The Last Patriot: The life and legacy of Bob White

One man's short-lived crusade to ''put the fear of God into each of the pacifist, pansy 'patriots' who gave away our canal." He was Tyler Durden before there was a Fight Club.

Long before there was a modern patriot movement — when the Libertarian Party was still in its infancy and MAGA was not yet a twinkle in Donald Trump’s eye — there was The Duck Book.

Founded in 1980, The Duck Book was the brainchild of Robert White, a millionaire prepper and “conspiracy theorist” who dreamed up the idea for a liberty-minded magazine while fighting terminal cancer.

A raspy, lanky, chain smoking Texan who ran away from home when he was 10, the iconoclastic White was known for saying things like:

“We won’t take this socialist crap like the limeys and the Swedes, just like we won’t drive 55 miles an hour and we won’t give up our guns.”

White once told The New York Times that although he had been called “a multimillionaire, right-wing, pistol-packing, redneck cracker,” none of those labels held true — “except maybe the pistol.”

When a French documentary producer asked White why he carried his pistol everywhere, White glibly told him it was because America was no longer safe. All his neighbors carried one, he said casually.

(Voiceover translation in above video produced via AI)

Bob White seems like the kind of guy you’d want as your neighbor in 2024. A man who supposedly spent time in a British prison. Who made a fortune inventing a high-pressure water process to clean airport runways. Who survived alone on a barren island for a week after wrecking his sailboat in a hurricane. Who believed that no matter who was in the Oval Office, the same clique would firmly be in control.

He was, John Wayne-style, true grit American.

The team at Collapse Life first read about White in Peter Grandich’s book, ‘Confessions of a Former Wall Street Whiz Kid.’

Here’s how Grandich remembers him:

As a result of calling the [1987 stock market] crash and all the media attention, I got what would be the first of many invitations to speak before a big, live audience; the Sound Money Investors (SMI) conferences, which were held offshore and in the U.S.

SMI was run by a controversial, eccentric American guy name Bob White who wore overalls and sandals at the shows. He was the author of the Duck Book, an über-conservative book best paraphrased as:

"The US. of A. is going to hell in a handbasket, the commies are taking over, and we're losing our market share. God help America."

He was so unconventional that his publishing company and SMI were both kicked off the Vancouver Stock Exchange, which was nearly impossible back then on Vancouver's highly controversial exchange.

In an extensive October 1981 profile in Esquire magazine, White laid out the business plan he cooked up for the magazine while hospitalized with colon cancer. He called it a ‘Ponzi Con,’ in which he would get millions of Americans to pay $10 for a lifetime subscription to the magazine — “My life, not yours.” (After all, he was battling terminal cancer.)

He would then use those subscriptions to expand the publication to millions more in the hopes that readers would become so incensed by what he told them, they’d start Duck Clubs around the country and eventually bring down the corrupt government.

You could say he wanted to ‘drain the swamp’ before that became an actual thing.

At first, reception was tepid. “I was betting on the American people responding, and I realized that certain types are sheep, already living in a socialist state, and wouldn’t respond.” So White switched gears to target the audiences of popular investment newsletters, the kinds of people interested in offshore tax havens and hard assets like silver and gold. He developed partnerships with the newsletter publishers, sharing their content and their mailing lists.

By the end of 1980, The Duck Book had a few thousand subscribers. By June of the following year, 90,000 people had bought lifetime subscriptions.

Each edition included reprinted articles as well as White’s own articles written “in an effort to wake up America” to the dangers of inflation and socialism and one world government.

Mainstream media quickly started to take notice of this fast-growing niche publication. In 1981 alone, in addition to the aforementioned Esquire profile, White and The Duck Book were written about in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal, the Miami Herald, the Fort Lauderdale News, and the Dallas Times Herald — which described him as “something of an underground legend.”

White liked these media mentions so much he included them in a full-page ad featuring his cartoon duck mascot.

In the January 1981 edition of Soldier of Fortune magazine, his ad read as follows:

Had enough of being pushed into a socialist welfare state by Rockefeller’s insidious Trilateral Commission and CFR? Want to get off your butt and stop their one world government plans? Check out the "Ponzi Con" pyramid scheme in the Duck Book. It was "created" by Robert White, the largest runway maintenance contractor in the U.S. as a vehicle to wake up the masses to the takeover of America - and a plan to stop them.

It is highly recommended by over seventy financial newsletter editors. Two bucks cash, check or stamps for a copy of my current 80 page issue which will be sent via first class mail. Your loot refunded immediately if you don't think it's worth a hundred times the price.

White’s campaign to keep the globalists at bay may have had at least some success. During the 1980 presidential primary, White said he circulated one million copies of an article that linked George H.W. Bush to the Trilateral Commission.

At the time, the Commission — a private, somewhat shady association of politicians and wealthy businessmen from Western Europe, Japan, and the US — had become code for any powerfully backed political entity.

“There’s no question I won Florida for Ronald Reagan,” White said after Bush lost the primary.

Although the Duck Book was conceived when White thought he would soon be dead from cancer, he actually managed to survive the disease. If it hadn’t been for that terminal diagnosis, perhaps none of it would have happened. With little to lose, White adopted a no-holds-barred approach to calling things as he saw them.

“Now I figure I’ve got nothing to lose. They can’t kill me; I’m gonna die anyway. So I’m gonna give ’em a run for their money, for the pure hell of it.”

Nonetheless, his life was tragically, if somewhat suspiciously, cut short soon after. In July 1988, at the age of 62, Robert White was shot to death on a farm in Belize in what was described as an apparent ‘robbery.’ Official accounts suggest White was accosted by two men who managed to disarm and shoot him three times with his own pistol. The two Americans who accompanied him were unharmed.

And thus ended White’s efforts to ''make the world safe for duck-mocracy.''

---