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.
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 Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had assisted in the creation of the Klu Klux Klan. 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 had their property be 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, an up-and-coming 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 has sent me a selection of them, and I have managed to determine that several of these 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 expressed his frustrating frustrations thusly:
You will reap the whirl wind for 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 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, which the Reader may recall from a few 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 last appeared on Earth, he had chosen to return on this occasion because he had a message that had to be delivered to the world, but 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 or something.
"So, what's the message you need me to deliver?" 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 administered by the most dishonest and incapable of men - and the result of this in turn 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.
"Hooray for teen pregnancy!" I exclaimed. "Seriously, though, I've spent enough time analyzing the disingenuous statements of bad commentators to know that if I Google 'Robert Stacy McCain' and 'teen pregnancy' or some such, I'm going to catch our buddy here expressing concern about teen pregnancy when the teens in question aren't cited as being religious."
"You will, in fact," said Apollo, smiling in a knowing and irritating manner. "You will also find something else that is even more interesting."
"How do you know?"
"I'M FROM THE FUTURE LOL!" And then he took off his mask, thereby revealing his mechanical face. "AND I'M A ROBOT! BEEP BEEP BEEP!"
The two of us made love well into the night.
***
McCain had indeed written another article about teen pregnancy, and he had indeed done so in so in such a manner as to maximize, rather than minimize, the problems inherent to such a phenomenon. In contrast to the September blog post in which he'd made fun of those who worried over the prospect of young girls giving birth, he had in this earlier article made fun of those who failed to worry over the prospect of young girls giving birth. The New York Times, of course, is singled out for particular criticism:
Given the sort of spin that most media put on the 102-page report, Parker-Pope of the Times obviously felt a need to debunk the alarmist fear-mongering. She cited previous reports showing that the percentage of girls ages 15-17 who reported having had sexual intercourse actually declined from 38 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2002. And she enlisted the sort of expert opinion that is indispensible to respectable social-science reporting, with University of LaSalle sociologist Kathleen Bogle providing the pooh-pooh quote: Theres no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were.
But when you look at the data, thats not the case.
Well, that settles it, eh? Despite the blip in teen pregnancy, teenagers actually arent screwing around so much. Another myth busted by the New York Times!
The skeptical reader raises an eyebrow. Less teen sex, more teen mothers? Skepticism is arguably justified... In contrast to the necessary ambiguity of self-reported survey results, birth statistics are solid data, and that data confirms that some teenager are, we might say, living la vida loca.
The big news in NCHS report was that Mississippi had reclaimed its accustomed No. 1 status as Americas teen pregnancy capital, supplanting Texas, which had led the nation in 2004. According to the NCHS data, in 2006, the three states with the highest teen birth rates were Mississippi (68.4 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19), New Mexico (64.1 per 1,000) and Texas (63.1).
Hmmm, says the skeptical reader. Perhaps demographics may be a factor?
Perhaps! McCain goes on to cite data indicating that Hispanic teens are more than three times more likely than whites to bear babies, and about twice as likely as blacks to do so. Having here raised the alarm about teen pregnancy among Hispanics, McCain would just a few months later make fun of those who raised the alarm about teen pregnancy among religious teens of no specified race. There are demographics, after all, and then there are demographics of the sort one wouldn't want dating one's sister. McCain scolds the media in general and one reporter in particular for failing to go all Paul Revere on the Latin explosion:
None of that data appeared in the New York Timess story, which in nearly 900 words didnt even acknowledge the demographic factor in teen pregnancy statistics. Chris Hansen keeps trapping Internet pervs, Greta Van Susteren keeps flying down to Aruba to explore the Mystery of the Missing Blonde, and the New York Post (we assume) eagerly awaits the next teen-sex scandal of Long Island Lolita proportions, but the much larger scandal remains remarkably underreported.
Confronted with the prospect of white teenage girls being outbred by brown teenage girls, McCain was for some reason disinclined to brush off the problem of teen pregnancy with the happy example of Henry Tudor, as he would later in the course of explaining why teen pregnancy is no big deal after having here explained why teen pregnancy is a big deal that everyone ought to be worrying about. I had indeed found something more interesting - the sex bot, it seemed, had been telling the truth.
