David Duke’s Bottle of Red Pills

[1]7,743 words

If you’ve ever wanted to deliver massive doses of red pills to your friends, David Duke’s My Awakening[1] [2] can be considered an entire bottle of them. The first edition, which is reviewed herein, has aged pretty well. Much has happened since then, of course — and little for the better. However, the basics are still relevant; what held true back then remains so now.

David Duke, in brief

The author hardly needs introduction. Even so, here’s one from Wikipedia, which of course not only is the source of all human knowledge; its “neutral point of view” policies make it the epitome of objectivity, boy howdy by golly:

David Ernest Duke (born July 1, 1950) is an American neo-Nazi, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, far-right politician, convicted felon, and former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. From 1989 to 1992, he was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives. His publications and politics are largely devoted to promoting conspiracy theories about Jews, such as Holocaust denial and Jewish control of academia, the press, and the financial system. The Anti-Defamation League has described Duke as “perhaps America’s most well-known racist and anti-Semite”.

This is, of course, in the same spirit as another Wikipedia intro, to-wit:

Barack Hussein Obama is a former dope peddler, Deep State toady, and fiscally irresponsible bleeding-hearted liberal. His remarkably murky past led to much speculation by critics that he’s a crypto-Muslim, mostly smoked weed in college, is a closeted switch hitter associated with the Chicago “Down Low Club,” and uses a fake ID because he was born in Kenya, among several other rumors. Obama is linked to Communist Frank Marshall Davis (suspected by some to be his biological father), terrorist Bill Ayers, anti-white motormouth Jeremiah Wright, and scandal-ridden ACORN. He is best known as a mediocre ward heeler elevated to an office far beyond his experience and competence, though mitigated by being effective at reading the teleprompter for his globalist handlers. His run as a pseudo-messianic champion of the common people was followed by sucking up to Wall Street in practice.

Actually, I fibbed. The Wikipedia article about The Lightworker is nothing like that, but that’s totally what it would say in an alternate universe where radical Leftist public figures get the same treatment as their Rightist counterparts.

More seriously, David Duke resigned from Fraternity Tri Kappa in 1980. However, the above is the sort of introduction he routinely gets even after four decades on the “good optics” side of the ledger. Note well, even if he hadn’t had any “bad optics” moments in his younger days, he’d still get called by the usual litany of heresies. (Ask Jared Taylor about that.) Then again, getting described by a long list of devil words ending in ­‑ist or ‑phobe actually is a pretty good recommendation.

Other than that, he’s been quite prolific, with his videos [3] and audio presentations [4] reaching untold millions. This is even before some purple-haired, face-pierced, otherkin castrato at YouTube’s censorship department pulled the plug on his channel. Finally, he’s stayed on message for decades, even under immense pressure, and that too is admirable.

David Duke’s early years

Much of My Awakening is autobiographical, beginning with insights into his family. As an active youth interested in biology, he often explored the Louisiana swamplands. He was aware of his Southern heritage and loved the Confederacy:

Yet we had no real desire to resurrect it, for we also intensely loved America, as it had become our country, North and South. We believed that although the South had been right, its loss signaled that God meant for the nation to be united. Although we flew the Stars and Bars from our tree houses, we also got lumps in our throats from hearing the national anthem. When we recited the Pledge of Allegiance, we stood straight and tall, fixing our eyes with pride at the small American flag that hung in the corner of every classroom.

Despite what one might expect from the above and his later political career, he initially held liberal views about race:

As I read more and more, I found many of my instinctual and traditional cultural ethics under attack; I began a process that many young people experience, through the influence of television and other media: I gradually became more liberal in my viewpoints.

I was just beginning to become politically aware as the ’60s burst upon us, and racial integration emerged as the biggest issue in the American political scene. The more I read and the more I watched television, the more sympathy I felt for the American Negro.

[5]

You can buy The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey here. [6]

His family’s maid was black, and is remembered fondly. I’ll add that if typical blacks acted like the church ladies and Talented Tenth professionals that I’ve met, I’d be liberal, too:

Often Mother, with me tagging along, drove her home into one of the blackest parts of New Orleans, the lower Claiborne Avenue area. This was in the late ’50s, when one could travel such streets safely, before the advent of the “love and brotherhood” brought by the civil-rights movement.

That speaks volumes about the damage done to the public by toxic Leftist ideology. Blacks turned out to be the canary in the coal mine for that. Much could be discussed [7] about why. Clearly minoritist policies and sentiments actually didn’t help them, but were counterproductive by coddling them, spoiling them, and making excuses for dysfunctional behavior [8]. This still continues, of course.

Concerning racial issues, Pinky had a traditional southern Black attitude. She insisted on using the toilet in the utility room rather than the main bathroom, and if we picked up some takeout food at a restaurant, she always used the “colored” service area. She was opposed to socializing with White folks other than in her work.

