Episode 2 Transcript

Edited 31Mar2019 by Kat/@leftgoth

JACK

Greetings fellow cucks, snowflakes, soy boys, and antifa super soldiers, and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the podcast in which I get Daniel Harper, Internet lefty person and my friend and colleague, to tell me what he learned and heard during more than two years of listening to and reading what the Alt-Right, which is really the far-right, say to each other in their safe spaces, their podcasts, their YouTube videos, etc… This is Episode 2. Last week, we talked about one of the better-known representatives of the so-called Alt-Right, Richard Spencer, and we're actually recording this episode too on the anniversary of the day he got punched. But I think we need to revisit Richard Spencer a little bit, in what might be sort of a regular feature of the show, which is the stuff that we didn't get to talk about last time. So Daniel, take it away. What was it that you wanted to talk about Richard Spencer that we didn't cover?

DANIEL

Well, I don't know if I really wanted to talk about Richard Spencer some more, but there were a couple of things I wanted to bring up, just things to highlight that I that I missed in last week's show.

JACK

“Wanted” is a relative term.

DANIEL

There are much better things that I could be doing in my time than following all these assholes and, you know, this is how it goes anyway. The first thing, you asked about the funding issues in terms of where Richard Spencer gets his money and where is their money. One detail that I do think I missed, there was that Regnery Publishing, this is a right wing, fringe book publisher publisher, basically anybody and everybody over right wing politics in the last 30 or 40 years.

It's run by this guy William Regnery II. William Regnery actually started and funds the National Policy Institute and he self-credits having quote unquote “discovered" Richard Spencer in 2011. So, you know, good for you, Regnery. One of the issues is that Richard Spencer is more overtly racist than a lot of the other people that he publishes are comfortable with. And so there's some friction there. But it does seem like Regnery is kind of right on board. He is a billionaire, apparently, and this is the source of one of the, you know, “Richard Spencer is secretly Jewish” stuff— Regnery himself. I think there's some family connections between [them], down the Spencer line and down the Regnery line and then somebody is supposedly half-Jewish or something, I forget all the details of that, but a lot of the lines of “Richard Spencer is an imposter”, seeking to bring down the movement stuff that you see in the fringier, weird corners. You go through that kind of rectory link anyway.

JACK

Well, that's reasonable.

DANIEL

Yeah. I mean, if you do decide to join the White Nationalist movement, and I'm assuming that, like, half the audience is just going to be convinced they need to do that after every episode, but if you do decide to join it, know that you will be accused of being a Jew by someone. That is just par for the course. The second thing I did want to mention was kind of the weirdest reference, one of the things that's the question of how connected these guys [are] to the “respectable” types, the suit-and-tie types, to the more violent paramilitary groups. It is really difficult to know with Spencer. As far as I can tell, I have seen no kind of direct connection anywhere. But there was one detail where, after the MSU [Michigan State] speech in, I think May 2018, there was a Unicorn Riot league. I was looking for the reference for this and I could not locate it so I'll see if I can I can dig it up and hopefully put it in the show notes. But there was an incident where, after that speech, he goes back to this undisclosed location/safe house somewhere in Michigan, somewhere in central Michigan, and with a whole bunch of, you know, kids, goons, fellow white nationalist types, and they were making Molotov cocktails out of tiki torch fuel and empty bourbon bottles—

JACK

Indifferent bourbon bottles, presumably.  We just put our first podcast in-joke.

Sorry, go on.

DANIEL

The issue there for me is it's hard to tell from the description because it's is very vague. Again, [were they] just these kids LARPing as revolutionary types or was this actually a more hardened attempt to defend themselves against the oncoming antifa hordes they were sure were coming? And that's just one of those weird details, that there were kids making Molotov cocktails and Richard Spencer is just, again, this suit-and-tie nationalism hanging out with all these people and [he] doesn’t seem to have any problem with it. Which does kind of speak to some of what his day-to-day life is like. But also, I find it's weirdly on-brand that [it] was tiki torch fuel, right. I really feel bad for the tiki corporation. So anyway, that's just one of those weird details, I thought it was just amusing and kind of scary. But I thought it was worth bringing up. And the third thing, and this is probably the one thing that I really felt bad about missing because I meant to mention it and I almost put it in a sentence and got distracted during the recording last week. He [Spencer] has been very credibly accused of domestic assaults against his now ex-wife. And in fact, this morning as we're recording this, there was a piece in The Huffington Post where the reporter actually spoke to both his ex-wife and actually spoke with Richard Spencer, and based on what I'm seeing, this does seem pretty legitimate. I mean, Spencer does not deny emotionally abusing his ex-wife and some of that. I mean, there are like violent texts and that sort of thing, [though he] does overtly deny ever actually hitting her. But there's pretty clearly a giant mountain of rage inside him that he keeps well away from the cameras. And I think the Huffington Post piece, there’s a lot of criticism going on, as there always is, about it seeming to let his ex-wife off the hook a little bit too much, because she has been working with Spencer for the last several years, nine years or so. I think they got married in 2010, so eight years. But there is. And you know, his wife has translated Alexander Dugin and was very involved in this movement, as much as Spencer himself. So yeah. Now that is just a detail that I would have kind of kicked myself for not bringing up at some point. I didn't want the listeners to feel like I was letting that slide and didn't care about that issue or whatever. You know, that was something that I just missed in the conversation forgot to bring back up again specifically.

JACK

I'm sure you know there are lots of people thinking now, you know, how can we criticize Richard Spencer for punching his Nazi wife if we think it's all right for people to punch him if he's a Nazi? Surely that's exactly the same thing. We’re massive hypocrites now.

DANIEL

Yeah, it's clearly, absolutely just one-for-one, exactly the same thing on both sides. You know.

JACK

A is A.

DANIEL

But are we quoting Ayn Rand or are we quoting Plato on that one?

JACK

That's too meaty for us. Okay, so having having dispensed with our unfinished business from last week, this week we're going to go back in time a bit. Well, not really go back in time because unfortunately he's still around, and [we’re going to] look at one-time Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. So Daniel, tell me about David Duke.

