Counter-Currents
Waking Up from the American Dream
The Last Word on Jack Hunter
Gregory Hood
2,003 words
A broken man is no longer a man. Few things degrade the human spirit more than watching another person debase himself. To view the spectacle somehow degrades you, for even passive participation in something so wretched taints your very soul.
After all, a man is characterized by his actions, his beliefs, his deeds. A woman can be valued for her own sake, but masculinity is an accomplishment, not an inherent characteristic. To put it flippantly, the Big Lebowski asked if being a man meant, “Being prepared to do the right thing — whatever the cost?” To which The Dude responded — “Sure, that and a pair of testicles.”
Sadly, we have to look at a broken man who lacks both of those qualities — disgraced political columnist Jack Hunter.
Jack Hunter, the erstwhile Southern Avenger, was an important voice in the early years of the Alternative Right, a solider in the Buchanan Brigades, and an early popularizer of libertarian ideas during the initial breakout of Ron Paul. He became a key aide to Senator Rand Paul and a sort of ambassador to the libertarian grassroots, keeping the restive legions of liberty firmly behind Rand Paul and the strategy of “playing the game” in the Beltway.
However, an organized action by, shall we say, “the neoconservative tribe” and their liberal kin drove Jack Hunter from his job with the revelation that he once said sensible things about immigration, multiculturalism, and race. Hunter fell on his sword to protect Rand Paul from charges of “racism” in preparation for his 2016 presidential run. Paul is now opening the Republican Party’s “African-American Engagement Office” in Detroit, furthering the charge by some observers that American conservatism is not a political movement at all, but a form of performance art owing more to Dadaism than Edmund Burke.
Having thrown himself under the bus to save his chief, Hunter has now re-emerged to throw everyone who once supported him in the same place. In one of the most sickening displays of emasculation since Abu Ghraib, Hunter has written “Confessions of a Right Wing Shock Jock” for Politico, in which Hunter admits that he said “racist things,” but only to be part of the larger conservative movement.
In this, Hunter crosses a serious moral line. It is one thing to sacrifice yourself. It’s admirable to give your enemies what they want and to destroy your own reputation in order to safeguard a cause you believe in. You might even call it noble. But for Jack Hunter to cast aspersions on former friends and allies, to so obsequiously surrender, to make fools of every person who wrote in his defense shows that he values the opinions of people who hate him far more than people who took risks to defend him.
Hunter traces his career as a right wing “shock jock” who invented the persona of the “Southern Avenger” in order to win an audience. As part of this, he called for Spike Lee to be “whipped” for criticizing Mel Gibson’s film The Patriot, toasted John Wilkes Booth, and most dangerously, worried about “racial double standards” for white people and said a “non-white majority would simply cease to be America.”
Hunter assures us that his views have “changed dramatically.” Presumably, he now believes that the The Patriot, an embarrassingly PC movie which features Southern plantation owners that employ free black labor, is actually a “racist whitewash.” Abraham Lincoln apparently is a great friend of the South now. And most importantly, “racial double standards” for white people actually don’t exist, and America remains America, regardless of the actual people who make it up.
Therefore, Hunter engages in a full cringe. He denounces the “stupid and offensive” things he said. He bemoans “insensitive” remarks he once uttered about illegal immigrants and Muslims. Going further, he berates himself for having said “terrible things.” Without giving examples, he moans, “I disavow them.” Presumably, he is so desperate not to be called a racist, he will simply disavow whatever they tell him to.
But Hunter crosses a line into outright immorality with one charge: “Let’s be honest — my commentary wasn’t all that different from what more mainstream conservatives were saying — at the time and still today.” With this, we learn why Politico published him — it is an opportunity to play the familiar game of “linking” conservatism to white racism. More importantly, the effect of the piece is to perpetuate that linkage — not end it. The typical reader will take away that the Republican Party is racist, that Hunter was complicit in — and prospered because — of that racism and that the new anti-racist libertarians are challenging the racist Republican base.
