Robert Stacy McCain
We have examined the question of how incompetent an award-winning American columnist must prove himself before he is fired and thereby prevented from doing further violence to the knowledge of the citizenry. We have been unable to answer this question, though.
Though we are incapable of answering our first question, we now have the opportunity to ask another one: How many neo-Nazi connections must one have, how many unambiguously white supremacist writings must one be found to have composed, and how many crazy and undignified outbursts must one perpetrate in order to get oneself kicked out of the mainstream conservative commentariat? We will not be able to answer this question, either.
***
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 the sort, as well as having received such honors as the Harvard Foundation's Distinguished Scientist of the Year Award and Oxford University's Senior Mathematical Prize. 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 to filmmakers who find themselves utilizing mathematical concepts in their, uh, plots, and has even provided measurable contributions to U.S. counterterrorism capabilities by way of his own applied research into something which presumably involves math. 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 end the professor's career by way of death threats and disinformation.
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 and likewise ditching a nearby statue commemorating some Confederate "hero." 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 rather 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. Just as it seemed that the whole incident might soon run out of steam, the story went national.
On December 3rd of that year, The Washington Times covered the Farley story by way of a news piece written by features editor Robert Stacy McCain, a journalist who had successfully made the transition from sports to politics a few years prior. 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," this having been a verifiable fact; Farley had by this point forwarded many of the more alarming messages to Tennessee police. Farley forwarded to me a selection of them; I 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.
Now examine 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?"
Note that the anti-Farley crowd is merely "frustrated;" Farley does not merit such a benevolent and excusing qualifier even after having received hundreds of e-mails along these lines:
So, the Confederate flag and the Confederacy offends you, huh? You being a math professor, I am sure you can add this up: We do not care what offends niggers, you worthless, ugly, smelly, stupid, shitskinned jigaboo!!! Go back to the african niggerland where some of your "brothas" will "welcome" you by having you over for dinner (as the main course, nigger)! Anyway, how is it that a nigger math professor is suddenly an expert on history? Did you personally experience 400 years of slavery?I thought you would also be a reverend, as all niggers are reverends. If the Confederate flag offends your minority-assed sensibilities, then this ought to REALLY make your day, nigger!!!
And then the fellow pastes a picture of the Confederate flag, which one might think to be a bit anti-climactic at this point. Another frustrated Confederate sympathizer expresses his frustrating frustrations thusly:
You will reap the whirl wind fo your transgressions. Get a Bodyguard or carry gun you will need it.
What's he supposed to do, shoot at the whirlwind? Amirite? Who's with me here? That's right, I'm taking on the white supremacists! I'll go after absolutely anyone!
At any rate, McCain was too busy to call the Memphis police hate crimes division and verify that Farley had actually received a series of death threats by armed wackos; his hands were tied in documenting Farley's own disturbing transgressions against civility:
In response to complaints from [Sons of Confederate Veterans] members, Mr. Farley has posted e-mail replies that "drip venom," [SCV leader Allen] Sullivan 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."
McCain does not bother to tell us what the SCV member may have written to provoke such a venom-dripping response as this; perhaps it was along the lines of other "complaints" Farley received from similarly frustrated individuals who identified themselves as belong to that organization, such as the following:
wait a minute,,,you arent even a fucking american,,,go back where you came from, was it the islands or the mother country,,,,,d
Incidentally, Farley is indeed an American, assuming that he hasn't rebelled against the flag by way of some treasonous secessionist movement since I last spoke with him.
While serving in the role of a journalist covering issues involving pro-Confederacy organizations, racial tension, and potentially dangerous neo-Nazi agitators, McCain was also pursuing his own hobbies - several of which, by way of a fun coincidence, happen to have lined up quite neatly with the subject matter of the article he'd written. He's a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, for instance, a name that the Reader may recall from six seconds ago.
***
In addition to having served for more than a decade as an editor and reporter for The Washington Times, our chapter subject is currently a regular contributor to The American Spectator and Human Events, as well as the co-author of the 2005 book Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party in which the, uh, Democrat Party is taken to task for various things; his partner, Lynn Vincent, went on to ghostwrite Sarah Palin's 2009 biography Going Rogue. an increasingly prominent blogger who has been linked to, praised, and defended by some of the conservative movement's most notable commentators.
One morning in September of 2009, our fellow citizen came across a news a study that was set to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Reproductive Health indicating that religious teens are more likely to go and get themselves pregnant than are their non-religious counterparts. That a journal on reproductive health would publish a paper on a matter of reproductive health was not only suspicious, decided McCain, but also indicative of some secularist bid to advance the cause of the irreligious:
The objective of this study? To convince college-educated middle-class people that religious faith is the No. 1 force for evil in the modern world. "OMG! If we let our daughter go to church, kiss Vassar good-bye!"
