WHO'S WHO IN THE DISSIDENT RIGHT: "DOCTOR" DAVID DUKE

by Colin Liddell

Read other entries like this in The Dikipedia: Who's Who in the Dissident Right, an ever-expanding biographical guide to the colorful characters of the Right Wing.

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Usually, he likes to be introduced with the title "Doctor," as in "Doctor David Duke," which gives a sequence of three alliterative words, or "DDD," a bit like KKK, an organisation he is almost synonymous with. His doctorate, however, was from the "Interregional Academy of Personnel Management," a controversial academic institution in Ukraine. More troubling for Duke, Ukraine's first Jewish Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman is a fellow alumnus of the same academic institution.  

Duke was born in 1950 in Oklahoma and grew up in Louisiana during the period of Civil Rights, a time when the South was going through a lot of Federally enforced changes and race relations were deeply strained. Not unnaturally, he became involved in White identitarian politics, but, like so many starting out with good intentions, he ended up getting involved with toxic elements, like the remnants of Rockwell's American Nazi Party and the KKK. 

Like many mid-brained Americans, he may have been unable to understand the complex socio-economic and geopolitical forces that were shaping America and changing the South, without recourse to the all-embracing Semitic Panotheory that became the central core of his beliefs.

Accordingly, Duke became increasingly Jew-obsessed and "anti-Semitic" in his views, believing that "all powerful Jews" were running and ruining his world. His anti-Jewish views were so strong that he even developed relatively positive views of other racial groups, especially Palestinians. His supposed "affinity" for the poor oppressed Palestinians may also have been partly determined by the need for convenient "moral cover" for his less socially acceptable views on the Jews.

In his 20s, Duke tried his hand at writing under a female pseudonym, "Dorothy Vanderbilt," penning a book called "Finders-Keepers: Finding and Keeping the Man You Want" that advocated anal sex and notoriously gave advice on how to give a good blow job!

Duke later became a moderately successful minor politician and even served in the Louisiana House of Representatives for a few years (1989-92). However, he achieved little except perfecting an oleaginous speaking style and optics approach optimized for grifting on his less sophisticated brethren.

In 2002, he was found guilty of filing a false tax return and hiding donations, getting a 15-month stretch in federal prison. This case also revealed that he begged his supporters for financial help then misused the funds over a period of years on such things as gambling trips. Some of the money may also have been used on the large amount of plastic surgery that he seems to have subjected himself to (shades of "Dorothy Vanderbilt"). This level of cosmetic vanity gives off a weirdly sub-masculine vibe, reminiscent of other well-known Dissident Rightists, like Richard Spencer, Greg Johnson, and Nick Fuentes. This is significant as it suggests that people like this are recurring type in such politics. 

Although Duke represented a kind of "Palaeo-Nazi," grifter type that the Alt-Right was initially keen to avoid when the new movement emerged in 2010, Duke soon merged himself with the Alt-Right, becoming something of a meme, thanks to the highly dubious efforts of The Daily Stromer and TRS.  This helped to toxify the Alt-Right and seclude it from a wider political role, emphasised by Duke's attendance at the now notorious "Unite the Right" event in Charlottesville in 2017, which was then weaponised to demonise, demonetize, and deplatform (DDD again) much of the Dissident Right.

Earlier Duke also played a notable role in the fall of British nationalism, after Nick Griffin's associations with him were used to stigmatize the relatively successful BNP in 2009. He also served as a mentor for former BNP youth leader Mark Collett, and a sort of template for his recent rise to prominence among the online Alt-Right in the UK.

In the 2020 Presidential campaign Duke performed the basic Russian shill function of endorsing the Presidential candidate most calculated to cut back on America's overseas commitments, namely Tulsi Gabbard.