Of course, the evidence Hunter gives is weak. Hunter writes, “Is our border-security problem really part of a La Raza takeover of the United States, as some have speculated? As I once speculated?” Well, probably not, since it’s more a cheap labor lobby takeover of the United States, assisted by Hunter’s left-libertarian useful idiots. However, there are plenty of chapters of the explicitly racialist Hispanic student group MEChA that receive millions of dollars in student funding on campuses around the country. They explicitly defend the idea of “La Raza” and dream of expelling every non-member of the “cosmic race” from their new ethnostate, but we know damn well that not a single libertarian student group will look up from whining about drugs and gay marriage to so much as criticize them.
Furthermore, we know “mainstream” politicians like Cruz Bustamante or Antonio Villaraigosa will never be held to account for their membership in such a group. It’s also true that Hispanics, empowered by racial collectivism, will largely govern the American Southwest if demographic trends continue and continue to use the state to transfer wealth away from whites towards their own racial group as part of racial socialism.
“Bring out the Gimp.”
“Is it necessary to call Barack Obama a food stamp President?” Well, under Barack Obama, the use of food stamps has soared, and even his new healthcare plan will increase usage. It’s certainly accurate to call him that if nothing else. It’s also true that Barack Obama’s majority is openly advertised as the triumph of government-dependent minorities over the historic American nation.
“Do we need to portray Obama as a secret Kenyan-Muslim-communist consumed by anti-colonial rage?” Well, actually, this is a veiled reference to the work of conservative minority mascot Dinesh D’Souza. His “anti-colonial” interpretation of Obama is an attempt at triangulation against the real truth that Obama’s polices are motivated by his contempt for the white race.
As Steve Sailer exhaustively documented in his reviews of Obama’s two autobiographies (which evidently only he has read), Obama’s policies are all American, in the kind of animus blacks feel for the legacy of Western Civilization, which, as Barack Obama himself put it, “just wasn’t mine.” The conservative movement and its non-white tokens may need to think of conspiracy theories to explain it, but the truth is far simpler. As Jack’s onetime hero Sam Francis said, they hate us “not because we are ‘Americans’ or ‘Christians’ or ‘conservatives’ or ‘liberals,’ but because we are white,” and created all the things they never could.
Hunter goes on to show that Ron Paul attacking government was a revelation for him, because it showed that “government” was the problem. Meanwhile, Hunter cries, “conservatives, including me, had spent years scapegoating Hispanic immigrants themselves.” Well, better not tell Ron Paul, who condemned Mexican flag waving “lawbreakers” who didn’t “assimilate culturally” and leeched off social services. He also called for more government resources to stop immigration. Paul also tended to take a strong stand on the issue when he was running for election, as did his Senator son.
Hunter concludes that conservatives need to pay more attention to the idea that racism is actually a problem and create a “broader, more diverse coalition of conservatives — including more minorities.” Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Republican base — the dreaded “Tea Party” that the media treats as a proto-Klan — was ready to give a former pizzaman the party’s presidential nomination on the grounds that he was black until his campaign collapsed amidst charges of repeated affairs. Lloyd Marcus’s minstrel show continues to draw at Tea Party events. Glenn Beck continues to host his television shows on the “black Founding Fathers” that the racist Democrats are evidently covering up. Hunter is attacking a straw man image of racist conservatives — because the existing conservative movement is already composed of weak men of straw, without strength, without principle, and without even the ability to stand on their own.
Most importantly, he follows the typical Beltway Conservative model of attacking his own supporters. There is no mention of why libertarianism should appeal to whites. There is no mention of sympathy for the white Southerners being dispossessed by the Muslims and Hispanics he claims to love. There’s certainly no acceptance of white racial collectivism in the same way that he claims libertarians should appeal to monolithic blocks of “blacks” and “Hispanics.”
The tragedy of Jack Hunter is he’s not some “new libertarian.” He’s just like the rest of them. He once showed potential as someone who could be a leader. But now, we know every word he’s ever going to say. “The drug war is racist!” “Government surveillance and the military is bad!” “The real problem with immigration is the government!” We’ve heard it all before. He’s not breaking from the Beltway Right — he’s fulfilling its role of training whites to be polite losers.