One day I asked Pinky why she had no problem with segregation. She answered simply and eloquently, “‘Cause I want to be with my own kind.”

Apparently not all blacks were as traumatized by segregation as The Narrative would have us believe. Some liked the idea of having their own spaces, and obviously they still do.

I read articles proclaiming that there is no significant genetic difference between Whites and Blacks other than skin color. Racial differences in poverty, illegitimacy, crime rates, drug addiction, educational failure, were said to be caused purely by environmental differences among the races. The media blamed Black failure and dysfunction on segregation and White racism. Ultimately, the poor circumstances of Black people were blamed squarely on White evil.

Six decades later, and The Narrative hasn’t changed. Well, how about that? Much else follows about the one-sided presentation from the media, academia, and even the church. Then this:

In addition to Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence, the following line was used repeatedly in articles: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people (the Negroes) are to be free.” One summer I traveled with Father to Washington, D.C., and saw those very words inscribed in magnificent foot-tall letters on the inspiring Jefferson Memorial on the Potomac.

Now hold that thought.

The red pill moment

Then something fateful happened:

In an eighth-grade civics class at Ganus Junior High School, the teacher gave her students an interesting assignment. We were to choose a topic dealing with current events and take a polemical position on it, then research that topic and defend it rationally in class. I chose as my topic “The Case for Racial Integration of Education.” After each of us had chosen and taken a position, she told us that we had probably taken a topic we probably agreed with. So our assignment now became to research and take the opposite point of view from what we had originally chosen. The assignment set my mind in turmoil.

He discovered that neither the school library nor the local bookstore had a single book opposing integration in education. Some claimed to be objective but weren’t, and others were clearly engaging in straw-man tactics. By chance, he discovered the local White Citizens Council [9], which had hundreds of counter-Narrative books excluded from libraries and mainstream stores. To get the talking points for the school project, he bought a copy of Carlton Putnam’s Race and Reason: A Yankee View [10]. He was fascinated by seeing a new perspective for the first time, but not shaken from his liberal views.

Another thing he discovered was that Thomas Jefferson’s views had been misrepresented. For example, the quotation given earlier is an excerpt taken out of context, making it sound egalitarian when the entire paragraph meant something quite different:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [Negroes] are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably and in such slow degree that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be pari passu filled up by free White laborers. If on the contrary it is left to force itself on, human Nature must shudder at the prospect held up.

I’ll add that history proved him right; it’s unfortunate that early Americans didn’t heed this warning about the race problem in development. Thomas Jefferson had plenty of other politically incorrect things to say, too. Duke found that even Abraham Lincoln had White Nationalist views and also wished to resettle blacks in their own nation abroad.

Race realism versus race denialism

[11]

Courtesy of Stonetoss [12]

After that Duke offers a description of intelligence and its importance that he discovered at the time. One side of the debate, then as now, is that there are indeed significant racial differences. The absolute egalitarian take is that IQ tests only measure how well someone does on an IQ test. He presents plenty of evidence showing that intelligence is hereditary and has meaningful impact on life outcomes. At this point in his life, young David Duke was still struggling to overcome the deluge of liberal ideology being fed to his generation from the converged opinion-forming institutions:

As a young man I had readily adopted the “environmentalist” position espoused by America’s mass media. Today, as then, anyone who reads the daily newspapers or the weekly and monthly magazines and who watches television will be deluged with environmentalist polemics. Childhood and early adult environments are blamed for a violent criminal’s destructive behavior, a poor person’s poverty, an F student’s grades, a drug addict’s or alcoholic’s dependency, an unemployed person’s poor work habits, a welfare queen’s fifth illegitimate child, a sexual deviant’s weird behavior and a low-IQ child’s failure to make it in school.

I had found it easy to believe the environmental argument because it offered so much hope. If only we change the child’s environment, we are told, we can solve the great ills of modern society. It seemed so kind and humane to think that all people were really bright and morally good inside, only to be corrupted by an imperfect world. That sounded a lot nicer to me than to contemplate that some people were — to put it crudely — just biological slobs destined to be the inheritors of the failed societies of humanity.

By accepting the environmentalist position, I felt that I was being noble, understanding and compassionate toward the less fortunate and downtrodden. It was the same kind of thinking that leads one ultimately to think of the criminal as the victim. But, as I read more, I wrestled with the mounting evidence showing the greater impact of heredity.

