I find it interesting how frequently the Paul men are found to be keeping company with white supremacists of various types.
Rand Paul aide has history of neo-Confederate sympathies, inflammatory statements
A close aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) who co-wrote the senator’s 2011 book spent years working as a pro-secessionist radio pundit and neo-Confederate activist, raising questions about whether Paul will be able to transcend the same fringe-figure associations that dogged his father’s political career.
Paul hired Jack Hunter, 39, to help write his book The Tea Party Goes to Washington during his 2010 Senate run. Hunter joined Paul’s office as his social media director in August 2012.
From 1999 to 2012, Hunter was a South Carolina radio shock jock known as the “Southern Avenger.” He has weighed in on issues such as racial pride and Hispanic immigration, and stated his support for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
That is from the conservative website
Washington Free Beacon. There is more.
Prior to his radio career, while in his 20s, Hunter was a chairman in the League of the South, which “advocates the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States from this forced union and the formation of a Southern republic.”
“The League of the South is an implicitly racist group in that the idealized version of the South that they promote is one which, to use their ideology, is dominated by ‘Anglo-Celtic’ culture, which is their code word for ‘white’,” said Mark Pitcavage, the director of investigative research at the ADL. The ADL said it does not necessarily classify it as a hate group.
Transcripts of Hunter's monologues are still hanging around, and it appears that some poor soul actually took the time to listen to them.
In one 2004 commentary, Hunter said Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth’s heart was “in the right place.”
“Although Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth’s heart was in the right place, the Southern Avenger does regret that Lincoln’s murder automatically turned him into a martyr,” he said in 2004.
He later wrote that he “raise[s] a personal toast every May 10 to celebrate John Wilkes Booth’s birthday.”
He also compared Lincoln to Saddam Hussein and suggested that the 16th president would have had a romantic relationship with Adolf Hitler if the two met.
Of course, Hunter is now disavowing everything he used to say. But that wasn't always the case:
In 2005, Hunter’s anonymous commentary caught the attention of a local Charleston newspaper.
“Some call it hate speech, while others call it comedic genius,” wrote the Post and Courier in a profile on the radio pundit. “But [the Southern Avenger] swears that every word that issues from his lips, no matter how controversial or politically incorrect, actually represents how he feels about that particular issue.”
There is plenty more, including the assertion that America without a white majority would no longer be America.
As an interesting aside: the Washington Free Beacon is owned and run by Matthew Continetti, who used to work at the National Review and the Weekly Standard whose previous claim to fame was:
So what's with the sudden outbreak of better judgement?
There are clues in the piece: whoever pays the bills at the Washington Free Beacon doesn't like Paul's foreign policy.
In one 2008 monologue, Hunter said the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II was the moral equivalent of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“I can say unequivocally that I find the terrorism committed on Sept. 11, 2001 and the terrorism committed in early August of 1945 both deplorable on the same grounds,” said Hunter. “[T]he harsh uncomfortable reality is that, in terms of scale and slaughter, the most colossal terrorist attack in the history of this planet was committed by the same country that often claims to be the greatest nation on it.”
In another 2008 commentary, Hunter accused neoconservatives of pushing America into wars on behalf of Israel.
“Whether for Israel or oil, or both, a permanent U.S. foothold in the Middle East has been the primary neoconservative goal since day one and certainly since long before 9/11,” he said.
And, closing thought: the various permutations of nepotism within the conservative media elite seem as numerous as the Paul family's terrible bad luck in always seeming to find writers who are racists at heart. According to Wikipedia, Continetti is married to Anne Elizabeth Kristol, the daughter of William Kristol.