On Friday, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who lives in Louisiana and is a registered Republican, announced that he will run for the United States Senate.
The Louisiana Senate seat held by David Vitter is vacant.
There is no word from the Donald Trump campaign regarding Duke’s announcement, which is interesting since Trump confidante Roger Stone has intimated they may support a challenger to Sen. Ted Cruz, who will seek reelection to the Senate in 2018.
Apparently Cruz’s brand of traditional American conservatism is more offensive to Donald Trump than the openly racist Duke, whom Trump cynically refused to denounce only days before the Louisiana primary, even lying by saying he didn’t know anything about Duke. In Trump’s world, where revenge is king, seeking vengeance on the man who challenged him and refused to endorse him apparently is far more important than targeting an open racist who supports Trump.
A couple of statements that Duke has made illuminate exactly who he is: There’s this one: “Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and separation of the white and black races. This goal must include freeing of the American media and government from subservient Jewish interests.” And this: “What we really want to do is to be left alone. We don’t want Negroes around. We don’t need Negroes around. We’re not asking — you know, we don’t want to have them, you know, for our culture. We simply want our own country and our own society. That’s in no way exploitive at all. We want our own society, our own nation …”
Duke served as a state representative from suburban New Orleans for one term, then failed in his bid for Congress. He later sought unsuccessfully to run governor in 1991 against former Gov. Edwin Edwards.
In Trump’s world, where revenge is king, seeking vengeance on the man who challenged him and refused to endorse him apparently is far more important than targeting an open racist who supports Trump.
Duke said on his website that he had been “urged by enormous numbers of people his district to run for United States Congress … With the country coming apart at the seams and no one willing to really speak the truth about what is happening, the majority population in this country needs someone who will actually give voice to their interests in the face of an increasingly violent hatefest launched by the media and political establishment against them.”
Duke was convicted in 2002 of cheating on his taxes, and spent one year in jail.