Theo Von's Friendship with David Duke
"He was charismatic. And he was tall. He was a handsome guy, man. He's a pretty beautiful man."
I’ve been meaning to tell you for ages about Theo Von’s erstwhile friendship with former KKK leader David Duke, a relationship he’s fondly recalled again and again over the years. Well, today I’m finally going to do it—after I tell you about something else Theo Von has fondly recalled again and again over the years: that time he and his friends saved up their money to go catch a glimpse of an Asian person rumored to be living a few towns over.
The most recent iteration of this story comes in an episode of Von’s podcast released this week, featuring the comedian and Kill Tony regular Fiona Cauley. Their conversation winds its way to the subject of autism, specifically the question of which race has the highest rates of autism, which Von asks his producer to look up:
Von: "Based on the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in April 2025, Asian/Pacific Islander children and American Indian/Alaskan Native children had the highest reported prevalence of autism." So Asians—but they were gonna have it, dude—like, a lot of Asians that I knew and that have been known over the years by people—it seems like a lot more is going on inside than outside. And I feel like if you put too much traffic on those inner streets, you're gonna end up bumper to bumper in there. And that's, I feel like, where autism really shows up. And that's not a scientific definition of autism. But a lot of Asian people, you just want to go up to them and be like, "What are you doing in there?" Especially in my generation because they were very quiet. You would rarely get a word out of a Asian guy.
Cauley: How many Asian people did you know growing up?
Von: We had one—we didn't have—well, we almost had one. Yeah. Dude, there was a rumor that there was an Asian guy—well, here's what happened. There was a rumor that there was an Asian guy in this town near us called Slidell, Louisiana, and it was like 17 miles away. So me and my buddy Scotty and some other guys, we cut grass for like three weeks and saved up money to go see this guy, right? Because dude, we don't know when we're getting—
Cauley: You gotta.
Von: Yeah. We don't know when we're getting another one, dude. And so we get over there and here's what had happened. A Pizza Hut—remember they had those unique rooftops?—had burned down to the ground. And people had started saying that an Asian person was living in there. It was like just a myth or whatever. Bring up that pizza roof. Bring up Pizza Hut red roof. That one. So imagine that completely down on the ground. Now, imagine you don't know a lot of information.
Cauley: Okay.
Von: Now imagine somebody tells you there's an Asian living in there.
Cauley: You got me. I'm with you.
Von: And that's what happened. That word traveled to us and we went over there and all it was was a burnt down Pizza Hut. But that's something that happened. It's like you never know what can happen if there's fire, if there's foul play.
Cauley: What did you think was going to happen if you found an Asian person in the Hut?
Von: We didn't know there'd be a Hut. We thought it would be like a place of living. We thought it would be a, I don't know, a lean-to, whatever. We had no idea what an Asian lives in or whatever, an egg. You know what I'm saying? We had no idea of what it could be. We just knew if we get there, we'll see 'em.
The story—a typical but still somewhat jarring example of Von’s casual obsession with race—had a rehearsed quality that left me wondering if he’s told it before. Indeed he has, in episodes with comedian Brittany Broski and Rainn Wilson, as well as in various other podcast appearances over the last decade or so. (A bit later in that Wilson episode, after he says a burned-down Pizza Hut has “the look of the Orient”: “Asian people, they’ll start a restaurant in anything… a lot of beautiful Asian people up there in Washington.”) As he tells it, he and his friends saved up $60 to take a cab to Slidell to see a person or people who turned out not to be there at all. The experience was so impactful that it continues to shape his perception of Asian people today, even though, again, he apparently didn’t actually know any when he was growing up.
By the way, that friend Scotty he mentions? Von has another story about the time he and his other friends drew a swastika on Scotty’s shirt. He insists, of course, that they had no idea what the symbol meant, having only seen it on pamphlets.
Seth Simons
Okay, let’s move on to his old friendship with David Duke. You may recall he mentioned it in an episode of his podcast with Tucker Carlson I wrote about a few years back. He’s also described it in episodes with singer-songwriter Zac Brown and documentarian Louis Theroux, as well as in appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience, Opie Radio, Kill Tony. The gist is that he and Duke were neighbors when Von was growing up in Louisiana, that they lifted weights together at the gym, and that Duke was dating one of Von’s coworkers at a local seafood restaurant. In a 2017 episode of Rogan’s podcast, he raised the subject unprompted when Rogan was complaining about a gym he’d stopped going to:
Von: Dude. I used to work out with David Duke when I was growing up.
Rogan: Holy shit.
Von: We shared a back fence when I was growing up.
Rogan: Holy shit.
Von: We used to go to, I mean, I dunno if you consider the Ku Klux Klan a pyramid scheme or not, but. I worked at this seafood restaurant. I was a bus boy over there, and he dated the prettiest girl that worked at the seafood restaurant.
Rogan: Was this when he was in the KKK?
Von: No, this was after. He was non-practicing. Honestly seemed like a nice guy, dude.
Rogan: How many years ago was this?
Von: This is 1995 maybe.
Rogan: So that was when he was in the public eye. He was like a big deal back then, right? Wasn't that when—was it it later than that, that he was like running for public office?
Von: Let me think. It was, no, when I was younger he was running against Edwin Edwards, I believe, for public office. That was probably around 1990 or '88.
Rogan: I feel like he did some stuff after that though, on a national level, or was it on a state level? Was he running for governor or something like that?
