In February 2006 David Duke attended the American Renaissance conference in Virginia, a biennial gathering promoting pseudo-intellectual racist theories and opposing non-white immigration, attended by 300 white nationalists.   Duke was not an official speaker, but disrupted the event with anti-Semitic comments and became involved in a heated verbal exchange with a Jewish participant.

In March Duke praised a controversial paper written by two academics entitled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” which claimed that an “Israel lobby” controls American foreign policy and engineered the country’s military overthrow of Saddam Hussein.  Duke claimed that the paper mirrored many of the assertions he had made over the years, and that he been “validated.”  Duke’s plaudits for the paper were reported in the media, and Duke himself made a rare appearance on mainstream television when he was interviewed on March 21, 2006, by Joe Scarborough on the MSNBC program Scarborough Country, on satellite hookup from New Orleans.