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Another Rand Paul staffer has shady links


Clarakore

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Paul hired Jack Hunter, 39, to help write his book The Tea Party Goes to Washington during his 2010 Senate run. Hunter joined Paul’s office as his social media director in August 2012.

From 1999 to 2012, Hunter was a South Carolina radio shock jock known as the “Southern Avenger.” He has weighed in on issues such as racial pride and Hispanic immigration, and stated his support for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

During public appearances, Hunter often wore a mask on which was printed a Confederate flag.

Prior to his radio career, while in his 20s, Hunter was a chairman in the League of the South, which “advocates the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States from this forced union and the formation of a Southern republic.”

—snip

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This is not the first time that Rand Paul has had a shady staffer.

Chris Hightower, a 9-11 conspiracy theorist, was forced to resign in 2009.

—snip

"Strike one was in 2009 when Rand Paul's Senate campaign spokesperson was forced to resign over a horribly racist comment and historical image of a lynching -- I'm not making that up -- posted by a friend of his on his MySpace wall on Martin Luther King weekend, then allowed to remain for almost two years," Hayes said.

Strike two, Hayes added, was when Paul expressed reservations about the Civil Rights Act in an interview on the Rachel Maddow Show. (Paul later said in a statement that he supports the Civil Rights Act "because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws.")

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and Obama hangs out with radical preachers. what's your point beyond "Rand Paul's naughty"?

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Not surprising, somewhere the ideas of each state its currency, disenfranchise the Federal Government and similar inanities had to com from.

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Given that his big base of support will probably be libertarians and many of those will be his volunteers and staffers, I'm sure you're going to see a lot of such stories should he run for office.

OMG a Rand Paul staffer wants to legalize marijuana!

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Given that his big base of support will probably be libertarians and many of those will be his volunteers and staffers, I'm sure you're going to see a lot of such stories should he run for office.

OMG a Rand Paul staffer wants to legalize marijuana!

Oh, the shock, the horror!

(Sarcasm)

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im getting kind of bored with the whole "anyone who is right wing is racist" thing. :sleepy:

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im getting kind of bored with the whole "anyone who is right wing is racist" thing. :sleepy:

You and me both! :yes:

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Strange bedfellows in either case and it is not rare to be judged by the company you keep.

Jon Chait added, "[O]bviously, you can like Ron and Rand Paul without being the slightest bit racist. Very, very few Rand Paul fans are glad Abraham Lincoln was shot. At the same time, the logic of southern white supremacy and the logic of libertarianism run along very similar lines. They both express themselves in terms of opposition to federal power and support for states' rights.... The deep connection between the Pauls and the neo-Confederate movement doesn't discredit their ideas, but it's also not just an indiscretion. It's a reflection of the fact that white supremacy is a much more important historical constituency for anti-government ideas than libertarians like to admit."

Another Paul, another Confederate problem

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Grasping at straws much? No one even takes 'secession' seriously.

Except Rand Paul's staffers it seems.

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and Obama hangs out with radical preachers. what's your point beyond "Rand Paul's naughty"?

Obama attended a church in which Farrakhan spoke as an invited guest, and he worked with *real* domestic terrorists in Chicago. Somehow, that wasn't seen as "shady" enough to disqualify him from the presidency.

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Washington Post picked this up as well as others.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has spent the last six months or so trying to raise his profile and show he is not a fringe character. His staff and supporters insist he is not his father, but question remains whether his views and judgment are any better or whether he is simply a slicker version of the conspiracy-minded former Texas congressman.

So far the effort has gone poorly. Actually, he’s gone backward in many respects in his quest for legitimacy. Let’s count the ways:

http://www.washingto...rehabilitation/

im getting kind of bored with the whole "anyone who is right wing is racist" thing. :sleepy:

By Jack Hunter's own words he is one.

As the arguably white nationalist Southern Avenger, Hunter praised the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, saying he “raise a personal toast every May 10 to celebrate John Wilkes Booth’s birthday,” compared Lincoln to Saddam Hussein, and suggested the great American president would have had a homosexual relationship with Adolf Hitler, had the two ever met. He also advocated against Hispanic immigration and in favor of white pride, warning that a “non-white majority America would simply cease to be America.”

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/09/rand_pauls_team_has_another_white_supremacist/

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What conspiracy theory has Ron Paul supported? Fow news reporter speaking to all the other reporters " if Ron Paul becomes president half the people in this room will lose thier jobs". The media has hated and lied on Ron Paul for decades. I expect no less from them regarding Rand.

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What conspiracy theory has Ron Paul supported? Fow news reporter speaking to all the other reporters " if Ron Paul becomes president half the people in this room will lose thier jobs". The media has hated and lied on Ron Paul for decades. I expect no less from them regarding Rand.

This whole post quoted here sounds like a conspiracy theory in itself.

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This whole post quoted here sounds like a conspiracy theory in itself.

I dont give a crap what it sounds like to you. You werent following the primaries and going through all the info with a fine tooth comb like I was. I watched it happen. I watched as he won Maine and Iowa, only to be told by the media that it never happened. I watched as whole counties votes were completly erased. You didnt watch the debates where the crowd had to BOO till they let him answer certain questions. Maybe you should find out what you are talking about before rrrrrr whatever nevermind.

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This whole post quoted here sounds like a conspiracy theory in itself.

which is how you dismiss any idea or theory you don't agree with, isn't it?

Ironic really, as this very topic is a conspiracy theory about Paul's "true" ideology and motives.

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Most of this information The World Needs You is quoting in his posts come from news sources such as: MSNBC, Washington Post, and Salon, so it is going to be extremely biased considering who owns these news sources....

Take MSNBC for example:

MSNBC (stylized as msnbc) is an American cable news, information, and political opinion channel available in the United States, Europe, South Africa, the Middle East and Canada. Its name was derived from the most common abbreviations for Microsoft and the National Broadcasting Company.[5]

MSNBC and msnbc.com were founded in 1996 as partnerships of Microsoft and General Electric's NBC unit, which is now NBCUniversal.[

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC

General Electric is a defense contractor for the government:

On August 4, 2009 the SEC fined General Electric $50 million for breaking accounting rules in two separate cases, misleading investors into believing GE would meet or beat earnings expectations.[93]

GE has faced criminal action regarding its defense related operations. GE was convicted in 1990 of defrauding the US Department of Defense, and again in 1992 on charges of corrupt practices in the sale of jet engines to Israel.[94]

A GE owned abandoned building resides on Seaview Avenue in Bridgeport, CT.[95] The abandoned property has been cited in crimes that include being used as a hideout for a 72-year old thief in 2008.[96]

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric

You might also want to check this out:

MSNBCs Long Time Love Affair With War: http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=D5wW49M_kyw&feature=plpp

No wonder their ratings are in the toilet....

Distrust in US media edging up to record high:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/143267/Distrust-Media-Edges-Record-High.aspx

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  • 2 weeks later...

im getting kind of bored with the whole "anyone who is right wing is racist" thing. :sleepy:

This story was first broke by The Washington Free Beacon's Alana Goodman. Their article was the first one to be posted in this thread in the OP.

The Washington Free Beacon is an independent conservative media outlet which is from the right itself and does not consider itself mainstream at all. Their own "About Us" page which begins by quoting Ronald Reagan includes the following self-description:

The Washington Free Beacon, a project of the 501©4 Center for American Freedom, is a nonprofit online newspaper that began publication on February 7, 2012. Dedicated to uncovering the stories that the professional left hopes will never see the light of day, the Free Beacon produces in-depth and investigative reporting on a wide range of issues, including public policy, government affairs, international security, and media criticism. Whether it’s exposing cronyism, dissecting the relationship between the progressive movement and the mainstream media, finding out just who is shaping our domestic and foreign policy and why, or highlighting the threats to American security and peace in a dangerous world, the Free Beacon is committed to serving the public interest by reporting news and information that currently is not being fully covered by other news organizations.

About Us

It is conservatives themselves who are announcing Rand Paul's shady links.

Read the following and keep in mind that Jennifer Rubin is a conservative...

