David Duke: I think only a very few have done so. Even more unfortunately, most of them had no real organization, woefully inadequate finances, and very little political savvy. Often they ran for offices far beyond their reach, such as US House of Representatives, rather than local races or what I think is the best starting point: the state legislature.

TOQ: What would you recommend for young nationalists who are thinking of getting involved in politics?

Here are a few of the guidelines that I think are essential for political success for our advocates.

1. Build a strong local organization such as EURO first so that you have at least a hundred dedicated volunteers and supporters. I had a local organization of about 1,000 supporters when I made my first race.

2. Pick the right race at the right time. Run for an office where you can actually touch the hands of a majority of the voters in your district. Establish residence in a district that has the right demographics and where a politician is vulnerable or a seat is opening up. “The right race at the right time.”

3. Run as a member of one of the major parties, not third party. Third party candidacies have huge disadvantages and also bring the perception of an inability to win, which is politically fatal.

4. Make sure you are an expert at campaigning. Go to Republican or Democratic political schools. Read the books on the subject. More importantly work in some campaigns and learn the science of campaigning. Have the latest voters list from the registrar of voters and get it paired with telephone numbers. Strategically develop a plan for you to conceivably knock on every door in your district, and your volunteers at least twice more singing your praises.

5. Make your candidacy very visible. One of the biggest tasks you have is to appear viable. The best way to do that in district is with yard signs. When I campaigned I walked the main thoroughfares and access roads in my District first, getting yard sign commitments. 60 days before the actual election came up, my yard sign crews went out one day and night and put up over 1000 signs. It looked like everyone was for me, and that changed the psychology of the election. Suddenly, people became unafraid to say that they were voting for me as they could see, thousands of others were.

6. Make your program true to our principles, but focused on issues that will get you votes, not cost you votes. Issues that will separate you from the crowd and give the most people strong reasons not to vote for you. For instance, even though you may favor a different US policy in the Mideast, that is not a vital issue in a state race. Why alienate people who are not educated on that issue? This is a campaign not an ideological journal like TOQ.

If something like comes up in an state election I would simply say, “Foreign policy is not an issue in a state race, but sure, I favor a policy that always puts American interest first and favors no special interests,” and then move on and say something like, “The ‘foreign policy’ that affects our state the most is the illegal alien and immigration policies that lead to more crime, more taxes and destruction of our traditional communities.”

Go with issues that have the most support among our people that are consonant with our views. For instance, hit hard against the racial discrimination of affirmative action, the cultural attacks against our people, destructions of our schools with forced integration, busing, rap, crime, etc. Hit hard on the welfare rip-off of the middle class taxpayer, the huge rip-off by the politically connected corporations, and the terrible taxes paid by our hard-pressed middle class to support these two parts of the economic vice squeezing our people.

My literature is available for everyone to see and the issues presented by it are certainly still valid. For some presentation advice read my threads on Stormfront critiquing Nick Griffin’s appearance on the BBC debate. There is a lot to be learned from those threads.

7. Note: It is vital that one does not sell out our basic concepts, yet at the same time present our views in way that is appealing rather than unattractive or disingenuous. It is tightrope that you must learn to walk if you take part in the political process.

8. Be super presentable, lose those extra pounds, or gain some muscle if need be. Physical strength and a well-dressed and well-groomed appearance are essential.

9. Attend every community election forum and usually there are dozens of them. If you do your homework you will shine above all the rest and give the people in attendance a real motivation to vote for you.

10. Operate a phone bank where you have 10 or more people who can call for you. Skype makes this very easy. Have them work the voters list. Promote a key issue or two, ask for their support, ask for a yard sign placement, and identity the favorable voters so you can get them out on election day.

11. If you are serious about the race, you need to take a leave of absence from your work, or let someone else run your business and be prepared to spend at least 5 months working 15 hour days on the project. For a local legislative house race you must raise at least $50,000 with $100,000 more desirable. If you have a good organization you can raise that kind of money. Voters are prepared to contribute to candidates, they want access to their representative.