Even his mea culpa is formulaic. Hunter’s bold departure from conservatism simply recycles the same old conservative rhetoric. What, after all the clichés of “limited government” and “freedom,” distinguishes Jack Hunter from Sean Hannity, or Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck? The only difference is that Hunter combines these trite illusions with the rhetoric of a university sensitivity seminar, arguing that whites cannot saying anything “insensitive” to minority mascots. The resulting liberal clichés scattered throughout his rambling, lazily written piece sound like they were spat out by an especially hurried intern at Wonkette. The thought that minorities have interests of their own and oppose libertarianism because they support racial socialism and the state transfer of white resources to nonwhite populations seems to never have occurred to Jack Hunter.
And this is why he is still a racist. Once you concede the ground of “white privilege” and “racism,” you have to follow up with compensatory policies, otherwise you are just a patronizing asshole. If white racism is a real problem, why shouldn’t the state redistribute income, regulate how businesses are run, and supervise state governments to make sure white Southerners don’t get uppity? Unless he repeals his policy prescriptions, Jack Hunter still bears the mark of Cain.
Even in the comments section of the article, gleeful liberals are piling on, calling him a racist, saying he has not done enough, and linking him to the broader Republican Party. Even “disavowing” your beliefs and everything else that other people think is offensive gives you nothing. Jack Hunter has not expanded his audience, appealed to minorities, or gained a respectful hearing. He’s simply disgusted his former allies and inspired justified scorn in his ideological enemies. After all, how you can respect or listen to a man who was so easily broken because someone called him a name?
When all is said and done, after crafting hundreds of columns, laboring over each particular word, spending thousands of hours of lobbying, networking, schmoozing and boozing, after bending the knee, burning the pinch of incense to the Establishment’s gods, disavowing everything he once believed, and even after renouncing his very name — he will still be known as Jack Hunter, racist.
Beyond that, he will be forgotten. His confession has meant nothing.
Why Jack, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Rand Paul?
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19 comments
“Even in the comments section of the article, gleeful liberals are piling on, calling him a racist, saying he has not done enough, and linking him to the broader Republican Party. Even “disavowing” your beliefs and everything else that other people think is offensive gives you nothing.”
How pathetic. American political activity has taken on both the appearance and the substance of a really bad S&M scene.
Yes, that Southern Avenger mask now makes me think of “Bring out the gimp!”
If a turd had arms, how hard would he polish himself?
The ending paraphrase is perfection. “Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales?”
Okay, somebody send Jack a copy of this article now.
Good thought. You Washington insiders who read this and who have the Gimp in your address book: send him a link.
I expect that at some point someone is going to do a fascinating doctoral thesis on the psychology behind self-transformations like this. Your analysis goes in that direction. In the end though, it all comes down to a desperate striving for social acceptance and money, not that this guy will get either. I do wonder though about the cowardly reaction to behind called a name. Are whites that weak today? Is that all it takes to cripple someone?
And again a republican calls for more diversity in the RP, more outreaches to blacks and browns. I.e. trading off 5 or 10 or 15 million white conservative votes which really still could win a national election, i.e. the real base – or one-time base – of the RP who will not vote for a McCain or a Romney or a Christie, for perhaps a few thousand or a few hundred black and brown votes who WILL vote for them, thus ensuring more defeats, more shifts to the left, more surrender, more demoralization – and calls for still more pandering to blacks and browns.
A very interesting piece. This needs to go into the next annual NANR compendium.
It is increasingly obvious that the Republican party is simply designed to fail. It is there to prevent white interests from being represented, ever, until the white demographic clock runs out and we have no more political potential within the democractic system. Then the only choice for the white minority will be to destroy the system or be destroyed by it. The sooner that whites realize that this is what is in store for us, the sooner we will work to destroy the system, and the greater our numbers — that is to say, the sooner we start — the greater the chance we will succeed.
Is there really anyone who does not know the Republicans are done for? American conservatism is now just the negotiated surrender of White people. You will see them become more slavish to the non-whites than the Democrats ever were – if that can be imagined.
With pathetic ass-kissing sellouts like him, it’s really hard to wonder why the GOP is losing. Real head scratcher there, isn’t it? (Sarcasm off)
Gregory Hood in blockquote:
He will also – the example of the late Dr. Sam Francis comes to mind – never be accepted by those to whom he “burns the pinch of incense on the altar,” the people who held him in low esteem then, and lower esteem, now.