***
Having determined that R.S. McCain had accidentally outed himself as being unworried by teen pregnancy among generic religious teens while being very worried indeed by teen pregnancy among Hispanics, I wrote a short article for The Huffington Post and True/Slant pointing this out, though I refrained from characterizing him a racist or a white supremacist or even a white nationalist just then insomuch as the facts did not necessarily prove any such thing; it was entirely possible that this discrepancy of worrisomeness was in service to the religious rather than in opposition to the brown. At any rate, I knew very little about the fellow at the time; he was simply one of the many commentators whose work I checked out from time to time in the course of my duties as a professional pointer-outer of oracular motes.
A few weeks later, I noticed that McCain had gotten into some sort of rhetorical scuffle with the Charleston Gazette, the editorial board of which had recently referred to him in passing as a "white supremacist." McCain responded in such a way as to ensure that everyone concerned would be aware that McCain is not a man with which to be trifled; the several discredited charges that had been made against him several years previous and which have nothing to do with the demonstrably true charges that are being made against him now, as he wrote in slightly different words, had collectively come to form "a Gordian Knot of non-fact that is not worth the effort it would take to unravel it." No mere metaphor can deter our warrior-poet, of course. "Like ancient Alexander, however, I am prepared to swing the sword," he announced. "Retract, please." McCain does not seem to have been satisfied with the ambiguously violent nature of this particular simile, though, and thus later that day he made reference to " the wise advice of Andrew Jacksons mother," which, as he noted, consisted of the following homespun maxim: "Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue anybody for slander, assault and battery. Always settle them cases yourself." Clearly, the editorial board in question had fucked with the wrong would-be tough guy. "Consider that it is 299 miles from my house to the offices of the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette," McCain explained to the readers of the blog Protein Wisdom. "I could leave by noon and walk into their lobby before 4:30 p.m." He didn't, incidentally. But had he done so, one can imagine the badass things he would have done in the course of doing whatever it is that he was planning on doing.
When I was 22 or thereabouts, I drunkenly challenged some guy to a fight in the midst of an internet debate. Of all the ridiculous, flamboyant nonsense I've pulled in the course of a ridiculous and flamboyant life, this particular item of nonsense still keeps me up at night in embarrassment, or at least it would if I didn't have such a comfortable mattress. McCain, in contrast, does not seem to believe that there is anything undignified at all in the practice of constantly depicting one's self as itching for a fight without actually going through any such steps that might bring such a fight into fruition; this Charleston Gazette affair is simply one among several such incidents of the hold-me-back-hold-me-back-yeah-you're-lucky-my-girlfriend's-here-to-stop-me-come-on-Rachel-let's-blow-this-party-and-go-fool-around-in-the-back-of-my-Ford-Explorer sort that one might expect to see from some douche at a high school keg party but which one might be surprised to find coming from a middle-aged man who writes for several of the nation's most respectable conservative publications.
About an hour after publicly estimating the drive time between his home and the location of those Gazette editorial board members whom he never did get around to beating up or trapping under a giant chandelier that he'd cause to fall on them by cutting the supporting rope while grabbing the end with the other hand and thus being hoisted up to the indoor balcony from which he'd then deliver some such line as "Sic semper tyrannis!" or whatever the fuck he thought he was going to do when he arrived at the newspaper office, McCain learned of the article I had written about him. "Barrett Brown - he'll get his in turn," McCain wrote. A few minutes after that, having apparently done a bit of Googling, McCain discovered that I serve as director of communications for what was formerly known as the Godless Americans Political Action Committee. The revelation prompted him to put up an excerpt from the PAC's "About Us" page and follow it up with a single, mysterious sentence: "Thanks for this helpful information, sir. How many Philistines did Samson slay with less?" What the fuck? Sometimes a person will pretend not to understand what someone else means in order to convey that that someone is incomprehensibly foolish. That's not what I'm doing. I've actually thought about this for a long time and I have no idea what he was saying other than that it involves violence.
A few days later, one of the conservative bloggers who had previously written an attack on me in the course of defending McCain contacted me in private and explained that he was troubled by some of the things that the fellow had been discovered to have written several years previous. Among them was an article that McCain had composed under an assumed name, Burke C. Dabney, itself derived from the names of two Confederate figures known mostly for the particular enthusiasm with which they advocated slavery. The essay warned that American whites were in danger of being out-bred by their black and Hispanic counterparts, in part due to the success of programs intended to reduce teen pregnancy in general but which appear to have been most effective in reducing such incidents among whites:
The success of such propaganda only accelerates the decline of the white population. If crusaders against teenage motherhood were serious, they would concentrate on the black and Hispanic girls who account for more than half of teenage births. Targeting whites as part of a general campaign is yet another form of racial suicide. We should encourage whites to have children within marriage; instead they are encouraged only to use contraceptives, whether married or single.
The venue in which the article appeared, American Renaissance, correctly bills itself as "Americas premiere publication of racial-realist thought;" as of this writing, the website's main page features an article entitled "Transition to black rule?" in which Obama is compared to Robert Mugabe and other African tyrants. "Let us hope whites all over the world save their newspapers from November 5, 2008, with their extravagant headlines and dizzy hopes," the piece concludes hopefully. "Let them reread them 10 or 15 years from now and let them think of South Africa." Much of the content consists of news item aggregation from mainstream sources, with a marked emphasis on stories concerning blacks who have committed crimes, anything that happens in Zimbabwe, reports on negative effects of immigration, and even more stories about blacks who have committed crimes. Each of these get the American Renaissance touch by way of none-too-subtle subtitles. Let's take a look at a couple from the site's main page as of January 2nd, 2010, shall we?
RapeSilent War on SA Women - Another legacy of apartheid.
My personal favorite of the site's original articles found on the main page at the time of this random viewing, though, would have to be "Whitewashing Jack Johnson," which concerns efforts by John McCain (whom our own R.S. McCain refers to as "Crazy Cousin John," presumably because he's a race traitor or some such) to bestow a pardon upon the infamous black boxer. Not so fast, Senator! It turns out that this uppity Negro was an uppity Negro! Ah, but then I'm giving away the story; as contributor Addison N. Sheffield relates:
Jack Johnson, who was born in Galveston, Texas, but later moved to Chicago, was the original loutish celebrity athlete. In the early 20th century, when white supremacy was still the norm, he taunted his opponents both in and out of the ring, and boasted about his endless fornications with white women...
... This, then, was the background to Johnsons prosecution under the Mann Act. The act, passed in 1910, got its name from its chief sponsor, Congressman James R. Mann (R-IL). The statute authorized federal prosecution of anyone who transported a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. Congress claimed that its authority to regulate interstate commerce could be used to stop the white slave trade. The act was part of a series of religious and Progressive Era reforms aimed at civilizing American society, and the city of Chicago took part enthusiastically in this effort. Johnson, however, continued to flaunt his insatiable sexual appetite, especially in the aftermath of his victory in the fight of the century"...
...I predict this most recent attempt to rehabilitate Johnson will succeed. After all, he is just the sort of black person we are supposed to admire: In his prime, he could beat any white man in the ring and he debauched untold numbers of white women...
Of course, McCain ought not be held responsible for content that other people may have written in an outlet for which he happens to write as well. And the single article that he wrote for American Renaissance is actually pretty inoffensive relative to, say, the vast amount of blatantly anti-black and white supremacist content one finds at the site. In fact, if you consider how incredibly racist the website is in general, and note how innocuous is McCain's article is when one compares it to all the other articles about how blacks are monstrous, rape-happy animals, then McCain comes out looking pretty good. Contrast this with the situation over at The New York Times op-ed page, which tends not to include any white supremacist content - can one truly say that the columns of Nicholas Kristof, for instance, are considerably less racist than the columns of Gail Collins or David Brooks or Paul Krugman? Surely one cannot, as all of these columnists are actually rather similar in the extent to which they express anti-minority sentiment and pro-white rhetoric. McCain, then, is far less racist than most of the people who write for his favorite outlet (we may assume he thinks dearly of it insomuch as he is willing to write for it under a fake name and so without credit). Nicholas Kristof, meanwhile, is just as racist as all the other liberals who work for his favorite outlet. Who's the real racist here, eh?