That afternoon, I was minding my own business, frantically reading other peoples' articles and blog posts in order that I might find something of which to make fun lest I otherwise go a whole day without pointing out some flaw in my fellow man, when all of a sudden and with great suddenness McCain's blog post happened to get itself caught right smack dab in my range of sight in a manner that I would probably describe as immediate and without warning. Suddenly, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Apollo, god of the sun.
"Greetings. I am among the greatest of beings, a bringer of light and truth. Do not be frightened by the radiance that streams forth from my personage, nor by my ethereal beauty, for these things are merely a manifestation of the highest and best in all men, whom I spend my days observing that I might spend my nights delivering divine punishment to the lowest and worst among them. All things fall under my purview; my dominion is the world itself."
"Nice to meet you. I am Apollo, god of the sun."
After some initial chit-chat, Apollo explained to me that, although it had been more than 1,500 years since he had appeared on Earth, he had chosen to reappear on this occasion because he had a message that had to be delivered to the world, but that he could not deliver this message himself because... something to do with a crystal amulet that gives him all his power and maybe it's been stolen.
"So what's the problem?" I asked.
"There is a sort of civil war ongoing among your republic's conservatives. One particular element of this conflict is particularly telling. You know, of course, of the importance of the blogosphere to the future of this country and to the world. The structure by which the traditional media operates tends not to punish failure in any meaningful way, and thus it is that men of insufficient ability are given the means to misinform and distract the voting citizenry."
"I've already kind of covered that in the earlier chapters, plus this whole bit is a little too similar to that stupid Ramna routine..."
"Yeah, that was retarded."
"So let's wrap it up."
"Sure. Now, the unprecedented dynamic of the internet allows the best of commentators to speak directly to the people, and in this manner a great number of men and women who are attentive to the truth and responsible to their readers for the accuracy of their words have emerged. You, of course, are among the very best of them, Glenn."
"Glenn?"
"Sorry. You prefer to be called 'Mr. Greenwald.'"
"Oh. Yeah. I mean, no, Glenn is fine."
"Very well. Now, although the principle crisis is not a matter of ideology or party, but rather of structure it is of course greatly relevant that some great portion of the voting public is of a particular political persuasion, this being conservatism. Just as relevant, then, is the crisis that has afflicted this movement, which has degenerated from Eisenhower to Palin in half a century, from reason and virtue to Evangelicalism and not being able to name a single magazine that one reads when asked, and, hey, did you see that one clip?"
"Yeah."
"Where she asked - no, wait, Couric, Couric asked her about what magazines-"
"I saw the clip."
"Katie Couric."
"Wrap it up."
"Basically, pretty much everyone who's worth a damn has either left the movement or been essentially kicked out, whereas all of these other incompetent freaks are now in control by default. The result is a conservatism that is operated by the most dishonest and incapable of men - and the result of this is a conservative blogosphere that operates on dishonesty and disinformation. This is not to say that there is not some laughable degree of nonsense to be found among the bloggers of the left as well - but the discrepancy between the two sides is so great that any honest person who has been paying attention must be aware of it, even if such a person is not a leftist himself. And even many who are vaguely aware of this are not yet aware of the extent of the problem, and thus of the potential solution."
"What's the solution?"
"You should probably save that for the epilogue."
"Yeah, I was just going to repeat Martin Peretz's whole thing about Bernie Madoff over and over again, but your idea is probably better. So, what do we do?"
"There is a particular incident that is perfectly emblematic of the fall of the conservative movement. It is going on right now, in fact. Look at this blog post by Robert Stacy McCain here."
"Gladly."
"You see how he is trying to minimize the importance of high teen pregnancy rates among those families which, like him, are heavily religious. Of course, McCain doesn't want anyone thinking ill of the religious in any respect, as it is his view that religion is superior to secularism and thus the religious must always be superior to the secularist. Confronted with proof that teen pregnancy is all the rage among religious teens in relation to their not-so-religious counterparts, McCain must now pretend that there is nothing wrong with teen pregnancy."
"I don't think it's necessarily a terrible thing myself, although of course this is dependent on the circumstances, and it must of course be remembered that prospective parents are better off having completed school or at least-"
"No one gives a shit what you think. Now, take a look at what McCain writes in order to minimize the negative aspects of teen pregnancy."
"Doo doo doo, doo doo... copyin' and pastin'... select... block quote..."
Consider this tragic example: Margaret started having sex when she was 12 and got pregnant when she was 13, in a community so violent that the 26-year-old baby-daddy got into a fight and died shortly thereafter, leaving the teenage girl, seven months pregnant, in the care of her mother, who was a devout Catholic and didn't believe in abortion.
Another teenage motherhood tragedy, and you know the statistics about the children of teenage mothers. So you can predict what happened to that fatherless baby.
"Oh, god," I said to the god. "Is he going to do that thing whereby-"
"Yes. Yes, he is."
Margaret named him Henry and on Aug. 22, 1485 -- yes, I said 1485 -- Henry's army defeated the forces led by the usurper Richard III in a place called Bosworth Field, ending the War of the Roses.
"Well, there you go," said I. "