NC legislative staffer's short tenure ends after appearances on 'pro-white' show resurface

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 Thursday from a job at the North Carolina General Assembly.

Carlton Huffman started his job at the statehouse this month, but his job title wasn’t immediately available from the legislature Thursday. His online résumé on LinkedIn listed him as a policy advisor to Speaker of the House Tim Moore.

The departure comes a day after statehouse reporters received a lengthy, anonymous email detailing interviews and online posts Huffman made more than a decade ago expressing sympathy for white supremacist causes. WRAL wasn’t immediately able to verify the identity of the email sender, but Huffman himself confirmed key details to WRAL. Many of the interviews and posts detailed in the email remain online. Some of his online posts appeared under an assumed name.

“Those views that I expressed represent a time in my life that I am not proud of,” Huffman said in an interview Thursday. “Views that I have shifted from, that I disavow.”

Huffman, 38, has a large online footprint, including interviews some 13 years ago with “The Political Cesspool,” a radio program and website that describes itself as “pro-white” and advocates reviving “the white birthrate … to grow the percentage of whites in the world relative to other races.”

Huffman appeared several times on Cesspool, including an interview in 2010 during which he said it broke his heart to see the Confederate flag brought down from atop the South Carolina state capitol and that the forced integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962 began “a very long fall from grace.”

In that interview Huffman praised university students who “stood side-by-side with Southern patriots” to try and block integration and “change the character of the campus.” When the host says “we have got to coalesce as an ethnocentric group and fight together as one,” Huffman responds “absolutely.”

“We have to stand together,” he said in the interview. “And we also have to get involved with the political process.”

Huffman was also part of a segregationist group called the Council of Conservative Citizens. He said Thursday that he left after the group expressed openly antisemitic views. Huffman said that he “did not embrace white supremacy or bigotry” but that he was “too closely associated” with people who did.

“Those views, they were ugly,” he said. “I admit it, and I hate that the world is seeing that, and I’m ashamed of it. But I know in my heart that the person that I am today is not the person that is reflected in that email and those writings.”

The details of Huffman’s hiring weren’t immediately clear Thursday. Moore’s office declined to provide any information other than to say Huffman was no longer employed at the statehouse.

Huffman told WRAL that he resigned after the anonymous email brought his past to light, but he referred questions about his job title and hiring back to the legislature.

Huffman also worked at the General Assembly in 2011 as a legislative assistant. When the legislature moved to pardon former Gov. William Holden, who Democrats impeached in 1870 at least in part because he defended Black voters targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, Huffman distributed a letter asking lawmakers not to do so.

Huffman told WRAL News that this was the beginning of his change of heart, and his more recent online postings have a much different tone. His Twitter account describes him as a “Bro/Patriot,” and there are recent posts quoting civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass.

In his interview with WRAL, conducted via Zoom, Huffman stood in front of a picture of King that hangs in his home and said that King and the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, another civil rights icon, “changed this country for the better.”

Huffman’s LinkedIn résumé lists a number of jobs in Republican politics, including with the Republican National Committee, with former U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows' congressional campaign from 2011 to 2013, with current North Carolina State Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger's 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 said Thursday that employers at his political jobs over the past decade never questioned his past statements.