Fox News host Bill O’Reilly invited former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke onto “The O’Reilly Factor” Monday night to discuss whether Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) spoke before Duke’s white nationalist group in 2002.
Duke flashed one of his books and began a digression about the Iraq War at the start of the interview before insisting that he had never been a white supremacist.
“I’m not a white supremacist at all, in fact the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) was a charted civil rights organization,” Duke said, adding that he fought the “racial discrimination” of affirmative action while serving in Louisiana’s state legislature.
O’Reilly tried to direct the conversation back to Scalise’s scheduled appearance at EURO, which O’Reilly declined to call a “white supremacist” group later in the interview. But Duke soon brought up former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-VA).
Duke criticized Byrd for having more substantive ties to the KKK than himself and held up a photo of President Obama with the former senator. O’Reilly objected.
“Don’t sit there and tell me you’re not a white — that your organization isn’t looking out for the white, European race,” he said.
Duke protested, arguing that he was making sure Europeans aren’t “discriminated against” for jobs or scholarships. O’Reilly conceded that those kinds of issues are “being debated all over the place.”
Next, Duke brought up Nelson Mandela, slamming the media’s hypocrisy for attacking Scalise for his connections to EURO but seldom mentioning Mandela’s connections to international communism.
O’Reilly granted Duke’s point that the mainstream media is “sympathetic for the left.”
“You don’t care about the mass media, you know they despise you, and you’re not gonna get a fair shake from them,” O’Reilly said.
But eventually, O’Reilly broke off from Duke’s tangents.
“Mr. Duke, don’t sit here and tell me you’re not trying to promote the cause of white people, ’cause you are!” the Fox host said. “The problem with this garbage — on both sides — is that we’re all in it together and skin color doesn’t matter.”
Watch the video, courtesy of Fox News:
