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.

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“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.

“Jack Hunter may have never railed against miscegenation, championed segregation, uttered a racial slur, or participated in a lynching, but it was my opinion then and it is my opinion now that Jack is the most common kind of racist, the one that doesn’t realize that he is one,” Haire wrote.

Paul has defended having Hunter as his director of new media by claiming Hunter’s no longer believes in his former neo-Confederate views. Paul said Hunter’s racist columns were just a youthful indiscretion, akin to smoking marijuana.