Pauls have courted the racist wing of the GOP

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Pauls have courted the racist wing of the GOP

Post by DEATH ROW JOE »

Former editor of Rand Paul’s Neo-Confederate staffer talks about the Southern Avenger

Jack Hunter asked me to delete columns
Posted by Chris Haire on Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 12:49 PM
Long before last’s week Washington Free Beacon story kicked up a two-day media storm, Jack Hunter knew that the Republican establishment was working to out him as a neo-Confederate and a racist, a move he believed could hurt the one-time City Paper columnist’s boss, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. He’d even sent me an e-mail asking me to remove dozens of posts, ones that he said no longer reflected his current worldview.

While I told him that I would have removed one or two posts — it’s not uncommon for writers to hastily pen a column they later regret — I found the breadth of the request to be excessive, and to be honest, quite cowardly. Doing so, I told Jack, was a repudiation of the very persona he had created as a writer and radio personality. It was a denial of the very views that had made him a local media celebrity and a rising star in the so-called liberty movement, and as such, a slap in the face to all those who had ever supported him. It was best, I said, that if those points of views no longer applied to him, Jack should pen a column detailing how he had changed his mind, but he declined. And frankly, that told me all I needed to know about Jack’s conversion. It was solely for appearances only. It was not heartfelt. It was not true. It was simply to protect his boss, Rand Paul, as he plots a path to the White House in 2016.

After reading Jack’s statement about last Wednesday’s controversy du jour — the one that let the rest of the U.S. know that a neo-Confederate secessionist was part of Sen. Paul’s inner circle — I still haven’t changed my mind. In his statement, Jack — much like Rand himself — tends to treat the damaging information as something akin to a youthful indiscretion, a one-time accident, or as something that was nothing more than an over-the-top personality that he had created while he was a member of the 96 Wave crew and had long-since abandoned. Rubbish. The Jack Hunter of the Charleston City Paper years was every bit as radical as the Jack Hunter of 96 Wave.

While a member of the City Paper’s stable of freelancers, Jack wrote in support of racially profiling Hispanics, praised white supremacist Sam Francis, blasted the House of Representative’s apology for slavery, claimed that black people should apologize to white people for high crime rates, defended former Atlanta Braves pitcher and racist John Rocker and Charleston County School District board member Nancy Cook after she said some mothers should be sterilized, argued that Islam was an innately dangerous threat to the U.S, professed that he would have voted for a member a British neo-Nazi political party if he could have, considered endorsing former Council of Conservative Citizens member Buddy Witherspoon in his bid to unseat Sen. Lindsey Graham, compared Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler and Ike Turner, and continued to profess the erroneous claim that the primary cause of the Civil War was not the fight over slavery, ignoring the decades of American history leading up to war and South Carolina’s very own Declaration of the Immediate Causes for Secession, which clearly note that protecting slavery was the preeminent motivation of state leaders.

Over the course of editing Jack for years, it was clear to me that when he spoke of Southerners, Southern values, and the Southern way of life, it was as if the South to him was solely populated by white people, and everyone else was an intruder or at best a historical inconvenience. Jack Hunter may have never railed against miscegenation, championed segregation, uttered a racial slur, or participated in a lynching, but it was my opinion then and it is my opinion now that Jack is the most common kind of racist, the one that doesn’t realize that he is one. In fact, like many on the right — from Pat Buchanan to Newt Gingrich to Rick Perry to Rush Limbaugh — Jack traffics in race-baiting rhetoric and repeatedly aligns himself with racists but then refuses to own up to the meaning and purpose of his actions. And just so long as he doesn’t call somebody a “nigger” or pistol whip a black man for looking at his lily white wife, he can keep on believing that, because to admit the truth would be to admit that he was in fact a villain.

And the same applies to Rand Paul. Like his father before him, Paul has courted the racist wing of the GOP, the faction that wants to vote for a states’ rights champion, a man with the courage to say we should have separate lunch counters as a matter of principle, a politician with the chutzpah to proclaim that he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act. Of course, when the day arrives that this relationship is brought to light once again, Rand Paul will again deny that he consciously sought out racists and anti-Semites and secessionists, the media and the masses will largely accept his flaccid defense, and the racists and anti-Semites and secessionists will have a good laugh knowing that one of their own had to lie to protect himself but underneath that protective cloak of political convenience he’s still one of them.


For now, it looks as if both Jack Hunter and Rand Paul have managed to escape from this controversy relatively unscathed. But make no mistake, it will return once again when the 2016 presidential campaign begins in earnest, and this time, the truth that Rand Paul has a neo-Confederate on his staff will not be limited to a virtually unknown right-wing news site and the more liberal media outlets in the American mediascape. It will be picked up by the big guys, and Paul and Hunter will be lucky if they can pull themselves out of this tar baby with their political hides intact.
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Re: Pauls have courted the racist wing of the GOP

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Great article.

I am curious - Rand Paul is a big enough politico to have a national (and to those who pay attention, international) profile. Would not such a figure wish to surround himself with the brightest and the best? This Hunter chap is surely neither - he's a dog-whistle racist and a cur of the worst stripe.