I have seen many cases of people – and I am not Jack Hunter among them – who do not get the reaction they want for their efforts, in a timely enough manner, and decide to go The Opposition. While, for the most part, Conservatives are dangerously inept, their Opposition is masterful in their ability to organize, define problems to their satisfaction, and shape solutions, to their satisfaction, and at our expense.
This is why it is so important to contribute to counter-currents, each and every month, without fail. The best form of approval, and support, is financial. Without it, nothing can happen. With it, and the Ideas pulled forward by counter-currents, we can change the world, or, at least, the part of it that matters.
Each and every month, without fail.
Adding the omission in my response:
I have seen many cases of people – and I am not PLACING Jack Hunter among them – who do not get the reaction they want for their efforts, in a timely enough manner, and decide to go The Opposition. While, for the most part, Conservatives are dangerously inept, TO THE POINT TEHY SEEM MORE A USEFUL SYNTHETIC OPPOSITION THAN A REAL COUNTERPOINT TO THEIR OPPOSITION, WHICH is masterful in their ability to organize, define problems to their satisfaction, and shape solutions, to their satisfaction, and at our expense.
The correct answer is neither (a) nor (b). It is a (c) that neither side dares mention, and that is a Third Way that works to build a new nation where we can live in peace, and none may make afraid.
Again, this calls for regular contributions to counter-currents, each and every month. All of us who read this can afford twenty dollars a month; some, much more.
I have always found it quite exasperating to note that so many people claim to wish to fight the Fall of Civilization, and meet our opposition on the field of battle (all done, of course, in an “apple pie, strictly legal, sort of way’ HT: Jim Giles).
Yet, asking them to do the simplest and easiest of actual deeds regularly – Hell, anonymously! – like sending twenty dollars a month to counter-currents – is simply beyond their capacities.
Fantastic article!
The skalds will not speak well of Mr. Hunter. In fact, they will not speak his name at all except as a foil to the brave deeds of men who stand boldly at the prow and challenge their enemies to eat cold steel.
He should have stood by what he said & resigned from the Rand Paul campaign. But now he has alienated himself from his own people in order to kowtow to the anti-White Cultural Marxists. He might as well move to NY or LA; Dixie does not need turncoats like Mr Hunter.
All he cares about is money and power, he doesn’t give a shit about the future, what exactly is he conserving is there anything conservative about him.
The vast majority of people that work in elite institutions such like media, academia, finance and bureaucracy are heavily depended on their monthly salary and it is often not high and in many cases are often slave wage. They all know that if they stick their head out – they will be punished by not get promoted, get that important tenure or even get fired. It is difficult for a 35 year old college teacher with a second child on the way to come out in defense of conservative causes. If he did he would more than likely not get his tenure and risk his entire career. People whom could come out, such as tenured professors will abstain because they know that even if they will be able to pay their bills they may not be able to get their work published and they end up being an outcast on campus.
For most people it is just about paying their bills and not to get fired from their job. For people that want to make a career of themselves in the conservative establishment they have to create a name for themselves. The competiveness is harsh and without connections you will end up being on the outside. To get in you need a way and one way is to play slightly on the right of the conservative establishment but because so many play this game you will find difficult to get in. Hunter likely understood that he had to get through the backdoor which is of course the libertarian and paleoconservative Tea Party movement that is much easier to break into for an outsider. Just get a blog running, call yourself a paleoconservative and write smart populist and libertarian posts and do some unpaid radio gigs. Any semi-intelligent college educated reasonable good writer that has the ability to take what is written in the alternative right and then transform it into mainstream could do it. Hunter did so and he did it well. He made a name for himself and was soon introduced to the libertarian and paleoconservative mainstream and after some time he was offered a job. This was his ticket to the establishment and the big money as an overpaid commentator on Fox channel, book contracts and a job at one of the many think tanks in Washington.
The elites do not want people like Jack Hunter around. They have already enough dissidents around and they do not need some new guy coming that previously worked in construction, wrote a popular populist blog and did some unpaid political stand up comedy at a small radio channel. The elites make celebrities of sweet interns from upper middle class Jewish-Catholic New York families with a J.D from Harvard and their heads full of feminism, liberalism and multiculturalism. If the elites hire a republican it is some like Megyn Kelly – that has everything associated to that liberal sweet overachiever but claim to be republican.
