Rising Republican Congressman’s White Nationalist Past
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Lamar White, Jr. at Salon has looked into the history of Majority Whip Steve Scalise.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Despite his denials, there is no conceivable way Rep. Steve Scalise did not know David Duke, the notorious white supremacist, was the leader of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), the hate group that hosted the conference he attended in 2002.
In the wake of House Speaker John Boehner’s resignation and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s expected promotion to speaker, Scalise, currently the House majority whip, is now running for majority leader, the second most powerful position in the U.S. House. Unsurprisingly, this means renewed attention to the scandalous revelation, first reported in late December by a blogger from Louisiana, that Scalise addressed an international conference of white supremacists when he was a state representative.
Less than a day after it was first reported, Scalise acknowledged the story was indeed true. He issued a halfhearted apology and claimed he was unaware, at the time, of the organization’s affiliation with the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He was there, he said, merely to speak in opposition to a tax proposal, the Stelly Tax Plan, that was being debated in the Legislature.
I know this story very well, because I am the blogger from Louisiana who broke it wide open. I also know, without a shadow of a doubt, that Steve Scalise was painfully aware of where he was and whom he was addressing. The writing was literally on the wall.
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