.
[00:04:19] It was there that he read a book that argued racial integration was doomed to fail, and after reading more and more white supremacist literature he developed the idea that race and genetics were the most important aspects of society.
[00:04:37] As Duke grew older, the New Orleans Citizens Council became like his second home, and he became interested in Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:04:47] One neighbour of the Duke family later said that the teenage David Duke even had the Nazi flag on his bedroom wall.
[00:04:57] The boy then fell under the influence of a man called Jim
[00:05:01] Lindsay,
[00:05:02] a Klan leader who stepped in as a father figure while his own father, David Duke Sr. was abroad.
[00:05:11] By the time he left high school - an integrated high school, by the way, a school with black and white pupils - Duke was already a fully-fledged member of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:05:23] In 1968, he enrolled at Louisiana State University, and first came to public attention for starting something called the White Youth Alliance and for his many racist and anti-semitic speeches on campus.
[00:05:38] He became well-known for wearing a Nazi swastika,
[00:05:42] and
[00:05:42] Alastair Budge: when a civil rights campaigner called William Kunstler gave a speech at another university in New Orleans, Duke travelled there for the event, dressed in full Nazi uniform and carrying a sign with the message: "Kunstler is a Communist Jew”.
[00:05:59] One contemporary, one colleague from Duke’s time at university, would later say that Duke "would talk about 'Mein Kampf" - Hitler’s political manifesto.
[00:06:09] "He would describe how he was going to become mainstream and get elected to the legislature,” he said.
[00:06:16] It seems that even back then, in college, Duke already had plans to take his vile views mainstream, and into the world of politics.
[00:06:27] After graduating from university, Duke remained involved in fringe white supremacist groups and protests.
[00:06:34] In 1974 he founded an organisation called “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan”, a rebranded, offshoot group that appealed to traditional Klan members but also tried to modernise the organisation.
[00:06:49] As you may remember from the last episode, throughout the Klan’s history there have been several offshoots, such as the Knights of the White Camelia and the White Brotherhood, that all existed under the loosely connected Klan name, and Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is best understood as another iteration, another form of this, rather than a separate or rival group.
[00:07:15] The name might have been slightly different, but the hate was the same. And Duke continued to make no secret of his vile views.
[00:07:26] That same year, he and a Klan colleague dressed in blackface - that is, they painted their faces black - and they interrupted the unveiling of a statue of a man called P.B.S. Pinchback, a black man who was governor of Louisiana in the Reconstruction era.
[00:07:44] Two years later, at the age of 26, Duke became Grand Wizard, the big boss, the youngest ever in Klan history, and he developed a reputation as an efficient salesman of Klan ideology and literature.
[00:08:00] Crucially, he knew about the Klan’s violent history and viewed it as baggage, or a distraction, stopping him from taking his white supremacist agenda into the political arena.
[00:08:13] During his time as leader, he tried to change and modernise the group, making it more palatable - more tolerable - to a mainstream middle-class audience.
[00:08:25] Although he was an unashamed racist and anti-semite, in public Duke tried to project an image of a well-dressed, educated, and family-friendly type of Klansman, one less associated with the traditional symbols and behaviour of the organisation’s past iterations.
[00:08:44] Under Duke’s leadership, Klan members were instructed to - and I'm quoting directly - "get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms.”
[00:08:55] Think less rural south, more suburban middle-management.
[00:09:01] Duke renamed the position of Grand Wizard "National Director" to give it a more official sounding name, and began calling cross burnings "illuminations."
[00:09:13] As the director of the Klanwatch project of the Southern Poverty Law Centre put it: "He used tactics that had never been used before -- throw away the robe, put on a three-piece suit, cut your hair, and get yourself on TV."
[00:09:29] Clearly, David Duke was trying to take white supremacy mainstream.
[00:09:35] And not just mainstream TV, he was making a bid for political power.
[00:09:41] In 1975, he had run unsuccessfully for the Louisiana Senate, gaining just 11,000 votes.
[00:09:49] Although he lost, Duke’s speeches, rallies and television appearances gently normalised white supremacist views as legitimate political positions, with nice suits and haircuts in television studios and debates.
[00:10:05] By 1980, however, Duke rather suddenly left the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:10:12] He gave up his position as Grand Wizard after a dispute with another Klan leader, Bill Wilkinson, who believed that Duke had sold a list of Klan members.
