Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, June 9, 1987, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Clu Klux Clan neo-Nazi

probably America's most well-known white supremacist David Duke announces his campaign for president while standing on the steps of the Georgia capital.

Up to this point Duke had made a name for himself, especially in the previous decade,

as kind of the quote-unquote new face of the K K K but now he was trying to break into politics.

He would eventually go on to win an election and serve in the Louisiana House of Representatives

and he launched many other political campaigns all unsuccessful but many of them

quite competitive so let's talk about David Duke I'm joined as always by

Nicole Hammer of Colombia hello Nicki hey jody and our special guest for this episode is Josh Levine of

Slate. He's here because he's smart. He has good things to say. He's one of my

favorite authors. He wrote this great book called The Queen, but he's also here

because he's the host of the new season of the fantastic podcast

Slow Burn which comes out this week and is all about David Duke.

So the perfect person for this conversation.

Hello Josh Levine.

Thank you so much for having me.

So I feel like it's becoming maybe a bit of a recurring segment on this show where I say

often to Nicki, wait a minute, that happened in the Democratic Party.

You know, obviously there's the Democratic Party that 19th

century which has changed a lot and we talked a little bit last week even about

Shirley Chism and George Wallace both being in the same Democratic primary but that was

...