Connie Chastain’s War on Women … And Guess Who Supports Her?

It’s not been a good week for Confederate heritage advocates. They are unhappy about what’s happened at the University of Mississippi, where it appears that advocates of flying a Confederate flag have had a rough time telling the truth as they suffer setback after setback. Now comes news that the favorite candidate of most Confederate heritage advocates, Republican nominee Donald J. Trump, is in serious trouble because of his crass and lewd remarks (and that’s kind) anout women, which most observers believe includes an endorsement of sexual assault. No word yet from Virginia Whine Country, which has been very protective of candidate Trump, about whether protests against sexual assault are simply new examples of political correctness, the target of many a mindless post that are little more than a clipping service of the alt-right. We await efforts to find a Gordon Wood quote that can be twisted in suppport of that blogger’s position.

Without a doubt, however, one need only look at what Virginia Flaggers spokesperson and webmaster Connie Chastain says about Trump to understand that some corners of Confederate heritage advocacy are also busily engaged in conducting a war on women. Like Trump, Chastain favors criminalizing the decision of women to have abortions:

Even Trump has thought better of this, but Chastain has not.

And, just like our friend at Virginia Whine Country, Chastain decides it’s all the fault of the left and the media:

Note the identity of the single retweeter. Note also that I guess that one can conclude that Trump’s past is irrelevant, but not so Clinton’s past … or that non-leftists don’t care about treating women with respect.

Of course, one remembers that Chastain was also a big fan of claiming that women often made false claims about being raped (unless the person being accused was Bill Clinton, I guess). This was a theme of two of her underwhelmingly successful novels. Endorsing sexual assault as a way to approach women is okay in Chastain’s mind, because we can set it aside as “locker room talk”; that such talk, if put into action, results in rape seems irrelevant (will it elicit more squawking  from her about false rape accusations?).

It’s a small step from here to the reasoning of sexual predators that women “really want it” and that “no” means “try harder.”

After all, just saying one’s sorry is good enough.

Note who retweeted both of these as well.

After all, Chastain wants Trump to whack people, including Clinton:

Funny that she chose that means of expression.

Mind you, Chastain thinks something’s wrong with women (“cackling hens”?) who protest such treatment:

Moreover, “real women” wouldn’t get upset:

That’s right … this controversy about advocating sexual assault is simply “nothing,” and the best proof comes from the sales of a book that is not Chastain’s (jealous, Chastain?). Let’s mock the outrage over such behavior as nothing more than make-pretend about “women’s delicate widdle feelings.”

What else could you expect from someone who seems obsessed about false rape accusations? So … anger over language advocating sexual assault is nothing more than an act to placate “women’s delicate widdle feelings”? Really?

(Yes … Chastain’s gone the fake-name route in crafting an alternative identity of “Polly Graff,” although it did not take her long to drop the pretense that it was her.)

We await Chastain’s efforts to identify which men engage in such talk. As her previous interaction has been with Republican politicians, Confederate heritage apologists, and false rape accusation protesters, we can’t wait to hear about her experiences about what is said in these locker rooms.

But don’t mistake Chastain for a feminist …

Note the wording: it’s not “pseudo-feministic women,” but “feministic pseudo-women.” Real women aren’t feminists: feminists are “pseudo-women.” And no, folks, that’s not a mistake … she says “pseudo-women” twice.

We await the usual retort from Virginia Whine Country that protesting lewd talk and endorsements of sexual assault are nothing more than exercises in political correctness from a leftist academic who’s attacking a political candidate … because, apparently, these things should not be attacked. They are nothing more than locker room talk, as if that’s an acceptable excuse.

Finally, note who likes (and retweets) Chastain’s Twitter activity on behalf of sexual predators … Susan Hathaway. The fact is that Hathaway and her followers have politicized their movement in explicit ways by endoring Trump, not just as individuals, but as an organization:

Oh, well.

The heritage of hate continues. If anything, it’s grown, because it now includes people who protest sexual assault and the victimization of women not named Susan Hathaway.

 

Oh, My … Flagging for The Donald?

Most fair-minded people would agree that Hillary Clinton was wrong when she claimed that half of Donald J. Trump’s supporters were “a basket of deplorables.” That claim painted with too broad a brush that tarred too many people.

