David Duke is running for the U.S. Senate and he has the LA GOP in a tizzy. While they’re rushing to condemn him, the Democrats are looking to tie him to conservatives and Republicans as a whole.

Here’s a part of the press release the Louisiana Democrat Party sent out attacking Duke:

“The recurrence of a cancer like David Duke was encouraged and made possible by the toxic climate of racism and fear-mongering dominating the Republican party in this election cycle,” said Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party. “With the GOP having formally nominated a sexist, xenophobic demagogue, and with their statewide candidates here in Louisiana working to elect that same sort of hatred and divisiveness to the presidency— it’s inevitable that a racist horror like Duke would be emboldened to run, and to run as a Republican. This is the climate they created: David Duke and Donald Trump are the twisted face of the Republican Party.”

Forget the hypocrisy of this statement, after all Karen Carter Peterson claimed on the floor of the Louisiana Senate that opposition to Obamacare is racist. The left will use a Duke candidacy to bludgeon Republicans with and Peterson is showing them how.

Duke for his part is claiming that he is father of modern conservatism. He released a 9 minute video rant that touched on everything from the LA GOP to his issues.

Despite what David Duke and the left want you to believe, he’s not a conservative. Duke is a white nationalist and a populist. His conservatism is as real as the doctorate he “earned” from a Ukrainian diploma mill.

What’s a conservative? Here’s what a conservative believes:

1) There is a Creator. 

2) All rights come from that Creator. We have certain inalienable rights because we are human beings and all human beings have them, not just a privileged class.

3) America is an exceptional country because of its classical liberal foundations of liberty, our Judeo-Christian values, and the history that has molded the American people. Unlike most other nations, what makes an American is not blood or race. It’s our values and our culture. We believe that the ideals that make up America are worth defending.

4) Government only has a few roles such securing and defending the borders, enforcing laws against harming others and taking their stuff, and doing those other things explicitly stated in the Constitution, if that. We believe that once government goes beyond those few things, it starts to crowd out the American people. As government expands, the people become less free and civil society contracts, which leads to a cultural breakdown and cultural rot.

David Duke does not really believe in most of this. Duke’s whole message can be distilled down to this: “freedom for white people only.”

That’s not conservatism of any variety. Constitutional conservatives believe that all Americans have their liberties protected by the Bill of Rights. Christian conservatives know that Jesus Christ came here to save all mankind, not just white people and that all people have value, regardless of their skin color.

Finally, David Duke is an useful idiot for America’s enemies.

In 2005, Syria was helping Iraqi insurgents kill American soldiers in Iraq. Duke traveled to Syria to address a public gathering put together by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. He claimed that “Zionists” occupied the United States government and other Western governments and that’s why they wanted war against Iraq and Syria.

More disgustingly, Duke called the Syrian government’s policy, which included the killing of American soldiers in Iraq, “a fight for freedom” and called proposed military action “a war for Israel.”

Earlier today, Scott McKay had this about the Republican candidates for Senate, comparing them to Duke:

Could that happen again this time? No. The difference between Duke’s two “successful” statewide runs and this Senate race, besides the 25 years of changes in Louisiana’s people, is that this year there is a Republican frontrunner in the race who is actually popular with the public. More, John Kennedy has taken great pains to present himself as something Duke got votes with – Kennedy has cultivated a reputation as an anti-establishment figure by crusading against the waste of public money and calling out the wasters of it. Kennedy has reaped great benefits from that presentation without making himself seen as a racist or otherwise vulgar personage. As such, Duke can’t beat Kennedy in any formulation of this race.

And Kennedy isn’t alone. Lots of others among the Republican field in the race can argue against leftist misgovernance without carrying the baggage and disqualification that Duke, a convicted felon, does. John Fleming and Charles Boustany might be less exciting to voters for having slogged through the congressional mud, but it takes a rare bit of electoral stupidity to consider membership in the House of Representatives a worse line on a resume than status as a Klan leader and federal inmate. And as Maness demonstrated in his Twitter scrape with Duke, he’s more than capable of shouting down the political has-been (and we’re being generous). The newcomer to the race, Abhay Patel, will also look fresh and interesting compared to Duke.

 

David Duke is a white nationalist masquerading as a conservative. Most Louisianians will see through that at the end of the day. Most of the Republicans in the race will do better than him in November.