Source: WRAL, NC Policy Watch
An anonymous email sent to the media in late January highlighting a General Assembly staffer’s past racist views and “pro-white” internet posts resulted in the resignation of one of Speaker Tim Moore’s employees, according to WRAL.
Carlton Huffman, “a Republican operative with a long résumé in North Carolina politics, and a history of pro-Confederacy advocacy and appearances on a ‘pro-white’ radio show,” resigned the following day from his job as a policy advisor to Moore, WRAL reported.
The email, according to WRAL, detailed interviews and online posts Huffman made more than 10 years ago where he expressed sympathy for white supremacist causes. It’s unknown who sent the email, but Huffman confirmed the details to the television station.
“Those views that I expressed represent a time in my life that I am not proud of,” Huffman said in an interview. “Views that I have shifted from, that I disavow.”
Huffman’s online footprint includes interviews 13 years ago with “The Political Cesspool,” a website and radio show that calls itself “pro-white” and advocates restoration of “the white birthrate … to grow the percentage of whites in the world relative to other races.”
Huffman, WRAL reported, appeared multiple times on Cesspool, including a 2010 interview where he said it broke his heart to see the Confederate flag taken down from the top of the South Carolina state capitol. In the same interview, Huffman also praised University of Mississippi students who, in 1962, fought to stop the integration of the college, saying those students “stood side-by-side with Southern patriots” and called the integration an attempt to “change the character of the campus.”
NC Policy Watch reported that on one episode of Cesspool, he discussed “cultural genocide in the South.” In another about European politics, Huffman praised Dutch politician Geert Wilder as a “firebrand critic of Islam” who “stands up for our European people.” He also celebrated the far-right British National Party, which wants to end all immigration into Britain, for “standing up for the white Europeans left in Great Britain.”
Speaker Moore’s former employee was also part of a segregationist group called the Council of Conservative Citizens. While Huffman is clearly OK with racism, he apparently draws the line at antisemitism – he told WRAL he left the segregationist group after members expressed openly antisemitic views.
Huffman told WRAL, “those views…were ugly” and that he’s “ashamed” of them.
Moore’s office did not provide WRAL with any information on their hiring process that either missed Huffman’s long history of racist postings or simply chose to ignore them. They also failed to provide any statement on the hiring or resignation other than to confirm that he was no longer employed at the legislature.
This wasn’t Huffman’s first stint at the General Assembly, according to WRAL. He was employed as a legislative assistant in 2011 and is now known to be the person who anonymously gave lawmakers a letter asking them not to pardon former Gov. William Holden, who was impeached in 1870 because he defended Black voters targeted by the Ku Klux Klan.
Huffman called Holden “corrupt” and broke Senate rules by anonymously leaving the letter on senators’ desks. He resigned from his job with Republican Rep. Jonathan Jordan not long after that, NC Policy Watch reported.
In a brief interview, Moore told NC Policy Watch he did not remember the anonymous letter from 2011 and knew nothing about Huffman’s radio interviews or writings.
According to Huffman, the anonymous letter incident was the beginning of his change of heart from being a racist to becoming a self-described “Bro/Patriot” who loves Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass and the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis.
Huffman’s LinkedIn shows a long list of former jobs he held in Republican politics, including jobs with the Republican National Committee, with former U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows’s congressional campaign from 2011 to 2013, with current North Carolina State Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr.’s failed congressional campaign in 2014, as a field coordinator with the North Carolina Republican Party, six years with the Republican Party of Wisconsin and a job as Herschel Walker’s regional field director in last year’s Georgia U.S. Senate campaign.
Huffman told WRAL that none of his previous employers ever questioned him about any of his racist statements or actions.