That said, it is true that some of Trump’s supporters are truly deplorable, especially those who have been associated with what one Pensacola blogger claimed was the future of Confederate heritage … the Virginia Flaggers.

Susan Hathaway supports Trump. Connie Chastain supports Trump. Matthew Heimbach, once a Flagger darling, has actually attacked protesters at a Trump rally.

Chastain’s political views, indeed, appear to be straight out of the Trump playbook.

We’ve seen Confederate flags at Trump rallies, which does little to promote the notion that either the Trump campaign or Confederate heritage is especially tolerant. For Trump supporters outside “the basket,” it’s an unfortunate association.

And then came Friday’s revelation of a video, some eleven years old, of Trump and television program host Billy Bush making crude and lewd comments about women.

Guess who came out swinging for Trump? That’s right, Connie Chastain. Given her obsession with the notion of false rape accusations … a theme that has shaped several of her works of fiction … one might well expect that she would shrug off Trump’s crass talk that smacked of sexual assault and rape. And so she did (check the comments section … where Chastain posts under her own name as well as the name “Polly Graff”).

So much for southern womanhood. We recall that Susan Hathaway once said that Chastain did her “heavy hitting.” Now we have a better idea of what that means.

 

 

A Blast From The Past

As the Virginia Flaggers celebrate the third anniversary of one of the most amusing days ever in Confederate heritage, the organization decided to take us down memory lane as follows:

You just don’t see that any more.

Do Flaggers Wear Hoods? Susan Hathaway and Her Klan-Loving Friend

One of the most interesting aspects of writing about Confederate heritage advocates, especially the Virginia Flaggers, is highlighting the associations of various Flaggers with white supremacists, white nationalists, and the like. Mind you, usually these associations are brought to our attention by the Flaggers themselves in social media or elsewhere. Thus it was the Flaggers themselves who hailed Matthew Heimbach as a fellow Flagger and embraced him in one of their marches (even Connie Chastain used one image in preparing a dust cover of yet another never-to-be-published book, as you can see here):

Tripp Lewis and Matthew Heimbach featured in a Connie Chastain design.

Even Chastain admits Heimbach’s a Flagger. Otherwise she’d never have prepared this design.

But Heimbach isn’t the only white supremacist/white nationalist embraced by Susan Hathaway. Nor does she protest when her writings turn up in anti-Semitic newsletters.

To highlight these association brings all sorts of protests from Flagger defenders and apologists, who have become very inventive if not very persuasive in their responses/excuses.

However, we did not take the pictures. We did not march alongside these people. We did not thank them on social media. We did not allow Flagger writings to appear in bigoted or racist literature.

All of our evidence has been manufactured by the Flaggers themselves as they seek to publicize what they do … and no one is more willing to do that than Susan Frise Hathaway.

So it should come as no surprise to anyone that more Flagger-provided evidence has surfaced linking Susan Hathaway to yet another white supremacist, one with a fondness for the Ku Klux Klan … Steven Monk.

Here are some images Mr. Monk shared on a social media group page:

Sometimes Mr. Monk wears gray. Sometimes he wears black:

Over at Restoring the Honor there’s a rather full set of images illustrating Mr. Monk’s beliefs. Among the images, we come across the following …

Oh, yes … don’t forget Billy Bearden. He’s there, too.

So we see Susan Hathaway, celebrating the Confederacy atop Stone Mountain with a fellow who seems rather fond of white supremacy, to the point that he doesn’t mind using a Klan hood as his profile picture (sortta destroys the rationale for the hood, right?).

It’s not the first time Hathaway and Monk have been pictured as cut from the same cloth … why, the link was made years ago, according to someone who remarked upon Hathaway’s decision to take up flagging, some five years ago this month:

Based upon my own experiences, and watching, talking, and reading of your own activities – you are cut from the same cloth as such Flagger legends as Lijah Coleman, Grayson Jennings, Clint Lacy, HK, Ken Waters, Steven Monk, Rodney Waller and Patricia Godwin.

Oh, and guess who else likes Steven Monk? Why, Connie Chastain!

You’ll find other Flaggers and Confederate heritage celebrities also like Mr. Monk.

But Susan Frise Hathaway likes him a lot.

