Burnett was skeptical. She’d heard a lot of stories about Duke’s past, and she wanted answers. She asked him about his use of racial slurs, whether he’d been affiliated with a Nazi group, and if his wife had left him because he was in the Klan. Duke denied everything. He was defensive and cagey and manipulative. He also criticized the 12-year-old’s interviewing technique.

“Let me tell you something,” he said. “All you’re doing in this interview is repeating allegations and attacks made against me by the media.”

Duke told Burnett that she needed to have an open mind. He suggested that she read the book Race and Reason. The author, Carleton Putnam, believed that Black Americans were genetically inferior to white Americans.

Duke talked to Burnett for 20 minutes that night. She’s not sure why he stayed on the phone that long. She thinks that Duke may have thought she was white and that she’d pass on his talking points to her parents.

Burnett’s parents weren’t Duke supporters. They did believe in good manners, though, and they asked their daughter to write Duke a thank-you note. Duke printed Burnett’s letter—and her home address—in the newsletter for his National Association for the Advancement of White People.

“I received at least three letters that I remember from prisoners, from inmates telling me that they were, you know, 5-foot-whatever or 6-foot-whatever, brown hair, blue eyes, and, you know, they were Aryan,” she said.

There’s a moment at the very end of Burnett’s tape that really got to me. It comes when her conversation with Duke is over, but before she stops her recorder.

“You heard it,” she says. “God, that guy is a jerk. Well, maybe not. He was just getting his points through, and he was like, ‘you should look at two sides of every story.’ ”

Burnett was puzzling through her conversation with David Duke in real time.

“I mean, he’s saying I should get the book Race and Reason!” she said. “ ‘You should learn and listen to both sides of an argument.’ Yes, but—should I really be letting David Duke tell me this?”

Should we be letting David Duke give us his side of the argument?

I’ve thought about that question a lot as I’ve been doing my research for Slow Burn. It’s standard practice in journalism to reach out to any subject you’re reporting on. For one thing, people have a right to respond to accusations you’re making against them. Plus, a story typically benefits from the perspective of its main subject. But David Duke is not a typical subject.

Consider Tom Snyder’s interview with Duke on NBC’s Tomorrow Show in 1974—the one we excerpted in the second episode of our series, where the host and the white nationalist sounded almost chummy.

Snyder introduced Duke to a huge new audience, and I don’t think he understood the gravity of that choice. The 37-year-old late-night host wasn’t as prepared as the 12-year-old Jo-Anna Burnett: He allowed Duke to define himself and to spread his white nationalist message nationwide. Other TV anchors have done a much better job confronting Duke. (You’ll hear about one of them later in our series.) But sometimes, the best choice is to keep someone like Duke off the stage entirely. And that’s why I won’t be interviewing Duke for this season of Slow Burn.

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In the episodes we’ve already released, listeners have heard plenty of Duke’s voice. I don’t think there’s any doubt about what he believed in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, or today. Duke told Burnett that we all change and grow, but he’s still using whatever platform he has to foment racism and anti-Semitism.

Duke is also congenitally dishonest—he made himself a mainstream political candidate by lying about his views and his background. His goal in interviews isn’t to explain himself. It’s to manipulate the record.

I’m doing this series because I think the Duke phenomenon warrants close scrutiny, and because the ideas he espouses are still with us—and still dangerous.

But Duke the politician is not currently a threat. Yes, he attached himself to the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, and yes, he supported Donald Trump’s run for the presidency. But the last time he ran for office, in 2016, he got 3 percent of the vote in a bid for the U.S. Senate. Talking to him now would serve no one’s interests but David Duke’s. We’ll be sure to include Duke’s responses to allegations leveled against him. But his core beliefs—that Black people are inferior to white people, that the Holocaust never happened—don’t deserve to be debated. So we’re not going to hand him the microphone.

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