As if this year’s election season couldn’t get any crazier, former KKK grand wizard David Duke qualified to participate in last night’s second U.S. Senate debate.
In 2016, a time when America has become one of the most diverse countries in the world and caters to people of all racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds, it’s bizarre that a person running a Senate campaign based on white nationalist views can be taken seriously.
To participate in the debate, each candidate needed to garner 5 percent of support from likely voters in a poll taken by Raycom Media, the host of the senate debate. Duke made the cut with 5.1 percent.
He trails Republican State Treasurer John Kennedy’s 24.2 percent and Democrat Foster Campbell’s 18.9 percent in the race for retiring Republican Sen. David Vitter’s seat. Having no clear path to victory hasn’t stopped Duke from speaking about what he believes the ideal America should look like.
According to him, it should look white.
Duke’s campaign is focused on stopping the “ethnic cleansing” of America. Duke blames immigrants for stealing millions of jobs and bringing crime, drugs and violence to America. But last I heard, it wasn’t immigrants killing people in mass numbers at movie theatres, schools or churches. But if you can’t blame Obama for something, blame the immigrants.
It’s no surprise that Duke is trying to ride Trump’s coattails to a victory on Nov. 8, considering the hateful rhetoric surrounding the Trump campaign since day one. Though I disagree with almost everything about Trump’s campaign, it’s not nearly as bad as the message behind Duke’s.
Duke’s call for the end of ethnic cleansing comes with claims that “liberals advance their own agenda by making the people whose forefathers created America a minority in their own nation.” He also claims that the media “celebrates the ‘dying out of white people in America’ and the replacement of their nation’s population with people of non-European descent who embrace different ideologies than the founding principles of America.”
The fact that someone who thinks this way receives any support at all shows how regressive Louisiana is compared to other states. It’s obvious Duke winning the senate election is impossible, but people are using this fact to avoid addressing bigger issues at hand such as Republican ties to the KKK.
Republicans have gone as far as calling the Black Lives Matter group a terrorist group but refuse to denounce the KKK.
The Black Lives Matter movement has acknowledged the racial inequalities in America and started conversations across the country about ways to solve it. The KKK has done nothing over the many years it’s been around but incite violence, cause terror and torture those who don’t identify as a member of their white nationalist movement.
To top it off, the Senate debate was ironically held at Dillard University, a historically black university in New Orleans.
One can only hope this will be the last of Duke’s failed ploys at reentry into public office. We should focus on America’s future, not its ugly past.
Brianna Rhymes is a 19-year-old mass communication sophomore from New Iberia, Louisiana.