A Quote by Ron Stallworth
What David Duke was preaching to me in 1978 about the Klan and what the Klan wanted to do regarding immigration is the same rhetoric, the same position that Donald J. Trump advocates and ran on and is trying to implement.
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That was part of David Duke's agenda, is to turn the Klan from a racist organization in the eyes of the public into something that is respectable and acceptable.
I denounced Donald Trump for not denouncing the kind of vitriol, the kind of violence that he has perpetrated with his angry rhetoric. And he knows exactly what he's doing. This is not the Donald Trump who denounced David Duke in 1991. This is a guy who's now soaking up this hate and his spilling it back out.
I knew as much about the Klan, if not more than many of the Klan people that I interviewed. When they see that you know about their organization, their belief system, they respect you.
There is no history of Donald Trump associating with the Ku Klux Klan. None whatsoever. But beyond that, people are saying that Trump is insensitive and he's boorish and he's a pig, and now he's sympathetic to all of these extreme right-wing groups 'cause that's who elected him. Okay, how many members of the Klan are there? The number is 200,000 tops. Tops! How many white supremacists are there? Where do they live? How do you campaign for them? Where do you get their votes? Where are they registered and how do you reach them in a campaign?
I decided to go around the country and sit down with Klan leaders and Klan members to find out: How can you hate me when you don't even know me?
Donald Trump is the physical embodiment of what David Duke wanted to achieve and failed.
When you hear Donald Trump say 'America First,' that was a Klan slogan from the early 1900s. Trump simply resurrected it. It's a clear example of his racist attitude.
There's a black lawyer in Galveston, Texas, who was the unpaid NAACP general counsel in Texas. He had a great record in housing discrimination, labor discrimination. He decided to take as a client a member of the Ku Klux Klan because the state wanted to get the membership lists of the Klan to find out if they could get something on the Klan. And he said, `I got to take you. I despise you. But we, the NAACP, won that case; NAACP vs. Alabama in the 1950s. Nobody has the right to get your membership lists.' He was fired from the NAACP. To me, he's a hero.
I'm writing about the things I see all around me. Growing up in Mississippi, I've seen how these backward ideas about class and race and healthcare and education and housing and racism impact everyday lives. For example, my mother wouldn't let me go to my homecoming dance because the yacht club where they were having the dance threw a fundraiser for David Duke, an ex-Klan member, when he was running for governor of Louisiana. So I grew up seeing how personal politics could be.
Well, I had nightmares when I was doing the Klan story all the time. I had a recurring nightmare of basically being exposed as a Jew inside the Klan compound.
In many respects, David Duke was the playbook. He established the playbook by which Donald Trump ran and ultimately became - I won't even use the term - let's just say he became the occupant of the White House.
It's to come up with a deal that both sides feel they can live with. And I think that that's probably where we're going to end up. I think that Donald Trump has people working for him who are ultimately deal-makers. And the Canadians are the same way. They're grownups about this. That's why you saw the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau not respond to Trump with the same rhetoric, but to talk about the strength of the relationship and the desire for a deal.
The white nationalist position, David Duke has always espoused that. The belief that immigrants are a threat to America and that we need border control, David Duke espoused that, and he talked about it during the time I was dealing with him.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing with the same result over and over again, expecting something different. The left just spent how many months trying to destroy Donald Trump, trying to impugn Donald Trump with every weapon they had, with every trick in their book, every tactic that has been successfully used by the media to destroy Republican candidates over the years. It's in their playbook. They brought it all out. Every bit of it blew up in their face; all of it failed. And yet they continue with the same tried and true and worn-out techniques to discredit Trump.
Donald Trump did denounce David Duke's support.
In a way, you might say that David Duke is the son of Willie Horton. Duke is more overt, of course, but he's really just pushing the same buttons and sending the same coded messages that the Horton ads did so effectively for the Bush campaign last year.
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