According to a report from the Washington Free Beacon, the man who co-wrote Rand Paul’s 2011 book and currently serves as an aide to the Kentucky senator spent numerous years as a pro-secessionist activist and radio shock jock in the 1990s and 2000s.
Jack Hunter currently serves as Paul’s media director and formerly served as chairman of the Charleston S.C. chapter of the League of the South, a group which “advocates the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States from this forced union and the formation of the Southern Republic.”
The group has maintained that it is not a racist organization, but Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League told the Washington Free Beacon that the League of the South is an “implicitly racist group.”
Other questionable details about Hunter’s past have emerged as well. In the early 2000s, he began contributing anonymous commentary to a South Carolina radio show under the pseudonym “Southern Avenger,” where Hunter would don a mask emblazoned with the Confederate flag during public appearances.
In transcripts from the radio show provided by the Free Beacon, Hunter said that Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth’s heart was “in the right place,” that white people are subject to a “racial double standard,” and that a “non-white majority America would simply cease to be America for reasons that as numerous as they are obvious — whether we are supposed to mention them or not.”
Interestingly, Hunter declined to answer the Beacon as to whether he still supports secessionist views, saying only that the issue is “sort of a dead letter.”
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