Rand Paul Aide鈥檚 Claims Regarding League of the South are Hogwash
In all the brouhaha surrounding Jack Hunter, the aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) exposed as a longtime neo-Confederate activist this week, Hunter鈥檚 past as the leader of the Charleston, S.C., chapter of the (LOS) hardly registered. After all, Hunter said when confronted by the , when he was with the group in the 1990s, it was 鈥渆xplicit鈥 in its rejection of racism.
Baloney.
Although LOS has grown more and more openly racist in the years since its formation in 1994, its ugly ideology was evident pretty much from the start. In 1995, founder , angry at the murder of a white man bearing a Confederate flag by a black youth, described black people as 鈥渁 compliant and deadly underclass that now fulfills a role similar to that of Hitler鈥檚 brown-shirted street thugs.鈥
One of LOS鈥 founding directors was Jack Kershaw, a lifelong segregationist who was an official of the segregationist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s who said in 1998 that 鈥渟omebody needs to say a good word for slavery.鈥
That same year, Hill complained bitterly about the 鈥渄estruction of states鈥 rights in the South鈥 that he lamented had 鈥渦ndermin[ed] the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic [read: white] people and its institutions.鈥 Arch-segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace, he added then, had 鈥渞ightly identified the enemy.鈥
In 1999, Hill denounced the 鈥渆vil genie of universal 鈥榟uman rights鈥,鈥 an extension of his earlier description of egalitarianism as an evil 鈥淛acobin鈥 doctrine.
In fact, by the end of the 1990s, the period that Hunter says he was active in the group, most of the academics and other intellectuals who were part of the LOS had quit, saying it had become too openly racist for them. It was around that time that Hill began openly opposing any and all cases of racial intermarriage. He described slavery as 鈥淕od-ordained鈥 and the group published treatises defending segregation as necessary to the racial 鈥渋ntegrity鈥 of blacks and whites alike.
The LOS got even worse as time passed, with Hill in recent years suggesting that a new war against the federal government will be needed and urging followers to obtain heavy weapons and even tools to derail trains. One of its key activists for a time was a convicted 鈥淎ryan鈥 terrorist, and its leaders openly urged seceding from the United States and forming a country to be ruled by theocratic whites. But the racism of the LOS was certainly evident when Jack Hunter was an LOS leader.
It鈥檚 true that the Southern Poverty Law Center did not begin to list LOS as a neo-Confederate hate group until 2000, but it鈥檚 difficult to believe that a ranking leader of the group like Hunter had no idea what its core beliefs were long before.
Jack Hunter is either lying 鈥 as the Washington newspaper pointed out in its expos茅, Hunter went on until at least 2009 as a radical neo-Confederate activist 鈥 or he is too dense to have understood the group he helped lead. Either way, it鈥檚 difficult to swallow Rand Paul鈥檚 blas茅 assertion to the Huffington Post that 鈥淸i]f I thought he was a white supremacist, he would be fired immediately鈥 and there鈥檚 鈥渘o evidence鈥 of any bigoted beliefs or behavior on the part of Hunter.