Earlier this week, there was a report from the Washington Free Beacon on the neo-confederate and neo-secessionist views of one of Senator Rand Paul’s aides. Jack Hunter is the guy and he helped Paul write his book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington:
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.
Surprise, surprise:
During public appearances, Hunter often wore a mask on which was printed a Confederate flag.
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.”
And yes, the League of the South is a real thing. The SPLC describes them:
The League of the South is a neo-Confederate group that advocates for a second Southern secession and a society dominated by “European Americans.” The league believes the “godly” nation it wants to form should be run by an “Anglo-Celtic” (read: white) elite that would establish a Christian theocratic state and politically dominate blacks and other minorities. Originally founded by a group that included many Southern university professors, the group lost its Ph.D.s as it became more explicitly racist. The league denounces the federal government and northern and coastal states as part of “the Empire,” a materialist and anti-religious society.
After Hunter’s involvement with these people, he became a shock jock — weighing in on Lincoln’s assassination (JWB was right!), racial pride (whites are victimized when they show any!), and immigration by Hispanics:
“That Americans, white or otherwise, don’t want Spanish-speaking people dominating their airwaves, neighborhoods, or country is no more racist than Mexico’s lack of interest in Seinfeld,” he wrote. “Native Americans had no illusions about how their land would change as boatloads of white men landed on their shores and modern Americans aren’t wrong to deplore the millions of Mexicans coming here now. A non-white majority America would simply cease to be America for reasons that are as numerous as they are obvious – whether we are supposed to mention them or not.”
Hunter also says that his shock jock history is what brought him to the attention of the Pauls and how he got his employment. And the GOP wonders why it can’t expand it’s appeal to non-whites. In this, though, Rand Paul is pretty much doing what his father did. Ron Paul wrote years of newsletters with very bigoted and otherwise dodgy content. Once this article was published, Ron Paul spent a good amount of time disowning those newsletters (with multiple stories), but never renouncing or distancing himself from the Stormfronters and others who were clearly a part of his Libertarian coalition. Think Progress looks at this in some detail:
That’s not say to say that the Pauls are racists themselves, but rather that they’re beholden to a constituency who is. Libertarianism is, right now, a very small movement very much on the political margins. The neo-Confederates continue to make up a significant portion of the libertarian movement (if not its intellectual ranks), partly due to a self-described “Outreach To The Rednecks” campaign orchestrated by leading libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard.
This creates what one libertarian writer, Reason Magazine’s Mike Riggs, calls a “paradox:” “Libertarianism is too small to afford infighting,” Riggs suggests, but “also too small to afford people like Hunter becoming representative.” The smart, well-meaning libertarians — the ones who could help the GOP and quite possibly the country — can’t kick out the neo-Confederates, which means that elected libertarian officials will always have some ties to some truly terrible folks. Libertarian power is capped by its own power base.
Indeed.If you are the natural home of some of the worst of America’s fringe elements, your destiny is to be the fringe element. Rand Paul is getting alot of press for making libertarianism the face of the GOP, except his libertarianism is pretty much the usual GOP bill of particulars. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the media will treat this re-naming as a spanking new thing and make sure that one more Paul is pretty much unaccountable for his retrograde associates.
In the meantime, some blowback is brewing. The Washington Free Beacon reports on a number of pro-Israel groups who are calling our Hunter and Rand and the Republican Jewish Committee is also calling on Rand to distance himself from Hunter.