Notes from the Outside World
Last week I notified conservative commentator and Confederacy enthusiast Robert Stacy McCain that I'll be including a chapter on him in my upcoming book, which, incidentally, I've got to finish up by January 2nd and which will be released in April. I've been going after McCain on and off since September, when I came across a blog post he'd written concerning a study that showed religious teens to be more susceptible to pregnancy than non-religious teens. McCain, of course, deemed the study to be politically motivated, and at any rate laughed off the idea that teen pregnancy is anything about which to be concerned; he did this little thing whereby he described one particular girl who had a baby at a very young age and then *SPOILER ALERT ZOMG THAT BABY TURNED OUT TO BE HENRY TUDOR TWIST ENDING, the point being that, hey, teen pregnancy isn't necessarily some terrible thing. I happen to agree with him on his conclusion, if not necessarily his goofy thought process, but at any rate it seemed obvious that the fellow was only defending teen pregnancy simply because the circumstance-and-ideology mix of that particular day required him to do so lest any negative trend be successfully pinned on God's people. So I Googled around a bit, expecting to find him indeed worrying over teen pregnancy in some other context. And, of course, he did turn out to have done so - except that in this other instance, he was worrying specifically about teen pregnancy among minority teens, and in fact criticizing
The New York Times for not specifically highlighting the fact that minority teens are more likely to go and get themselves pregnant than white ones. Generic religious teens, race not specified? Yay pregnancy! Minority teens? Oh noes, pregnancy! I wrote a piece for
The Huffington Post noting that the fellow loves white babies and worries over darker ones and called it a day.
At some point thereafter, I learned that prominent ex-conservative blogger Charles Johnson had also been hounding McCain, so I got in touch with the fellow to see what he knew. It turned out that McCain had expressed his sentiments on the subject of race and teen pregnancy in more explicit terms in a 2002 article he'd written under an assumed name for the white nationalist website American Renaissance, in which he warned of "race suicide" on the part of whites - and that he'd also spent quite a bit of time hanging around with neo-Nazi leader Bill White, who was convicted last week on several counts of making violent threats, and had otherwise kept himself busy with all sorts of similarly race-oriented hobbies for good measure.
Anywho, Johnson and I, as well as a few other folks, have since been trying to bring attention to the fact that such supposedly respectable outlets of conservative commentary as American Spectator have been providing a platform to a fellow who is quite clearly a white supremacist, and that dozens of relatively prominent conservative bloggers have been approvingly linking to to same. Thus it was that I decided to throw McCain into the book mix at the last minute - not simply because of McCain himself and what he embodies, but also because of the increasingly comical efforts on the part of his defenders to try to explain away things that simply can't be explained away, not least by McCain himself, who's proven to be not particularly good at defending himself. To be sure, he's fought back a bit, having written a couple of posts asserting that my book won't sell (my last one is going into paperback next year) and that I'm either an anti-Semite or just anti-Israel (a couple of the columnists I'm going after are Jewish, you see); we've also had a bit of an e-mail exchange along similar lines. But then
I proposed a sort of debate via e-mail, which I would agree to print verbatim in my book no matter how awesome his awesome retorts may be and how terribly he pwns me with his uber-1337 rhetorical BOOM head shots and first bloods and multi-kills and fatalities and SONIC BOOM SONIC BOOM RYUKEN TIGER UPPERCUTS and whatnot; McCain tried to ignore my challenge until such point as several prominent blogs picked up on it, thereby forcing him to finally respond - in the negative, of course, as the facts are clearly on my side insomuch as that the guy was writing articles for a white nationalist publication, for fuck's sake. I mean, come on.
Meanwhile, Donald Douglas of the influential conservative war blog American Power has joined in McCain's defense, denouncing Johnson and myself as "smear-merchants" and otherwise throwing around loaded terminology instead of addressing the most significant of the charges. After I wrote a response to the effect that Mr. Douglas didn't seem to be aware of some of the more damning pieces of evidence, the fellow wrote another post in which he asserts that "what little evidence Barrett Brown offers is wholly tainted as products themselves of ideological smear campaigns" and then goes on to prove this by noting that some of the things that McCain has been shown to have written are not necessarily more controversial than certain other things that Samuel Huntington has written. Of course, he also makes much of my role as spokesman for the secularist political action committee Enlighten the Vote as well as my efforts on behalf of gay Americans who seek to engage in contracts with each other, all of which apparently makes me a "soldier" for the "radical left." I will admit to being an atheist who is sympathetic to gay rights, whereas my new adversary here is presumably a theist who thinks poorly of gays - does this make him a "soldier" for "radical Islam," perhaps?