DANIEL

Sure. David Duke was born in 1950 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He moved around a lot. His father was a petroleum engineer, so he did move around a lot in his childhood. He briefly lived in the Netherlands when he was about three. They eventually settled in New Orleans in 1954-1955. He describes he had an African-American housekeeper whom he dearly dearly loved as a child, who was like a second mother to him.

JACK

So he wasn’t racist then.

DANIEL

Can’t be a racist then at all. He describes in his autobiography, which we'll get to, that he does have lots of purple prose about his basically Andy Griffith-like upbringing in Louisiana. He says, you know, “as a child, we often saw the Andy Griffith Show and thought that just looked like our lives”. Other people who have written about his past have slightly different views about that. Apparently he was often bullied and called “Puke Duke”, for one detail. But anyway, he describes being very liberal and very open to racial integration and, like, everyone around him in Louisiana in the late 50s and early 60s was clearly very interested in moving forward on the race question and being progressive, etc, etc. And he was assigned a school book report, kind of the Beat Club thing in 1963 when he was 13. And he said, “I would love to talk about segregation because I'm fully against it and I want to discuss it and that's what I want to do this project about”. And his teacher very clearly said, “Well, no, because this is a rhetoric class, you’re going to have to take the other side, young man, and that's the only way you're going to be able to do this report.” “Oh,” Duke says, “I can't find any material anywhere about this actually pro-segregation in New Orleans in 1963,” until he finds the Citizens Council Building downtown. And they had not just one book, but a whole library of books, among these titles was Race and Reason by Carleton Putnam. It's called Race and Reason: A Yankee View. And basically, this book transformed David Duke's life. He becomes a committed white nationalist at the age of 13 based on, well I think one day we may actually cover some of these books. I have read this book, it is filled with…basically every racist on Twitter uses some revamped version of this same kind of basic bullshit. So he becomes a committed racist at the age of 13. He meets William Luther Pierce, who is the guy who is best known for writing The Turner Diaries and who founded the National Alliance, a straight up Nazi-type in 1967. This is a detail that Duke leaves out of his autobiography, interestingly enough. [He] joins the Klan at 17 in 1967, goes on to basically become a full-fledged Nazi as a college student in the 70s, from about 1970-1974. Graduates. He does spend a year in Laos with his father, instead of serving in Vietnam. He had attempted— he was top of his class in the ROTC, but could not join the military to fight in Vietnam because of his racism. Even at that time, he was too well-known to be able to actually join the military. So he goes off and has a long and distinguished career as a, basically, professional racist. The details of that, I mean it gets kind of messy and contested, we can go into some of that, but the high points are, by 1978, he appears on the Phil Donahue Show, he does a ton of stuff basically mainstreaming the Klan, also nazifying the Klan, which is an interesting detail. He runs for office a few times, he actually serves a term in the Louisiana House of Representatives between 1988 and 1991. He runs as a Democrat in the 1988 primary, basically on the “I'm going to attack Jesse Jackson” ticket. Fails utterly. He had previously worked on the George Wallace campaign and there's some contested history there about, like, an arrest and he claims one thing and the authorities claim another, but he did join the Populist Party to run in their primary in the ’88-’89 era, and then kind of becomes a Republican after that. Has a run for president a few more times in ’92, ’96, and in 2000 attempted to gain the Reform Party nomination and failed at that. And then, [he] came back to the Republicans and he had attempted to run, I believe as governor of Louisiana, in 2016. Most people know David Duke in that late 80s/early 90s period. That's kind of the height of his era in the public eye. But the reason I really wanted to do him second after Richard Spencer was because David Duke in the late 70s and early 80s reminds me a lot more of where Richard Spencer is now. Although David Duke was in his late 20s at that point, Richard Spencer is 40 years old, but at least the strategies and sort of the connections that he's making. And so I think Duke's later career gives us a sense of where Richard Spencer might go in the next 10 or 15 or 20 years, assuming he remains active in the movement, which there's no reason to think he will leave it. The other big salient detail in David Duke's life after the year 2000, he does spend about five years living in Russia feeding on Russian right wing media money. He goes to prison from 2003 to 2005 for tax fraud and mail fraud. He was pretending to be penniless to his base of supporters and he actually got prosecuted for it. So he did serve in prison. He does a have a doctorate, Dr. David Duke. It is basically a right wing, racist diploma mill in the Ukraine that that published his book My Awakening, which is his autobiography, in 1988 and another book, The Jewish Roots of Communism, I think is the title, in 2002 or so. And, believe me, [that’s] basically an expansion of a section of My Awakening. Today he runs a radio show, without an RSS feed or I would like spend more time listening to it, but it's basically unlistenable. We’re podcast hosts, we kind of understand [that] the process of becoming a podcaster is often just, you know, I feel like I have things to say and certainly I'm not going to pretend that sort of vainglorious lack of self-enjoyment to a certain degree, but no man, I think in history, has loved the sound of his own voice more than David Duke. He talks and talks and talks. He does, particularly after 2016, he does a ton of guest-hosting on other people's podcasts. He appeared on one show once, I think this was like right before Charlottesville and literally the kid asked him one question, you know, “how's it going David Duke? Welcome to the show,” something of that nature. And David Duke continued to speak for a full hour uninterrupted.

JACK

Well, I hate to draw comparisons, but Adolf Hitler was also famous for that. He’d just talk and talk and talk endlessly. He used to keep people up all night at the dinner table just talking at them and then they'd all be allowed to go to bed when he finally finished at 3:00 a.m…

DANIEL

Yeah, I can't imagine that being with him personally is anything more than that. I mean, he sounds like an absolutely insufferable human being. He is now 68 years old, he appears on these radio shows all the time. He is regularly a guest on “Zee Public Space”, which is JF Gariepy, his show which we've mentioned before. I'm going to give you this link— there is a very cute little three minute video of David Duke saying, like, “oh no, let me stop you for a second, I just need to get something out before you can move on to your point,” and then continued to speak for long enough that JF is clearly made uncomfortable. So even the other people in the white nationalist movement don't really like him too much. Some of the leaked Unite the Right planning documents, like the texts that they were receiving, was pretty clear that Richard Spencer was planning on ditching David Duke after the rally and not telling him the place of the after party and that sort of thing.