Besides, surely there's nothing amiss in McCain's tendency to be fond of his own ethnic group and to hope for its continuance in perpetuity - and of course we wouldn't want to see white people disappear altogether, because then who would play white people in movies? All in all, there's certainly no reason to suspect that McCain's views on race are anything like those expressed by his colleague Sheffield, who is so disturbed by the prospect of interracial couplings.
Just kidding. In a comment posted to the internet forum Reclaiming the South, McCain took pains to reassure the world's racists that they were not actually racists because, after all, you see, uh:
[T]he 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.
Okay, so his take on interracial marriage is similar to that of all of the white supremacists who write for the white supremacist site for which McCain writes under a pen name taken from a couple of white supremacists who are best known for their white supremacy. To McCain's credit, though, American Renaissance is one of the nation's most respected journals of white supremacist news and commentary, as opposed to just being some clunky, poorly-designed website with spinning swastikas and dancing Hitlers. I mean, it's a little rough around the edges here and there, but by and large, if you're looking for an outlet in which to display your anonymous essay on how whites must collectively out-breed their black and Hispanic fellow citizens, you could do worse than American Renaissance.
***
This we know: Our ancestors cause was just and their conduct was honorable. Anyone who says otherwise is insulting the memory of heroes... If the Confederate cause was a matter of honor for our ancestors, then it is a matter of honor for us, their descendants. It is our duty to defend the honor of our ancestors, and to preserve their memory for our own descendants.
The above excerpt comes from a speech that Robert Stacy McCain presented to the Sons of Confederate Veterans in May of 2003 - five months after the Washington Times staple had written his "news account" regarding Professor Jonathan Farley's conflict with that very organization, of which he also happens to be a member. Having sacrificed all ethics and journalistic objectivity in service to "the Confederate cause," McCain can truly be said to have fulfilled his "duty to defend the honor" of his ancestors by virtue of having bravely stood up to a black mathematics professor who had been "insulting the memory of heroes."
McCain did such a fine job of taking on Professor Jonathan Farley, in fact, that Farley himself admitted defeat when he contacted me on the occasion of an article I had written on the pundit's more recent activities. "McCain killed me," he wrote to me in October of 2009. "My career (as I can clearly see 7 years on) was wrecked by the likes of Robert McCain." Things had not gone well for Farley in the aftermath of the Washington Times article, which had gone a long way towards nationalizing the story and alerting certain parties to the fact that some black liberal was speaking ill of the Confederacy while also ensuring that even those readers who might not have a strong opinion on the matter were inclined to see Farley as the villain and his detractors as merely "frustrated." The administrators of Vanderbilt were presumably worried that the backlash might not stop at Farley, but rather cause trouble for themselves as well and perhaps even have the end result of drying up endowment; thus it was that, instead of defending the professor, the university instead released a series of statements meant to distance the institution from its most controversial employee.
That Farley was receiving death threats from those with the means and motive to carry them out, meanwhile, did not seem to bother anyone in the administration, as Farley was not offered any protection from campus security. One might defend the administration in this instance by noting that death threats are so ubiquitous that they may be generally disregarded - or at least one could, if the powers that be at Vanderbilt had indeed disregarded such things, which they plainly did not. When then-chancellor Gordon Gee received a single threat on his life at the time of the controversy, he spent the rest of the day with campus police in his office. It did not seem to occur to anyone at the university that perhaps Farley, who had received far more death threats and who was of course the main focus of the slanted coverage thus far, might perhaps need some protection as well. Gee discusses the incident in his 2006 book University Presidents as Moral Leaders, in which he also claims that Farley suddenly took a position with MIT during all of this, thereby leaving the chancellor to "clean up in his wake;" in fact, Farley had told the administration of his decision to leave well before. Ironically, Gee himself had previously left Brown University for higher-paying Vanderbilt under a bit of a cloud after having remained at the former institution for only two years, thereby sparking a controversy of his own. Perhaps more ironically, when Gee became the subject of his own scandal derived from the great deal of money he and his wife had spent in renovating their university-owned residence, among other things, spokespersons for Vanderbilt were quick to defend him just as strongly as they had previously criticized Farley for expressing his views to the effect that slave-owning traitors ought to have been dealt with at least as harshly as mentally-retarded murderers are treated to this very day.
