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June 10, 1960. San Francisco County Jail.
Two men of middling stature and build, unremarkable to the eye, stand separated by security mesh. You would never guess, based on their clean-cut appearance and furtive demeanor, that these they are among the most influential figures on the postwar far-right.
The one in custody is an enigmatic fascist named Francis Parker Yockey from Chicago. He went AWOL from the Army during World War II to aid Nazi spies in the United States and Mexico. He’s spent the last decade on the run from the authorities and has developed an international network of contacts with likeminded radicals. He even sought to serve as a bridge between the far right and Soviet Russia, which Yockey saw as an enemy of the Jewish people and therefore a natural ally to his cause. Under the pen name Ulick Varange, he wrote Imperium while hiding out in Ireland. It is a strange tome with an occult flavor that views the whole sweep of human history from an out-of-body, “astral” perspective, and calls for fascists not to give up the world-historical struggle. He dedicates it to “the hero of the Second World War.” Yockey, of course, means Adolf Hitler.
The other man, the visitor, is Willis Carto. Like Yockey, he moves in the shadows, preferring to work behind the scenes. And like Yockey, Carto is a true believer. Every fiber of his being is committed to the cause of bringing about a world cleansed of what he sees as the inferior races of man. Name a prominent American white supremacist or antisemite, and you’ll almost certainly find them in Carto’s Rolodex.
Carto was tireless in his efforts to shape the trajectory of the right. At one point, he even took control of The American Mercury, a monthly magazine co-founded by H.L. Mencken that boasted a star-studded cast of authors from Zora Neale Hurston to F. Scott Fitzgerald and W.E.B. Du Bois. Over time, however, and with changes in ownership, the magazine devolved into a fevered, far-right antisemitic rag.
Carto became obsessed from afar with Yockey, who was already then spoken about on the radical right in almost mystical terms. “His eyes bespoke great secrets and knowledge and such terrible sadness,” Carto wrote in the introduction to the edition of Imperium that was republished through his press. Their meeting in the San Francisco jail was the first and last time they’d ever come face-to-face, and it only lasted fifteen minutes.
Six days after Carto’s visit, Yockey was found dead in his cell. He had apparently killed himself using a hidden cyanide capsule. In a cryptic note, Yockey indicated that he had sympathizers on the inside. Suicide only cemented Yockey’s status as a martyr to Carto, who redoubled his efforts to carry the radical torch aloft. In 1978, Carto founded the Institute for Historical Review in California, a nerve center of the Holocaust denial movement in the United States. But despite his wide-ranging influence and seemingly countless contacts, Carto proved incapable again and again of maintaining stable relationships with his comrades. He was capricious and bitter, too much of a crank for the cranks.
By 1993, Carto and the institute were in the process of an acrimonious break. He moved about an hour south, settling in Escondido. It means “hidden” in Spanish. It’s also where I was born, roughly three years before Carto’s arrival. I didn’t know until much later in life that I grew up just a few minutes down the road from one of the most notorious radicals in American history.
Carto was emblematic of a particular kind of rightist who rattled the mainstream of conservatism in the latter half of the twentieth century. And though he lived and died in obscurity on the eve of Donald Trump’s ascendance, his sort would arguably have the last laugh. There’s a good case to be made that the ethnonationalist, paranoid, vicious, and revolutionary rather than conservative style of right-wing politics that seethed through the late ’80s and into the ’90s won in the long run.
I thought about Carto after Erick-Woods Erickson published a story the other day about key players on the hard edge of the new right:
A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations. They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies. They are getting added to conservative institutional boards, attempting to purge churches, and are desperate to indoctrinate young conservatives into fascist ideology. They even surround the Vice President of the United States. Some of them believe the United States is at a tipping point, and they want to push it over the edge and rebuild it in their image. You might think it does not affect you, but, in time, you will see their efforts in your church pews, in your kids’ brains, and in your politicians’ mouths.
Erickson names many names but focuses much of his fire on Charles Haywood, an odd man with too much time and money on his hands who imagines himself as a warlord-in-waiting living at the nigh end of everything. As Erickson notes, Haywood made his fortune in the shampoo business and today is a prolific funder of the right with close ties to various conservative institutions, including the Claremont Institute and New Founding.
Haywood operates under the motto of “no enemies to the right,” or NETTR, and may well have coined it. It means exactly what you think: Haywood sees the left as the real enemy and is open to forming an alliance with anyone who agrees with him on that score, including fascists. Erickson points to Haywood’s praise of Thomas Rousseau, the leader of Patriot Front, a white supremacist group born out of the neo-Nazi milieu. NETTR inevitably creates a ratchet effect in practice. The right only ever becomes more radical, more extreme, purging individuals exclusively based on whether they’re perceived as sympathetic to the enemy or somehow hindering the cause. Rousseau, to Haywood, is a “very impressive” enemy of the left, and that’s good enough for him.