JACK

You mentioned that the era he's best known for with the public is the 80s and early 90s and that era. I mean, firstly the famous Donahue appearance was in ’92, wasn't it?

DANIEL

He actually appeared on Donahue twice, once in ’92 and once in ’78. The ’92 appearance includes clips from the ’78 appearance. I cannot find the full 1978 interview anywhere online. If somebody has that, please let me know.

JACK

Yep. And he became known in the 80s as kind of the new face of the Klan, didn't he? Unless I've got this wrong. He was the guy that was making the Klan respectable, supposedly.

DANIEL

Yeah, that's a little bit more in the 70s because he actually left the Klan in 1980 and he founded something called the National Association for the Advancement of White people. Guess where he got that name from. This is a pattern that you see over and over again— even the term “white power” itself was a misappropriation of the Black Power rhetoric of the 60s and 70s.

JACK

Well, I mean, how can you object to it? How can you say it's wrong with white power if you  don't think there's something wrong with black power? Because hey, A is A, it’s the same thing, isn't it?

DANIEL

All lives matter, you know. So David Duke was “all lives matter’ing” the NAACP in 1978, 1979, that era.

JACK

It's almost as if there's only so many ways you can package the same old bullshit.

DANIEL

Almost, almost.

JACK

Okay, so I got my facts a bit wrong then, it’s more the 70s when he was looked upon as the guy revamping the Klan, right?

DANIEL

That’s a little bit earlier, but it's funny, like even those later appearances and during the 80s, [he] would [be] referred to as ex-Grand Wizard or even Grand Wizard of the KKK. But at that point, he had to ditch the robes in favor of the suit and tie, and he put on this very presentable appearance [that he’s well-known for]. In the mid to late 70s, up to about 1982, he did a ton of radio interviews of actively pushing the Klan as new and improved. You know, “we’re not the bad guys, we’re not the inbred yokels and hicks that the media tells you. We're just a civil rights organization interested in the rights of white people.” He also fought against something I mentioned a second ago. He is kind of credited in this book, Blood and Politics by Leonard Zeskind, and if there is one book on the white nationalist movement I would recommend, it is that one. It is an amazing amazing text; David Duke features heavily in it. I was going to re-read those sections of the book in preparation for this for this episode and then realized very quickly that he's in like 300 pages.

JACK

It would basically just be re-reading the book.

DANIEL

Basically be re-reading the book, right. But he's got his fingers in a lot of pies as he sees it. He’s a really, really important figure in that period and then later on when he was reaching for more mainstream political office. So, I mean, you get these two separate eras of David Duke, one of which is working with the Klan in terms of doing more straightforwardly classic, white nationalist organizing, like building a membership list, working directly with the Klan and other organizations, some campus politics, that sort of thing. And then later on when he becomes a quote unquote “mainstream” political candidate when he's actually trying to achieve ordinary political office. So those are the two separate kind of moments that we remember David Duke for. And he often is confused, I think, sometimes in terms of like how people think it's all kind of the same thing, but no, there's a Klan period and then there's a leader seeking, trying to become governor of Louisiana, trying to seek the presidency, trying to run for the Senate. You know, he ran [for] a bunch of offices and kind of got nowhere. His biggest claim to fame, definitely in terms of his electoral career, was he did run for governor of Louisiana in 1991. He was repudiated by his own party— he was too toxic even for the Republicans at that time. But it did come down to a definitely closer than expected vote. He ends up with, again, according to Wikipedia, about 38.8% of the total vote. But he did win over half of the white vote in Louisiana in that year, which is kind of terrifying, right.

JACK

Yeah, well, that's the incident in which I run into David Duke in my research into libertarians and Murray Rothbard and everything. Murray Rothbard wrote a thing about that where he says, “Oh, everybody is scandalized that David Duke did so well in that election,” you know, and then he goes on to basically defend him and say, “Well, you know there's very little in David Duke's ideology that that runs counter to libertarianism.”

DANIEL

Right. I mean, because Duke definitely was running under a sort of, you know, would couch it as “white civil rights”, anti-affirmative action, anti-civil rights laws, like freedom of association laws, states rights, that sort of thing. And that plays directly into that libertarian ethos [that] you see a lot of the political organizing around that time in particular, and particularly going into the libertarian/Libertarian-Republican politics of the 90s, [it] rests on that same kind of language and logic. So David Duke was seen as, “Well, we don't necessarily want to be quite that racist, but we definitely support his right to be racist.”

JACK

Yeah, you mentioned nazifying the KKK. Perhaps you could speak about that a bit.

DANIEL

Sure. This is again something that is covered in a lot more detail in Blood and Politics, but the basic idea is that the Klan was always an anti-African American organization in its early days from the 1860s, and then in the 1920s they didn't like Jews, but that was just kind of down their list of complaints.

JACK

Was a side issue for them.

DANIEL

And what they were looking to do was to engage in a more white supremacist vision in which African Americans lived under the same government as white people, but were subjugated. You know, Jim Crow laws, segregated housing. It was like, “We don't want them to be laborers, we just want them to be away in their own little crappy places and we don't want them voting. We don’t want them having political power.” And when Duke takes over the Klan, when he starts nazifying it, he’s looking much more in terms of the more modern idea of the ethno-state concept. “We want to have a government separate from Africa. We don't want them near us. We don't want the crime. We don't want,” you know, etc. And so it looks a lot more like an eliminationist rather than segregationist party, right.

JACK

And of course, the idea of the ethno-state, as opposed to the segregationist version of the same racism, is very integral to racism today, isn't it.

DANIEL

Right. In fact, when the modern day guys will say, “Well, I'm not a white supremacist, I’m a white supreeemist,” as a mocking of [the word] supreme. “I'm not a white supreeemacist, you call me a white supreeemacist because I don't want to live with black people. I want them to live in their own place away from me. I don't believe I should be supreme. I want separation.” And so that rhetoric ends up being used a lot. I mean, of course, it's a different version of the same thing, ultimately.

