David Duke is made out to be a raving lunatic racist by people on the left and right of the political establishment. Denouncing David Duke is how every conservative reassures people that he's compassionate and sympathetic to all races and religions. And yet, if you listen to David Duke you'll hear a calm, rational and articulate man. He has more intelligence in his pinky finger than Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly have in their entire bodies.
He has the calmness of a mobster plotting a hit. He has the intelligence of such a mastermind of hatred as Josef Goebbels. He knows enough to not talk about setting up concentration camps and torture chambers as might the crudest neo-Nazis and Ku Kluxists. He knows enough to not use the word that rhymes with "Tigger". No, I don't mean the name of Roy Rogers' horse.
David Duke has attended conferences of Holocaust deniers. He may have been a Klan leader, but he now knows enough to give up that shtick. It's too offensive. No, he tries to dress his racism in a slightly-updated expression of the discredited pseudoscience of eugenics.
Nothing says that intelligent people can't be evil. Some stupid losers pick evil because that allows them a tool of survival and achieving some transitory bliss. Some. like Goebbels, Trotsky, Quisling, and Duke choose it for sharing power with some sort of political demon.
David Duke is more subtle in expressing hatred, violence, and white supremacy than the schmuck who wears tattoos of swastika,
Sieg heil!, White Power, and the numbers '14' and '88' that he got while in prison for auto theft or armed robbery. He is for peace only to the extent that he does not have the means for fomenting a sacred 'racial holy war' that the schmuck who wears tattoos of swastika,
Sieg heil!, White Power, and the numbers '14' and '88' that he got while in prison for auto theft or armed robbery wants now. Traditional values? Sure -- if segregation and the subjection of non-white peoples constitute 'traditional values'. Torture? I can only imagine what sort of legal system he wants.