Von: He ran for a governor a couple times. Yeah, him and—I remember the signs, because Edwin Edwards was a crook, allegedly. And David Duke was a racist. That's what one of the campaign posters said, don't vote for the racist, vote for the crook. That was the campaign poster that was everywhere. And the crook won. That man won. That's crazy. But we used to go to the gym. And I'll tell you this man, he was—I don't believe any of his practices, but he was—
Rogan: [Reading an article] He was elected to Louisiana House of Representatives in 1989. And that year the sitting representative resigned his seat to become a judge, and Duke ran in the special election to fill his seat. The Daily Beast describes the race in writing, the off-year specials election, in which David Duke threw himself little media notice at first, who touted himself as as a pro-life fiscal conservative, was known as an ex-Klan member, he eschewed overtly racist language and instead pointed to crime in the city, criticizing affirmative action and minority set-asides.
Von: Yeah, I just did chest and tris [triceps] with him, so I wasn't into all that. We just did basic workouts.
Rogan: Did he quit like a bitch when the reps got high?
Von: Dude, he was an—
Rogan: He was an animal.
Von: He was strong. He was a strong man, yeah.
Rogan: Probably a lot of people after him to kill him. Probably gotta be on your Ps and Qs.
Von: Probably. And he gave me direction. He just gave me direction, you know, and he didn't—yeah.
Rogan: Like how to do it right?
Von: He didn't conversate a ton, but he would, yeah, this is how you do it. This is how you do it.
Rogan: Oh. Did you ever ask him about the Klan?
Von: Mm-mm. I didn't ask him about that, dude. I wanted to try and meet his lady, dude. I was trying to mill around to see if I could smell a pair of her pantalones, you feel me, dude?
Rogan: Even when you were a little kid?
Von: I mean, at that time I was 15, man, and she was gorgeous.
Rogan: Oh, so it was kicking. Really? How old was she?
Von: I was erect, bro. I've never been more erect than I was back then.
Von’s not just bullshitting here. Duke himself offered similar recollections in a 2024 chat with the conservative streamers Keith and Kevin Hodge and in a chat with neo-nazi Jake Shields. In that latter episode, he claims that he “taught him how to work out, how to be a man,” and “had a positive effect” on the young comedian. Obviously Duke’s self-mythologizing warrants an even bigger grain of salt than Von’s, but the point is they agree it was a positive, quasi-paternal relationship.
Seth Simons
Pretty much every time Von brings up Duke, he’s sure to mention that the former KKK leader was a nice guy whose racist days were behind him. In 2023 he told Tucker Carlson: “I’ll say this: nice guy… There was never any racial things or whatever, but you know, he was a very fit man.”
In 2024 he told Louis Theroux: “As a neighbor, nice guy… He was just kind of still a healthy guy at the gym. But he wasn't yelling racist things or wearing a racist shirt or anything.”
In 2018 he said on Kill Tony: “He's a nice guy. I mean, overall. I didn't get into any of his practices… Everybody's gonna judge him, but I mean at the time he was non-practicing. Non-practicing. Yeah, and he just seemed pretty casual and liked to hit the gym.” (It’s neither here nor there, but I’d just like to note that in this instance he again brings up the subject completely unprompted, apparently responding to another comic’s mention of Michael Dukakis.)
In a year I can’t pin down, he told Gregg “Opie” Hughes: “He was charismatic. And he was tall. He was a handsome guy, man. He's a pretty beautiful man… He was chilling, dude. He was talking chest and tris, baby. That was it.”
One can hardly blame teenage Theo Von for his ignorance about Duke, who was far from a “non-practicing” white supremacist in the mid-1990s. After his single term as a Louisiana state representative—during which a colleague alleged that he sold copies of Mein Kampk from his office in the state Capitol—he ran for governor, then for the Republican presidential nomination, then for the US Senate in 1996, then the House in 1999. In 1998, he published a memoir that advocated for segregation and argued that Jews run the media—a claim Von made on both Joe Rogan’s podcast and his own podcast in 2024. To this day he appears on white supremacist podcasts making white supremacist arguments. He’s been a practicing racist his entire life.
Like many comedians of his generation, Von has neither the critical capacity to understand that someone nice to him might nonetheless be a figure of great evil, nor the intellectual curiosity to ponder whether “racism” might be something much more casual and insidious than “yelling racist things or wearing a racist shirt.” It’s no wonder he can’t seem to make the connection that the genocide he’s tearily lamented is being facilitated by the politicians he helped elect; he’s just too easily charmed.
Seth Simons
Of course, he’s also an ideological racist himself. As a reader pointed out to me some months ago, one of Von’s earliest controversies arose when, as a college junior and cast member on MTV’s Road Rules in 2000, he spoke out against interracial dating. Per a contemporaneous profile of Von in California Polytechnic State University’s student newspaper:
Theo said his tendency to speak freely on the show created wrong impressions.
During the show’s casting special, introducing the MTV audience to prospective Road Rulers, Theo said in one interview that he was against interracial dating and that blacks and whites should not mix.
“They had hours of tape and they picked that [to show on-air],” he says. “So I’m not a fan of interracial dating. I don’t hate black people. I don’t hate Asian people. I don’t hate anybody. I’m just chillin’."
Theo blames the show’s head honchos for editing tape throughout the trip to create more drama, and subsequently, better ratings.
“They’re just trying to make a show,” he claims. “That’s what they’re all about.”
He says that, if people call him ignorant, he will embrace it.
Theo claims that, without ignorance, the world would turn a little slower and life would be less exciting.
“I think ignorance is the funniest thing in the world,” he says. “I went to high school with people always looking for their bookbags.”
He’s not racist. He’s just chillin’.
Seth Simons