JACK

Yeah, exactly, because the justification for Jim Crow was separate but equal, wasn't it. It's just the same principle extended, and then they pretend it's a completely different thing, right.

We should probably mention, actually, the context that we're recording this, just I think a couple of days after Representative Steve King asked why it was offensive now to call yourself a white supremacist.

DANIEL

Among, you know, what could anybody possibly think is wrong with saying, "I think white people are supreme.” It's like, “white people, we’re just people with sour cream on us and tomatoes,” this is a terrible joke there as well. Apologize for that one.

JACK

Yeah, there's only so much you can do for humor.

DANIEL

Well, here's a funny detail that I skipped over there during the fallow period in between when he [Duke] was doing open Nazi shit versus Klan versus political stuff: he had trouble making money. And one of the things he did was he wrote a bunch of stuff under pseudonyms, and he did write a book called Finders Keepers in 1976. I cannot find a copy of this book. I would love to read it. The book contained, I'm taking this from a Washington Post article from 1990 so I'll give you a link, the book contained instructions on oral sex, foreplay, and vaginal exercises, and also encouraged women to have sex with married men because they make better lovers. Duke has said he only checked for grammatical errors in the sexual content of the book, but did not write those chapters. Apparently the bulk of that was just lifted wholesale from Cosmopolitan magazine and plagiarizing Cosmo and writing a book and using that to make money. Duke is also an inveterate womanizer. He was very well-known in the Klan circles in the 70s and, presumably to, I am hoping not present day. But you see a lot of people in the Klan groups who say, “keep your wife away from him,” you know, he's somebody who gets handsy and he's perfectly happy to cheat on his wife with whatever pretty young thing is hanging around with the Klan guys in the 70s.

JACK

Definitely keep your wife away from him, and keep yourself away from him, and just keep away from him, basically, for various reasons, let alone the ones just stated.

DANIEL

He did marry Chloe Hardin in the 70s. They eventually divorce; the details of the courtship are well-covered My Awakening, why she left is not so much, but she does eventually leave him. Then she marries Don Black, who would go on to found Stormfront and also has his own little shady radio show without an RSS feed. Don Black is a truly despicable piece of shit who went to prison for a few years for trying to take over the island of Dominica in the Caribbean, [in a] basically, an open imperialist attempt to form a white nationalist state.

JACK

Like a private act of imperialism.

DANIEL

Right. There's a very good book I actually just read called Bring the War Home. Kathleen Belew is the woman who wrote that. It’s a very good book that goes into the history of Vietnam veterans coming home and how they get involved in white nationalist, white supremacist Klan groups, and the ideological connections there, and that leads all the way up to the Timothy McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing in 1996. And that's a really interesting book that put me thinking in some different directions about that stuff, which I'm still kind of figuring out the way some of this fits in. But we don't have to cover that necessarily. David Duke is mentioned a couple of times in the book, but he's definitely the focus. It's more people that he used to hang out with [who] went on to do other things. In fact, you can often find that a bunch of David Duke's second-in-commands end up being, A) they end up not liking him very much, and B) they end up going on to form other organizations. Tom Metzger, who eventually is going to form the White Aryan Resistance, who is still alive, who produces, believe it or not, audio CDs of white nationalist radio programs that you can subscribe to. For $20 a month, he will mail you audio CDs of himself talking, which I'm sure is an incredibly effective way of spreading the message. He's also in the Louis Thoreau and the Nazis documentary. He's kind of a figure in that [documentary] and I hear he does occasional appearances on some of the more fringy white nationalist podcasts. So I've heard him speak a little bit. So Tom Metzger is one guy, Don Black is one guy, and a bunch of people who have peripheral connection to David Duke's work in the 70s, who went on to do more overtly violent things than he [Duke] could do. Also, he’s well-known for embezzling money from the people around him, and there's some evidence he probably informed on some of his underlings to the FBI. What I find fascinating is just how much of a clown he is today. And because I describe all this nazifying the Klan, like, “let's make the Klan worse. Let's take this down, it was already terrorizing people, and find a way to make it worse.” David Duke does that. You know, people know him as this pretty bright, smart person with white nationalist leanings. He does a lot of that. You see a lot of the coverage of David Duke in the 70s and 80s, [it] looks a lot like the “dapper young Nazi” Richard Spencer stuff. And so there's this clear link there. I mean, a lot of these more current guys are clearly trying to figure out where Duke went wrong. You know, engage in the same kind of mainstreaming of these far-right, openly genocidal ideas into open political discourse. In 1970, when he was a college student, he was well-known for having actual Nazi posters on his wall in his dorm room. A bunch of people who were there at the time will attest to that. And he used to go around campus wearing an SS uniform complete with swastika armband. And there are some widely-circulated photos of him in 1970 protesting the appearance of the Chicago Seven, who are the protesters who were arrested at the 1968 Democratic Convention, he is protesting the appearance of one of their advocates in 1970 when he appeared at the university, at Louisiana State, where Duke was a student at the time. And, again, David Duke wearing Nazi shit, being a straight-up Nazi, and that’s, again, something he does not mention in his autobiography. In the late 70s, 1978, when he was part of the Klan, he did a bunch of public attention stunts, one of which was he did the “Klan Border Patrol”, where he actually went down to the U.S.-Mexico border and basically did a militia-like stunt to stop the illegal immigration coming in. And seeing that repeated again, it’s just lovely.

JACK

Yeah, it's nice. It’s nice to see these old standards come back, isn't it, as they have done.

