Glenn Reynolds promotes book authored by neo-Confederate propagandist.

Putz's latest "IN THE MAIL" offering looks innocuous enough at first. It's a book titled, 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask, and the description at Amazon makes it sound like it's one of those relatively harmless if not annoying "here's what those PC liberal academics won't tell you about history" tracts. (updated below)

But there's something a little creepy about the Amazon description -- one especially notices the blatant Lost Cause revisionism.

It turns out that the author, Thomas Woods (see also here) is a founding member of the League of the South, a fringe, separatist organization which states on its website:

The League of the South is a Southern Nationalist organization whose ultimate goal is a free and independent Southern republic. To reach this goal, we intend to create the climate for a free South among our people by 1) de-legitimating the American Empire at every opportunity; 2) by proving our willingness to be servant-leaders to the Southern people; and 3) by making The League of the South a strong, viable organization that will lead us to Southern independence.

As disturbing as that is, the League of the South has a dossier at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

To the founder and president of the League of the South (LOS), the 6-year-old organization that has emerged at the forefront of the neo-Confederate movement, the incidents in Biloxi — along with similar attacks on white women in New York City's Central Park by black and Hispanic men — represented a call to arms.

The assaults, he suggested, were not merely the handiwork of individuals. All minorities, in Hill's view, were responsible.

"It is time for us, as Southern whites, to look to our own well being and defense against these thugs," the one-time college professor wrote on AlaReb, an invitation-only, neo-Confederate discussion group on the Internet.

"Moreover, it is time we demand that respectable members of the 'minority community' control their debased 'brothers and sisters.' If they refuse, then we can only believe that they secretly condone such behavior. Let us not flinch when our enemies call us 'racists'; rather, just reply with, 'So, what's your point?'"

It gets worse.

One LOS founding member who now sits on the board of directors is Jack Kershaw, who is also a member of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC).

As described in an earlier issue of the Intelligence Report (Winter 1999, No. 93), the CCC is directly descended from the White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, racist groups known as the "uptown Klan" that fought against desegregation in the South.

And indeed, Kershaw's lineage goes back to one of those councils, the Citizens Council of Tennessee, of which he was executive secretary.

With the help of LOS, Kershaw recently erected in Nashville a huge statue of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest — a man who was also the Ku Klux Klan's first imperial wizard, a fact the LOS studiously avoids mentioning.

"Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery," Kershaw said in 1998. "Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?"

Another founding member of the LOS said that, "We will NEED a new type of Klan."

Why would Putz --- or anyone for that matter --- publicize a book authored by a founding member of a hate organization like LOS? It's precisely behavior like this (other incidents highlighted here) that has prompted accusations of racism at Putz.

UPDATE

In time this post was written, someone has edited the Thomas Woods' Wikipedia page and deleted the item indicating that he is a founding member of the LOS.

That page is here.

There is more on Woods' affiliation with the LOS here, here and here.