The Conservative Campaign to Purge Rand Paul

If you’re not a political inside-baseball junky, you may have missed the proliferating conservative campaign to vilify Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky libertarian with presidential aspirations. Catch up quickly via the vigorous work of Jennifer Rubin, author of the Washington Post’s Right Turn blog. Rubin advocates purging Paul based largely on his employing as a Senate aide one Jack Hunter. According to Rubin, Hunter “has a history of outlandish statements (as late as 2009) including opposition to the Civil War that would make Pat Buchanan cringe.”

She draws on the legwork of yet another conservative outlet, the Washington Free Beacon. It reports:

*snip*

Controversies like this “are hardly new to Paulworld,” writes Jonah Goldberg of the conservative National Review Online:

Most famously, Rand’s father, former Representative Ron Paul, the three-time presidential candidate (for whom Hunter worked in 2012), published newsletters bearing his name that brimmed with bigoted bile. When his writing became controversial, the elder Paul insisted he hadn’t known what was in his own newsletters (though in 1996 he took responsibility for them).

Both controversies stem from the same sinful strategy adopted by so-called paleolibertarians in the 1980s. The idea was that libertarians needed to attract followers from outside the ranks of both the mainstream GOP and the libertarian movement—by trying to fuse the struggle for individual liberty with nostalgia for white supremacy. Thinkers such as Murray Rothbard hated the cultural liberalism of libertarians like the Koch brothers (yes, you read that right) and sought to build a movement fueled by white resentment. This sect of libertarianism played into the left-wing view of conservatism as racist. The newsletters, probably ghostwritten by Rothbard and former Ron Paul chief of staff Lew Rockwell, were the main organ for this effort.

“The paleo strategy was a horrific mistake,” libertarian economist Steve Horwitz wrote in 2011, “though it apparently made some folks (such as Rockwell and Paul) pretty rich selling newsletters predicting the collapse of Western civilization at the hands of the blacks, gays, and multiculturalists.”

Clearly, some voices on the right want to push Paul out of contention for their party’s 2016 presidential ticket. Will they be heard?

http://www.businessw...purge-rand-paul

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Here are two more conservative voices who also are bringing up Paul's shady links.

Michael Gerson claims:

Rand Paul can never be a mainstream Republican

To this point, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has been the Republican flavor of the year. Events from the IRS scandal to NSA revelations to the Obamacare train wreck have corroborated libertarian suspicions of federal power. And Paul has shown serious populist skills in cultivating those fears for his political benefit. For a while, he succeeded in a difficult maneuver: accepting the inheritance of his father’s movement while distancing himself from the loonier aspects of his father’s ideology.

But now Paul has fallen spectacularly off the tightrope. It turns out that a senior member of his Senate staff, Jack Hunter, has a history of neo-Confederate radio rants. And Paul has come to the defense of his aide.

Paul’s attempt to dismiss the matter has only added to the damage. “It was a shock radio job,” the senator explains.“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.”

But Hunter’s offenses were committed as an adult. They included defending a regime founded on slavery, comparing Abraham Lincoln to Saddam Hussein and raising (in Hunter’s words) a “personal toast every May 10 to celebrate John Wilkes Booth’s birthday.” This was not a single, ideological puff but rather a decade spent mainlining moonlight and magnolias in the ruins of Tara.

*snip*

This disdain for Lincoln is not a quirk or a coincidence. Paulism involves more than the repeal of Obamacare. It is a form of libertarianism that categorically objects to 150 years of expanding federal power. During this period, the main domestic justification for federal action has been opposition to slavery and segregation. Lincoln, in the Paulite view, exercised tyrannical powers to pursue an unnecessary war. Similarly, Paulites have been critical of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for violating both states’ rights and individual property rights — an argument Rand Paul himself echoed during several interviews as a Senate candidate.

This does not make Paulites racists. But it does make them opponents of the legal methods that ended state-sanctioned racism.

*snip*

http://www.washingto...0424_story.html

Jonah Goldberg on the other hand believes there to exist:

Rand Paul's paleo problem

*snip*

Both controversies stem from the same sinful strategy adopted by so-called paleolibertarians in the 1980s. The idea was that libertarians needed to attract followers from outside the ranks of both the mainstream GOP and the libertarian movement — by trying to fuse the struggle for individual liberty with nostalgia for white supremacy. Thinkers such as Murray Rothbard hated the cultural liberalism of libertarians like the Koch brothers (yes, you read that right) and sought to build a movement fueled by white resentment. This sect of libertarianism played into the left-wing view of conservatism as racist. The newsletters were the main organ for this effort.