Erickson shows how Haywood and his allies have forged a more adversarial Christianity aligned with the political interests of the hard right. Overall, the piece is a helpful primer for understanding important players and networks and their influence on our politics. But the problem goes much deeper than Haywood or any of the groups he’s affiliated with.
After Yockey’s death and before moving to my neck of the woods, Carto took to political activism. In 1968, he organized Youth for George Wallace, which supported his third-party presidential bid. As I recently wrote in The Nation, Wallace is a crucial figure in the annals of the right’s history because his openly segregationist platform forced Richard Nixon’s campaign to embrace the “Southern strategy.” To win over the white Southerners Wallace had galvanized with overt racism while not alienating the rest of his coalition, Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips recommended in a memo that Nixon adopt coded language that appealed to the racial antipathy of Wallace supporters toward the civil rights movement. It was remarkably effective at fracturing the historic Democratic coalition, and racial dog-whistling became a staple of GOP electoral politics from that point on.
Following Nixon’s victory, Carto repurposed Youth for George Wallace into the National Youth Alliance and enlisted the help of William Luther Pierce, a neo-Nazi activist. Under the pen name Andrew Macdonald, Pierce wrote The Turner Diaries, an infamous white supremacist novel about a radicalized man and a secret order working to overthrow the U.S. government and bring about a race war in which minorities and race traitors are hunted and butchered after the world is baptized in nuclear fire. Some of its themes have effectively become mainstream on the right, popularized in films like Citizen Vigilante, which centers on an American who murders migrants—criminals and non-criminals—in Europe. He also kills anyone he sees as either obstructing his agenda or beneath him.
Carto’s alliance with Pierce ended the way virtually all his associations did: bitterly. He went on to help found the Populist Party in 1984, which supported an unlikely candidate who, in many ways, prefigured Trump: David Duke.
It seems underappreciated that a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan struck terror into the political establishment.
Four years after the formation of the Populist Party, Duke ran for president under its banner after he failed to secure support as a Democrat. Carto effectively launched Duke’s national political career, providing him with a platform and fundraising infrastructure. Duke went on to lose badly, but it helped set the stage for a successful run as a Republican the following year in a special election that landed him in the Louisiana House.
Duke took the state by storm in the lead-up to victory. He proved an alarmingly talented political athlete. He also had the benefit of circumstance on his side in that the social, historical, political, and economic conditions of Louisiana were just right for someone like him to come along and capitalize on real issues as much as deep prejudice. “His appeal was not limited to downtrodden blue-collar whites; it crossed over, more quietly, perhaps, into the precincts of middle-class respectability,” wrote John Ganz in his excellent book, When the Clock Broke. Duke’s protean nature enabled him to dance around the media and survive what should have been lethal scrutiny:
Duke freely admitted to his past Klan membership, which, as he pointed out, he shared with many respectable 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.”
The Republican Party’s embrace of the Southern strategy also made it easy for Duke to seamlessly recast his extremist views in more moderate terms. As Ganz writes, “Duke was offering a standard Reagan-era conservative attack on welfare and affirmative action, aside from his willingness to touch the burning racial core of the issues.” How could the GOP credibly condemn Duke for employing the very same instruments of political warfare that had been forged by their strategists?
Ganz recalls that when New Orleans archbishop Phillip Hannan issued a statement against Duke’s candidacy, even he found an unreceptive audience in the predominantly Catholic district. “This bishop in New Orleans, I never did like him,” the wife of a retired oil engineer told The Washington Post. “He likes colored people. He says we should love colored people. But they’ve been different from the beginning, and God must have had a reason for making them that way.”
As with Trump, attacks on Duke only galvanized his supporters, who saw in him a politically incorrect populist champion against the establishment. “Even the president of the United States came out against us,” Duke bragged to his supporters. Indeed, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan endorsed Duke’s main opponent, fellow Republican John Treen, a brother of former governor David C. Treen. And yet, Duke prevailed, garnering 8,459 votes to Treen’s 8,232.
Afterward, a GOP activist named Beth Rickey followed Duke to a Populist Party convention in Chicago, where he was surrounded by skinheads and Klansmen. “My victory in Louisiana was a victory for the white majority movement in this country,” he declared. Rickey recorded Duke’s speech and publicized it in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, it would cross an uncrossable line. But it did not. Nor did anything happen when photographs of Duke shaking hands with the chairman of the American Nazi Party made it to the press. Duke felt comfortable enough in victory to sell copies of Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries directly out of his legislative office. He also had Imperium on offer. A visitor to Duke’s office might have obtained a copy and cracked it open to find Yockey asking the enemies of fascism in the foreword, “Did you think it was over?”
By 1990, Duke was drawing large crowds of devoted followers at rallies across the state. He threw his hat in for a Senate bid that year against Democrat J. Bennett Johnston. He lost the race but won 59 percent of the white vote, which undoubtedly emboldened him to reach for an even bigger prize the following year, when the governor would be up for reelection.
