Good luck with that one....especially since the non-racist Republican/conservatives keep making excuses for them and claiming they are not racist....Bear with me, this will make sense at the end, with the final statement.
July 1, 1950: David Duke is born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His family moved around alot because of his dad's job in the oil business, but they eventually landed in Louisiana.
October 6, 1965: Steve Scalise is born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Specifically, he grew up in Metairie.
1967: David Duke joins the national KKK, at the age of 17. Not even out of High School and already hating minorities.
1968-1974: David Duke studies at LSU and forms the "White Youth Alliance" in 1970, at the age of 20. This group is a youth offshoot of the American NAZI party. Duke claims to have served in the military, in Laos, in 1971. He did not. He went to visit his dad there. His dad hired him to teach English to laotians, who then fired him because he was so terrible at it.
1974: upon graduation, David Duke founds the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for Louisiana (KKKK) and becomes it's "Grand Wizard". He was 24 at that time. This was at the height of the Watergate Scandal in DC and shortly before Nixon's resignation in that year. At that time, Duke is a registered Democrat in Louisiana, two years after Nixon's successful Southern-State strategy in the 1972 presidential election.
1975: David Duke enters politics and runs for the LA state legislature, at first, as a Democrat, where he got a little over 11,000 votes and placed third (Jungle Primary, LA law). In 1979, he ran again and placed 2nd.
1979: David Duke founds and incorporates the "National Association for the Advancement of White People" (NAAWP). This is the second White Nationalist (Supremacist) group that David Duke has founded.
1984-1988: David Duke pays no income taxes.
1988: David Duke runs for President of the USA as a Democrat (lol) and actually wins the little known New Hampshire VICE-PRESIDENTIAL primary, which no longer exists as of 2009, but of course, his campaign goes no where. All told, Duke gets 45,290 votes (most of them in Louisiana), or 0.19% of all primary votes cast in the 1988 DEM primaries.
December 1988: David Duke changes his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican.
1985-1989: Steve Scalese attends LSU, graduates in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a minor in political science.
1989: David Duke wins his first political race, a special election in Lousiana House District 89 (which would later become district 81) - Metairie (due to a retirement). None of the candidates gets over 50% in the Jungle Primary, but Duke narrowly beats out George H.W. Bush's preferred candidate (John Treen) in the runoff. Duke serves as State Rep for district 81 (it was district 89 until the 1990 census and resulting redistricting) until 1992. He was so hated in the LA HOR that even a non-affiliated rep tried to pass a motion to refuse seating Duke in the LA HOR because his residence was not in the district he had won. At the time that David Duke is seated in the LA HOR in a district where Steve Scalese grew up, Scalese is 24 years old.
Here is a video of some of Duke's campaign in 1989:
There is a still-photo of HIM at the 59 second mark. Take a look. Yepp, that's a swastika on his armband.
1990: David Duke runs for the US Senate. He, an avowed racist and holocaust denier, wins the GOP nomination for Senate. At the time that David Duke runs, Steve Scalise is 25 years old. Because Steve Bagert (whom the GOP elite supported), who had been defeated by Duke in the primaries, was still on the November 1990 ballot for the Jungle Primary, the GOP was TERRIFIED that David Duke could win and they therefore arm-twisted Bagert to back out, which he did, reluctantly. It was such a serious threat that Jack Kemp, who would go on to become the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee in 1996, threw his support to Democratic incumbent Johnston, saying: "there's no place in the Republican Party for someone who has practiced and practices racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism." Good for Jack Kemp. The Republican party needs more Jack Kemps in 2015. On election night, Johnston won 54 to 43 for Duke. But as of this point in time, David Duke was now on the national radar screen and the GOP was not happy that he had joined their party - to their credit, at least at that time.
1991: David Duke runs for Governor, in one of the most fascinating political chapters in our Union's history. This is a race I remember quite well, for I was really starting to get turned on to electoral politics after Bush 41 was elected. This is the year in which Buddy Roemer (who was a friend of Bush 41) switched parties, the GOP primary was a mess and David Duke WON the GOP primary. Meanwhile, Democrat Edwin Edwards, a crook, was going for a fourth, non-consecutive term. In the October Jungle primary, it was Edwards 34% / Duke 32% / Roemer 26.5%, with a smattering for the other nine candidates. Republicans were more terrified than ever that Duke could actually win the runoff and make it into the US Senate. Buddy Roemer, who hated Edwards with a passion, nonetheless swung his support to Edwards and yard signs popped up all over Louisiana with "vote for the crook, it's important", the "crook" being Edwards. Even President Bush 41, through his spokesman Ed Sununu, chimed in with: "The President is absolutely opposed to the kind of racist statements that have come out of David Duke now and in the past." At the end of the day, Edwards (D) won in a landslide, but only because Roemer's faction fell in line and voted for "the crook". In spite of losing big time, Duke said: "I won my constituency. I won 55% of the white vote." And indeed, he did. 55% of the white electorate in Louisana voted for a NAZI white-supremacist in 1991, according to the exit polling. That is a very sad historical footnote.
Here is the complete debate from November 6th, 1991:
There was a panel of four political reporters who moderated the debate. One of them is black. His name is Norman Robinson (he was also a WH correspondent for CBS). There is an exchange where Robinson asks Duke questions about his overt racism and hatred. The exchange starts at 33:47 and goes to 37:58. Take a good hard look at that one. That is a good lesson on how racists dodge and avoid and evade. Most people who watched the debate say that this is the moment that most definitely nailed David Duke's campaign coffin shut and then, that was that.
