Note to Donald Trump: You're probably busy counting up your Super Tuesday delegate spoils. Yes, after cleaning up on the primary's biggest night, you seem headed for the nomination.
But as the previous GOP nominee learned, politics aren't Etch-A-Sketch. Voters haven't forgotten what happened just a few days ago. You know, when everything you ever knew about notorious hate monger David Duke suddenly disappeared from your memory.
Allow me to offer you a refresher. Before your campaign took off, the white nationalist and former KKK grand wizard had, fortunately, largely disappeared from the public consciousness. The one-time Louisiana state lawmaker "hasn't done anything political in years," the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center told NBC.
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Still, Duke hasn't crawled into a cave where he belongs. He's still spewing delusional filth to anyone willing to listen. I learned of his racist, anti-semitic rants online when he went after me in one of them. In a moronic tirade painting my then employer CNN as being some sort of Jewish conspiracy, he decided to term me a "tribalist."
I have no idea what that means. Then again, sane people who don't share Duke's hatred can't imagine seeing the world through his warped lens. For insight, check out the Anti-Defamation League's extensive list of his quotes, broken up into categories such as "On Blacks," "On Segregation," "On Immigrants," and "On Homosexuals." Reading it is like going down a rabbit hole covered in hastily-scrawled swastikas.
You, of course, do know about David Duke, having slammed him as a "bigot" back in 2000. He's stayed busy since then, the SPLC reports, spending time in prison for tax and mail fraud, writing vile books, and pushing his neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial abroad. He was kicked out of Italy after a court found him "socially dangerous."
Still, despite his best efforts to command an audience, he lost the megaphone he once commanded in this country. After I entered his crosshairs in 2012, I didn't get a flood of hate mail from Duke worshippers. In fact, I didn't detect any notable spike in hate mail or tweets directed at me. (And for the record, the handful of anti-semitic messages I've received over the years have been from both sides of the political spectrum.)
But now, Duke and his ilk are experiencing a resurgence in the media. And it's essential that you — and everyone else, since there's no way you'll actually read this — understand why.
No one is arguing that when a repugnant extremist announces support for a candidate, that candidate should have to stop everything and focus exclusively on repudiation. No one is saying Duke's endorsement of your candidacy means you agree with him.
Here's what is happening: Your candidacy is drawing out hate in America like a magnet. And you know it.
White supremacists have launched robo-calls to support you. A coalition of self-declared white nationalists has been pushing for you. As you also know, it's gone way beyond a matter of immigration policy, and beyond your sweeping statements about Muslims.
Conservative columnist Ben Domenech at The Federalist wrote back in August that you present the GOP with a choice: "a path toward a coalition that is broad, classically liberal, and consistent with the party's history, or a path toward a coalition that is reduced to the narrow interests of identity politics for white people." And last week, The New York Times reported on stunning figures from your voters in South Carolina, including that 1 in 5 disagreed with the Emancipation Proclamation. "Mr. Trump has reinvigorated explicit appeals to ethnocentrism," the Times wrote.
Then again, you're now winning praise from Louis Farrakhan as well, so maybe you really will bring together what New York Magazine calls "a cross-racial coalition of the hateful."
Yes, your poll numbers among GOP voters have kept going up no matter what you've done. But the rest of the country, which is not in your camp, is increasingly concerned. There's a big question hanging over your candidacy: Just how far will Trump go to court haters?
That's why your hesitation Sunday on CNN mattered. Morally it's a no brainer: If you're running for president and a reporter asks whether you condemn David Duke, you respond with something like, "Of course." You don't refuse to do so. You don't insist repeatedly that you don't know anything about him. You don't wait a few hours and then note that you had previously said you "disavow" Duke's support. (And you don't pretend there was some kind of technical problem.)
In any other election, your refusal to instinctively condemn this man would be seen as a scandal, a huge flub by a frontrunner. It might even be coined "Duke-gate." But in this election, it's more like a depressing, inevitable part of your crescendo.
You have an opportunity here. You can send a clear message to anyone who shares even an iota of David Duke's thinking. You can use the bully pulpit to stand up against hate.
As John Oliver brilliantly pointed out, you've said of yourself in the past: "I'm very highly educated. I know words — I have the best words." Try using some to do what's right.
