Staffer resigns after white supremacist comments surface, House speaker’s office says
A policy adviser at the North Carolina General Assembly resigned Thursday after an anonymous tipster sent records to reporters of the staffer’s appearances on a “pro-white” radio show.
House Speaker Tim Moore’s office said Carlton Huffman was hired as an investigative analyst for the legislature’s commission on governmental operations less than one month ago. Moore’s office said Huffman “no longer works at the General Assembly” after staff learned Thursday of his past activity with The Political Cesspool Radio Program, a far-right talk show that touts an “unapologetically pro-White viewpoint.”
The commission is co-chaired by Moore, a Cleveland County Republican, and Senate leader Phil Berger, a Rockingham County Republican.
The Political Cesspool says in a mission statement on its website that it hopes “to revive the White birthrate above replacement level fertility and beyond to grow the percentage of Whites in the world relative to other races.”
Huffman was a contributing author and featured guest on The Political Cesspool several times throughout the 2010s. In a 2015 article on the program’s website, he praised Confederate soldiers and the South’s “resistance to change” despite “over 150 years of attempted cultural genocide.”
In a radio interview on The Political Cesspool, Huffman lamented forced integration at the University of Mississippi in 1962, which he said began “a very long fall from grace.”
Huffman confirmed to The News & Observer and WRAL, which first reported his departure, that he was part of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a segregationist organization the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as “a crudely white supremacist group.” It is “a modern reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South,” the SPLC website says.
Huffman told The N&O Thursday evening that he “deeply regretted the ugly person I was.”
“I resigned from (the Council of Conservative Citizens) because of the antisemitic things they started to say,” Huffman said.
When asked if the group’s other positions had bothered him, Huffman said, “I did not know that they were white supremacists, and learning that started a lot of introspection that started me on a different path.”
“It’s not who I am now, but actions have consequences,” he added.
Moore’s office said neither he nor staff knew about Huffman’s background until Thursday, and the information resulted in a conversation that led to his resignation.
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