There are a number of people who want to keep the White House white, and in 2012 some will try to take the matter into their own hands. A number of white supremacists (or, as they’d like to be known, "racial realists") have begun taking steps to secure legitimate homes for their racist ideologies, from city councils to the executive branch of the federal government.

David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and 2012 presidential hopeful, isn’t a stranger to politics. He’s served as a member of Louisiana’s House of Representatives and, until 2000, was the Republican executive-committee chair in his district. Duke has also run for a whole host of other public positions, and despite his blatantly bigoted beliefs, he’s done surprisingly well. In a 1990 campaign for the United States Senate, Duke received 43.5 percent of the vote, and he considered his bid for Louisiana governor a year later a victory, as he won 55 percent of the white vote.

Duke isn’t the only famous racist hoping to find himself in the Oval Office in 2012. Billy Roper, head of The Nationalist Party of America, a neo-Nazi group that began online in the late ’90s, is also making a run for President of the United States. His platform includes putting an end to dual citizenship in the United States and building a 2000-mile double-line electric fence and barricade wall patrolled by military forces on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The rise in white power candidates is undoubtedly linked to the election of the first black president in 2008. These racial extremists claim that, as a result, "white interests" need to be protected. A new umbrella organization, the American Third Position, or A3P, is backing a number of candidates who represent its racist ideals, yet has the audacity to compare itself to the NAACP.

There doesn’t seem to be any real threat of these candidates winning a major national office, but the mere fact that they’re running with the support of large numbers of other white supremacists  — many of whom have been attracted to the hateful cause through the Internet on websites like Stormfront —  is terrifying. They have much more realistic chances of taking small community positions, like the mom who doubles as the "Sergeant" of the Neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement and is hoping to join the Crime Prevention Committee in her Wisconsin town. The attitude of the white power candidates seems to be that no office is too small. True; no office is too small to promote hate in a country that needs anything but.