DANIEL

So, I mean, he's legitimately a scary figure. He's legitimately a nasty little piece of work. But I think the thing that amuses me is just how un-seriously most of the modern guys take him. Like [they] think, “oh, he did great work back in the day,” but nobody wants to hang out with him. In particular, he’s a huge fan of health food and fasting. He spends a ton of time talking about how, in fact, this hour long thing I told you about in that podcast episode was really not about, like, how terrible the Jews are, although he will tell you how terrible he thinks the Jews are at a moment's provocation. Although, he'll usually say things instead of, like, “Jewish,” he’ll say the “Zio-media”. He's big into that  “Zio-left, the Zio-media”. You know, “they're coming after our white people.” But he basically describes his fasting routine and his exercise routine and is like, “You know, you're a young guy and if you want to be whip-smart and you really want to be the best you can be, you really got to start to try fasting, and I've got this health food in my bag, and you should definitely try some of that.” Apparently, in the van in Charlottesville when they were driving around as part of the Unite the Right rally, he did give a small speech, it is online, I'll give you the the audio of that. He and someone we will definitely be talking about in the future, Mike Enoch, there is one video where they each give like a five minute speech, but apparently he was pushing health food on people in the van in Charlottesville. So in the post-Charlottesville and post-Unite the Right podcasts, you'll hear kids who were there, guests on the shows, and they will mock David Duke specifically for that, because he's like, “you got to eat pea soup and bran muffins and  fast everyday,” and it's complete nonsense. But that's what he's into now. He's basically like Natural News, but like a racial agenda.

JACK

There's a lot of that in this subculture in various forms. There's a lot of obsession with diet and health foods and healthy living and supplements and stuff like that. I mean, a lot of it's hucksterism, but…

DANIEL

Right, well, even in like Alt-Right circles, [there’s] the Brain Force Plus (an Alex Jones supplement), you know, all that kind of stuff. One of the things is this biological view of humanity that is, you know, “we are essentially our bodies, that society and socialization, those things don't count at all, just biology.” And so they get really obsessed with making sure that they're eating the right things and making sure that they're behaving properly as men. So they they work out constantly - or at least they say they work out constantly - that stuff happens a lot. You get a lot of talk about how you're supposed to eat, what you're not supposed to eat. “No, there are phytoestrogens in beer and you can't have beer…although beer is a European thing, it's like a European tradition.”

JACK

Isn’t that one of the great achievements of European culture?

DANIEL

“We as white men can absorb alcohol where the other races just don’t do as well, particularly Native American and East Asians, because of our unique genetic heritage, which leads to a culture which allows us to absorb alcohol responsibly,” and then the other half is like, “Yeah, but it’s got phytoestrogens and it's going to be turn you into a soy boy f—t cuck or whatever.” Apologies for the language there.

JACK

Do you want to talk about his appearance on Donahue, is it worth talking about or have we covered that enough already?

DANIEL

I mean, it's definitely worth watching if you're interested in seeing what the previous media environment is like and, in particular, looking at the old. You look at that appearance and you look at the way that Donahue does it, what Donahue does and doesn't challenge, because he can't. So David Duke, again, if you look at what he's done, he bases a lot of his justifications on this very strong, pseudoscientific, genetic argument, right. Like the ideas of race and IQ and then he claims to have been interested in biology from a very young age. And so you hear David come out and say, ‘Well, there are clear IQ differences and this comes from this unique genetic heritage,” and whatever, and talk show hosts like Donahue - he just doesn't have the rhetorical ability to really combat that directly. So it ends up being like the source of that “facts not feels” thing, right. There is actually more, I can't remember if that happens, if David Duke actually gets him on that kind of argument in ’92, but Donahue had an episode on about Holocaust deniers, and that comes up over and over and over again. One of the things that I think is a general challenge of dealing with this stuff, is how you deal with the arguments that they're making because the whole point of being say, “look, I've got all this genetic evidence and I've got all this, you know, William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, and the Nobel Prize guy, and James Watson,” — today, they'll talk about James Watson, the discoverer of DNA, believes that black people are inferior, and “he’s the Galileo of our time”, and you know, responsible scientists do not want to challenge that because they don't want to give it airtime. But when they make these claims to people who don't know the science, they're very easily tripped up because they've got rhetorical moves planned in advance. So it's a real challenge in combating this stuff because they sound like they know what they're talking about even when they're actually speaking of clear nonsense that anyone with a basic knowledge of genetics should be able to refute. But then they've got these big names that they say all agree with their side. You see this a lot in creationism, which I think everyone who listens to this knows that I used to hang out in those circles, and that all the creationists use those same kind of strategies over and over again.

JACK

It's the same with anything you go into a debate about, you know [for example] 9/11 with a Truther. If you don't know anything about engineering and metallurgy and stuff, they'll beat you despite the fact that they're talking complete rubbish.

DANIEL

Right. And just by the fact that they can sound like they know what they're talking about, sounds like, “Oh, well, you have you ever looked at the IQ data,” and they can get the kind of jargon down enough to flim-flam, essentially, and that's something that's a really dangerous form of pseudoscience there.

JACK

So the interview [Duke and Donahue] is famous. What do you think the overall effect was? Did it make him more respectable overall? He seems to be quite influential despite the fact that almost everybody, including all the people on his own side, views him with contempt.

DANIEL

Because he comes across well in these interviews, because he's polite, because he can distance himself from the stereotype of the Klan, I think he has an ability to become the respectable face of this stuff in a way that few other people do. So the Donahue interview itself, I mean that was after his failed run, that was him on the downward slope in terms of any kind of mainstream respectability. Basically, he lost enough political races that he started to look like a loser instead of a winner. You know, because in the early days, he looked like, “Oh, this upstart,” who can come up and win electoral victories, and it's going to become the new face of the Republican Party in some ways. By ’92, I mean I don't know that it necessarily obvious at that time, that was kind of his peak. But certainly in retrospect, we can see that he really was never higher in public esteem, or in his public face, than he was in November ’91 when that election happened.

JACK

But would you say, then, that the main way in which he's been influential, I mean, you said earlier that Richard Spencer reminds you a bit of David Duke at this period. Would you say that David Duke's main influence, then, has been this idea of being polite and dapper and seeming respectable, etc, as a way in to the mainstream?

