“What will you do, Mr. & Mrs. White Southerner. . . ?”
Gary Adams is sorry.
It seems that on Tuesday someone posted a nasty little screed over at SHPG urging white southerners to band together against the “blacks, Hispanics, Jews, etc.” who are set on “‘get[ing] even’ with the White Devils.” It was up for a couple of hours before it was removed and the person who posted it got booted from group’s membership. Gary assumed responsibility for the post, and apologized for it. And I am certain that he is sincere about that.
Nonetheless, Gary left out one really important fact about that post. It wasn’t some random new member who posted those paragraphs, but arguably the most prominent southern nationalist today, League of the South President J. Michael Hill:
I know Gary and other folks at SHPG are embarrassed by this, but they should also be embarrassed that some of their members obviously agree with Hill. If Gary and the rest of the leadership at SHPG were serious about calling out such vile people, they would do so by name. Hill’s post is only surprising for its location; his views, and the those of the League of the South, have been very clear for a while now. Whether they saw that particular posting or not, I’m sure nearly everyone on SHPG knows who Hill (right) and his group are; why protect them by giving them anonymity in their bad behavior? Is it because many prominent members at SHPG — John Stones, Robert Mestas, Valerie Protopapas, Carl Roden, Susan Frise Hathaway, David Tatum, Jimmy Shirley and Karen Cooper — are (as of this writing) social network friends of Hill’s?
While you’re at it, Gary, you might want to ask yourself why a smart, calculating man like Hill would think his message would have a receptive audience at SHPG — which, for at least some folks, it absolutely did.
I know that Gary and the other folks at SHPG won’t ask those questions. But one can hope.
If Confederate Heritage™ means covering up for reprehensible characters like Michael Hill, it damn well deserves to whither and die.
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Plagiarism is the Sincerest Form of Flattery
A couple of years ago, I worked up a long comment over at Kevin’s place about the prevalence of slave-holding in the Confederate states. I later took that initial comment and expanded it into a longer piece that was published both on this blog and as a guest post on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog at The Atlantic.
Gary Adams (right), self-styled “Chief Executive Officer” of the SHPG, has repeatedly lifted large segments of my posts on that subject and posted them, without attribution, to that Facebook group. (I know Gary saw my original comment of at Kevin’s, because he posted his own long comment in the same thread.) He’s done this at least twice previously. Today, he’s put up a nearly 800-word Facebook posting that’s lifted verbatim from this blog.
There’s not a single original word in it. About half of it is a long excerpt from Joe Glatthaar’s magnificent General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse, but neither of us is credited as the original authors. Indeed, Gary actually appended his own name at the bottom of the piece.
I realize that, in the grand scheme of the universe, this doesn’t matter for much of anything. And I’m glad Gary thinks enough of my work (and Glatthaar’s) to appropriate it and claim it as his own. But still, it grates, coming from someone who claims the role of “Chief Executive Officer” of a group that wraps itself in self-righteousness and uses words like “honor” and “truth” and “integrity” as cudgels against those with whom they disagree.
So what’s the correct response here, y’all?
Update, July 3: Gary responds with a heaping helping of word salad here. This is, if anything, even less comprehensible than his attempt at refuting Kevin’s published research on Silas Chandler. The main takeaways here seem to be that (1) neither Gary nor his friends are willing to acknowledge the original complaint, and (2) they really, really hate Corey Meyer.
Same as it ever was.
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Image: “Me admiring Grant’s Bust” from Gary Adams’ Facebook page.
Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
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