12. Also important in preparing for a run for office is long-time community involvement. Become vocal long before the election on issues that come up which dovetail with our views. Make sure you are community active. You should be active in a number of community organizations such as Kiwanis, Red Cross, Lion’s Club, Rotary, etc. Not only can you do good work for your fellows, such involvement destroys the stereotype the media tries to portray of us. And over the months, and preferably years, the people in these organizations will respect you, many will help in the campaign, others will contribute and your membership in those groups will give a lot assurance to people who are suspicious of you because of media attacks.

13. One last thing. Go to church. Find a large church and a pastor or priest that you find the most agreeable. You might be surprised but you can almost always find a pastor who is sympathetic (usually quietly) to our views. Get involved in Church activities. And by the way, never be afraid to offer a differing view in Sunday School if some of the lessons stray into political and racial drivel. Just do it in decent way and you can have the whole class agreeing.

Because the media portrays people like us to be strange, anti-social, etc. it is more important for you to engage in these activities than for almost any other politician. And almost all successful political personages do this whether they believe or not. Bill Clinton in church has to be one hell of a joke.

Your viewpoints will set you apart and the media will try to characterize you in stereotypes, so it is vitally important for you to set deep community anchors that refute those stereotypes to the people you must reach to win political office.

Those are just a few concepts that I have learned over the years. I was elected to the House of Representatives in Louisiana in race with 5 opponents who were all millionaires. I received over 60 percent of the White vote in two statewide elections for US Senate and Governor and was elected to the Republican Executive Committee in the largest Republican district of Louisiana, and then subsequently elected chairman by the other 14 elected committeemen. If I can do that with the constant media attacks on me for my affiliations decades earlier, your road is much easier. Just standing up for our people’s rights and heritage will garner a lot of publicity on its own, and if elected on that platform you will become a nationally known political figure.

It is disgrace that there aren’t at least 1000 of our people in state legislatures across America, and at least a hundred in Congress. As of now there is not one elected politician in America would say “I am proud of the fact that I defend the rights of heritage of European-Americans.” Not one. Let’s change that!

Good luck!

TOQ: How would you respond to someone who would say the following: “Dr. Duke, you have political talent and skills equal to anyone in the US Senate right now. Why did you not pull out all the stops, do anything, say anything to get there? Why didn’t you renounce racism, kiss black babies, hug Oprah and blubber about your change of heart, anything to get real political power?”

David Duke: Again, it is the art of walking the tightrope. I did make it clear again and again that my beliefs weren’t the stereotypical White racist beliefs and slanders presented by the media, but I wasn’t going to renounce my core beliefs of preserving our heritage. Politics and mass democracy in the land of MTV is distasteful, and there are a thousand cuts at your integrity necessary to get elected. You are no longer a private person who can share every thought or every belief, otherwise at some point you would alienate in some way every voter. That goes for a David Duke, a Bill Clinton, or a Barak Obama. It’s the political reality of an alien controlled media.

I did whatever I had to do to get the votes I needed, but I could not and will not ever compromise the essential issues of our people’s survival. As far as I was personally concerned, I thought I had compromised too much in quest of a victory and power that could have served our Movement so much.

Also, understand, even if I would have recanted all, it would have made no difference, because the Jewish extremists who dominate the media and political process never forgive and never forget. They still would have launched all their forces against me and in reality, showing political cowardice on the key issues would have taken the wind from the sails of the thousands of dedicated people who worked day and night in my campaign.

We had an historic 42,000 supporters of the campaign in Louisiana, and 5000 volunteers. I got over 6 out of 10 of the White voters, but needed 7, and I did everything I could to get to 7, but my radical past (with photos) caused media induced prejudice among too many White voters.

The biggest factor in the race as boasted by Jewish researchers, was the economic blackmail against the state. We lost at least 2 out of 10 White folks because of that fact, they thought their jobs would be lost, their businesses driven to ground if I were elected.

Many people think they understand the incredible power of our Jewish supremacist enemies, but they have no idea of the true extent of Jewish power until they pose a real threat to system, then they unleash all their power in a torrent that few can withstand. I have endured years of constant, vicious Jewish lies and slanders, as would any man who threatened their power. Yet, I have endured and still fight for our people every day of my life. They couldn’t afford my presence among the most powerful 100 men in the world: the United States Senate. They knew that would have started a revolution, not just in America but across the Western World.

I hope young patriots can build on what I have accomplished and take the next step upward. I am there to advise or help anyone who is really serious.