DANIEL

I think there's a lot to that and I think that this kind of gets into something that, if you've been following these guys at all, the modern Alt-Right movement, they’re obsessed with their optics, quote unquote “optics”, like the polo shirts and khakis, the idea of like, “We're not going to dress like slobs, we're going to be like kind of middle class, working class guys.” You know, kind of like wearing what you'd wear to work, if you work in the tech industry, which most of these guys do.

JACK

I wonder what that says about the tech industry.

DANIEL

Oh, that's kind of an amazing question, honestly.

JACK

That's a whole other series.

DANIEL

That’s a whole other thing. But, you know, this idea of dressing it up and cleaning it up and making it— I mean, ultimately the reason that David can do this is, in some sense, because the larger media, again post-World War II, never really dealt with the reality of what the United States is as a white supremacist nation. We never really, in Western society in general, but I can speak specifically for the United States, we just kind of pretended it wasn't true. We've always been multicultural, we have always been a multicultural melting pot here in the United States. We've always had people of many different races and many different societies and cultures who all joined together. We can't pretend that that's not true. But we have done that in this kind of openly white supremacist way that privileged certain kinds of people over others.

JACK

You know, I was going to say it's just that American capitalism was built on some of those people being owned and used as farm machinery, as Vonnegut put it.

DANIEL

Exactly. The rhetorical technique then was to paint [it like], “Oh, you want to be sophisticated, you want to be a better person,” and [it] embraces multiracial and rejects open forms of racism. And anybody who is a racist has got to be some inbred hillbilly from Alabama or Mississippi, which plays very much in terms of the way that the resentment of the American South, since the Civil War really, but particularly after World War II, you know, people living in the south do have a legitimate resentment towards quote unquote “coastal elites" who treat them as inbred. And this has both an illicitly racial and a cultural-Christian [thing] this gets played into. There's a big stew of this stuff in different bits and bobs that pop up every now and then. I grew up in the south. I know how the attitude is. I mean, you know when people say the Confederate flag is about heritage not hate, now there's a lot of bullshit there, but there are people in the South who genuinely think, “We were just rebelling against these rich guys who treated us like shit from another part of the country and we were trying to go off and do our own thing.” They ignore that the thing they were trying to do was engage in a continued system of exploitative labor where people get to own other people, like explicitly racist lines. But there is something to that, in terms of the psychology, and someone like David Duke and Richard Spencer and a lot of these guys on the Alt-Right now have basically played into this resentment wherein, if you live in this kind of rural area and maybe your life hasn't gone so well and you feel like you're looked down on by, again, “coastal elites” — you can put parentheses around that if you like — then somebody like David Duke is saying, “No, I'm speaking for your interests and speaking for white interests and speaking for the rural people who live in these flyover states in this flyover country, who do not live in these big cosmopolitan states” — again with and without parentheses — “who have legitimate interests, and that you are white people and I'm reaching out to you as white people.” You can take that ’92 [Donahue] appearance, you can take the stuff that he was doing in the late 70s, and mainstreaming and making it nice and polite, you can play that right into you. I mean, we can do a super-cut of David Duke in 1978, David Duke in 1992, Richard Spencer in 2009 or 2010, relevant to the modern guys today. We could do essentially one sentence, it just runs all through that. And it's that same basic idea that plays into everything, that's been going on in American politics, that's the southern strategy, at least on this idea. I mean, Nixon talking about, “It’s these New York elites,” privately he would say Jews, but you know, the idea that the liberal media is out to get you because you're conservative, because you're traditionalist, and this “great silent majority” rhetoric. We do get to this thing, like it feels difficult to take someone like David Duke seriously because, ultimately, he is a very marginal figure and even at his greatest success, he was not really reaching that high. He never really got that far in terms of like mainstream political success, and now he does a really shitty radio show without even an RSS feed. So, it tells you he's not a mainstream figure, but he is just the tip of the spear that is playing with, basically, harder-edged versions of what's going on in very, very mainstream politicians, of both political parties, particularly in certain regions. This is in no way trying to pretend that this is just a Republican thing, it is making explicit what is implicit. That's what I find fascinating, in a lot of ways about studying these guys, is that the whole thing that they're trying to do, is to say, “Hello, stop saying working class Americans and just say white people, which is what you really mean.”

JACK

So you wanted to talk about his autobiography.

DANIEL

Yes. There is, and I have given Jack the links here, you can buy it on Amazon if you like. We are not going to stop you, but don't. There is a PDF available, it is on the Internet Archive, it is Google-able, but again, I'll give Jack a link so you can have that. I do have that PDF, I did kind of go over [it], kind of skimmed a bunch of it while I was preparing for this podcast. But my initial experience of reading this book was not through the PDF or through the text copy, which I would not buy a text copy, I'm not giving this guy any money. He makes an audio book freely available on his website through the Internet Archive, doesn't actually host the files himself of course, because it's probably beyond his technical sophistication. But he does link to the Internet Archive. You can go and download an audio version that he recorded. It's unclear to me when he recorded this, but it was sometime after ’98 and before 2016 when he was running for governor. He not only reads the book, but he goes into and he does asides on the book.  So for instance, he'll do a sequence talking about then current data and the race and IQ stuff, he’ll quote  like Rushton from 1997 and then go and then do an aside like, “And actually, this was updated in 2004. There was an even better book…” and then would go into that kind of nonsense. So he’s not even really reading the book as much as meta-commenting on the book. There are tables in the book and he will describe the table and say, “If you download the PDF, you can have that table and look at that.” It is really insufferable. It is, I think, 42 hours long. I listened to it at 2.0 speed. I may give Jack some audio from this, I was looking for like a really choice package. Let me describe the contents of this book to you. It is split into four basic units, four parts of the book, and each one has several chapters inside. Part One is essentially David Duke's childhood where he describes how wonderful growing up in Louisiana was and the Andy Griffith stuff and then how he discovered the race question and segregation, right. So Part Two is basically race and IQ, and fraudulent sets of pseudoscientific data. So there's a lot of David Duke saying things like, “Blacks are more inherently inclined to crime and we know this because FBI crime data, such and such thing, and I'm going to give you a citation again if you want all the real data. I've got hundreds of references and you can find it in the paper copy of my book which you can buy and such and such.” Part Three is on the Jewish question, which is essentially a long list of people that David Duke thinks are bad who are also Jewish. I wish I was exaggerating this but…

JACK

That reminds me of Nick Griffin's pamphlet about how the Jews control the media in Britain and it's basically just the list of people in British show business who are Jewish.  

