Andrew Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court judge and current senior judicial analyst at Fox News, on Wednesday spoke out in defense of Jack Hunter, the aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) whose pro-secessionist past came to light on Tuesday.
“Yesterday you saw some hawks, whose ideology is dying and whose worldview is being discredited every day, launch an attack on Senator Rand Paul by attacking one of his brilliant aides, Jack Hunter,” Napolitano wrote on a post published on his personal website. “Jack’s sin in their eyes was having spoken favorably of states’ rights, and negatively of Lincoln. They can’t seem to recognize that states’ rights–even secession–does not equal racism; it constitutes a brake on the feds’ march to totalitarianism.”
According to transcripts reviewed by The Washington Free Beacon, Hunter’s radio commentaries in the 2000s included assertions 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 are as numerous as they are obvious – whether we are supposed to mention them or not.”
But according to Napolitano, everything “that was ‘broken’ in the ‘news’ story in the Free Beacon has been public information for a long time. It was not hidden. And it was not news. Some of it was youthful hyperbole, and all of it was sliced and diced out of context.”