Arthur Kemp, author of March of the Titans: A History of the White Race, has written a new book about the failures of the White Nationalist movement in America. If this name rings a bell, it’s because he is the same guy who wrote about Nordics bringing civilization to China, Egypt, Greece, Italy, South America, and Easter Island. Now he is full of advice for racialists on this side of the Atlantic.

Kemp’s prescription:

1) Strip the movement of “cranks and crackpots” who infest the American ”right wing.” The short list includes Christian Identity nuts, Neo-Nazis, Neo-Confederates, the KKK, WW2 hobbyists, and skinheads . . . in sum, everyone offensive to the bourgeois sense of propriety.

2) Reject the National Alliance vanguardist approach.

3) Engage in modern democratic nationalism. Imitate the Ron Paul movement.

4) Reject Judeo-obsessivism.

5) Create a “European-American Political Action Committee.” Draw up an electable platform. Have EUPAC select and endorse Republican and Democratic candidates.

6) Target state senate seats.

Five years ago, I would have found Kemp’s argument a lot more plausible than I do now. I’m not convinced the White Nationalist movement is marginalized because it is infested with kooks and fringe characters. If all of the above types were expunged from the White Wing, which is not really possible in a liberal democracy, I doubt that our media image would change. The BNP’s treatment by the British media is proof of that. Our enemies will continue to smear us regardless of whether or not we wear costumes.

Kemp’s caricature of White Nationalism is twenty years out of date. The typical White Nationalist isn’t an uneducated, hate mongering, tobacco chewing Christian Identity redneck. Even our professional monitors like Leonard Zeskind and Carol Swain are willing to grant that much. White Nationalists are usually middle class, college educated, white male professionals who have joined the movement out of concern about third world immigration, multiculturalism, or affirmative action.

The debate between the “mainstreamers” and “vanguardists” has been going on since the 1980s in the United States. There is nothing original about any of Kemp’s observations. I’ve seen it all before over the years. David Duke famously took off the Klan robes and got involved in Louisiana state politics. He was running for president when I was eight years old. If there is anything to be said for the “mainstreamer” approach, it is that there wasn’t nearly enough follow up in the wake of the Duke campaigns.

White Nationalists targeting state representative and state senate seats is only plausible in the Deep South states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana) where white racial consciousness is still relatively strong. I’m not opposed to this. Building a base is a good idea. Unfortunately, no one except Jim Giles is doing it. I’ve complained before that there is no national organization on the ground trying to recruit explicit whites into White Nationalism.

As a radical political movement, I also think our time and money is better spent trying to change the culture than engaging in expensive, fruitless political campaigns. The mainstream right dominated the US from Nixon to Obama, but you would never know this from the state of our culture. If we can change the culture, political victories will naturally follow. Political victories that don’t capstone deeper cultural triumphs will only prove temporary.

Can America be saved? Possibly . . . but I remain unconvinced that plunging into mainstream democratic politics is the way forward.

From “Can America Be Saved?” II, Occidental Dissent, November 9, 2009:

The anti-Semite David Duke was the most successful racialist political candidate of the last twenty years. He was an elected member of the Louisiana House of Representatives for several years. He ran unsuccessfully for the Louisiana Senate, Governor of Louisiana, US Senator from Louisiana, US House of Representatives, and President of the United States. He won the majority of the White vote in two of his campaigns from Governor and US Senator. In Alabama, Larry Darby (a race-mixing, atheist, Holocaust denier) won 43% of the vote in the 2006 Democratic primary for Alabama Attorney General.

The only region of the country where racialists have any chance of political success is the Deep South (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana) where White racial attitudes are still relatively strong. I grew up in Alabama in the heart of the Bible Belt. From anecdotal experience, I know the statistics are misleading. People around here (in particular, the young) aren’t nearly as religious as the polls suggest they are. They don’t care nearly as much about the Jews as the philo-Semites suggest they do.

The anti-Semite John Rankin from Mississippi served 16 consecutive terms in US House of Representatives. He caused Rep. M. Michael Edelstein (D-NY) to die of a heart attack on the House floor. Theodore Bilbo was Governor of Mississippi and served two terms as US Senator from Mississippi. Anti-Semites can and have won races in the Deep South. The problem is not anti-Semitism. It is that there are no racialist candidates bothering to run.