So much for the notion that this was merely an accident or the ill-timed click of a camera shutter.

The evidence linking the Virginia Flaggers to white supremacists is rather large enough as it is … but it keeps on growing. So please don’t tell me it’s heritage, not hate, because it’s all too clearly a heritage of hate, and Susan Hathaway’s associations remind us of that every day.

More Chaos for Confederate Heritage Advocates

It’s not been a good two weeks for Confederate heritage advocates. They’ve suffered setbacks at Vanderbilt University, the University of Texas, and with the University of Mississippi marching band. They seem helpless to stop the rising tide of opposition to their position, and the best they can do to gain ground is to promise to fly more flags throughout the South.

But it’s the self-inflicted wounds that are just as likely to leave an enduring mark. There’s still fallout from Tripp Lewis’s attack on Karen Cooper. As detailed on Restoring the Honor, while many advocates of Confederate heritage sided with Cooper and denounced Lewis, others, led by Gary Adams of the Southern Heritage Preservation Group, called on Cooper to silence herself instead of denouncing Lewis.

Why, indeed?

More Trouble in Flaggerland: Tripp Lewis Versus Karen Cooper

Over in Virginia Whine Country there’s trouble east of the Shenandoah Valley as well … and it’s not unexpected. After all, it’s been a contentious election year, and the nastiness of the campaign is reflected in the rather coarse contempt people display for each other on social media.

A case in point: a recent Facebook exchange between Virginia Flagger headliners Tripp Lewis and Karen Cooper. Lewis seeks attention far more than does Cooper, although Cooper’s not adverse to sharing her views with the media. We have no record of Cooper being arrested for Flagger-related activities: this is not the case with Lewis. Nor do we have any record that Cooper has been a part of any Flagger activities that have backfired: this is not the case with Lewis. Finally, we have no record of Cooper celebrating white nationalists as “good guys”: this is not the case with Lewis. But, as the following exchange suggests, those are not the only differences …

The Virginia Flaggers’ Next Target: Alexandria?

By now we all know that the Virginia Flaggers, perhaps the most notorious Confederate heritage group in existence (and certainly among the most amusing as well as most visible), is dedicated to restoring the honor by returning the flags. However, to date they have not made much of an impact in the Old Dominion in the northern part of the state. At present the northernmost Flagger triumph east of the Blue Ridge Mountains is at Stafford, along I-95 north of Fredericksburg.

Now comes word that the folks in Alexandria, Virginia, are also taking steps to diminish the city’s commemoration of the Confederacy. Already the city’s taken action to cease flying Confederate flags on public property. Now up for debate is a proposal to cease calling US Route 1 “Jefferson Davis Highway.” Left untouched is a statute honoring the service of Confederate veterans that remains an iconic part of the city.

Vanderbilt’s Choice

This past week Vanderbilt University announced that it would comply with a 2005 judicial decision and repay the United Daughters of the Confederacy the $50,000 (with interest) given by the UDC to Peabody College in 1935 to help build and name a residence hall “Confederate Memorial Hall” (Vanderbilt acquired the college and the building in 1979). In exchange, the word “Confederate” would disappear from the building (it’s been known informally as simply “Alumni Memorial Hall,” or some variation thereof, for some time). Donors provided the $1.2 million needed to complete the transaction.

According to Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos, “Many generations of students, faculty and staff have struggled with, argued about and debated with vigor this hall….  Our debates and discussions have consistently returned over these many years to the same core question: Can we continue to strive for that diverse and inclusive community where we educate the leaders that our communities, nation and world so desperately need, with this hall as so created? My view, like that of so many in the past, and so many in our present, is that we cannot.”

Silly Season is Underway

One of the amusements of blogging is the knowledge that some people who really don’t like you are among the most faithful readers of your blog. You learn this when you see that there is a surge of incoming traffic from a blog that you may not hold in high regard, and a check of the link leads you to another elaborate denunciation of your blog for its open partisanship, commitment to political correctness, or whatever tends to offend these overly-sensitive folk who ventured forth from their intellectual and emotional safe space to see what other people were saying. Indeed, some blogs probably would not exist or have even smaller audiences than they currently enjoy were it not for this desire to draw attention to themselves in front of their fan base.

