Duke’s paradoxical effort to be a public Klan leader was born from a narcissistic personality that couldn’t be satisfied with the rulership of an “invisible empire” and therefore craved public recognition, at the same time still desiring the frisson of ghoulish power that flows from conspiracism, secret societies, and terrorist machinations. This amphibian nature helps to explain both his successes and his failures: he found purchase as the acceptable public face of unacceptable private hatreds and paranoias, but he was always too “soft-core” for the radical vanguard of his own movement even
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