Multiple media sources are confirming that Jack Hunter, the white supremacist aide to Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, has “resigned” two weeks after he was outed as the Southern Avenger, a neo-Confederate columnist and radio personality famous for hiding his identity behind a cloth mask depicting a Confederate flag. Hunter also co-authored Rand Paul’s book,”The Tea Party Goes to Washington.”

After the announcement was made public, Hunter’s former editor at a South Carolina news outlet published an editorial claiming that Hunter asked him to delete all the Avenger’s columns from the outlet’s website.

In a statement to a fellow conservative who writes for the Daily Caller, the right-wing propaganda website owned by Swanson Foods heir Tucker Carlson, Hunter said:

“I’ve long been a conservative, and years ago, a much more politically incorrect (and campy) one,” Hunter wrote. “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’s quiet departure now is based on a standard scandal-management procedure in Washington. If Sen. Paul had fired Hunter immediately after the revelation that one of his closest advisers was one of an icon to Ku Klux Klan-style white supremacists, it would have created a media firestorm that potentially could have derailed Paul’s never-gonna-happen-anyway bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

The standard scandal-management approach in a situation like this is to wait until the major media has moved onto some other story — in this case it happened to be the verdict in the Zimmerman trial — and then quietly jettison the troublesome aide in a late Friday night news dump. The only wrinkle in the defenestration of Jack Hunter is that the announcement of his purported resignation was released on a Sunday night which means it is being given play online at the start of the weekly news cycle.

In the wake of Hunter’s parting ways with Rand Paul, Chris Haire, editor of Charleston City Paper, the South Carolina news outlet that published Hunter’s Southern Avenger columns, now claims Hunter asked him to delete all of his columns from the paper’s website:

Long before last’s week Washington Free Beacon story kicked up a two-day media storm, Jack Hunter knew that the Republican establishment was working to out him as a neo-Confederate and a racist, a move he believed could hurt the one-time City Paper columnist’s boss, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. He’d even sent me an e-mail asking me to remove dozens of posts, ones that he said no longer reflected his current worldview. 

While I told him that I would have removed one or two posts — it’s not uncommon for writers to hastily pen a column they later regret — I found the breadth of the request to be excessive, and to be honest, quite cowardly. Doing so, I told Jack, was a repudiation of the very persona he had created as a writer and radio personality. It was a denial of the very views that had made him a local media celebrity and a rising star in the so-called liberty movement, and as such, a slap in the face to all those who had ever supported him. It was best, I said, that if those points of views no longer applied to him, Jack should pen a column detailing how he had changed his mind, but he declined. And frankly, that told me all I needed to know about Jack’s conversion. It was solely for appearances only. It was not heartfelt. It was not true. It was simply to protect his boss, Rand Paul, as he plots a path to the White House in 2016.

Haire also provides a sampler of the Southern Avenger’s “campy” neo-Confederate rants that he published:

While a member of the City Paper’s stable of freelancers, Jack wrote in support of racially profiling Hispanics, praised white supremacist Sam Francis, blasted the House of Representative’s apology for slavery, claimed that black people should apologize to white people for high crime rates, defended former Atlanta Braves pitcher and racist John Rocker and Charleston County School District board member Nancy Cook after she said some mothers should be sterilized, argued that Islam was an innately dangerous threat to the U.S, professed that he would have voted for a member a British neo-Nazi political party if he could have, considered endorsing former Council of Conservative Citizens member Buddy Witherspoon in his bid to unseat Sen. Lindsey Graham, compared Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler and Ike Turner, and continued to profess the erroneous claim that the primary cause of the Civil War was not the fight over slavery, ignoring the decades of American history leading up to war and South Carolina’s very own Declaration of the Immediate Causes for Secession, which clearly note that protecting slavery was the preeminent motivation of state leaders.

Haire does not address why he and Charleston City Paper felt it was appropriate to provide a platform his newspaper and its website for Hunter’s despicable, retrograde views. Perhaps it’s peculiar to the South Carolina media environment that being fair and balanced requires ensuring that that neo-Klan white supremacist views and hatred of blacks, Hispanics, Jews and the rest is given a prominent voice in the Palmetto State’s political dialogue.

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