The media wasn’t just powerless to stop Duke. It was complicit in the rise of his star. Slippery with an easy smile and affable air, he was born for television. He masked his views, reframed them in seemingly moderate terms, downplayed his ties to white supremacist groups, or simply lied when pressed where he didn’t want to go. When questioned by ABC News about writing that “Negroes are lower on the evolutionary scale than Caucasians,” Duke demonstrated a gift for batting away political grenades. “Well, I don’t think I wrote that,” he said. “I do believe that there is a difference between whites and blacks. I think that there is an IQ difference. But I think the way to determine a person’s quality and qualifications is in the marketplace of ideas, through testing, for instance, in universities, through applications for jobs.”
There are familiar echoes in the way Duke’s supporters constantly gave him the benefit of the doubt and heard what they wanted to hear. Ganz writes:
The national TV appearances caused contributions to trickle to Duke from around the country. He had already tapped into the fundraising base of the far right during his 1988 run on Willis Carto’s Populist Party ticket. But now he was breaking through to people who would not necessarily move in the Holocaust denial and KKK subcultures. He started to get small envelopes of $5, $20, $40-many from the elderly. A retired schoolteacher in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, told The Boston Globe: “I like the fact that he thinks that everyone should get an even break—white or black or Jewish or anything else. I think we have had a lot of antiwhite racism.” George Marcou of Baraboo, Wisconsin, a retired brewery engineer, told the Chicago Tribune, “I don’t really think he is a racist. Either that or I’m blind. There are probably things we’ve all done that we’re sorry for.” And William J. Zauner of Brookfield, Wisconsin: “He’s saying what a lot of people are thinking.”
In the end, Duke lost to Edwin Edwards, a Democrat and former governor himself. But again, Duke had cause to celebrate: he won 55 percent of the white vote, including 69 percent of white evangelical and fundamentalist voters. “If the ideals that I stand for are addressed, then I will only be a footnote in history,” Duke predicted. “But if the deterioration of the white middle class continues, then I will be president.” Or, as Ganz writes, if not Duke, then someone like him. We don’t have to wonder.
“Looking at votes cast for Trump in the 2016 GOP primary by county, what Louisiana calls ‘parishes,’ shows that Louisianans voted similarly to how they voted for Duke in the gubernatorial primary in 1991,” an analysis published in The Conversation found. And in 2024, after hearing Trump vow to become a dictator on “day one,” after listening to him declare that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump won more than 83 percent of white evangelicals.
When Willis Carto died in the fall of 2015, Trump had already emerged as the GOP frontrunner. Some observers saw shades of David Duke’s ’91 campaign in Trump 1.0, and Duke himself remarked that he “of course” saw his own supporters in Trump voters. “Because I represent the ideas of preserving this country and the heritage of this country, and I think Trump represents that as well,” he said. If it were possible to balk at such comparisons back then, no one should laugh now, not when the White House under Trump 2.0 has embraced explicitly white nationalist symbolism in its propaganda. Indeed, earlier this month, the White House released a video game dehumanizing immigrants, likening them to zombies. The media framed it as a new and shocking low, and it was—but it had actually been done before. In 2002, the National Alliance—the group that grew out of the Carto-Pierce coalition and then schism—developed a first-person shooter called Ethnic Cleansing, in which players massacre minorities. One reviewer commented that “if you look at this game and see how absolutely dogshit it is, you may think it’s an ironic dig at white supremacist ideology.” But it’s not, and there’s a decent chance it served as a source of inspiration for the communications people at the White House, who have proven intimately familiar with fringe scenes and references. More importantly, Trump still enjoys support from the majority of Republicans despite all of this. Like Duke, there doesn’t seem to be a line he could cross to get many otherwise seemingly decent, indeed, God-fearing people to break with him.
Near the end of his article, Erickson states that Haywood and his ilk represent “ultimately a spiritual problem rather than a political one.” I think he’s more correct than he realizes. Without Haywood or any of the groups Erickson named, someone and something else would fill the void. David Duke’s defeat did not mean that he and his allies were beaten, just early. The man who beat them, Edwin Edwards, saw it then.
“Tonight Louisiana became first—first to turn back the merchant of hate, the master of deceit,” Edwards declared in his acceptance speech. “I ask the nation, the national press, I ask all those whose opinions we respect to write and say of us that Louisiana rejected the demagogue and renounced the irrational fear, the dark suspicion, the evil bigotry and the division and chose a future of hope and trust and love for all of God’s children.” An already raucous crowd exploded in even greater cheer. But then Edwards issued a warning:
Prophecy is reserved for those who are given that special gift, which I do not possess. But I say to all of America tonight, there will be other places and other times where there will be other challenges by other David Dukes. They too will be peddling bigotry and division as their elixir of false hope, they too will be riding piggyback on the frustration of citizens disaffected by government . . . We must address the causes of public disenchantment with government at every level . . . Tonight Louisiana defeated the darkness of hate, bigotry, and division, but where will the next challenge come from? Will it be in another campaign in Louisiana? Or in a campaign for governor in some other state? Or a campaign for president of the United States?
Edwards had the gift of prophecy after all. The future realized the fears of the past, leaving us with the bitter present.