Duke also got his ass handed to him by another panel member AND his Democratic opponent from 39:45 to 41:44 - about his racially tinged comments about "welfare mothers". That is a fascinating exchange.
Also, from 47:43 to 49:50, Mr. Robinson raked Duke over the coals about integrity, specifially, his tax evasion and the writing of pornographic books under a pseudonym. 49:33 is FASCINATING, you MUST watch it. At 49:33, Edwards, in his 30 second rebuttal, said of Duke: "he also wrote a plan for dividing America, in which he was gonna send the Hispanics to Arizona and the Jews some place else and the Blacks some place else and the Cajuns to Vermont, and I want to let you know, Mr. Duke, I'm a spokesperson for the Cajuns, and we ain't going". BOOM. In his closing statement, Duke claimed he didn't write that plan, but the facts don't bear him out. He did. So, the racist, anti-semitic David Duke lied. Big suprise there. He also indicated that he is "standing up" for his "heritage". Those are code words used by white supremacists. Ewards 3-minute closing statement probably goes into the history books as one of the most effective slap-downs in all of electoral history.
1992: David Duke runs for President, this time as a Republican. He is not well-received. He only gets 0.94% of all primary votes. However, WHERE he gets the Republican votes is fascinating: 10.62% in Mississippi, 8.85% in Louisiana, 7.09% in South Carolina, 3.14% in Tennessee, 2.85% in Texas. David Duke got more votes in the 1992 GOP primaries than did Ross Perot. That is a fascinating fact.
1995: Don Black and Chloe Hardin (Duke's Ex-Wife) found "Stormfront" as a website. David Duke has an account at that website. Hate has found it's way to the interweebs.
1995: Steve Scalese is elected to the LA House of Representatives, district 82, at the age of 30. He serves from 1996-2008, is re-elected twice, does not serve out his third term. See: 2007
1996: Duke again tries for the US Senate, but this time, is only 4th place in the Jungle Primary, but in 1999, he runs again for LA-01, the district that Steve Scalise currently represents in the HOR. Steve Scalise also runs for LA-01 in 1999. He is 34 at the time. So, in this year, the two men ran against each other for the same US HOR seat. This is the year in which Steve Scalise gave an interview in Roll Call and said that many of his views were the same as Duke's but that he was more electable.
2000 onward: David Duke is on a "Jewish Supremacism" trip and writes a number of virulently anti-semitic books. He is arrested and subsequently released in the Czech Republic for his neo-nazi writings.
2002: David Duke is charged with and found guilty of tax fraud. He serves 15 months in prison. He had duped his followers through postal mail and asked for donations for a campaign he never ran. The issue of tax fraud was brought up way back in the 1991 Gubernatorial debate, remember.
2007: Steve Scalese runs for and wins a special election to the LA Senate, District 9. (New Orleans). After the 2010 Census, LA reduces it's state Senate districts to 7. So, if you are looking for State District 9 now, you will not find one.
2008: Steve Scalese elected to the US HOR for LA-01 (North of New Orleans, east of Baton Rouge), 65.7% to 34.3%, he will be re-elected in 2010 (78.5% to 19.2%), 2012 (66.6% to 21.3%) and 2014 (77.6% to 10.2%). Steve Scalese represents a ruby-red, conservative district in Louisiana.
2009: David Duke is discovered living in secret at "Zell am See" (Salzburg) Austria, under the pseudonym "Ernst Duke". As of 2014, Duke is no longer listed as a registered voter in Louisiana. Zell am See is exactly one hour's drive from Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, which was Hitler's summer home and a favorite tourist spot for Neonazis. Zell am See was also a favorite vacation spot for Jörg Haider (who was the leader of Austria's neo-nazi party called FPÖ, until his death in 2008) outside of his home in Kärnten. I can't prove it yet, but I bet that if I dig deep enough, I will be able to prove that the two men knew each other.
2015: Scalese-gate
What is the point I am making?
The point is that when Steve Scalese had finished his undergraduate work at LSU, at the same time that David Duke had become national figure because of his coming dangerously close to winning two important races in Louisiana, in 1990 and 1991. Steve Scalise grew up in the same city that David Duke represented in the LA Legislature: Metairie. To have minored in poly-sci and now to act as if he barely knows anything about such an incredibly controversial and racist figure such as David Duke is just ridiculous on the part of Steve Scalese. In fact, a lot of his statements sound a lot like a lot of David Duke's catch-phrases from the 1991 gubernatorial debate.
And even sadder yet, some of the things that David Duke said then, things that were shunned by Republicans of 1990 and 1991, are now being embraced by Republicans of 2014-2015. That is just plain old scary.
So, no, Scalese-gate is not going away. Not by a longshot.
Now, whether you are a Conservative and maybe angry that I bring this up, David Duke's political activities are now part of the public record, he (and today's Republicans) cannot hide from them.
Not an issue for RWs but change the names to Obama and Ayers and you'll hear a different tune.
Scalese saying he's a 'David Duke Republican' and 'David Duke without the baggage' pretty much says it all.
We need to get white supremacists out of public office.
Yes, it's all the rage with Rrrrracist Rrrrrrightie Rrrrrroookies theses days.
Please produce all the racist quotes of Scalise.
Uh=Oh!