Those who delve deeply into the “nature versus nurture” controversy will encounter the usual Leftist talking points. Even so, some of this was new to me:

The scientific research on intelligence has silenced all but the most belligerent egalitarians. Unfortunately the mass media in America are still promoting the unscientific and discredited environmentalist views of fringe neo-Marxist and far-left elements such as R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, Stephen Jay Gould, and Leon Kamin. The media almost always fail to mention these men’s political affiliations, such as Kamin’s former position as New England editor of the U.S. Communist Party’s weekly newspaper. Similarly ignored is Lewontin’s pivotal role in the pro-Marxist, Vietnam era “Science for the People,” and Gould’s smug recounting of learning his Marxism on his father’s knee.

This part of My Awakening goes on into extensive detail showing that biology matters, covering subjects such as brain size, heredity versus environment, inherited behavioral characteristics, the reality of race, regional evolutionary pressures, r/K selection [13], and racial survival. (Breaking from the autobiographical format for a while, this part of the book also goes into newer research on intelligence.) It also documents disingenuous Leftist efforts to explain away inconvenient facts, one fallback position after another trying to prop up their predetermined conclusion. The section about intelligence and race realism goes on at length, too, and might tend to drag. However, those who’ve been indoctrinated with false egalitarian narratives and spin-doctoring might need a lot of remedial education.

I’ll add that since the book was first published, there has been some research on which genes tend to boost intelligence and which races tend to have them. If this becomes prominently discussed, then the usual suspects will surely figure out a way to explain away the facts and muddy the waters as usual. Will they go postmodernist and tell us biology doesn’t matter, because we’re all living in an illusionary hologram? Leftists still place dogma and wishful thinking ahead of the painful truth; their ideology will remain deeply flawed until they bite the bullet and embrace reality.

I note further that the newest twist on race denialism is the “privilege” argument, in which whites (or whichever other group is to be demonized: males, straights, the “cisgendered,” etc.) possess an invisible force by which they oppress everyone else out of sheer malice. As the argument goes, the “privileged” do this just by existing, no matter if they think they’re not oppressing anyone (which they probably aren’t, in actual fact), or even are going out of their way to be self-effacing lickspittles (like the professional diversity consultant Robin DiAngelo). That argument is unfalsifiable and straight out of Kafka-land, so Leftists don’t even have to argue the case for why they believe it’s true. Moreover, “white privilege” is baloney, because blacks have been getting legally-sanctioned preferential treatment since the 1960s, which is real privilege.

Chapter 11 wraps things up with a racial view of history and warnings about what happens to populations that become mixed. This much is similar to arguments by Senator Bilbo [14], which he references briefly, and several others. Here, David Duke briefly takes on “we wuz kangz” Afrocentric history, which had been experiencing a revival even then. Another point he makes is that a society might not be agreeable to those who didn’t build it:

It is true that when I write of the things I love and cherish that I can only be subjective, for my values are the values of my own people. Some men even dispute the virtue of civilization itself. Freedom, beauty, love, achievement, they are all subject to the eye of the beholder. An Indian American living wild and free in the American forests and grasslands had his own idea of what is good, and that concept is certainly far more sublime than the mass alcoholism found in the Indian community of today. The African’s rhythmic pounding of the drum, his sexual and physical bliss, bare feet against the warm soil, and his sound sleep beneath the open stars have always answered the needs of his soul. Could anyone deny that such may certainly answer a young Black man’s heart better than imprisonment in the jails of America, or the slavery of crack and heroin, or gunshot wounds suffered in the night?

It’s a good point. Every year, millions of Third Worlders flood into white countries because our treasonous politicians are hell-bent on giving away our territory. As for the migrants, they’re looking for the prosperity and stability that their people couldn’t create for themselves. Still, upon arrival they feel out of place. Then they want things to be done as they are where they came from, although of course they could’ve stayed where they belonged if they liked it there so much.

Multiracialism doesn’t work

[15]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto here [16]

Suppose that a nation’s public is compelled by law to allow a minority population into their living spaces, schools, workforce, and public facilities. Suppose that this minority is characterized by low average IQ, low average impulse control, a culture promoting rebellion for its own sake, and historical grudges against the majority which have been inflamed for the sake of political advantage. In a situation like that, one would expect trouble, of course. In fact, any government that forced such a situation, and then neglected the interests and safety of the majority, could plausibly be considered to act out of malice rather than out of high-minded fairness. This, of course, was what occurred following integration. The young David Duke, now racially conscious, got to observe it firsthand. The following are merely his opening remarks:

Areas having large Black populations, such those in the South and in the large cities of the North and West, quickly degenerated. Social disaster struck the Black community first. As White controls and guidance were relaxed, Black crime rose to intolerable levels. Schools deteriorated. Illicit drug abuse and addiction got out of control. Illegitimacy soared and the black family disintegrated. Welfare rolls exploded. Venereal disease reached epidemic proportions.

All these social calamities were the opposite of what the egalitarians had promised would occur with the granting of political and social equality. The veneer of European-style culture and morality imposed on the Black community for centuries, crumbled in the wake of social emancipation.

Whites, of course, suffered from the changes as well. The quality of public education rapidly declined under integration. Millions of Whites were driven from public schools and ultimately from the cities they had built, fueling the rise of suburbia. Millions more fell victim to increased Black crime. Whites endured dramatically higher taxes and paid the higher costs necessary to sustain an increasingly dependent and dysfunctional Black community, and the political power structure changed as the minority-voting blocs held the balance of power.

In short, everything that the critics of integration predicted eventually came true. As usual, the Leftists doubled down on their failed policies.

Then the book turns to the crime rate. This contains many statistics which aren’t much of a surprise to us, but surely would be to a recovering television addict. Economic factors, “criminals are the real victims [17],” and other liberal excuses are considered and struck down. Parts of the discussion get rather gruesome.

After that, it turns toward the damage that integration inflicted on our educational system. It turns out that both black and white students have been harmed by this. The usual liberal solution — throwing money at the problem — just didn’t work. This accelerated white flight, since no white parents in their right minds would want to send their kids to black schools, if it’s at all possible to avoid it. This changed the ethnic composition and political climate of big cities. All told, integration was a bust for blacks, too:

Although Blacks as a group had accrued more buying power than ever before and more education among its most capable elements, in the most important aspects of life Blacks suffered terribly. A generation of Blacks was growing up without fathers. Masses of Blacks are hooked on drugs, and the young have a mortality rate for murder that exceeds that of American soldiers during the Second World War. Murder is now the leading cause of death for Black males between the ages of 15 and 44, and AIDS is the leading cause of the combined death toll of Black men and women. Blacks have about 14 times the AIDS rate that Whites have, and 50 times the syphilis rates. Unemployment, especially among the young, is rampant, and most Blacks are enmeshed in the welfare system. Blacks were more violent, more prone to criminality, and angrier toward White people than ever before.

This chapter is quite impactful and covers several other topics as well. Blacks individually have the freedom of association to choose between integration and self-segregation, but whites can’t opt out of multiracialism insofar as the law has anything to say about it. Then it describes the joys of integrated housing. Moreover, even by then, HUD actively used subsidized Section 8 housing to disrupt white neighborhoods while minority residents got to live off of the government tit. Also, welfare led to parasitism (though David Duke is kinder than me and didn’t put it in those words) and also incentivized the destruction of black families. Affirmative Action has been putting its thumb on the scales of equality since the 1960s. The book even mentions an initiative to force cabbies to take more black passengers despite a rampant armed robbery problem; but at least Cornel West [18] was surely relieved.

The next chapter concerns demographic changes, including what this means for our people, our country, and our environment. Driving home the point, he described visiting his childhood neighborhood, which (other than a few dispirited white holdouts) had become a ghetto. He describes the impending Great Replacement, which he’s been trying to warn the public about since I was a young hellion:

An American Haiti or Mexico is not inevitable. White Americans can avoid such a fate if they once again gain control over their government, their media and their borders in the first few decades of the 21st century. Even after Whites become demographically outnumbered, because of our intelligence and organizational ability, for perhaps a generation there will still be more than enough Whites to prevail in a revolutionary physical struggle — but only if we are racially awakened and strong in will and purpose. But, the fewer our numbers, the greater the suffering and sacrifice expended in the future battle for our survival and freedom. The longer our people delay, the harder the fight that we — and even more so, our children — will face.

Now that we actually are in the first few decades of the twenty-first century, I’ll say that we’d better start working on our organizational skills pronto.

Eskimo problems

A discussion about the crazypants Second Wave feminists leads into a lengthy section about Jewish misbehavior. Topics include their role in Communism and the Soviet Union, their role in the “civil rights” movement, the nastier passages of the Talmud, some rather unfortunate attitudes of theirs, scriptural topics, certain destructive academic fads, feminism, control of the media, Zionist influence in the American government, financial chicanery, organized crime, the slave trade, prostitution, questionable loyalty, Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians, support for Third World mass migration, claims of Jewish superiority, and of course The Holobunga. I’ll have to admit that some of the chutzpah is off the charts, such as demands to edit the New Testament to their liking. Not even the Pope gets to rewrite Scripture, so who do those bozos think they are?

I wish I could say that My Awakening is overstating the severity of all this, but the evidence it provides is staggering. No ethnic group is perfect, of course, but they seem to have a pretty high trouble-per-capita ratio. Unfortunately, it’s inescapable that the bad behavior he documented has besmirched the reputation of their entire tribe. I hope that one day they’ll realize that this doesn’t win hearts and minds. We could all get along, if they’d just stop doing that.