(Note: that’s one reason I don’t link to these blogs. Let them earn their own hits. I know they’ll come here anyway.)

We can expect more of this cross-blog commentary as we enter the heart of the presidential election contest. Politicians love to draw upon historical images and comparisons to make their points, and every presidential election offers case studies in the use and misuse of history, the state of historical memory, and the propensity of some people who claim to be historians to render their fledgling efforts at historical understanding primarily through the lens of political partisanship.

Take a recent whiny complaint from someone whose obsession with left-wing academics (a redundancy in his mind) and political correctness overwhelms what might be considered useful observation and information. Apparently we now know that the political season is upon us because of a surge in posts attacking Republicans, and only Republicans: “They prove it by only doing this type of thing to Republican candidates. And the virtue-signalling is extremely nauseating.”

I guess I struck a nerve.

We note that this protest appeared just a week after a post appeared declaring “Why Progressives Love Abraham Lincoln & Why Conservatives Don’t Undertsand Him.” I’ve retained the original spelling. Oh, no politics here, right? That’s surrounded by three more posts, two reflecting this blogger’s obsession with political correctness and another about protesters bearing Soviet flags outside the Democratic National Convention, something, the blogger asserts, should warm the hearts of “moral reformer” historians.

Now that we’ve established which blog is primarily an exercise in political commentary, we can test its claims for historical accuracy. The blogger appears to be upset that comments to various entries here that talk about how politicians use (and misuse) history are simply political commentary (and thus that the posts to which these comments allude were framed to elicit such commentary, betraying the nefarious motives of the blogger). One need only to examine the comments section of the blog in question to realize that this is just another case of the pot calling the kettle black (given the propensities of some of the commenters over there, “black” will drive them nuts). What people say is what people say. But to see in others what one does note recognize in oneself is telling.

But does this blog restrict itself to commenting on Republican candidates’ misuse of history? The record suggests otherwise. This blog commented on Hillary Clinton’s flawed commentaries on Reconstruction—twice. Nor would it be true the say that we don’t follow up on stories concerning Republicans who take positions where it’s assumed that we agree with them. This blog also followed up on leads that suggested that an advocate of removing the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina state house may have misstated the facts when she claimed to be descended from Confederate president Jefferson Davis (suffice it to say that the post in question received substantial traffic with the politician in question ran for office and lost).

In short, these are issues of historical accuracy, not political correctness. We conclude that either the critic is incompetent or dishonest. Which is the case, and why that’s the case, we leave to others to decide.

We do notice, however, that while the critic is loud about the supposed faults of others, we have yet to see any commentary on the critic’s blog about the historical shortcomings of his heroes. I bet you didn’t know that there were twelve articles in the Constitution, although Donald Trump (another not-so-well-informed foe of political correctness) says he will defend Article Twelve. And we are surprised that a man who wants to share with us how well a certain Confederate general treated his slaves had nothing to say when Bill O’Reilly asserted that the slaves who helped build the White House were treated rather well. But does our critic note such lapses? No. He’s practicing his own form of political correctness, I guess.

In short, someone who complains that certain blogs are partisan forums without admitting that his blog is indeed slanted for political and philosophical reasons is something of a hypocrite who lacks integrity. But did we really expect anything else?

Talk about “virtue-signalling.”

We admit, however, that we are amused to hear that this blog and other blogs are “nauseating” for this poor critic. We suggest that the best remedy for this particular reaction is to cease reading such blogs. Exercise some self control, please. As for me, I find such whiny rants amusing. I have indeed struck a nerve, and, it appears, more. To point out someone’s incompetence, hypocrisy, dishonesty, and lack of integrity is to fill an empty net with pucks. But whenever I come across such tripe, I’m reminded of this:

Lighten up, Francis.

PS: Yes, we expect to hear from the offended party that he’s endeavoring to prepare a forthcoming reply. Invariably these promises are never fulfilled. That was the case a few weeks ago with another blog, and it’s been the case with me several times.

 

The Character of The Virginia Flaggers

While most Americans have been preoccupied with far more serious issues involving the future of this country, Connie Chastain has returned to blogging in yet another attempt to portray the Virginia Flaggers as victims. This time, it’s “character assassination,” although Chastain favors the wording “to character assassinate” for some odd reason.