Remember folks, anyone who tells you the Republican Party has a serious problem with racism is a liar and a scoundrel.

Oh, and by the way? House Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) spoke at an event in 2002 sponsored by white supremacist David Duke.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA)Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the House majority whip, acknowledged Monday that he spoke at a gathering hosted by white nationalist leaders while serving as a state representative in 2002, thrusting a racial controversy into House Republican ranks days before the party assumes control of both congressional chambers.

That organization, founded by famed white supremicist David Duke, has been called a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But in a statement, Scalise’s spokesperson emphasized that the then-state lawmaker was unaware at the time of the group’s ideology and its association with racists and neo-Nazi activists.

The problem with this excuse is simple: David Duke. White supremacists. Antisemites. Sorry, I’m not buying that he didn’t know he was speaking at an event hosted by the most infamous former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard in the world.

But what did he speak about? He says it was an innocent non-racist speech about “eliminating slush funds.”

“Throughout his career in public service, Mr. Scalise has spoken to hundreds of different groups with a broad range of viewpoints,” said Moira Bagley, Scalise’s spokesperson. “In every case, he was building support for his policies, not the other way around. In 2002, he made himself available to anyone who wanted to hear his proposal to eliminate slush funds that wasted millions of taxpayer dollars as well as his opposition to a proposed tax increase on middle-class families.”

But the leading white supremacist website, Stormfront, posted a glowing review of Scalise’s speech in 2002, making it very obvious why they invited him to speak.

White quoted a description of the appearance that was originally posted on Stormfront, which describes itself as, “the voice of the new, embattled White minority.”

“Representative Scalise brought into sharp focus the dire circumstances pervasive in many important, under-funded needs of the community at the expense of graft within the Housing and Urban Development Fund, an apparent give-away to a selective group based on race,” the blog post wrote, quoting the post on Stormfront.

A few years later, the same user who described Scalise’s speech said he should run for Congress if Duke did not, noting that he offered “his support for issues that are of concern to us.”

LGF contributor Sergey Romanov dug up David Duke’s speech from this event:

Here is Duke’s speech at that workshop:

http://web.archive.org/web/20020601145938/http://www.duke.org/radio/index.html

Who are the real racial Supremacists?
by David Duke
Broadcast 05/22/2002

This week, EURO National President David Duke shares a portion of his speech given to the joint conferences held last weekend in America and Europe to the International Conference on Human Rights and the EURO Workshop on Civil Rights. David Duke explains how his well-documented, hard-hitting articles on Israeli treachery in regard to the 9-11 attacks and the Jewish supremacy existing in the American media and government have been reprinted in literally hundreds of newspapers and journals all over the world. The articles are appearing in not only the America, Canada and Europe, but literally all over the world. This has led the government of Israel has started an entirely new commission to combat what they call rising anti-Semitism. Of course, David Duke is not anti-Semitic, nor or most other critics of Israel and world-wide Jewish supremacism, but Jewish supremacists such as those who run Israel and who control the media and the foreign policy of America have spent a lot of time and effort to condition the world to oppose so-called anti-Semitism. So they libel any opponent of Israel’s murderous policies as quote anti-semitic.

Here is the full transcript:

web.archive.org