This section goes on at great length, consisting of chapters 15 through 25, and is about a third of the book. (David Duke also wrote monographs on some of these topics: Jewish Supremacism [19] and The Secret Behind Communism [20], in part recapping some of this material.) To me, it seems that for a general introduction to Dissident Rightist thought, this lengthy discussion about the Jewish question does seem rather overwhelming. Then again, I’ve gotten called out a lot, basically since day one, for being too soft on the “JQ.” Fine, I confess.

The only quibble I can offer is that I would’ve liked to have seen more about WASP limousine Leftists and Washington insiders who’ve caused plenty of trouble and epic bungling of their own. Most of all, they shirked their duty to rule their folk wisely and are misusing their power more than ever. Thus, the problem isn’t only about some high-ranking Jews who fear the public, suffer from hubris, espouse nutty Leftist ideologies, and otherwise are remarkably bad examples for their people. Another problem is the Deep State swamp critters who have been sucking up to them for ages. If these “elite” WASP bootlickers hadn’t let the neurotic Zionist upstarts have at the levers of government power, there would’ve been considerably less Jewish misbehavior for their many critics like David Duke to discuss.

Early activism

The autobiographical format resumes. At the cusp of young adulthood, Duke could tell that America was going to be in a lot of trouble if certain destructive trends continued: race agitation, mass Third World migration, and so forth. (Was he wrong?) He realized that he had to try to do something. The Council of Conservative Citizens did little to oppose Zionism, so he joined the Ku Klux Klan. He found that they were pretty solid folks, even if they weren’t deep theoreticians.

He also discovered Commander Rockwell [21], and they even corresponded briefly. This inspired him to protest an appearance at Tulane by the anti-American pinko lawyer William Kunstler:

We three made up one large sign reading KUNSTLER IS A COMMUNIST JEW. To add to the drama and prevent the press from ignoring it, I decided to try the Rockwell tactic and use a swastika armband to demonstrate against the Communist traitor. We went to the location of his speech at McAllister auditorium on the Tulane campus, and found ourselves greeted by three dozen members of the Black Panther Party, all of them wearing berets and black leather jackets.

So that led to the famous David Duke bad optics photo of 1970. Ah, the enthusiasm of youth! It’s too bad that he didn’t get a chance to stick around and explain to the Black Panthers that Kunstler wasn’t really their friend.

While attending LSU, he started a white students’ association that grew to two thousand members and about a dozen chapters elsewhere. He also gave widely-attended talks at Free Speech Alley, which inspired the student newspaper (the book even shows the clipping) to write, according to Duke’s summary, “that it had become simply a forum for racism and suggesting that it should be done away with. No longer a forum for liberalism and Marxist ideology, free speech became expendable.” How typical — the stories I could tell about the future mainstream media (MSM) flunkies in the journalism department writing for my own campus rag! He also described a lecture by the iconic childcare guru Dr. Spock, in which he asked the wealthy comsymp a couple of utterly devastating questions. (Reading them is worth the price of My Awakening.) All told, he was a much more effective campus shitlord than I was; my activism mainly amounted to melting special snowflakes.

World travels

To Duke’s profound disappointment, his political activities got him blackballed from pursuing a military career through the ROTC. The Louisiana State University commandant of cadets explained that “a number of Jewish people in the community” called to complain about his views. So they badgered a colonel until he actually gave in to their kvetching! Epic! A Congressman was sympathetic but couldn’t intercede, instead suggesting that he had a different calling. I concur; therefore, I’d like to thank these chutzpahniks for doing a fine service for the white race by keeping David Duke out of danger in America’s archetypal spit-in-your-eye war.

Hoping to do what he could to fight Communism nonetheless, he taught English to Laotian officers battling an insurgency.[2] [22] During the many layovers on the trip, he got a feel for the local societies. Upon arriving in Laos, he found that the French cultural influence made it oddly familiar.

After that job was over, he went to India, encountering massive overpopulation — they like sex but apparently don’t care for birth control — and shocking poverty. (I note that earlier he’d found Hong Kong to be quite nice, despite the considerable overcrowding.) However, its impressive ancient architecture was evidence of better times in the past. He concluded that centuries of miscegenation and dysgenic breeding had ruined the once-great country. Lavish foreign aid wasn’t eliminating poverty, but only worsening overpopulation, particularly among the most impoverished. He was deeply affected when he encountered a girl begging in the ruins of a forgotten temple, emaciated and covered with sores.

On the way back to my room I wondered if, in a few hundred years, some half-black descendant of mine would be sitting among the ruins of our civilization, brushing away the flies, waiting to die. Every day our nation grows a little darker from the torrential immigration of non-Whites, high non-White birthrates, and increasing racial miscegenation — and with each passing day, we see the quality of our lives decline. Crime is ever on the increase, drug activity proliferates, educational quality declines, and the American standard of living suffers. There are those who ridicule the healthy racial values of our forefathers and replace them with the pseudo-science of egalitarianism. Treason to our heritage thrives, and corruption feeds in the highest places.

