#3022: Pat Hines

The League of the South is a Neo-Confederate, white supremacist, patriarchal, largely anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant organization founded to protect and promote “Anglo-Celtic” Southern culture; they are not officially racist because, according to the organization’s Board of Directors, “the term ‘racism’ has its origins in Communism and that movement’s sordid attempt to undermine Western Christendom”. Their big cause is the Lost Cause of the South, and they advocate for various Southern States to secede from the US, partially, as some members put it, because secession is the only way for the South to avoid the Muslim invasion. Articles they host on their webpages are, as you’d expect, the usual mess of pseudohistory, conspiracy theories and paranoia.

 

We’ve covered their former leader Michael Hill before, but their roster provide a rich source of materials for entries as well. Pat Hines, for instance. Hines was, at least as of 2020 (we can’t really be bothered to keep track), the leader of the group’s South Carolina chapter. A retired military nurse, Hines stepped into the role in 2015 after the exodus of members uncomfortable with the radicalization of the group in the wake of Dylann Roof’s massacre in Charleston, and he is the kind of person you’t expect to be on record feeling the need, in discussions of slavery, to remind people that “without slavery, all the black people in the United States wouldn’t be here” (defending slavery is a central task for League of the South members, and their attempts do come far more colorful than Hines’s as well) and referring to the removal of Confederate monuments as “cultural genocide on the Southern people”; to elaborate: “The opposition to the pro-south groups are Judeo-Marxts [sic] working themselves up to be as deadly as their genetic grandfathers, the Bolsheviks. They support the murders of all southern whites and the destruction of our monuments.”

 

Pertaining to the Lost Cause of the South, Hines has also defended celebrating the murder of Abraham Lincoln, “the most murderous, treasonous president that ever existed,” though he was reluctant to praise John Wilkes Booth too highly given the latter’s tardiness when it came to getting the matters done. More interesting was Hines’s justification for the assassination of Lincoln: “Well, he was a United States President. Well, he was commander-in-chief, which makes him a legitimate target immediately.” And if you wonder whether he thinks any commander-in-chief is a legitimate target, “Well, they are.” Well, then.

 

Diagnosis: President Trump has called Hines and his fellows “some very fine people”, but the president’s judgment sometimes arguably seems a bit off on these matters. Things suggest that Pat Hines isn’t a very fine person.