Second - how do these folks continue to get hired considering the existence of the Internet? This lack of due diligence alone speaks volumes about Paul. Seriously, he's being touted as a presidential candidate?
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Re: Pauls have courted the racist wing of the GOP

Post by tin00can »

CliffByford wrote:Great article.

I am curious - Rand Paul is a big enough politico to have a national (and to those who pay attention, international) profile. Would not such a figure wish to surround himself with the brightest and the best? This Hunter chap is surely neither - he's a dog-whistle racist and a cur of the worst stripe.

Second - how do these folks continue to get hired considering the existence of the Internet? This lack of due diligence alone speaks volumes about Paul. Seriously, he's being touted as a presidential candidate?

I think once you reach a certain level in politics you have some sort of hubris that makes you think you won't get caught doing whatever it is you're doing. Or that if you do get caught you can fix it and move on.
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Re: Pauls have courted the racist wing of the GOP

Post by Sheep_Mafia »

CliffByford wrote:Great article.

I am curious - Rand Paul is a big enough politico to have a national (and to those who pay attention, international) profile. Would not such a figure wish to surround himself with the brightest and the best? This Hunter chap is surely neither - he's a dog-whistle racist and a cur of the worst stripe.

Second - how do these folks continue to get hired considering the existence of the Internet? This lack of due diligence alone speaks volumes about Paul. Seriously, he's being touted as a presidential candidate?
The problem in the US is that some, well most, get away with associating with shady characters so they aren't as cautious as they should be. That and they aren't as principled as people as some of us would like and actually care about regardless of political affliliation.

Obama, for example, was tied to several corrupt, racist and radical individuals and irresponsible liberal folk were fine with that. (Wright, Ayers, Resko etc.) So, I suspect many people who support Paul will look the other way as well. Sadly, it's just how it works here. This thread a blaring example of that.
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Re: Pauls have courted the racist wing of the GOP

Post by CliffByford »

Interesting response, Sheep Mafia. To me, this also speaks about the tenor of politics in our respective nations. If an aide or advisor to one of our top politicians was found to espouse similar views to Hunter, that aide would almost certainly find themselves collecting unemployment pretty damn quick. Then again, I think mainstream politics here is more liberal overall.

That said, the Prime Minister recently hired Lynton Crosby to help with PR, a man with a very chequered past. So who knows? Maybe we're becoming more indifferent to guys who reportedly love the odd Muslim joke and have murky connections to the tobacco industry...
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Re: Pauls have courted the racist wing of the GOP

Post by Rainbow Bright »

Sheep_Mafia wrote:
CliffByford wrote:Great article.

I am curious - Rand Paul is a big enough politico to have a national (and to those who pay attention, international) profile. Would not such a figure wish to surround himself with the brightest and the best? This Hunter chap is surely neither - he's a dog-whistle racist and a cur of the worst stripe.

Second - how do these folks continue to get hired considering the existence of the Internet? This lack of due diligence alone speaks volumes about Paul. Seriously, he's being touted as a presidential candidate?
The problem in the US is that some, well most, get away with associating with shady characters so they aren't as cautious as they should be. That and they aren't as principled as people as some of us would like and actually care about regardless of political affliliation.

Obama, for example, was tied to several corrupt, racist and radical individuals and irresponsible liberal folk were fine with that. (Wright, Ayers, Resko etc.) So, I suspect many people who support Paul will look the other way as well. Sadly, it's just how it works here. This thread a blaring example of that.
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Re: Pauls have courted the racist wing of the GOP

Post by DEATH ROW JOE »

Sheep_Mafia wrote: Obama, for example, was tied to several corrupt, racist and radical individuals and irresponsible liberal folk were fine with that. (Wright, Ayers, Resko etc.) So, I suspect many people who support Paul will look the other way as well. Sadly, it's just how it works here. This thread a blaring example of that.
LMFAO @ this stupid comment.

You can always tell a simpleton because they see similarity where it does not really exist.

The public was not fine with Wright. Obama held a press conference to do damage control. Most people view a black person's hostility towards whites as justifiable resentment rather than racism. Regardless, Obama's mother is white so it's impossible to portray him as someone who hates whites.

Obama's interactions with Ayers and Rezko were insignificant. Both associated primarily with upstanding citizens even though Ayers was a anti- Vietnam war terrorist and Rezko was involved in extensive fraud.

The Pauls in contrast are neo-confederates and hard core racists. For 3 decades they have pandered to racists, supported racist causes and have argued in defense of fellow neo-confederates as they try to re-write history.
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Re: Pauls have courted the racist wing of the GOP

Post by Stoner »

Paul doesn't give a shit about people finding out about this - it just cements his spot in the primaries with that demographic.

Nothing gets leaked on accident. Even if Paul comes out later and apologizes and tries to dissociate himself from this guy, it will still be with a wink and a smile to the bigots, who understand why these kinds of things need to be kept hush-hush. The most racist motherfuckers who are capable of the most harm are never the loudest.
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