"The paleo strategy was a horrific mistake …," libertarian economist Steve Horwitz wrote in 2011, "though it apparently made some folks (such as Lew Rockwell and Paul) pretty rich selling newsletters predicting the collapse of Western civilization at the hands of the blacks, gays and multiculturalists."

By no means do all Ron Paul supporters subscribe to this dreck. Some are ignorant about this history, while others dismiss the controversies as a distraction from Paul's real message. Most take great offense at any suggestion that Paul or Paulism has anything to do with racism.

http://articles.chic...abraham-lincoln

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So if there remains doubt that these are "just attacks from the left" claiming "anyone who is right wing is racist" or that it is the mainstream media trying to stir up the pot then that reveals a greater lack of knowledge of current affairs especially within the Republican party where a war is being waged between neoconservatives and libertarians.

Sun Tzu's famous saying, paraphrased here, if you do not know yourself or your enemy you will lose every battle, has a familiar ring around those who believe these are attacks from the left instead of infighting within their own camp.

The latest battle beyond Hunter-gate (Rand Paul's shady staffer) is Liz Cheney's intention to run against Republican Senator Mike Enzi, Rand Paul's ally, in Wyoming.

Liz Cheney's Senate Bid Exposes GOP Schism

Liz Cheney's decision to jump into the Wyoming Senate race is threatening to bring an all out generational war within the Republican Party.

Senators are horrified that the former Second Daughter would challenge low key veteran conservative Sen. Mike Enzi, who immediately brought forward his announcement that he will seek a fourth term next year.

Enzi made it clear that he will not roll over with a stinging message to his new opponent. "I thought we were friends," he told reporters.

"She said that if I ran she wasn't going to run — obviously that wasn't correct."

But she gained no support from frequent Cruz ally, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. "When I heard Liz Cheney was running for Senate I wondered if she was running in her home state of Virginia," he said, according to Politico.

When Paul was asked about Cheney's potential run earlier this month, he told Politico, "I am a friend of Sen. Enzi and while we aren't exactly the same, I consider him a good conservative."

*snip*

http://www.newsmax.c...07/17/id/515541

Edited by The world needs you
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Shady links?

im getting kind of bored with the whole "anyone who is right wing is racist" thing. :sleepy:

That's his thing man. Don't be a buzzkill.

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Jack Hunter tried getting all his columns deleted at the Charleston City Paper.

His former editor declined and has now written about it. Busted...

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.

*snip*

http://www.charlesto...outhern-avenger

Jack Hunter, a top aide to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), allegedly tried to have dozens of his own columns removed from the Internet.

According to an editor at the Charleston City Paper, Hunter asked for his own columns to be deleted because they “no longer reflected his current worldview.” Editor Chris Haire said he would have considered removing a few questionable columns, but Hunter was seeking to have a “cowardly” amount of his writing removed.

“It was solely for appearances only,” Haire said. “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.”

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, reported earlier this month that Hunter was a neo-Confederate who celebrated John Wilkes Booth’s birthday. He believed the southern Confederacy was correct to secede from the United States. Hunter also had served as chairman of the League of the South, which the Anti-Defamation League has called “an implicitly racist group.”

The columns that Hunter had written at the Charleston City Paper compared Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler and said black people should apologize to white people for high crime rates, among other things.

*snip*

Rand Paul’s neo-Confederate staffer sought mass deletion of his own columns

Keep in mind it is Republicans and conservatives themselves who are outing Rand Paul and his staffer for who they are.

Edited by The world needs you
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Why Libertarian Kids, Not Drones, Scare McCain and Graham

Jennifer Rubin—WaPo’s token conservative—said it perfectly:

and sounded like the old man down the street screaming to the new kids on the block, “Get off my lawn!”

The real reason McCain and Lindsey Graham embarrassed themselves on the floor of Senate had nothing to do with what Rand Paul said. Rand Paul’s ideas terrify McCain, Graham, and most of the Republican establishment.