However:

No matter how dark our destiny may appear, there is enough genetic treasure among our people to fashion a road to the stars. Those who know the racial truth often excuse their inaction by expressing pessimism. Suggesting that “the battle is already lost” is often simply an excuse for cowardice.

After a stop in Pakistan, his next destination was Israel. There was just one problem: He remembered a little too late that his luggage contained several brass swastikas from India, and plenty of naughty literature, which could get him killed by the Mossad. Luckily for him, it turns out that he had a State Department passport thanks to his job in Laos, exempting him from a search.

He found Israel to be basically a fascist country, including some of its harsher aspects. Returning to his hotel room, he discovers that a couple of immigration officials had been by and went through his luggage, perhaps tipped off about his subversive status by some meddlesome “watchdog” outfit. He leaves the next day, but unwisely eats the in-flight meal. Later, he becomes deathly ill and barely makes it to a First World hospital. Airplane food usually sucks, but damn! Coincidence?

On the mend from the (((chicken salad sandwich incident))), he starts exploring Greece, discovering its wonderful glory and cultural significance. That much is quite inspiring, definitely worth a read. Rome also was quite a treasure. Then he went to Germany, making a special side-trip:

I visited the concentration camp at Dachau, and I noted that the camp was in the process of important changes. I had read that the camp was an extermination camp containing chambers in which many thousands of Jews had been murdered. But placards had been changed. They now read that it once had a working gas chamber, but that it had “never been used.” I recalled my reading of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials’ [23] documents alleging the gassings at Dachau. Not all the exhibits had been changed at that time; some of them still suggested the mass murder of prisoners. In a restaurant near the camp, I spoke with an old man who told me that his brother, during the American occupation, had been one of the laborers who had put in the plumbing for the “gas chamber.”

After returning to Louisiana, he resumes his political work. The Jerry Rubin [24] incident is one of those anecdotes worth the price of the book!

Trouble ahead

Unfortunately, a wide variety of dirty tricks by law enforcement began against Duke’s group. This was hardly unusual at the time. The government was just as opposed to pro-white political activity as it is now; they’re just more honest about their peculiar biases lately.

He describes an apparatchik of one of those Jewish “watchdog” outfits bribing the police with about $37,000 (adjusted for inflation, over a quarter of a million) to incite Klansmen to violence and lead them into a trap where they’d be gunned down. Effectively, the crooked cops involved in that murderous setup were acting as hit men. This plot was carried out, and “[a] pretty, young White-activist teacher, Kathy Ainsworth, who was riding with the Klansmen, was killed in the ambush.” Also:

Police officers are quoted as saying that when they dragged a severely wounded Klansman, Tommy Tarrants, from the bushes, they intended to continue shooting him, but had to stop because a crowd of neighbors had gathered.

Believe it or not, this politically-motivated assassination by the police was in Mississippi, not El Salvador, Haiti, or Uganda. I’ll further add that the “watchdog” group, despite the involvement of one of its notables in a murder-for-hire plot, retains its sterling reputation for “stopping hate” and acts as a consultant to law enforcement agencies. Regarding the local situation that David Duke was facing a few years after that:

The New Orleans Police Intelligence Division had been running a campaign of nonstop harassment against my fellow activists and me. Freddie O’Sullivan ran it, a former vice-squad cop who despite his seemingly Irish name, proved to be a Jewish member of Touro Synagogue. A huge picture of Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky adorned a wall of his police headquarters. Whatever his attachments to the persona of Trotsky, he later turned out to be such a committed Zionist that he immigrated to Israel a few years later.

These wayward Eskimos really need to mind their optics. Don’t they realize that this Comrade Trotsky/Fifth International stuff makes them look like a bunch of extremists? Stop doing that!

David Duke got busted twice on bogus charges during this period. On the second occasion, three companions and his girlfriend were jailed in filthy conditions. On the men’s side, the blacks had the run of the place, as they outnumbered the whites overwhelmingly, and buggery was a serious danger. After release, the charges were dropped. The gun-toting bureaucrat “O’Sullivan” had nothing on them and had sent them to the dungeon only for political reasons, though I suppose David Duke would go a little further and suspect that his not particularly Irish ethnic background had something to do with it, too.

Fraternity Tri Kappa

[25]

Before his time, but I had to go there.

Rather than being intimidated, Duke persisted. He transformed his organization into the good-optics Klan. He came out ahead in several media appearances until the MSM realized they couldn’t get the better of him. He led a tour of the southern border, and the publicity inspired many would-be illegal aliens to stay where they belonged. He even toured Britain, despite being banned from the country, leading to a surreal hunt for him while he kept giving public appearances.

