Here's a rough draft of the piece; let me know what you think.
Incidentally, if you do end up running it, it should get a lot of play;
McCain has attacked me again this morning and Charles Johnson will link to
anything I write about the fellow.
Mathematics professor Jonathan Farley has a hell of a resume, having
served in varying academic capacities at Harvard, Cal Tech, Stanford's
Center for International Security and Cooperation, and MIT, among other
institutions of learning, as as having received the Harvard Foundation's
Distinguished Scientist of the Year Award, Oxford University's Senior
Mathematical Prize, and other, similarly dull-sounding yet prestigious
things. He has been referred to by prominent neuroscientist and longtime
Harvard administrator Dr. S. Allen Counter as "one of the world's most
impressive young mathematicians," was one of only four Americans to be named
a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in the 2001-2002 nomination round, founded
a firm that provides consultations on films using elements of math, and has
provided notable contributions U.S. counterterrorism capabilities by way of
his applied research regarding something I'm not really going to look into.
The city of Cambridge has even named a day in the fellow's honor.
As well as he's done so far, Dr. Farley would have almost certainly
managed even greater things were it not for a widespread campaign among
neo-Nazis and Confederacy apologists to harass the professor and put some
dents into his career prospects by way of death threats and disinformation.
These things happen, of course, but in this case the extent of the attacks
was such that they actually achieved their purpose; after finding that some
unknown individuals were contacting administrators at several universities
and government agencies where he'd been taken on or considered for
employment, he eventually gave up on the U.S. in favor of Europe, where he
now teaches algebra at Johannes Kepler University in Linz. And many of the
thousands who were involved in this campaign against an academic with real
contributions to make to the world were mobilized in the first place by a
prominent conservative pundit who has thus far managed to pass himself off
as a respectable mainstream journalist despite an ever-growing body of
evidence that he is a committed white supremacist.
The nonsense in question began in 2002 with one of those irritating
controversies over Confederate iconography; in this case, various
administrators at Vanderbilt had expressed an interest in removing the word
"Confederate" from one of its dormitories. Farley, who was then teaching
mathematics at the university, wrote an op-ed piece for *The Tennessean to
the effect that officers and enlisted men of the Confederacy ought to have
been executed for treason after the war and their property dispersed among
former slaves. Being a black academic of a leftist bent, Farley was perhaps
not the best person to deliver that particular message to a region in which
the most destructive and poorly-conceived insurrection in American history
is still celebrated as some sort of neat thing. The threats on his life,
challenges to duels, racially-charged e-mails, and denouncements by public
figures of various sorts began immediately, as these things tend to do. And
just as it seemed that the whole incident might soon run out of steam, the
story began to go national.*
On December 3rd of that year, *The Washington Times *ran a "news"
piece by features editor Robert Stacy McCain, a rising figure among the
conservative commentariat who had successfully made the transition from
sports to politics. A couple of passages merit particular scrutiny,
beginning with this seemingly innocuous sentence fragment:
*
Mr. Farley has complained of threatening e-mails and phone calls...
Another way of phrasing this would have been, "Mr. Farley has received
threatening e-mails and phone calls," as this was by then a verifiable fact;
Farley had by this point forwarded many of the more sinister messages to
Tennessee police. I've seen a selection of them and have managed to
determine that several of the death threats came from presumably armed
military veterans living within a half-hour of Memphis, whereas others came
from out-and-out white supremacists with ties to violence-advocating
organizations like the National Vanguard. Still, no one appears to have been
charged or even investigated, which is why I will soon be releasing the
names and associated threats in order that everyone may see for themselves
how easy it is to get away with threatening to kill a prominent black man in
Tennessee. *
* Now, take a gander at the following excerpt from the same article:*
*Tim Chavez, a columnist for the Tennessean, described one 66-year-old
reader's frustration over Mr. Farley's views: "This just burns me because I
don't know what to do about it," the man said. "If someone compared your
ancestors to mass murderers, what would you do?" *
*
If you're a neo-Confederate, you'd probably write a semi-literate
e-mail to the effect that the offending black man is "just an ignorant
nigger," as was the case with Madisonville bed-and-breakfast proprietor
Russell Walker. Or you might explain to him that he "will reap the whirl
wind for your transgressions" and further advise him to "[g]et a Bodyguard
[sic] or carry gun [sic] you will need it," as did Army veteran C.S. "Chris"
Barwick of Maryland, who still maintains an e-mail account with his chosen
military branch. You might opine that "all niggers should be exterminated
from this earth, starting with loudmouthed, smelly, worthless, smart-alecky,
boot-lipped jigaboos like you," as did some random fellow whom I've yet to
identify. Or you might engage in some or another variant on all of these
things, as did the hundreds of other proud southern folks - lawyers,
business owners, veterans, and educators - who filled Farley's e-mail box
with sentiments of comparable cuteness. The reader may have also noted that,
according to McCain's phrasing above, the anti-Farley crowd is merely
"frustrated," as opposed to, say, responsible for hundreds of racist e-mails
and phone calls.*
McCain, though, was more interested in Farley's own transgressions
against civility than he was with the death threats that he'd received. This
brings us to our next excerpt:
*In response to complaints from *[Sons of Confederate Veterans]* members,
Mr. Farley has posted e-mail replies that "drip venom," *[SCV leader
Allen]* Sullivant said. Replying to one SCV member, Mr. Farley vowed to
"form our own armies to expose and smash you. ... Very simply, we represent
good and you represent evil." *