After all of this, Farley decided that it would be best to extricate himself from Vanderbilt for a while, and thus requested an unpaid leave of absence, which he was granted, in order to take a visiting professorship at MIT, a university that was conspicuously free of Confederate iconography and, worse, Confederates. Meanwhile, the controversy was about to be revived; the Daughters of the Confederacy was apparently in the process of initiating a lawsuit regarding the matter, thus possibly putting Farley front and center once again and even requiring him to testify. Disinclined to get further involved, Farley wrote a letter to Richard McCarty, then dean of Vanderbilt's College of Arts and Science, in which he requested an extension. McCarty replied in the negative:
"This letter is to inform you that your 'request' to continue your leave of absence from your tenured position at Vanderbilt is not approved... Your stated reasons for not returning from your leave of absence, i.e. a purported debate over whether the founder of the Klu Klux Klan should be honored in Nashville and past threats you claim have been made against you, are not sufficient to support the continuation of your leave of absence and your unilateral decision not to return is unacceptable."
The Reader may notice that McCarty words this in such a way as to leave open the possibility that no such debate had occurred, and that the death threats made against Farley were simply something that the professor had claimed into existence - this, despite the fact that the university at which he served as dean (and today serves as provost) had been saturated with the controversy for months, and despite the fact that the death threats Farley had received were in the possession of the university as well as of Nashville police. One might think that, when considering the request of a tenured professor to have a leave of absence extended, one might want to factor in the datum of whether or not people had been announcing their intent to kill that professor, instead of simply taking the position that this may be the case or may simply be simply something that the professor is making up; of course, this is only the case if one's intent is to actually make a truthful determination in this regard.
Incidentally, I spoke to Richard McCarty, who has since been promoted to provost, regarding this matter in 2009, asking him specifically about the letter and other related matters. At the beginning of the conversation, he spoke in such a manner as to convey that he had Farley confused with some journalist - at least until I reminded him that the fellow of which we were speaking had received death threats. "He said he received death threats," McCarty corrected, suddenly knowing exactly to whom I was referring (when I asked him about this in a follow-up e-mail, and then another one, the provost declined to reply). And although McCarty told me that he had never seen the death threats and indeed had never asked to see them, he told me at another point that "we did not feel at the time that the threats were of a sufficient magnitude that he should not be returning to his duties." He was ultimately unable to explain how the sufficiency of the magnitude in question could have been determined by someone who had never seen the e-mails in question and who in fact had never thought it necessary to determine whether such e-mails existed in the first place. Farley believes - and I must agree with him, having seen dozens of pertinent documents and having had an unsatisfactory conversation with McCarty - that the university had simply been trying to get rid of him in such a way as that it would seem that Farley was at fault, rather than that the university had cut loose a troublemaker by any means convenient.
Even after resigning from Vanderbilt in disgust at his treatment, Farley continued to be targeted by unknown detractors whom we may assume to overlap with those who had spent so much time and energy hassling him in the months after the publication of his column. The day he began at Caltech, his colleagues began receiving anonymous e-mails along the following lines, directed to Farley but forwarded to his superiors, for whom they were obviously intended to begin with:
Could you please spend more time preparing lectures for your students and less time on writing articles expounding on racism in the United States? Many of us find your course very confusing...
Clearly, some party was continuing to track Farley's movements and take such actions as they believed might deter him from successful employment at other American institutions. Other, similar incidents awaited Farley for several years until such time as he gave up and left the country to take a position at Johannes Kepler University in Linz. Farley didn't fight back by means of the press, and in fact spoke to no journalists for seven years until reaching out to me in 2009 when he realized that McCain was now on the defensive. He had learned a valuable lesson about media dynamics; it only takes one unethical journalist working for the advancement of a cause to cripple a brilliant career.
***
Around the time that I began receiving documents from Farley, I was informed that someone else had already been waging a campaign by which to bring attention to Robert Stacy McCain's obvious racial sentiments. Charles Johnson had for years existed as the darling of the conservative blogosphere, having been instrumental in the conservative victory over Dan Rather after that anchorman had run with documents that appeared to have revealed special treatment for Bush during Vietnam but which turned out be fraudulent, and having otherwise been at the forefront of some of citizen journalism's most memorabble victories over the mainstream media. His blog, Little Green Footballs, was among the most prominent of its kind from the time it turned to politics in 2001 up to the present day; he had also co-founded Pajamas Media, a conservative blog network which remains a cornerstone of the internet's right-of-center informational infrastructure to this day. Lately, though, Johnson had grown disgusted with the conduct of his colleagues, and began to say as much in public; naturally this resulted in a fissure which has only grown since.
The matter of R.S. McCain had become a particular sticking point. Johnson's efforts to point out what McCain had been up to in years past had prompted a massive counter-campaign against Johnson himself; many of his former allies were now attacking him on a regular basis while also defending McCain, even as the evidence against the pundit continued to mount. Nothing seemed to matter to McCain's apologists, even as they found themselves confronted with more and more for which to apologize. McCain has admitted to a long friendship with Bill White, an unusually fluid radical whose views ranged from communism to anarchism at least 2002, by which year he had transitioned unambiguously into an active white supremacist and thus decided to attend an American Renaissance event. There, he hung out with McCain, who himself was covering the event in the capacity of a "reporter" for the Washington Times - and who, of course, was secretly writing for American Renaissance on the side. McCain had in fact known of White's various bizarre activities before meeting him, having interviewed the fellow in 1999 for a story on White's anti-government website Overthrow.com. McCain today admits to having been friends with the fellow for much of this time, though he claims that the two drifted apart before White made the transition from Libertarian Anarchist or what have you to full-on white supremacist. One might wonder what the two would have had in common before White's move to white advocacy; White was on the record as opposing Christianity, whereas McCain is such a staunch Christian that he involves himself in such movements as Quiverfull, which itself advocates heavy child-bearing on the part of Christians that they might outnumber their unbelieving adversaries and otherwise be in possession of a "quiver full" of young adherents.White was also a communist of various sorts for the entirety of his adult life before moving on to fascism, whereas McCain is, of course, a conservative who spends much of his time attacking leftists of considerably less socialist sentiment than one might expect from a communist. At any rate, McCain chose to publish four letters from White in 2000 in his capacity as an editor at The Times. During the same time, he was also linking to White's bizarre anti-government website from other forums under his Burke C. Dabney alter-ego.
McCain wrote off the relationship thusly in December of 2009, upon the occasion of White's conviction for crimes involving violent threats he'd been making in the course of his activism:
When he lived in the D.C. area in 1999-2000, White was actually a useful source for behind-the-scenes information on, among other things, the anti-globalization protests and the effort of Pat Buchanan's supporters to take over the Reform Party. After the 2000 election, however, White got mixed up with the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization run by William Pierce.
The implication here is that McCain would not want to associate with any such person with such ties as this - nevermind that McCain was linking to Overthrow.com from the conservative forum Free Republic as late as 2001, that he was himself involved with the white supremacist organization American Renaissance at the very same time as he was supposedly concerned with White's association with the National Alliance, that something about White had prompted his inclination to publish several of the nutty fellow's letters in The Times in his capacity and his editor and to keep in touch with him via e-mail and phone calls - all despite White holding several views that were fundamentally opposite to McCain's. What was it about White that appealed to McCain, who would have had such strong disagreements with the fellow on so many fundamental issues?
