Also, I'd need to update the piece due to ongoing events:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/34935_Robert_Stacy_McCain_Ankle-Bites_Again
On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Barrett Brown <
barriticus@gmail.com>wrote:
> 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