WASHINGTON –- In an interview with The Huffington Post, Sen. Rand Paul stoutly defended an aide who, as a radio shock jock in South Carolina, praised John Wilkes Booth, heaped scorn on Abraham Lincoln and wore a ski mask emblazoned with the stars and bars of the Confederate Battle Flag. 
 
 Paul (R-Ky.) stressed that he opposed such views, many of which have been recanted by the Senate aide, Jack Hunter, who co-wrote Paul's first book in 2010 and who is now his social media adviser in Washington. 
 
 “I'm not a fan of secession,” Paul said. “I think the things he said about John Wilkes Booth are absolutely stupid. I think Lincoln was one of our greatest presidents. Do I think Lincoln was wrong is taking away the freedom of the press and the right of habeas corpus? Yeah. 
 
 “There were great people who were for emancipation. Lincoln came to his greatness. One Republican congressman described it as ‘on borrowed plumage.’ I love the description, because there were some great fighters [for emancipation] and Lincoln had to be pushed. But I'm not an enemy of Lincoln, like some who think he was an awful person.” 
 
 Paul said that Hunter had never acted in a discriminatory way, and that his earlier work in South Carolina was a form of youthful political showmanship. 
 
 “People are calling him a white supremacist,” Paul told me in his Senate office. “If I thought he was a white supremacist, he would be fired immediately. If I thought he would treat anybody on the color of their skin different than others, I’d fire him immediately. 
 
 “All I can say is, we have a zero tolerance policy for anybody who displays discriminatory behavior or belief in discriminating against people based on the color of their skin, their religion, their sexual orientation, anything like that,” Paul told me. “We won't tolerate any of that, and I've seen no evidence of that. 
 
 “Are we at a point where nobody can have had a youth or said anything untoward?” the senator asked rhetorically. 
 
 Hunter is 39 years old. He was a well-known figure in South Carolina for years before he caught Paul’s eye with some well-circulated YouTube videos. 
 
 Say this about Paul: He doesn’t run from a fight, especially if it means defying a Washington Beltway consensus. 
 
 The 50-year-old freshman senator, a tea party libertarian hungering to climb his way through the GOP to the White House, wins passionate fans for questioning the rise of the Security State at home and the drone wars abroad. 
 
 But he wins equally passionate critics for some of his statements on race and civil rights, which foes see as a throwback to the days when resistance to federal power was tantamount to defending the Old South. 
 
 The consistent thread is his irritation at other people -– especially those in the federal government or media –- telling him what he should do, say or think. 
 
 And he is not about to distance himself from a writer who long called himself the “Southern Avenger.” 
 
 Paul insisted that he had only known “vaguely” about Hunter’s work. But even if he had known all of the details, Paul said, he would not have shied away from hiring Hunter because he is a talented conservative writer. 
 
 “Let me put it this way,” Paul said. ”I’m aware of some of your columns, but not all of them. And some of them I find very unfair, calling me a conspiracy nut, things like that. But I chose to talk to you today. So that means we have a relationship now. But it doesn't mean that I agree with all of your past writings. 
 
 “It's the same way any time you meet somebody who's got a large body of work,” Paul continued. "So if I hired you to work in my campaign, there would be some things I agreed with, and some things I disagreed with. 
 
 “I think it's hard. The thing is, I grapple with this. What am I supposed to do? I'm going to have a lot of people working for me. They've all got writings and opinions." 
 
 Hunter, he said, "is incredibly talented." 
 
 Behind the flashy and provocative rhetoric, Paul said, Hunter often made thought-provoking arguments. “Look and listen to the actual words and not to the headlines, people,” Paul told me. 
 
 What about the ski mask? I asked. 
 
 “It was a shock radio job. He was doing wet T-shirt contests. But can a guy not have a youth and stuff? People try to say I smoked pot one time, and I wasn't fit for office.” 
 
 Paul clearly thinks that he is. 
 
 And, by the way, he told me, he was headed to Nevada this weekend -- Nevada being a key early-nominating state in what would be a 2016 GOP nominating race. 
 
 Before he gets there, Paul will have to deal with myriad nettlesome issues that come from his family’s political roots in the libertarian, states’ rights and nativist soil deep in some reaches of American politics. 
 
 A major theme of Paul’s short career has been the tension between the grassroots tea party enthusiasm and libertarian online donors he inherits from his father -– perennial presidential candidate and former Texas Rep. Ron Paul -– and Rand’s own strategic plan to be seen as a mainstream-able GOP figure. 
 
 The two imperatives seemed to have collided in the person of Jack Hunter this week, and Paul stood by his friend. He could hardly do otherwise. Hunter is too close to him, for one, to be easily jettisoned. But more important for Paul, firing him would have been allowing other people to tell him what to do. ||||| The man who for years called himself the “Southern Avenger” says he now seeks to avenge his own honor. 
 
 Jack Hunter, the aide to Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul who has been under fire for comments critical of Abraham Lincoln and sympathetic to the Confederacy, has left the senator’s office to resume his career as a political pundit. 
 
 Hunter told The Daily Caller News Foundation that he wanted to avoid being a distraction for Paul and to clear his own name, which he argues is now unfairly associated with racism. 
 
 A senior Paul aide confirmed Hunter’s departure. 
 
 “I’ve long been a conservative, and years ago, a much more politically incorrect (and campy) one,” Hunter said in an email. “But there’s a significant difference between being politically incorrect and racist. I’ve also become far more libertarian over the years, a philosophy that encourages a more tolerant worldview, through the lens of which I now look back on some of my older comments with embarrassment.” 
 
 Hunter, who has contributed opinion pieces to The Daily Caller, is a personal friend of the author. 
 
