Any Idiot Who Thinks Jack Hunter a Racist, Is a Racist

One of the reasons I so passionately despise polar politics—both on the left and on the right—is that people behave as demagogues.  They steamroll their way right past the issues and find any irrelevant detail to which their smear campaigns can grab a toe-hold.  They’ll find a detail and mercilessly exploit it, blowing it ever out of proportion simply to spread rumors and discontent.

Jack Hunter (left) with Senator Jim DeMint.

It began this morning with a lengthy hit piece against Jack Hunter on Media Matters, written (highly out of context) by Ben Dimiero and Eric Hananoki.  As if that malarkey was bad enough, it was quickly perpetuated by others.  I have absolutely no respect for the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman nor for the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin.  Both of these scandal-biters, like Dimiero and Hananoki, have perpetuated what is essentially a continuation of the ill-founded race-baiting and hatemongering against Ron Paul, only they’re trying to make the boiling water roll over to Rand Paul.  Let these so-called journalists know that their petty tactics won’t fly.  Henceforth they’ll be referred to as the Gang of Four.

What they’re focusing on is Jack Hunter’s association with the League of the South during his college days, and some inflammatory statements he made in support of the Confederate cause.  The man is Southern, for heaven’s sake; the South is filled with tens of thousands of men and women—white, black, Hispanic, and Native American—who wave rebel battle flags.  If this surprises them, they must not get out much.

What the quasi-journalists fail to overlook is that, while he may have been ardently pro-secessionist, there is no evidence that he’s racist.  Back when he was highly conservative—the way even I used to be before becoming libertarian—immigration used to bother him.  It bothers a lot of people on both sides of the spectrum these days, including left-leaning union leaders who’re trying to secure scarce jobs for their dues-paying citizen members.  His old view was that immigration dilutes NOT race, but culture.

Those concerns are not merely opinion, but policy in left-leaning France, where hijabs are banned and businesses that speak and write too much English versus French are fined by the Ministry of Culture for endangering French language and culture.  I don’t see these same quasi-journalists calling Woody Allen racist for glorifying xenophobic France in his movie Midnight in Paris, yet here they try to paint Hunter—and, by implication, Senator Paul—as racist.  The point is that Hunter’s changed his views (and that Goodman and Rubin are looking for red herrings where no conspiracy exists.

One of the reasons the Gang of Four’s conduct incenses me is that the race-baiting they’re engaging in—through the creatively deceptive use of euphemisms like “neo-Confederate”—is the same kind of ludicrous malarkey the neoconservatives engage in every time they call President Obama a Communist or a Muslim.  His father was a Muslim—big whoop.  He hung out with dedicated Marxist-Leninists in college—big whoop.  Simple association doesn’t make him either of those things; it simply makes him intellectually curious.  Obama did engage in radical rhetoric as a college student—hey, it was the 1970s—but he changed his views and his admirers on the left don’t hold his feet to the fire for it.  On the same plane of logic, Hunter’s membership in a pro-secession organization while in college doesn’t make him a slave owner, much less a racist; it makes him intellectually curious.  His feet shouldn’t be held to the fire for old views any more than Obama’s should for similar reasons.  Hell, even I, a libertarian Republican, dated a Marxist-Leninist a while back, but that sure as hell doesn’t make me a Red.

Everyone can safely assume that the Gang of Four—and anyone else perpetuating the Media Matters Mythology—are not journalists, with the same level of integrity as Cronkite or Murrow, but rather charlatans trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill, manufacturing scandal in order to further their own careers.  Machiavelli writes about such bottom-feeders in The Prince, and their conduct doesn’t surprise me.

Regarding the whole idea of secession, it’s not that big of a deal (at least nowadays).  So many on the left like to bellyache about Southerners being an evil group of people who tried to secede from their country and form a new country, in which slavery would be legal.  What they conveniently overlook—despite their unparalleled proficiency in the art of investigative journalism—is that our country, the U.S. of A., was founded by a group of people who seceded from their country to form a new country, in which slavery would be legal.

H.K. Edgerton

There still are some people who believe that legal slavery could have ended peacefully in America—as it did in every other North American country—if Lincoln’s administration hadn’t resorted to a military invasion of the Southern states and total war against the Southern population.  Furthermore, historian Tom Woods, backed by documentation, so eloquently points out in The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History that the first American states to threaten secession on the record were Northern states in the early nineteenth century.  During the Civil War, the Confederate army had three times as many Hispanics as the Union army, and the high chief of the Cherokees, Stand Watie, was a rebel general.  Former NAACP chapter president H.K. Edgerton is a Confederate enthusiast, and he's black.  That red flag with a blue cross is about rebellion, not about racial supremacy.

To top it off, our country has encouraged secession in other countries!  The State Department welcomed the South Sudanese plebiscite, the DoD sent troops to enforce the secession of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania from Yugoslavia, and NATO allowed the Red Army to secede East Germany from the West in 1949.  Talk about double standards!  My point is that secession isn’t that big of a deal, but the Gang of Four thinks it is, just as long as their articles get lots of attention.

What does Hunter have to say about all this?  If I may quote verbatim: “I abhor racism.”  I’m sure glad the Gang of Four had the journalistic integrity to ask Hunter his beliefs before deciding what they are in his stead… NOT!  It reminds me of a quote from the African-American—and conservative—Reverend C.L. Bryant’s film Runaway Slave, when a black conservative is blasting a black liberal for race-baiting: “You are tearing at a wound that is trying to heal!”

Finally, I can personally attest to the fact that Jack Hunter is neither a racist nor an extremist.  Like all formerly radical college kids (including President Obama), Jack grew the hell up and so did his views.  As far as the racism goes, I recall a certain time a while back when Hunter was courting a particular lady.  He was doing so chivalrously, as a Southern gentleman is expected do.  Not only was the recipient of his admiration strikingly beautiful, but SHE WAS NOT WHITE.  Yup, the Gang of Four sure found a bona fide racist!  Pretty soon they’ll produce exposés on the Chupacabra, Carmen San Diego, and Waldo.

Back to the courtship, it didn’t work out between those two, but today Jack is going steady with a wonderful girl whom I’ve met and worked with and is fantastic.  I wish them all the best.  Very few people on this planet have the integrity, intelligence, and compassion that Jack Hunter does.  I’ll be able to say for the rest of my life that I’m proud to know Jack, to have worked with him, drank with him, and to have been a part of history with him.

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Hunter and DeMint photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore.  Edgerton photo courtesy of BlackConfederateSoldiers.com.