The good optics approach worked, leading to a surge in membership by 1973. Then the MSM struck back by trotting out bad-optics Klansmen, including a prominent one on the federal payroll. The KKK can’t be trademarked, and their symbols are in the public domain, so there’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a splinter group, including as controlled opposition. The propaganda effort inspired a movie with an “all-star cast,” including the then-eminent superstar O.  J. Simpson.

[26]

You can buy Savitri Devi’s The Lightning and the Sun here [27].

A brief interview, which apparently left a remarkably profound impression, inspired the first novel by a celebrated agony aunt in Britain. (She recently turned 86; happy birthday, Ms. Irma Kurtz!) In the book, the Semitic journalist protagonist finds herself unable resist the Nordic charms of Louisiana’s Grand Dragon. After a torrid fling with the blond beast, she attends a rally in which he delivers a remarkably crude speech. She realizes that he’s a no-goodnik after all, and that her anti-Gentile father was right about her dating choices. I’d like to congratulate Ms. Irma Kurtz for sending the positive message that sticking to our own kind is best. Jews can do good things, too!

The MSM smear campaign continued. So did the extrajudicial harassment. This even included glowies telling others that David Duke is a glowie. Controlled opposition Klan figures continued to poison the well. (Within my own circles, I heard vague rumors about him that were perhaps a legacy of this smear campaign. However, I’m not the type to believe unsubstantiated scuttlebutt, much less spread it.) So he passed the torch to Don Black and spun off a new organization that would be free of baggage, the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP).

Electoral politics

After that, he began campaigning for public office. He discusses the dilemma in choosing between the Evil Party and the Stupid Party. He ran for the Louisiana legislature in 1988:

Many of the people in my district realized that for the first time in their voting life they could actually vote for someone who represented their own viewpoint. For the first time someone was saying out loud what people say in the privacy of their homes or among their friends. People got excited. Many middle-aged people told me that they believed their vote for me was the most important one they had ever cast.

Naturally, his chief opponents went into overdrive. For example:

In a satellite hookup from New York, the New Orleans ABC affiliate, WVUE-TV, interviewed [Mordechai] Levy by a live hookup on the 6 o’clock news. When Levy thought the live interview was over and the microphone was turned off, he told the reporter that the people of Metairie were “asshole-idiot White devils.” By a fortuitous technical glitch, the feed was still live on the air when he said it, and the people of Metairie heard loud and clear what my Jewish antagonists really thought of them.

The chutzpahniks even leaned on the local Archbishop to have an anti-Duke statement read during a church service, a gesture which backfired.

As the stakes got bigger, the traditional enemy pulled out all stops. They had President George Bush write a letter to the district voters discussing the crucial importance of the election. (Of course, the reason that a small House race in Louisiana became crucial to the president of the United States was because it was seen as critically important by the Jewish power.) Ronald Reagan did radio commercials telling people to vote for “his friend” John Treen. Under intense pressure — almost every state representative came out against me; every state senator; every U.S. congressman and U.S. senator in Louisiana and from many neighboring states; the Governor and Lieutenant governor; the heads of the Chamber of Commerce; the archbishop; many Protestant ministers; as well as coaches, sports heroes, Hollywood actors, and the president of the United States, vice-president of the United States and a number of former Presidents of the United States. I frequently said in my speeches, “The only one who didn’t show up to oppose me was the Ayatollah Khomeini. And the only reason he didn’t was because he was dead.”

The election had a 78% voter turnout, the highest ever for a Louisiana House race. (Shucks, that’s nothing; if he were Joe Bidet, then he could’ve gotten a 105% turnout.) He won; as Jean-Marie Le Pen would’ve put it, everyone was against him except the people.

I thought about all the abuse I had taken over the years for my beliefs. In that one moment of victory, all of it was worth it. It was a breakthrough that I know could inspire many more across America, perhaps even for years to come.

They tried to overturn the election on technicalities, but it didn’t work. Later, he ran for the Senate, unsuccessful but getting 60% of the white vote. Around this time, the MSM was cranking out lie after lie. Bush the Elder’s administration pursued vexatious audits. He also made a presidential bid. Pat Buchanan was running at the same time; sad to say, he made a ritual denunciation of Duke and agreed to purge his own campaign of his supporters. I’ll add that it didn’t help Buchanan’s prospects one scintilla; he didn’t even get a kind word from his critics. Republicans, take note: punching right doesn’t work.

The final chapters contain prognostications for the future. One is that the Internet will become the way around the MSM information blockade. (Significantly, this did come to pass. Censorship is a problem, of course, but by now the Tech Tyrants are mostly outing themselves as digital book-burners.) He also suggests other long-term victory strategies. Although the two decades since then have turned out badly, probably worse than he might have suspected, these strategies remain relevant.