Those Troublesome Libertarian Kids

McCain and Graham sit at the top of the Republican hierarchy that thrives on protection money from crony capitalists. (See more on crony capitalism here.)

Young libertarians are the closest thing to conservatives coming out of the Millennial generation. If the GOP is to play a role in the 2016 election, it must attract every possible Millennial libertarian.

That puts establishment politicians like McCain and Graham in a precarious position between two competing interests: small government libertarians and big money crony capitalists.

The Conflict That Divides The GOP

These crony capitalists aren’t evil. Neither are the Republicans who enable them. They all believe in American exceptionalism. They invest money and time and energy to keep America great. They honestly believe that America’s strength depends on companies producing wealth. On that point, they’re right. Where they go wrong is cause and effect.

Republican crony capitalists believe that corporate profits are the source of American greatness. Libertarians and tea party conservatives believe that corporate profits are therewards of American greatness.

(Democrats, by the way, believe that government is the source of American greatness . . . if they believe in American greatness at all.)

Republican Crony Capitalism Can’t Survive On Its Own

Crony capitalists feel they must invest in politicians who will protect and promote their business interests. Those business interests, in turn, create jobs for people, donate funds to improve their communities, fund non-profit charities and schools, and guide politicians on good policy. These are noble activities that benefit all of society.

Over the years, though, these civic investments – increasingly through donations to candidates — have become less noble and more self-serving. With the rise of profit maximization and shareholder value thinking, corporations treat government and politicians like vendors.

Investing in good government should improve business conditions by promoting a stable economy in which free market capitalism flourishes. Crony companies, however, expect a measurable and direct return on investments for their companies and shareholders alone. The rest of the country be damned.

Link: http://hennessysview...uls-filibuster/

Here's the best part of the article:

What Libertarian Kids Want Threatens the Establishment

Libertarians realize that it was never supposed to be this way. More importantly, we’re pretty sure that America would never have become great had he started out like this. This was, after all, how Europe worked in the 18th century, as mercantilists pandered to nobles and royals who, in turn, granted mercantilists permission to do business, protected their businesses from competition, and collected handsome taxes from their profits. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was, in part, a criticism of European mercantilism. So was the Boston Tea Party.

A libertarian solution to the mess politicians and corporations have made involves untangling the knots that bind government and business and banking together. It means that each Congress reduce the loopholes in law and taxes meant to coerce business behavior, eliminate regulations designed to change behavior toward some ideal, and reduce tax rates on businesses.

But that solution threatens a lot of people’s jobs.

Republican establishmentarians rose to power through this quasi mercantile system. They didn’t run on the idea of getting government out of people’s ways. They ran on getting government to favor their constituents, sometimes by holding back someone else’s constituents. Freeing business to thrive or die on a level playing would eliminate the skills that lifted McCain and Graham (not to mention Reid, Pelosi, Durbin, McCaskill, and Obama) to the top. And they’ll fight like hell to keep their power.

The Democrats practice crony capitalism more effectively than Republicans. While their constituencies might be different, the process is the same. Taxes and borrowing raise money that government distributes to favored groups and companies. Taxes and regulations coerce people to trade with those favored companies and organizations.Public education and green energy are two prime examples of Democrats driving economic behavior to benefit friends.

Still, McCain and Graham know that libertarians pose a bigger threat to their power than Democrats. The two big parties play the same game. Libertarians don’t.

Edited by Kowalski
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Jack Hunter, the shady Ron Paul staffer, who was first outed by the conservative Alana Goodman, and who "cowardly" tried getting all his columns deleted at the Charleston City Paper according to his former editor, has now resigned. The Republic party infighting has claimed a casualty. Hunter is out.

Rand Paul aide resigns

The aide to Sen. Rand Paul with a pro-Confederate past has resigned from the Kentucky Republican's office.

Jack Hunter, Paul's director of new media, left his post following the controversy over his past writings and comments as the "Southern Avenger," the name he adopted as a radio talk-show personality. His departure was confirmed Monday by Moira Bagley, a spokeswoman for Paul.

*snip*

http://www.usatoday....esigns/2574379/

Edited by The world needs you
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