In a radio interview on Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said his former aide Jack Hunter, who spent years in the 1990s and 2000s as a pro-secessionist activist and radio shock jock, was unfairly treated by the media last month. Paul said that while he disagreed with much of Hunter’s past writings and statements, none of Hunter’s words were racist.
“If you’ll read through a lot of his things, I think some of the things he wrote, or many of the things he wrote, were stupid, and I don’t agree with,” Paul said during an interview on NPR’s On Point program. “I do think though that he was unfairly treated by the media, and he was put up as target practice for people to say he was a racist, and none of that’s true. And if you look at his writings, I think there are a lot of problems, and a lot of disagreements, and none of it do I support. But none of it was racist.”
Paul went on to say that Hunter, who resigned his position in the senator’s office last month, had “got along fine with everybody in the office, treated everyone fairly, regardless of race or religion.” In the late 1990s, Hunter was a member of the League of the South, a group which advocates the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States. In the early 2000s, Hunter began contributing anonymous political commentary on South Carolina radio under the moniker “Southern Avenger.” Among his assertions from that time: the Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth’s heart was “in the right place” and that white people in the U.S. are subject to a “racial double standard.”
During the interview on Tuesday, On Point’s guest host, John Harwood, also read Paul an Economist article arguing that libertarian politicians have risen to power through ties to “racist and nativist movements.”
“Don’t you have something better to read than a bunch of crap from people who don’t like me?” Paul replied. “I mean, that won’t make for much of an interview if I have to sit through reading after recitation of people calling me a racist.”
(h/t Mediaite)
