I’ve read many of John “Duke” Wayne’s statements & watched interviews with him, and I have little problem with his position or his statements, especially when viewed from a 1971 lens. If you twist his words & conjure up alternative meanings to them, you can somewhat make a case against him, but you’d have to use those same arguments against everyone & we’d all fail at some point in the past, present, and possibly the future.

Duke didn’t believe in giving jobs to black actors or crew members unless they earned it on merit, but he had the same policy with white actors & all other races. In other words, he was against DEI & Affirmative Action, which are both racist programs in that they prefer that minorities get selected regardless of merit. Even Jerry Seinfeld is against this practice of including minorities simply as a matter of policy if they don’t merit inclusion. Seinfeld has famously (and correctly) said many times that all that matters is being funny, not your race, gender or background.

Ignoring someone’s color is what we’re all supposed to do, but DEI & Affirmative Action teach the opposite. Black people as a race have been given all the tools to get ahead in life over the last 60 years, and it’s helped some, but many have taken advantage of it in a poor way. Welfare programs have destroyed black culture (and society as a whole) for the last 60 years which can easily be proven by statistics, which also includes families with single mothers who have more babies to get more benefits, whose kids grow up without a father in the household, who fail in school, run amok & engage in teenage violent crime. However, civil rights laws have helped blacks to overcome oppression & gain legal equality to get ahead as a society. DEI & Affirmative Action destroy society by giving preference to those who haven’t earned it, and it makes society weaker as whole.

Duke said that he didn’t think blacks should be given power until they earned the right to wield it properly. This statement appears bigoted viewed from our POV in 2025, but in 1971, the black community was still in its infancy in using their newfound basic rights & learning how to cope with them & societal leadership without oppression. I also think it was a heavy-handed statement from a 2025 POV, but not so much from a 1971 POV.

It’s also important to note that mainstream white society held the same opinions that Duke held, as that’s where we were as a society then, and Duke wasn’t an outlier. Just 8 years earlier, George Wallace stood in a schoolhouse door in Alabama, and just 3 years LATER, Boston (not the Deep South, but the northern cradle of our nation) was the scene of a lot of anti-desegregation fights over busing. Looking at how public schools have deteriorated since forced desegregation, it’s easy to argue that the downfall of public schools was desegregation, or at least the catalyst, but there are many reasons why public schooling failed simply beyond blaming desegregation.

From a racial standpoint, it’s important to note that Duke was married 3 times, all to non-white wives. You can say that this was a Latina fetish, but you can’t say he was racist in his personal life.

Duke’s position on American Indians and our allegedly stealing America from them is rational & makes perfect sense historically & in practice. The correct way to address them is American Indians, not Indigenous People or Native Americans, as nobody was ever native or indigenous to any continent except Africa. There’s no inherent right to land — land belongs to those who can take, hold & defend it as it has always been throughout history & which is being practiced even today in politics & in sovereignty. It’s why our military & gov’t agents are always on the lookout in protecting America. Ukraine is a prime 2025 example as is 2007 Soviet Georgia, 2003 Iraq & the Palestinian lands of Gaza & The West Bank over the last 80 years. All the wars worldwide further solidify this concept.

American Indians fought amongst each other for many centuries to determine who gets to live & where they can long before Europeans arrived. American Indians didn’t want European settlers living among them & refused to be peaceful about it. More white settlers were killed than American Indians before they were conquered & shipped to midwest reservations in order to detain them to keep settlers safe. Of course, the settlers now had all the resources to themselves, but to the victor go the spoils of war as it has in every instance worldwide where groups compete for land & power.

Howvever you feel now about Duke’s words, keep in mind that they were almost universally accepted in his time, so if you indict Duke, you have to indict all of earlier society for condoning it. Judging past societies by today’s standards will eventually include us in the dark side of history as future societies brand us as barbarians for very basic actions & principles that we accept now as being mainstream, like using toilet paper, eating high fat/sugar/sodium foods, drinking alcohol, sunbathing, believing in religion and much more that will eventually come to be taboo ideas/actions in the near future. Just look at what we can’t say & do now that we could just a decade or two ago.