Communists and White Nationalists

The communist position on race (in the 1910s and 1920s) was adopted by mainstream liberals (1930s and 1940s) and conservatives (1950s and 1960s). Glenda Gilmore documents this transition of radical anti-racist rhetoric from the communist fringe to the mainstream in Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950. The communists didn’t have to “move forward” because the mainstream left hijacked their issues.

. . . William F. Buckley . . . watered down the right out of political pragmatism and excluded some of its best minds like Revilo P. Oliver. Instead of fighting the culture war, mainstream conservatives focused on winning elections. The result: fifty years later the right has been routed by the left on every cultural issue. The last Republican presidential nominee was John McCain, a multiculturalist, anti-racist, open borders advocate. If that is winning, what do you call losing?

If White Nationalism ever hopes to enter the mainstream, we must pull the national political conversation our way (like the communist vanguard), not the other way around (like the conservative movement). This means the mainstream right has to become more like us, not us more like them.

Conclusion

Kemp is wrong about the “cancer” he describes. The kooks and fringe characters that he laments were the White Nationalist mainstream in the 1980’s. In the 1990’s and 2000’s, they were marginalized within the movement by a new breed of racialist. Carol Swain and Leonard Zeskind, hardly fans of ours, have documented this in The New White Nationalism in America (2002) and Blood and Politics (2009). The typical White Nationalist is a middle class, college educated white male professional who is unaffiliated with any racialist organization.

White Nationalists are attacked for who we are and what we represent, not for our previous associations. Unlike the conservatives, we represent a potent threat to the liberal mainstream. You can’t be “pro-White” and “respectable” in the eyes of our anti-racist elite. The philo-Semites resent having to make that choice and scapegoat the racialist fringe (the Neo-Nazis, Klan, Christian Identity, skinheads) for their loss of status. In doing so, they exaggerate the influence of the fringe out of all proportion to their actual numbers.

The root of this consternation was the perception by liberal fanatics that the BBC was lending credibility to the Chairman of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, by giving him a spot on the panel of Question Time. The fact that the BBC’s guidelines require them to host representatives who have achieved a certain level of influence among the electorate is totally irrelevant to this apoplectic rabble hell-bent on censorship.

The frantic attempt by the enemies of Life to silence a critic of their agenda filled me with excitement and anticipation. Many of the machinations of the protesters outside the TV Centre were being broadcast live on BBC News, and their desperation to stop Griffin’s appearance was so transparent that it provoked many thinking men into taking a closer look at Griffin and his ideas.

While I was concerned with whether or not Nick Griffin would make it into the BBC studio safely, I didn’t give much thought to problems that would arise once he was already on the air. I was sure that he would handle himself well once he got his foot in the door. Griffin had sent out an e-mail update, just hours before the broadcast was recorded, in which he stated that the panel, and the audience, of QT would be deliberately stacked against him; however, he said that he was prepared for this and that he would use this vehicle to disseminate our message and cut through the fog of media lies. Right before entering the studio, he said he was prepared for an old-fashioned, political rough-and-tumble.

I assumed that we would see an intelligent, well-educated (Nick is a Cambridge man), polished orator and Political Soldier deliver a life-affirming defense of our Cause, remaining steadfast in the face of blistering criticism. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by Mr. Griffin’s performance on Question Time , and it truly saddens me that such an extraordinary opportunity to reach the British public was squandered.

The program was clearly configured to discredit Nick Griffin, and the usual format of the show was altered in a manner conducive to the witch hunt they sought, by consistently providing traps into which they hoped Griffin would fall; sadly, on more than one occasion, he did just that. David Duke provides some good analysis of the performance on his web site, which I think is worth reading for anyone who aspires to a role of prominence in Identity politics. Whatever your opinion might be of David Duke, he handles the media adroitly, and his exchange with Wolf Blitzer, which aired live on CNN, is legendary.