If Jack Hunter had kept inside mainstream within the libertarian and weak paleoconservative movement he would stayed on the outside and would continue to hold a working class job with dreams of a career in politics and journalism. When the mainstream conservative (neoconservative) establishment saw him coming they crushed him. He was gone the same day he stepped into his office in Washington. So what does he do? Well – he tries to get back inside but few want to let him back in and the libertarians nor the neoconservatives do not gain anything to let him in. At least he is allowed to make a few pennies as freelance columnist.
A summary: Hunter met a guy in a bar that worked at a local radio channel. He thought that it would help him with his career if he did some free jobs for that local radio channel. He did well and began to blog and became famous and after awhile began to write popular columns for fringe but still respectable libertarian and paleoconservative wing of the Republican inc. He wrote a book for Rand Paul and was hired as a senior Senator aid – and his passed resurfaced and he lost everything. Jack Hunter is just a guy that wanted to make a living of his writing and tried to get in the backdoor and it backfired.
What does that say us? Once upon a time in United States (it is the same in Europe) you could get into the establishment with some hard-right or hard-left political thought but those days are gone. Jack Hunter is just the latest evidence that if you are not breed for the elites you will not get in – regardless how hard you try.
You might understand I am tired of fighting against the tidal wave of ignorance. It is a waste of time and energy. Those worth saving can save themselves. So let them. The rest deserves to die anyhow. There is no use trying to save them.
I will step aside, climb that hill and wait there whilst the tidal wave below destroys this “civilisation” and everybody in its way. – Varg Vikernes
I guess he’ll be too busy getting stoned to burn any more churches.
I think you are right but Jack Hunter and many other did it the wrong way. If you want to get into the establishment you should travel the liberal path instead. It is a much less bumpy road and there are tons of tons of populist liberal thought you can sell. There are a lot of things written at Counter-Currents and Occidental Observer that would be quite popular among liberals so long you do not get into race. When I wrote my MA-thesis I wanted to write about the destructive effect of multiculturalism on western society but I did not want to end up as one of these radical right students. What I did was to write my thesis with a shimmer of my heavy concern of institutionalized racism in the greater society. My thesis was a great argument against multiculturalism but I also balanced it with (smart) rants about white racism.
I reasoned like this: Immigrants from the third world are overrepresented in crime partly because of low IQ. The lower IQ stems from the lack of material and academic resources in a social unequal society. Then I did some heavy references to liberal researchers. But get this: It does not matter if non-white immigrants are overrepresented because of poverty or low biological or socially nurtured IQ. They are still overrepresented in crime so they end up creating a destructive effect on western societies. I made plenty of controversial statements like that but I explained them with all the liberal tools available.
I thought my professors would notice and fail me but they did not. They gave me an A and hoped I would apply for a doctorate program. It is all about presentation. The core is: Get the message out that non-white minorities from the third world is overrepresented in crime. The elites want to hide these truths and if they are forced to acknowledge these truths they use all liberal explanations in the book to smooth things over. Remember, most people do not even know that non-whites are overrepresented in crime. This is where you have to start. At the present situation in the western civilization, such message is enough. If you from the very beginning start to write about racial differences in IQ as explanation of social class and crime you are toast.
Jason Richwine did not get it – he thought he would get away with it as researchers did before him, like the authors of the Bell Curve did in the past. Richwine did understand that you should talk about “skill” and not “IQ” because the first is less controversial but he foolishly wrote his intentions down in his thesis. I never mentioned my intentions in any of my thesis. If I did tell people about my political views, which is not white nationalist, though conservative enough including the fact that my reading habits consist of books and blogs published by the radical left and right – at my current job I would much likely get fired. I write all kind of semi-controversial internal reports about a varied of subjects– though they are never published outside “the house”. The key is “get the obvious facts out”, hide it in liberalist nonsense and never ever tell your professors or superiors about your intentions. I did it when I was in school and continue doing the same thing at my current employer when I get the opportunity to write about a “sensitive subject”. Did I reproduce liberalism and socialism in my MA-thesis? Did I advocate non-racial explanations? Yes, I did both and I did it much better than most liberals. The point is that I was able to write about the destructive parts of non-white immigration and could push it to the absolute limit – without getting caught.
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