1. David Duke unsuccessfully ran as a Democratic candidate for state legislature during the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in his campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination.
90 Facts About David Duke
1. 2.
David Duke soon won his only elected office, a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives.
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David Duke then ran unsuccessful but competitive campaigns for several more offices, including United States Senate in 1990 and governor of Louisiana in 1991.
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David Duke mounted a minor challenge to President Bush in 1992.
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David Duke then began to devote himself to writing about his political views, both in newsletters and later on the Internet.
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David Duke continued to run for public office through 2016, but after his reversion to open neo-Nazism, his candidacies were not competitive.
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In December 2002, David Duke pleaded guilty to felony fraud and subsequently served a 15-month sentence at Federal Correctional Institution, Big Spring, in Texas.
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David Duke's mother was an alcoholic; his father permanently left the family in 1966 for Laos taking a job with United States Agency for International Development.
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David Duke said his segregationist awakening started during his research for an eighth-grade project at this school.
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In 1964, David Duke began his involvement in radical right politics after attending a Citizens' Councils meeting and reading Carleton Putnam's pro-segregation books, later citing Race and Reason: A Yankee View as responsible for his "enlightenment".
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Also during his adolescence, David Duke began to read books about Nazism and the Third Reich, and his speeches at CCA meetings became more explicitly pro-Nazi.
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In 1968, David Duke enrolled at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
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David Duke appeared at a demonstration in Nazi uniform carrying a sign reading "Gas the Chicago 7" and "Kunstler is a Communist Jew" to protest Kunstler's appearance at Tulane University in New Orleans.
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David Duke says that he spent nine months in Laos, calling it a "normal tour of duty".
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David Duke joined his father, who remained working there, and had asked his son to visit during the summer of 1971.
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David Duke's father helped him gain a job teaching English to Laotian military officers, from which he was dismissed after six weeks when he drew a Molotov cocktail on the blackboard.
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David Duke claimed to have gone behind enemy lines 20 times at night to drop rice to anti-communist insurgents in planes flying 10 feet off the ground, narrowly avoiding a shrapnel wound.
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One pilot suggested that it might have been possible for David Duke to have gone on a safe "milk run" once or twice but no more than that.
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David Duke was unable to recall the name of the airfield he had used.
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In January 1972, David Duke was arrested in New Orleans for inciting a riot.
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In 1972, David Duke was charged with soliciting campaign funds for presidential candidate George Wallace and keeping the proceeds.
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David Duke was charged with filling glass containers with a flammable liquid, banned under a New Orleans ordinance.
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In 1974, David Duke founded the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, shortly after graduating from LSU.
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David Duke first received broad public attention during this time, as he endeavored to market himself in the mid-1970s as a new brand of Klansman: well-groomed, engaged, and professional.
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David Duke reformed the organization, promoting nonviolence and legality;, for the first time in the Klan's history, women were accepted as equal members and Catholics were encouraged to apply for membership.
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David Duke told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that he left the Klan in 1980 because he disliked its associations with violence and could not stop members of other Klan chapters from doing "stupid or violent things".
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David Duke first ran for a seat in the Louisiana State Senate as a Democrat from a Baton Rouge district in 1975.
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David Duke ran for a seat in the state senate again in 1979, losing to the incumbent, Joe Tiemann.
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David Duke later justified the repairs by saying most of his home was used by the Klan.
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David Duke ran for the Democratic presidential nomination during the 1980 presidential election.
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David Duke was arrested for illegally entering Canada in order to discuss third-world immigration into Canada on a talk show.
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David Duke left the Ku Klux Klan in 1980, after he was accused of trying to sell the organization's mailing list for $35,000.
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David Duke founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People and served as its president after leaving the Klan.
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David Duke allegedly conducted a direct-mail appeal in 1987, using the identity and mailing-list of the Georgia Forsyth County Defense League without permission.
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In 1988, David Duke ran initially in the Democratic presidential primaries.
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David Duke, having failed to gain much traction as a Democrat, then sought and gained the presidential nomination of the Populist Party, an organization founded by Willis Carto.
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David Duke appeared on the ballot for president in 11 states and was a write-in candidate in some other states, some with Trenton Stokes of Arkansas for vice president, and on other state ballots with Floyd Parker, a physician from New Mexico, for vice president.
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In December 1988, David Duke changed his political affiliation from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
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David Duke finished first in the primary with 3,995 votes.
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David Duke criticized Treen for a statement he had made indicating willingness to entertain higher property taxes, anathema in that suburban district.
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David Duke served in the House from 1989 until 1992.
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Lawmakers who opposed David Duke said that they had to defer to his constituents, who narrowly chose him as representative.
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David Duke took his seat on the same day as Jerry Luke LeBlanc of Lafayette Parish.
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One legislative issue pushed by David Duke was the requirement that welfare recipients be tested for the use of narcotics.