Griffin knew going into this situation that he was facing a group of people entirely hostile to his perspective, and yet he failed to assumed a posture that fit the situation. Rather than steeling himself for the inevitable hostility and projecting confidence in the face of overwhelming opposition, he sat there sheepishly grinning, staring at the desk, and forcing himself to clap for the other panelists, one of which was a particularly acerbic Negress with a habit of deriding the BNP constituency, and all of whom were obviously tasked with assailing him. Shockingly, they did not return Griffin’s civility. He patiently waited for his turn to speak and allowed each of them to state their opinions clearly, whereas they shouted over him and subjected him to a torrent of verbal abuse.

We, as White Nationalists, must not allow ourselves to swallow, to any degree, the enemy propaganda that we are doing something shameful or dirty by standing up for ourselves, our culture, and our collective identity. When the angry Negress told Griffin that no party in the world is based on “indigenous populations,” he had a perfect opportunity to name some of the many parties in the world with consanguineous prerequisites.

Specifically, he had a chance to touch on Israel: a bigoted, war-mongering, Apartheid state whose outrages should be brought into the public discourse as much as possible. However, as Duke notes, Griffin negated that opportunity by previously stating his support for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. I understand why Griffin does not want to attack the Jews, even if I disagree with this tactic; however, there is a big difference between not attacking Jews and being so philosemitic that you justify Zionist atrocities. What does Griffin hope to achieve by fawning over Israel? Does he think we will ever really achieve support from Jews? Does he think Jewish money comes without strings attached?

Griffin was easily lured into criticism of Muslims and other out-groups, yet he spoke very little about the nature of British Identity, how it is unique, and why it must be safeguarded. He was afforded the chance to defend our heritage and unique nature several times, most notably when the Negress on the panel rejected the notion of indigenous British people and began mumbling about Neanderthals.

We must defend our identity without being lured into disparaging others. We should provide newcomers and lemmings with very common metaphors to which they can relate: “I love my children more than the children of others, but that doesn’t mean I hate other children.” Don’t get into arguments about superiority and inter-cultural value judgments. It’s just not worth the hassle. European people are superior at reproducing other European people, and that is simply a fact. We don’t need to prove anything beyond that; our uniqueness is of intrinsic value and anyone who denies that is trying to deny Life.

Too often, Griffin came across as a dejected outsider peddling the politics of ressentiment. He seemed to lack resolve, and more importantly, Geist. He nodded his head, smiled, and seemed to concur when other panelists suggested that people were voting for the BNP simply out of frustration and a lack of options. The panelists argued that these were not so much votes for the BNP, but rather protest votes against the current system, and Griffin did not seem to challenge this. I was reminded of Nietzsche’s quote from On the Genealogy of Morals:

The slave revolt in morality begins when resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the resentment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what
is “different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye — this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself — is of the essence of resentment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external environment: it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all –
its action is fundamentally reaction.

How many BNP voters are truly committed to our world-view, and how many vote for the BNP in secrecy and shame, largely to protest the current state of affairs? This is an important question, and one of the reasons why I believe it is vital for us to be strong, determined, and life-affirming in our rhetoric. We must vanquish “the cloud” to which Jonathan Bowden often refers: a cloud which will continue to descend upon us, confusing and distorting our efforts, until we summon the resolve necessary to lift it. Lifting this cloud is an essential first step in the “reevaluation of values” needed in order to restore ourselves to health. Greg Johnson summed up this imperative quite well in a recent e-mail:

We will never save ourselves, much less recover what we have lost, until we have a moral revolution: until we stop apologizing for our ancestors, stop apologizing for ourselves, and start asserting ourselves and our interests — not furtively, sneakily, and apologetically — but righteously, with the unshakable conviction that we make the world a better place. It is the self-assertion that comes naturally to any healthy organism, and if we cannot summon it, then we will be culled as one of nature’s rejects.

We can no longer afford to politely play the games of our enemies, by their rules, hoping to get lucky at some point. We must overturn the tables and expose the sinister rigging beneath it. We must do this boldly and openly, coupling mastery of style with uncorrupted masculine principle. I urge Mr. Griffin to consider the choice outlined by his fellow countryman, Alex Kurtagic, and insist on assuming a place of majesty rather than servitude.

NOTE: The appearance is now available on YouTube here:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=videos&search_query=BNP+Nick+Griffin+on+BBC+Question&search_sort=video_recently_uploaded

From Occidental Dissent, October 23, 2009