Tea Party Senator Rand Paul 'Reaches Out To Blacks' But Continues To Associate With His Racist 'Neo-Confederate' Allies

Illustration by DonkeyHotey.

By Steven Rosenfeld
Rand Paul, the U.S. Senator and 2016 Republican presidential candidate, keeps crossing paths with his notorious political soul mate, Jack Hunter, who ghost-wrote Paul’s 2011 book but resigned from his Senate staff last July after his past as a neo-Confederate blogger who praised Abraham Lincoln’s killer—and called for African-American filmmaker Spike Lee to be whipped—caught up with him.

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On Wednesday night, Paul gave the keynote address to the Young Americans For Liberty 2014 convention in Washington. The Libertarian group, which once hired Hunter—who had blogged as “The Southern Avenger” and was known for wearing a Confederate flag facemask—is having him Hunter for a Friday morning talk, entitled, “You Can’t Be A Conservative Without Being A Libertarian.”

As Kentucky civil rights pioneer Georgia David Powers told AlterNet this week, Paul has a long history of voting against the interests of African-Americans, despite recent efforts to recast himself as a racial justice crusader. “A leopard does not change its spots,” Powers said, adding that Paul has surrounded himself with white supremacists for years.

That brings us back to Hunter, who wasn’t just another southerner venting that the wrong side won the Civil War. Thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, you can read what he wrote in 2005 for the Charleston City Paper, where he relished the persona that he created of a Confederate-flag-masked pundit seeking to offend Yankee sensibilities.

In the piece where Hunter said that he’d be celebrating the birthday of Lincoln assassin, John Wilkes Booth, he also ridiculed the African-American holiday of Kwanzaa.

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