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Gomez, in his 2000 autobiography, said that he recalls David Duke obtaining the passage of only a single bill, legislation which prohibited movie producers or book publishers from compensating jurors for accounts of their court experiences.
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David Duke launched unsuccessful campaigns for the US Senate in 1990 and governor in 1991.
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David Duke's views prompted some of his critics, including Republicans such as journalist Quin Hillyer, to form the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, which directed media attention to David Duke's statements of hostility to blacks and Jews.
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Rickey released transcripts of their conversations to the press and provided evidence establishing that David Duke sold Nazi literature from his legislative office and attended neo-Nazi political gatherings while he held elective office.
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David Duke then pressed Duke for an apology and when Duke protested that Robinson was not being fair to him, Robinson replied that he did not think Duke was being honest.
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David Duke ran as a Republican in the 1992 presidential primaries, although Republican Party officials tried to block his participation.
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David Duke received 119,115 votes in the primaries, but no delegates to the 1992 Republican National Convention.
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When Johnston announced his retirement in 1996, David Duke ran again for the US Senate.
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David Duke finished a close third, thus failing to make the runoff.
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David Duke organized a weekend gathering of "European Nationalists" in Kenner, Louisiana.
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David Duke's proposal was accepted and is known as the New Orleans Protocol.
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David Duke claimed that thousands of Tea Party movement activists had urged him to run for president in 2012, and that he was seriously considering entering the Republican Party primaries.
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David Duke did not contest the primaries, which Mitt Romney won.
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In 2015, it was reported by the media that David Duke endorsed then presidential nominee Donald Trump.
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In February 2016, David Duke urged his listeners to vote for Trump, saying that voting for anyone but Trump "is really treason to your heritage".
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David Duke urged Trump to replace his vice president, Mike Pence, with talk show host Tucker Carlson, asserting that such a ticket was the only way to "stop the commie Bolsheviks".
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David Duke said he was running "to defend the rights of European Americans".
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David Duke came in 7th place in Louisiana's open primary.
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In February 2019, the media reported David Duke had endorsed Tulsi Gabbard for the Democratic nomination for president and changed his Twitter banner to a picture of Gabbard.
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In October 2024, David Duke endorsed Green Party nominee Jill Stein for president of the United States, criticizing what he viewed as "Trump's subservience to the Jewish lobby" and praising Stein's opposition to the Gaza war.
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In 1998, David Duke self-published the autobiographical My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding.
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David Duke promotes the white genocide conspiracy theory and claims that Jews are "organizing white genocide".
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In 2001, David Duke promoted his book Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question in Russia.
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David Duke's website has hosted articles by authors claiming that Jewish loan sharks own the Federal Reserve Bank and that Jews own Hollywood and the US media.
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David Duke has made a number of statements supporting Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, a German emigrant in Canada.
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David Duke has taught an international relations course and a history course at MAUP.
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In June 2024, David Duke participated in an antisemitic rally in Detroit alongside others including Nick Fuentes and Jake Shields.
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David Duke had expressed his support for Fuentes and others who opposed a purported "Jewish supremacism".
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In 1995, Don Black and Chloe Hardin, David Duke's ex-wife, began a bulletin board system called Stormfront.
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David Duke is an active user of Stormfront, where he posts articles from his website and polls forum members for opinions and questions.
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David Duke has worked with Black on numerous occasions, including on Operation Red Dog in 1980.
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David Duke continued to be involved with the website's radio station in 2019.
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David Duke has written in praise of the alt-right, calling one broadcast "fun and interesting" and another a "great show".
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People for the American Way reported David Duke championing the alt-right.
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David Duke described them as "our people" when describing their role in Donald Trump's election as president.
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The Forward has said that David Duke "paved the way" for the alt-right movement.
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David Duke was accused of filing a false 1998 tax return.
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Mr David Duke used the money for personal investments and gambling trips.
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Four months later, David Duke was sentenced to 15 months in prison.
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David Duke was fined $10,000 and ordered to cooperate with the Internal Revenue Service and pay money still owed for his 1998 taxes.
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David Duke said he felt the charges were contrived to derail his political career and discredit him to his followers, and that he took the safe route by pleading guilty and receiving a mitigated sentence rather than pleading not guilty and potentially receiving the full sentence.
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Prosecutors alleged that David Duke raised hundreds of thousands of dollars this way.
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At the time of his arrest, David Duke was reportedly guarded by members of the Narodni Odpor.
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In September 2009, the office of the District Prosecutor for Prague dropped all charges, explaining that there was no evidence that David Duke had committed any crime.
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David Duke was banned from Facebook in 2018, over a year after his participation in the Unite the Right rally.
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David Duke was banned from YouTube in 2020 for repeatedly violating its policies against hate speech, along with Richard Spencer and Stefan Molyneux.