In retrospective

David Duke was born in 1950, growing up in America’s last normal decade and then coming of age during the nutty 1960s poz-fest. In some ways, his path was similar to my own, later journey [28]. In an auspicious event — one might even call it fateful — he wandered out of Plato’s Cave at a young age. After thinking it over, he rejected liberalism to sail against the headwinds of Enlightened Opinion. Then he had some bad optics moments. After those early days, he went on to adopt a more mature and presentable persona. (That’s where we part company; I’ll proudly say that my sense of optics is worse than Nancy Pelosi’s wrinkles and almost as bad as her snippy attitude.) Obviously, David Duke is still stuck with the Fraternity Tri Kappa label, more than four decades after he resigned. Still, looking at things another way, his lucid writing style and obvious intelligence dispels the MSM stereotype that all Klansmen — present or former — are hillbillies drooling tobacco juice.

He had quite a remarkable ideological journey. At first, like many young Boomers, he believed in the universalist ideals which would become codified in St. Dr. Rev. MLK Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. (I’ll say that Comrade Stanley Levison [29] was a talented speechwriter, despite whatever disagreements I have with his ideology.) All whites had to do to mend relations with colored people was walk a mile in their moccasins [30], end discrimination, and overcome Jim Crow, and then a golden age of harmony and brotherhood would emerge. It would’ve been great if all that had worked as advertised, but reality turned out far differently [31] from the wonders they’d expected. Many young Boomers were hooked on hopium and didn’t realize that the wonderful sentiments of equality they’d been sold on would emerge into a dysfunctional racial spoils system, and that they were putting their descendants at risk of dispossession. Some haven’t figured out even now that it was only a dream.

All told, the first edition of My Awakening has aged fairly well. Concerning the race realism controversy, things aren’t entirely different since it was poublished in 1998, aside from some new twists along the same tangents. By then, the disingenuous obfuscation in favor of race denialism amounted to beating a dead horse, even if they have to keep trying to defend it even to the point of absurdity. That’s because Leftist ideology stands or falls on their premises that everyone is innately the same and that there are no meaningful differences between the races. The Narrative usually denies differences between any other identity groups as well. In practice, they play favorites despite their even-handed rhetoric — but all that’s another story.

The Boomers easily accepted equal rights and equal opportunity as desirable outcomes. Very quickly after it was granted, this morphed into demands for equality of outcome, in recent times using “equity [8]” as an anodyne-sounding code word for dragging everyone down to the same level. To argue against this sort of extreme Procrustean social levelling, it’s necessary to confront the reality of human differences. Fortunately, My Awakening comes with a crate of rhetorical ammo about race realism.

Race relations have deteriorated since 1998. We’re one more generation distant from segregation, which is only remembered by senior citizens – and yet the MLK dream is even further away. We’re over a century and a half beyond slavery, yet oddly blacks are sorer than ever about their distant ancestors having been forced to pick cotton. There are dark forces working to inflame old grievances by minorities, and meanwhile to demoralize whites by pushing guilt narratives.

As for Jewish relations, it’s unfortunate that this ancient conflict still hasn’t faded away. Zionists think a few decades ahead but lack a more far-sighted perspective, along with some errors in strategic planning. They had a remarkable rise to power during the twentieth century, with their influence peaking around the time of the first Gulf War. It’s been slowly declining since then and will continue to do so, largely because of their own overreach and counterproductive strategies. The only way Zionists can save themselves from eventual irrelevance on the world stage is if they adjust their attitude and quit rocking the boat they’re on.

The final word on My Awakening

All told, it’s a good, comprehensive introduction to the basics of Dissident Right thought. This is everything that conventional conservatives need to get enlightened. High-functioning liberals can benefit from it, too, if they can be persuaded to read such heresy. For them, it will be helpful to get a notepad and write down any objections they have. By the time they’re finished, these will be answered. It’s also helpful for getting a good idea of the amount of work it takes to build a political career.

At 752 pages, it’s quite extensive, with 1,021 footnotes, which should satisfy the “Oh yeah, says who?” types, including the category of scholarly OCD sufferers who can’t tie their shoelaces without an academic citation.

Note well, there’s now an updated edition for sale. It’s available on David Duke’s website [32], as well as an audiobook version [33]. It’s best to get it there, since it’s been censored by certain corporate digital book-burning departments that don’t want you to be free to make up your own mind about his message.

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Notes

[1] [34] David Duke, My Awakening (Covington, La.: Free Speech Books, 1998).

[2] [35] I’ll add that it was a lost cause; the rebels took over in 1975, and Laos remains nominally Marxist to this day. The Viet Cong assisted, having a free hand for foreign operations by then; Kissinger’s 1973 Paris Peace Accords had worked as designed.