[00:10:23] You might remember from the last episode that by this time Ku Klux Klan groups across the country had been infiltrated by a targeted campaign of FBI undercover agents, and as Klan membership declined in the 1970s, what was left of it became increasingly distrustful of one another.
[00:10:44] After leaving, Duke founded a white civil rights group called the National Association for the Advancement of White People and tried to recover his image, distancing himself from the KKK and presenting himself not as anti-black, or anti-semitic, but pro-white and pro-Christian, a tactic to try to normalise his ideas of racial superiority.
[00:11:09] Although he would forever be associated with it, Duke was in fact the leader of the KKK for just four years, from 1976 to 1980.
[00:11:19] Though his tenure was short, it would prove to be a very useful stepping stone for what was coming next, the political aspirations he had held ever since his days at university.
[00:11:31] In 1988, Duke put himself forward for the Democratic party presidential nomination but he failed to win any primaries.
[00:11:42] Instead he won the nomination of the white nationalist Populist Party but won just 47,000 votes on election day.
[00:11:51] The next year, in 1989, however, Duke finally made his jump into the mainstream and finally got, in his eyes, his political reward.
[00:12:03] He left the Democrats and joined the Republican party, and won a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives by a very narrow margin - taking 50.7 percent of the vote.
[00:12:16] Just like Klansmen before him, Duke capitalised on, or took advantage of, times of social and economic unrest.
[00:12:26] The American economy was struggling in the mid-1980s. Duke blamed this on affirmative action - or positive discrimination - and capitalised on the fears of white voters to win election.
[00:12:39] Now, Duke didn’t really do anything of note during his time in office, preferring to focus on his personal brand and further trying to normalise white supremacist views.
[00:12:51] In 1990, however, he decided that a lowly state legislature wasn’t enough for his ambition and he ran for Senator.
[00:13:02] He lost, and the following year, in 1991, he ran for Governor of Louisiana.
[00:13:09] Though he did lose the election, Duke’s white supremacist platform won him almost half a million votes.
[00:13:17] Between the two elections - for Senator and Governor - Duke won almost 60 percent of the white vote.
[00:13:25] And just like another more recent divisive figure in American politics, Donald Trump, David Duke found himself initially somewhat cast out by the Republican Party.
[00:13:36] Some of the biggest Republican figures in American politics, including Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush, publicly criticised Duke and tried to distance the party from his abhorrent views.
[00:13:50] But like with Trump, his supporters backed him anyway, and anyone who criticised him was branded an establishment liberal, part of the status quo.
[00:14:01] I should add here that his political views weren’t the only unusual, unorthodox, things in David Duke’s life.
[00:14:09] It might not surprise you, but Duke was an incredibly strange man, and engaged in many unusual activities, typically with the aim of either sowing racial division or personal enrichment, making money. Normally both.
[00:14:26] In the 1970s, he wrote a martial arts guide for black militants under the pseudonym, or fake name, "Mohammed X."
[00:14:35] Years later Duke would say that it was an attempt to collect a database of black people who were potentially anti-white.
[00:14:43] During the 1980s, after his divorce, he wrote a self-help sex manual for women - writing under the name of Dorothy Vanderbilt.
[00:14:53] He was also implicated in a bizarre plot to establish a white supremacist regime on the island of Dominica and attended "white leadership" training sessions to prepare.
[00:15:06] And in 1989, while he was a Member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, he reportedly sold Nazi literature from his office, and it was around this time that reports emerged that for many years he had celebrated Hitler’s birthday - cake included, of course.
[00:15:24] Yet perhaps the most remarkably strange thing from Duke’s life, and an incredible story that inspired Spike Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman, was Duke’s relationship with this man called Ron Stallworth.
[00:15:38] Now, if you haven’t seen BlacKkKlansman, by the way, I thoroughly recommend it because that initial phone call we touched on in the introduction was just the beginning.
[00:15:48] As you heard at the start, Ron Stallworth was African-American, he was black, he was not your typical member of the KKK.
[00:15:58] What I didn’t mention was that he was also a police officer - the first black undercover police officer in the history of the Colorado Springs police department.
[00:16:08] Incredibly, Stallworth managed to infiltrate the Colorado Springs Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:16:16] Now, it almost goes without saying that it would have been incredibly dangerous - perhaps even fatal - for Stallworth to infiltrate the group in person.
[00:16:27] So how did he do it?