DANIEL

Literally in some places, he’s like, “Oh, look at all the people in, like, Lincoln's cabinet who had possible Jewish ancestry, look at all the people in,” — I guess the book was written in the Clinton administration, so he goes through and lists all the Jews who are running such and such department — “Look at all the media-Jews, look at it…” Literally, it's just a list. A whole bunch of it is just, “Oh, and so-and-so and so-and-so: Jewish. And then this guy is vice president: also Jewish.” The text version is bad enough, but listening to him, just like the way he says “Jewish" over and over and over again. Like every time it's supposed to be this stab in the face towards his rhetorical enemies, it's absolutely, you know, if it wasn't filled with the worst kind of antisemitic hate, it would be really amusing. It's completely on the face of it ridiculous to basically just name a list of Jewish people. It's not even like a correlation-causation error like the race and IQ stuff and all of the science around genetics. It’s just, “look at some Jewish bad people and they're overrepresented because of such and such, and you know the Jewish roots of communism. Karl Marx: Jew.” Again, it's literally just a list of like all the Jewish people who founded Communism in Russia in 1917.

JACK

The hatred is so visceral.

DANIEL

“The Russian mafia is really the Jewish mafia, don't you know, because all these people coming over and committing crimes and doing the the Russian mafia stuff. They're not Russians, they’re not real ethnic Russians. They’re Jews, that’s what makes them extra-bad, and they've got weird sexual proclivities,” and that sort of thing. It's hours and hours and hours and hours to just do this. I mean, I tuned out for big chunks of it because there's no reason to follow the details of this in any detail.

JACK

It doesn't sound like a page-turner, no.

DANIEL

And then the fourth part, I'll just finish up the description of the book, is, “Look at all the times I owned the Liberals and the media, look at all the little edge lord activities I engaged in when I was a college student.” I mean, there's a lot of like the, “And then I asked my professor if you think that you know the egalitarian principles right, then how do you account for such and such? And they had no answer because clearly I was right. They were just parroting their egalitarian bullshit.” There literally is that: “Look at all the times I owned the libs when I was in college, and then when I traveled the world I went to India and everything was dirty and the food so spicy because they don't wash their plates. And then I went to Europe and everything was gorgeous.” And yeah, this is a rich kid. He got to travel the world, his dad was a petroleum engineer in the 70s.

JACK

Another rich kid like Spencer.

DANIEL

Yeah. I mean, I don't get the sense that he comes from old money in the way that Spencer does. But you know, these kids are very often pretty well-off. There's not a sense of real kind of material lack in their lives, in most cases. There is one detail, the only thing I'm going to like empathize with him a little bit here, is that his mother does appear to have been a really, really awful alcoholic and pill-popper, particularly after his uncle died when he was very young. And that like pushed his mother into this really, really awful alcoholism, like every source agrees this was really, really bad. And so I will say, you know what, yes, David Duke, you had a really terrible experience with your mother. That doesn't justify genocidal racism, but I will give him that.

JACK

Okay, so the other thing about David Duke is that he was at Unite the Right in Charlottesville, wasn't he?

DANIEL

He was and in fact—

JACK

As you've already mentioned.

DANIEL

The fact that David Duke agreed to go when Jason Kessler, who organized Unite the Right, asked him, seems to have been essentially the reason that Richard Spencer said yes. For instance, because again, we have text messages of Kessler texting with Spencer. He said, "You know Duke and Enoch are both going to be there,” and Spencer agrees, “Okay, yes, I will come.” You know, so David Duke does lend a certain legitimacy to Unite the Right, on the far-right at that time. Like, “Oh, we've actually got this. This is white nationalism 1.0,” is what they call it, “We've got this giant figure who's very well-known in the movement, who is taking us seriously.” David Duke appeared on the Fash the Nation podcast in 2016, for instance, and it was really weird for me because I had been listening to that podcast for a couple of months, and then I hear David Duke come on and using words like cuck. It was just like, what the fuck are we doing. You know like when your grandpa starts trying to play hip-hop or something. It felt like a really strange thing to me at that time.

JACK

Well, this sort of image of the “Facebook grandpa” has kind of been recurring to me a lot during our conversation.

DANIEL

There's a lot of that going on where David Duke is. I mean, they sort of respect him in the sense of like he's just been around forever and they give him a certain amount of space. But again, they don't seem to really like him, they don't think he really gets their meme. He's kind of a joke, but he's just, you know, he's clever, the doddering old grandpa, and there are some figures who seem to have legitimate affection for him. But I think everybody finds him insufferable and they think that he's going to try to steal their wives and he's going try to steal their money.

JACK

And wants to talk to them about health food.

DANIEL

About health food and “the juice”. It's just “the juice” all the time, everything, the “Zio-media is out to get us”. You know, I really should give you some audio just to drop in at some point. I think that people should listen to like 30 seconds of this at some point.

DAVID DUKE RECORDING

“Pinky” was my family's black housekeeper who seemed like part of our family. She cared for me as if I were her own son. Prepared many of my meals, tended my wounds, and listened to my dreams. I was 11 years old when she died and thinking about her now warms my heart. So how did it happen that, despite my childhood love for Pinky, I became a spokesman today for what the postcard sender had called quote, “the politically incorrect European American”? As my life and thoughts unfold in this book, you will find out why. I will lay bare the formative parts of my life, the experiences that stand out in my memories, and recount the search for truth that led to my awakening. In telling my story, I will challenge the vital premises of the establishment and roast some sacred cows. I will anger those who worship fashion rather than independent thought. Hopefully, a few of the more open-minded will pause to think. In this book, I offer an eye-opening view of the world today, a revolutionary view, to be sure. I also offer my evolutionary vision of the new world that will be created tomorrow.