*
*
* That's certainly some drip-prone venom right there, but it's
important that we look evil square in the face, even in the case of
something as disturbing as a mathematician replying angrily to potentially
dangerous racists who'd like to see him dead. It's also important that we
honor the suffering of SCV members such as the one who wrote to Farley:
"wait a minute,,,you arent even a fucking american,,,go back where you came
from, was it the islands or the mother country,,,,,d." For the record,
Farley is indeed an American, although his parents were immigrants and, for
all I know, terrorists. I actually forgot to ask him.*
If McCain's *Times *piece seems to be lacking in traditional
journalistic objectivity, this could be explained in a number of ways. Maybe
he's a shitty journalist. Or maybe his piece was biased against the black
professor in question because McCain himself is a white supremacist who, at
the time he wrote the article, was also writing under an assumed name<http://74.125.155.132/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cache:http://www.amren.com/ar/2002/03/&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8> for
the white nationalist publication *American Renaissance*, linking to that
site as well as to the neo-Nazi outlet Overthrow.com in messages he posted
on the conservative forum Free Republic, hanging around with<http://74.125.155.132/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cache:http://georgearchibald.typepad.com/george_archibald/2007/08/breakup-at-the-.html&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8> neo-Nazi
agitator William White<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_White_(neo-Nazi)> and
other admitted racists, serving as a member of the all-around wacky League
of the South, and doing God knows what else that he's actually managed to
conceal. Also, he's a shitty journalist.
He's actually not an unskilled commentator, though, which is why he's
managed to develop a large blog following over the last couple of years
while also writing regularly for *American Spectator *and a variety of
other conservative outlets and meanwhile be cited, defended, and otherwise
elevated to supposed respectability by dozens of prominent conservative
bloggers such as Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. Had he been merely some
random blog jockey who turned out to be a racist, this would be of no
concern to anyone. But McCain has managed to find a reasonably prominent
place among the conservative commentariat and associate himself with a
number of individuals who themselves are now confronted with the unpleasant
evidence of their own poor judgement. Few of them are willing to acknowledge
this, of course; their collective response has been to denounce Charles
Johnson - once among the most prominent of conservative bloggers, co-founder
of Pajamas Media, and the fellow who helped lead the way in such early
victories of citizen journalism as Rathergate - out of anger over his recent
work in uncovering and accumulating the large body of evidence that now
exists to prove that McCain is the white supremacist he always appeared to
be.
McCain himself has been responding to his critics in an inevitably
ridiculous manner; among other things, he's taken to making bizarre
comments<http://trueslant.com/barrettbrown/2009/10/08/stacy-mccain-demands-retraction-over-white-supremacist-charge-predicts-doom-for-smartass/> about
both myself and a political action committee for which I serve as director
of communications, making announcements along the lines of, "Barrett Brown:
He'll get his in turn," and otherwise conducting himself in a strange and
goofy manner.
Meanwhile, McCain is still attempting to explain away his demonstrable
sentiments. He wrote the other day<http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2009/10/16/smear-re-smear-lather-rinse-repeat-my-comment-at-a-liberal-blog/> that
he has "neither any personal nor political interest in the marital
preferences of others and have many friends of all races, some of whom are
of mixed ancestry and some of whom are in mixed marriages," but in an
e-mail he composed a while back<http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=124>,
he proclaimed that the "media now force interracial images into the public
mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an
altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting
business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as
his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue,
Hollywood and Washington tell us.” And in an interview with Alan Colmes that
took place after that e-mail was revealed, he said he didn't know if being
disinclined to do business with a black bank clerk constitutes racism,
either.
Robert Stacy McCain can perhaps play an important role in the national
conversation insomuch as that there are tens of millions of virulent racists
among our citizenry as a whole whose views have not been adequately
represented in the mainstream media for half a century. McCain could serve
as their voice.
On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 6:48 PM, Michael Hogan <
Michael_Hogan@condenast.com> wrote:
Sure, pass it on when it’s written.
Best,
Mike
On 10/15/09 6:35 PM, "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, Michael-
I'm in the midst of a public feud with former <goog_1255612850681> *Washington
Times <goog_1255612850681> *editor and Palin ally Robert Stacy McCain <
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barrett-brown/robert-stacy-mccain-and-t_b_319987.html>
, who's been making a series of goofy, violent threats towards myself, my
PAC, and the *Charleston Gazette *this week. I was contacted this morning
by Jonathan Farley, a prominent mathematics professor of African descent.
He's forwarded me a series of death threats he received in 2002; many of
these were the direct result of McCain's insanely one-sided *Times *article
on a controversy surrounding a column Farley had written that year in which
he referred to Confederates as traitors; Farley himself had to move out of
Tennessee and is now teaching in Austria. Incidentally, McCain is himself a
member of the neo-secessionist group League of the South and has ties to a
number of self-proclaimed neo-Nazi organizations and individuals;
nonetheless, he has managed to remain a mainstream figure, having
co-authored a book two years back with Lynn Vincent, who herself ghosted
Palin's *Going Rogue *and who also has questionable ties.
Let me know if you'd like to take a look at the piece when it's finished.
Thanks,
Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302