 The Washington Free Beacon originally reported that Hunter toasted the birthday of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, lamented the United States’ shrinking white majority and compared honoring the Founding Fathers while admiring Lincoln to “praising Jesus and worshiping Satan simultaneously.” 
 
 The story set off a firestorm of controversy across the political spectrum. Hunter was most recently criticized by his former editor at the Charleston City Paper for asking him to remove posts and for being the “most common kind of racist, the one that doesn’t realize that he is one.” 
 
 Chris Haire, the Charleston alt-weekly’s managing editor, also described Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Pat Buchanan as racists. Asked why he published Hunter — a paid columnist — if he believed him to be a racist, Haire tweeted in response, “To reveal the mindset of the SCGOP and the Neoconfederate fringe.” 
 
 Paul described Hunter’s comments as “absolutely stupid” but defended his “incredibly talented” social media director in an interview with The Huffington Post. 
 
 “People are calling him a white supremacist,” Paul said. “If I thought he was a white supremacist, he would be fired immediately.” 
 
 Others have defended Hunter as well, saying that while he may have been attracted to peculiarly Southern forms of conservatism and occasionally naive about racial issues, he is not the figure some critics have portrayed. 
 
 “In all my dealings with Jack Hunter, I have found him to be most impressive, most professional and a committed conservative,” South Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Sanford told TheDCNF. “I think a lot of this has less to do with Jack Hunter than Rand Paul and 2016.” 
 
 
 
 Former Charleston City Paper music editor Ballard Lesemann knew Hunter back when he was still wearing a pro-wrestling-style mask emblazoned with the Confederate flag. He told TheDCNF that Hunter was already assuming a less kitschy and provocative persona back then. 
 
 “By the time Jack started working with local AM news/talk station 1250 WTMA, he’d already ditched the mask and the schtick side of the Southern Avenger character, and he began to develop a more serious, thoughtful, in-depth approach and delivery,” Lesemann said. 
 
 While the two of them “bonded more over conversations about Iron Maiden, Rush, and the Who than about political candidates and partisan politics,” Lesemann was familiar with Hunter’s political work. 
 
 “As a left-leaning independent who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, 2004 and 2008, you can imagine how my own political views could clash with those of Jack Hunter’s,” he said. “But in all of our conversations, interviews, and late-night tavern chats, we never fought or argued.” 
 
 Marcus Amaker edited Hunter’s entertainment writings for the Charleston Post and Courier. He described Hunter as “a good guy” and “professional freelancer.” 
 
 “I never had any issues with Jack,” Amaker told TheDCNF. “Honestly, I haven’t paid much attention to the controversy. Anything that seeks to divide people isn’t on my radar and doesn’t get my energy.” 
 
 Prior to working for Rand Paul, Hunter was the official campaign blogger for Ron Paul during the 2012 GOP primaries. In that capacity, he frequently worked to marginalize extremists within the movement, ridiculing conspiracy theorists and defending the idea of working within the mainstream Republican Party. 
 
 Now the controversy over Hunter’s past writings and radio broadcasts is widely seen as a drag on libertarian-leaning Republicans’ mainstream political ambitions and a reminder of the elder Paul’s newsletters. 
 
 While the former Texas congressman denied writing or even reading the racist content in the newsletters that appeared under his name, questions persisted about their authorship. 
 
 Hunter isn’t denying writing the columns in question, but he does say the coverage doesn’t represent the full body of his writing. 
 
 “The stories made me angry, as well as many who’ve followed my work, because the cherry-picked distortions weren’t even remotely the real me,” he said. “It was enraging to watch neoconservatives, liberals and even some actual racists speculate about what I believe, based on what they were eager to portray me as believing. Not surprisingly, their speculations almost always suited their own political purposes.” 
 
 “Still, the moment I became a distraction for Sen. Paul, I knew it was time to leave. My purpose has always been to help, not hinder,” Hunter added. Now as he once ditched the mask, he will also discard the Southern Avenger name. 
 
 “I also wanted the ability to defend myself in my own voice, not as a member of anyone’s staff or even as the ‘Southern Avenger’ character, which has now been so mischaracterized that I will permanently retire that moniker,” Hunter said. 
 
 In addition to any fallout for Rand Paul’s political future, the controversy raises philosophical questions for conservatives and libertarians. 
 
 “Nothing in American history has done more harm to the limited government cause than the association of state sovereignty arguments with defenses of slavery,” wrote Philip Klein in the Washington Examiner. “Confederates who employed limited government arguments to argue for preserving a brutal and inhumane practice shouldn’t be deemed friends of limited government.” 
 
 Hunter maintains he is now freer to join these debates. 
 
 “I look forward to returning to just being a pundit and fighting these battles on my own,” he said. “The neoconservatives, who first ran and promoted this story, would much rather argue about the Civil War than the Iraq War.” 
 
 “From their standpoint, and given current trends within the Republican Party,” Hunter concluded, “I can’t say I blame them.” 
 
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 Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
– The Southern Avenger rides alone once more. Jack Hunter has left Rand Paul's employ amidst a firestorm of controversy about his past as a Confederate flag-wearing secessionist shock jock and columnist. Hunter first broke the news to his friend W. James Antle III at the Daily Caller. "I've long been a conservative, and years ago, a much more politically incorrect (and campy) one," Hunter said. "But there's a significant difference between being politically incorrect and racist." He intends to return to punditry. Paul had previously stuck by Hunter. "I think the things he said about John Wilkes Booth are absolutely stupid," he told the Huffington Post two weeks ago. But "if I thought he was a white supremacist, he would be fired immediately." Instead it seems he's been fired slowly. Paul today said he and Hunter had come to a "mutual decision" that he should leave. "I think everybody occasionally has people that work for them who sometimes have a background that damages what you’re trying to do," Paul explained, according to CN|2.