DANIEL

Yeah, so, probably the only other thing I would mention is that, since we mentioned Richard Spencer’s disastrous personal relationships and violent activities, we should talk of that. There is a piece, I mentioned Chloe Harden, who he [Duke] married in the 70s, but we do have a little bit from a woman who did date David Duke in the 1989-2000 era. It's actually a woman named Laurie Eden, who is a former swimsuit model, who I think was in her 40s at the time, and dated David Duke. There is a really nice little profile where she describes the process of dating him and the fact that she thinks a lot of his racism is put on. At least, she did at the time. I haven't seen any more recent stuff. I did try to google around. I mean, she is alive, she is still living her life, as far as I know. She doesn't talk about this stuff ever anymore. There were some kind of Facebook posts by her where she just said, “I don't talk about that anymore.” I'm perfectly happy to let her have the rest of her life to not have to deal with it anymore. But at the time in this interview, she apparently feels that Duke is putting on some of this. She tells the story of one of his kids was playing in a pool where a black kid was on the other side of the pool, like playing, and David Duke was fine with it until one of his flunkies shows up, and you know, “We have to protect her, we’ve got to keep her away from those monkeys.” That sort of activity, meaning that he's maybe not quite as explicitly racist as he pretends to be for his buddies. I say, you don't spend 50 years in the white supremacy movement and not like actually believe this stuff. But that's her perspective.

JACK

I think it's more likely, you know, suddenly there was somebody there that he wanted to impress.

DANIEL

Right. I'm sorry. I'm re-reading this profile, she was 33 at the time that she independent inclusively and said this racism seems to depend on having an audience. Once, hanging around with his entourage, big men who had shot people before, men who would take care of him. He very publicly yanked her out of a large hotel swimming pool when a black child got in at the other end. But another time, at a small ice cream shop for her son's birthday, he got into a long and apparently friendly conversation with a black friend of hers. His followers weren't there at that time. You know, there's a lot of talk about like, humanizing these people, right. And [how] that giving them any kind of ability to be people at all, is to downplay the evil to some degree. And I think it's important to note that these are human beings and to understand them as human beings, as opposed to treat them as monsters all the time. I think that treating them as monsters who are just fundamentally different from you and I avoids the the real issue. It avoids the fact that these ideologies do not just come about because people are just like always bad. And it plays into the very thing that allows someone like David Duke, who comes across as, “Well, he's very polite to that one black person he knows and therefore how could he possibly be racist?” It's that exact failure of knowledge and imagination that allows these people places to grow. And I think that getting a sense of who he is as a person, even through an ex-girlfriend, who I think has her own issues with what she's willing to say and believe about him, does give us a peek into seeing him as a person as opposed to as a villain. Gives us a sense of the reality that seeing him as kind of the cartoon cut out of just you know racist man bad does not and I think we can acknowledge the evil and acknowledge the real harm that this man has done over his life while at the same time recognizing that those failures are human ones and not demonic.

JACK

Yeah, well it's always better to understand things properly, and the more you understand, the better it is. Always always always. And as you say, if you think of these people as monsters, the minute they turn up in a smart suit and they're polite to you and they speak reasonably, then you suddenly, “Oh, well maybe they're not so bad after all.” Whereas of course they are. It's the being able to understand that they are humans that allows you to understand exactly how they are so terrible, because if you indulge in this sort of fantasy of these people as just evil, you’re hobbling your own ability to understand, which is never good, right. And I feel like also, if you understand them as humans, you can understand how pathetic they are. I mean, this is a pathetic individual you're describing. He's obviously a raging narcissist. Nobody writes an autobiography that takes 42 hours to read out loud, which he then does, and record it unless they've got serious problems with a complete lack of self-awareness and self-knowledge, and a raging narcissistic personality disorder or something like that. There's something seriously wrong with this person. If he hadn’t devoted his life to spreading racism, it would be pitiful.

DANIEL

I know a lot of these guys feel like that, like I mean, you can imagine David Duke as the used car salesman, the guy who owns a car dealership.

JACK

Well, they are aren’t they, they’re just hucksters selling bullshit and it's a different kind of bullshit to a used car.

DANIEL

You got to get that true coat. Also going to rust. That's the whole thing. I mean, just so many of these guys feel that way. Donald Trump seems very much that way to me, like if he had not been able to inherit 700 million dollars over the course of his life from his father, that's a guy who would own a car dealership somewhere and he would be very, very good at that, and he would not be president of the United States. Understanding the personalities, so much of what I try to do is to try to understand who these people really are as opposed to the version of themselves that they put out there, and trying to understand that through the misty lens of their propaganda is difficult. But also, I think having a real insight from, again, just knowing that he spent 42 hours reading this thing while he was traveling into a microphone, it’s just ridiculous. It's silly. I mean, look at his website. I gave you the link to his website. Go check the website where he posts his radio show. It looks like it has not been updated since 1997 in terms of its style. A bunch of these old school guys have that problem, where it looks old and junky and nasty and it's just your racist grandpas. He’s just the king of the racist grandpas.

JACK

And that's a perfect place to end, I think, as long as as long as you're happy.

DANIEL

I am perfectly happy to leave it there, yes.

JACK

Okay, that's great. Thank you, again another great episode. Do you know what you want to do next time?

DANIEL

I think we’ll do Unite the Right next time. Just kind of feed into you something we sort of covered a little bit. We'll talk about Unite the Right and some of the issues of how that came about and what that meant in some of the before and after. Because I feel like a lot of people think we should do that one soon. And I was going to put it off for a while, but I think it's worth talking about now because I think so many of the things that we are going to talk about, how they sort of pivot point around the Unite the Right rally. So I think it's worth going ahead and getting [that] out of the way.

JACK

Okay, the next episode will be about Unite the Right. I have a feeling that one might run long, so we might split that into two episodes, but we'll see. Okay, so thanks for listening everybody and thanks for Daniel for being so informative again. And that was the second episode of I Don't Speak German. Goodbye.