---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:
Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 4:34 PM
Subject: Re: From Barrett Brown
To:
r.s.mccain@att.netYes, I do think that your reporting was "not entirely objective" in that instance, and I have indeed concluded this based on what is now known to those few of us who have thoroughly examined your activities under the name Burke C. Dabney, as well as based on certain phrases you decided to employ in that particular news piece. Of course, I only have a partial picture of what you were up to in those days, as you successfully managed to have your posts and comments removed from Free Republic, for instance. But it is extraordinarily obvious that you were and remain a white nationalist. That's certainly your right; it is my right to point this out. Likewise, it's your right to imply that I am out to get the Jews, as you did recently. I've got enough Jew street cred at this point that I can absorb the blow.
Anyway, it's true that you're not quite as prominent as the other commentators I'm targeting in the book, but you are still emblematic of something, and at any rate are probably not giving yourself enough credit; you did co-author a book with Palin's ghostwriter, for instance, and have been linked to and praised by a number of more prominent conservative commentators, many of whom are themselves otherwise engaged in trying to depict their own opponents as being racists of some sort or another. So you can probably see the value, from the standpoint of those of us who believe the conservative movement to have become intellectually and morally illegitimate and would like others to see what we see, in revealing certain things that your fellow commentators are currently trying so hard to ignore.
You are keen on dueling, I think. Perhaps you would like to engage in an e-mail based back-and-forth in which you shoot down my claims? I would agree in advance to reproduce it in its entirety in the chapter. If my attacks are flimsy, as you say them to be, then you will no doubt make a fool of me in my own book. Let me know if this is agreeable to you; I am assuming it won't be.
On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 1:54 PM,
<r.s.mccain@att.net> wrote:
Thank you for the courtesy, sir. My first response was, "Jonathan Farley? Who is Jonathan Farley?" Then I looked it up and recognized him as the Vanderbilt University professor with the Che Guevara poster who waged a campaign to rename Confederate Memorial Hall, a controversy I reported about:
Shall I surmise the "otherwise engaged" as indicative of your belief that my reporting was not entirely objective? If I succeed in my fundraising drive to go to Pasadena to cover the BCS championship, do you suppose that I'll get the score wrong or misspell the players' names?
You are yourself an ax-grinder with a cause, Mr. Barrett. If your publisher wishes to provide you with the opportunity to advance that cause at my expense, that would be an interesting transaction, although I doubt it will prove very lucrative for either of you.
-- RSM
-------------- Original message from Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>: --------------
Sir-
In the open letter you wrote to me a while back, you mentioned that people rarely go to the trouble of contacting you before attacking you. As I just mentioned in a comment I left at your blog, I am including a chapter on you in
my upcoming book, which is set for an April release. If you would like to address any of the things that I or Johnson have written about you so far, you are free to do so, and any such explanations will be printed verbatim in that chapter, no matter what they may be (assuming it totals less than 2,000 words). You are even free to attack me if you wish. Let me know if this interests you.
In addition to the various items that have already been discussed by myself and others, the chapter will revolve largely around an incident that I have yet to mention publicly and which involves the article you composed in 2002 regarding Jonathan Farley, as well as the activities in which you were otherwise engaged at the time in which you wrote that particular piece.
Regards,
Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY