One of the right-wing’s most popular bloggers asked one of the most important questions of the new year, “How in hell does someone go to a David Duke sponsored event in 2002 and not know it is white supremacist?” Indeed.
That is the lame excuse Republican Congressional leader (third in the leadership) is trying to peddle as a reason he spoke to a David Duke event in 2002.
In 2002 David Duke was well known as a professional racist and sometime Nazi. He had been an Imperial Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan and a neo-Nazi leader.
Duke had run for governor in 1992 and made national news. Rev. James Orange and I had led a caravan of 50 union activists from Atlanta to New Orleans to help get out the vote against Duke.
By 2002 even the most casual observer of Louisiana knew who David Duke was and what he stood for.
Steve Scalise is lying. In 2002 he knew he was going to speak to racists, Klansmen, and Nazis. He went because the Southern Republican Party had been working to turn itself into the party of racists.
Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater even had a name for it–the Southern Strategy.
I spent 25 years on the frontline of the organized racism that took over the Southern Republican Party–the fights over state flags, minority jobs, affirmative action, voting rights, get out the vote efforts, and campaigns to elect African-Americans to office.
I lived it. Scalise is lying and so is the Radical Right-wing Republican Party. More to come.
Image source: Twitter.com/Marmel