[00:16:29] Well, after making initial contact over the phone, Stallworth built up a rapport - a relationship - with local Klan members over the phone, and sent one of his white - and very brave - colleagues along to the meetings.
[00:16:45] As Stallworth would later write in his memoir none of the Klan members were ‘the brightest bulbs in the socket,’ meaning particularly clever, and nobody noticed nor asked why Ron Stallworth had one voice on the phone and another in person.
[00:17:02] Incredibly, and this is where it gets really good, after that initial phone call with Duke, Stallworth began a phone correspondence, or relationship, with David Duke himself - the national leader of the Klan.
[00:17:18] According to Stallworth, the two got on very well and spoke once or twice a week - Duke still having absolutely no idea that Stallworth was black.
[00:17:30] In his memoir Stallworth even said that, “As a matter of fact, when you took away the topic of white supremacy and K.K.K. nonsense from discourse with Duke, he was a very pleasant conversationalist.”
[00:17:43] In other words, if you didn’t think about the fact that he was the country’s most famous racist, he was quite a nice man to talk to.
[00:17:51] When Stallworth asked Duke if he was worried that somebody might play a trick on him, and pretend to be white on the phone, Duke confidently told him: “I can tell that you’re white because you don’t talk like a black man… you talk like a very smart, intellectual white man, and I can tell by the way you pronounce certain words.”
[00:18:12] Duke then visited Colorado Spring for the fake Ron’s initiation to the KKK, and the real Stallworth was assigned to be Duke’s personal protection officer for the day.
[00:18:25] Now, it might sound like a Hollywood movie, and of course it was made into one, but I assure you, this is a true story.
[00:18:34] When Stallworth - the real one - arrived, he told Duke that although he didn’t respect the KKK he would do his professional duty and protect him.
[00:18:46] Incredibly, Duke never made the connection that the black man standing in front of him was the real Ron Stallworth, the man that he had talked to for hours over the phone - he didn’t even recognise his voice.
[00:19:00] Duke never realised who Stallworth was and the story came out decades later.
[00:19:06] So, for someone who thought he was the face of what he called the ‘master race’, perhaps Duke wasn’t quite as intelligent as he thought.
[00:19:15] And it turned out that, aside from being a famous racist and not as good as he thought at deciding the colour of people’s skin from their voice, like many American politicians, he also wasn’t very good at paying his taxes.
[00:19:31] In December of 2002 Duke was convicted of tax fraud and served 15 months in prison.
[00:19:39] When he got out, he spent time travelling around Europe giving lectures and making connections with European neo-nazi groups.
[00:19:47] Duke’s focus now was not on the Klan or racism towards black Americans, but he developed an obsession with anti-semitic conspiracies about Judaism and Zionism.
[00:20:00] He mingled with Holocaust deniers, travelling around the world speaking at anti-Zionist conferences, which is what he is still doing really to this day.
[00:20:10] So, to wrap things up, David Duke was only leader of the Ku Klux Klan for a few years in the late-1970s, during a period when its membership declined and never really recovered.
[00:20:23] Until he became Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, it had generally tried to operate in secret to some extent, and as a result its leaders weren’t often in the spotlight.
[00:20:34] David Duke tried to change all that.
[00:20:37] He put himself front and centre of the Klan’s activities and white nationalist ideas, and tried to cultivate, create, a more professional and clean cut image for the group.
[00:20:49] He swapped white robes and pitchforks for smart suits and television screens.
[00:20:54] The beaming smile, the well-groomed hairdo, he looked and behaved like tens of millions of other American businessmen.
[00:21:03] But beneath the surface, and not even that far beneath the surface, he shared the same hateful ideas as his predecessors.
[00:21:13] Fortunately, he seems now to be further than ever from any real political power himself, but his political success, although it was never really a great success, did a great deal to legitimise white supremacy on a national level.
[00:21:28] And the consequences of this are indirect, far-reaching, and unfortunately may not be clear for many years to come.
[00:21:39] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on David Duke, “America’s most well-known racist and anti-Semite”, and not a very nice man indeed.
[00:21:49] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about Duke, or this was the first time you’d heard anything about him, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:21:58] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:22:01] What impact and influence do you think David Duke really had?
[00:22:06] What do you think the relative political success of a man like David Duke says about American society?
[00:22:12] And have you seen the Spike Lee film, BlacKkKlansman?
[00:22:15] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:22:19] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:27] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:32] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
