I think it’s safe to say that David Duke didn’t do either Rep. Steve Scalise or his own white supremacist group any favors during a contentious interview on The O’Reilly Factor tonight.
Bill O’Reilly seemed to be looking for an out for Scalise who has been embroiled in a controversy over his talk to Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights group in 2002. If so, this interview was an epic fail.
O’Reilly’s first question was to ask if it was true that Duke was absent from the 2002 conference. Clearly, O’Reilly was trying to suggest that Duke would not know if Scalise had actually spoken there. However, while Duke acknowledged he was in Moscow, he later said he had heard Scalise was scheduled to talk.
Then things really got weird as Duke tried to argue he’s a civil rights activist.
DUKE: I was never a white supremacist. I’m not a white supremacist at all. In fact, the European-American Unity and Rights group was in fact, a chartered civil rights organization.
Duke went on to boast that he sponsored a bill in the Louisiana state legislature “that forbid racial discrimination.” But he meant discrimination against white people by “these programs called affirmative action which are racial discrimination.”
That is exactly what Fox espouses. But O’Reilly didn’t want to go there. He quickly interrupted to go back to Scalise “because he’s in the eye of the tiger right now.”
“So you don’t know whether he actually showed up,” O’Reilly prompted. He noted that it had been reported that Scalise actually spoke to another group at the same hotel, not Duke’s group.
But Duke squashed that effort. “I know he was scheduled to speak,” Duke said, though he also said he didn’t know if Scalise actually spoke.
Duke tried to deflect by saying he had been out of the Klan longer than the late Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) was out of the Klan when he went to the U.S. Congress. For extra deflection points, Duke held up a photo of Obama with Byrd.
That was too much for O’Reilly. He pointed out that Byrd “repudiated his past.” O’Reilly added, “And I mean you’re still the head of the European whatever, whatever group it is. Come on.”
“When you defend the rights of all Americans… that’s not racism,” Duke argued.
“Don’t sit there and tell me you’re not a white – your organization isn’t looking out for the white European race. That’s who you’re looking out for,” O”Reilly countered.
Duke replied that he’s looking out for “all Americans” and that “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Duke also deflected by holding up a photo of Nelson Mandela at a communist party meeting, accused the media of inflaming “African Americans against European Americans” and vice versa and called the big bankers the real oppressors who are ”robbing us blind” and “putting us in these wars for Israel.”
O’Reilly had completely lost control of the interview.
Watch it below, from tonight’s The O’Reilly Factor.