When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

by John Ganz

Duke freely admitted to his past Klan membership, which, as he pointed out, he shared with many respectable public figures like Robert Byrd, but he denied ever being a Nazi. When inconvenient photographs reemerged of him in a brownshirt’s uniform on the LSU campus with a sign reading GAS THE CHICAGO 7, Duke claimed that such antics constituted a “teen-aged stunt” and “a satire” rather than “a defense of totalitarianism.” Absurd defenses such as these aside, his platform was undeniably shot through with thinly veiled anti-Black racism: he denounced “welfare dependency,” affirmative action, and minority “quotas.” He put a eugenic spin on these issues, calling for a reduction in “the illegitimate welfare birthrate that is bankrupting us economically and is the source of much crime and social ills.”