The idea that White just suddenly became a white supremacist leader in his own right in 2002 without first having held white supremacist views beforehand is, of course, nonsense. McCain associated with White for the same reason he associated with American Renaissance, Sons of the Confederacy, The League of the South, and whatever other individuals and organizations that he's actually managed to conceal having been involved with - McCain is, and long has been, a white supremacist. And if this were to be brought to fuller public awareness, it would discredit all manner of individuals and outlets with whom McCain has been associated to some degree or another - Glenn Reynolds of the popular conservative blog Instapundit and others who have linked to the fellow over the years, American Spectator, Human Events, the network Hot Air, and other venues which have continued to publish McCain's work even after this information has come to prominence - and, of course, Lynn Vincent, the writer with whom McCain co-authored the book Donkey Cons and who later went on to assist Sarah Palin in writing Going Rogue. That such an active racist has managed to make a name for himsein the midst of the conservative informational infrastructure would be embarrassing to a number of parties, and so these same parties have taken great pains to either ignore the evidence or attack those who bring it forth; some have even managed to do both at the same time.
After such time as I met Johnson and began to coordinate with him on our efforts to bring McCain's past activities to the attention of enough people that he might be thrown out of polite society, McCain's backers increasingly began to attack me in turn, focusing in particular on my atheism while usually ignoring the more damning bits of evidence in favor of older charges that neither I nor Johnson had been making and which were irrelevant to our overall case anyway. Eventually, I got in touch with McCain himself in order to give him a chance to address the various allegations; the fellow had already written a few things about me even as I was writing a few things about him, and so I figured it would not be amiss if he and I were to write things at each other rather than about each other. So I sent him an e-mail; he replied with an open letter published on his blog. I print it below, interspersed with the point-by-point reply I sent to him immediately after:
A rare occasion, Mr. Brown, when any of those who've chosen to attack me even bother attempting to contact me. Of course, no one ever contacts me in advance: "Hey, did you actually write X, Y, Z? If so, why? What did you mean? What are your opinions about these things?" Instead, they leap to assumptions (if it's on the Internet, it must be true) and the fact that certain things have been endlessly repeated online leads to the assumption that these things are true.
The fact of the matter is that you did indeed write X, Y, and Z, and in fact you do not even dispute writing X, Y, and Z, and X, Y, and Z happen to consist of such things as you writing bizarre apologies for the institution of slavery, jokingly proposing bumper stickers with messages such as, "Have you whipped your slave today?", and claiming that viewing mixed race marriages with "revulsion" is a natural thing. The rest of the alphabet continues in a similar vein.
How often, since Charles Johnson began attacking me, have I emphasized that, during the years I was at the Washington Times, I was not permitted to address these allegations? And how often have I remarked that "white supremacy" is quite contrary to my observed conduct among those who actually know me?
I don't know. Twice? More than twice? That is between you and The Washington Times. Insomuch as that publication is owned by the self-proclaimed king of the universe, I can understand why you followed their orders on this. "Pick your battles," my dad always said.
You are, I gather, a young man, and quite arrogant.
This is true, unfortunately.
Not an unusual combination, really, but neither should you mistake your own arrogance for knowledge. Try Googling my name in combination with the phrase "Hayekian insight." There are in the near-infinite number of things you don't know certain facts that may, I suspect, be far more important than those tacts you know. And it may be that you are mistaken about some things you accept as facts.
Very well.
Well, I've had more time to study all this sort of thing than you could imagine. You desire to make me look like a villain, for whatever selfish motive, and therefore assemble a prosecutor's case -- the Ransom Note Method. This you present with a lot of noise and clamour: "A-ha! I have exposed the dangerous villain, whose stealthy evil had never been fully known until now!"
And then I twirled one end of my handlebar mustache in satisfaction and took a pinch of snuff, the single vice I allow myself.
Now, what is *expected* of me in response is that I will address your "evidence" point-by-point or, failing that, that I will Deny, Denounce and Repudiate: "Oh, I'm not actually friends with Person A, and I abhor the thought of being associated with Person B."
I don't expect you to do anything of the sort.
Ah, but there is never an end to it, you see? Were I to answer charges A, B, C, you would then proceed to interrogate me about D, E, F, etc. To address your accusations in such a manner would ultimately avail me nothing, while tacitly acknowledging your authority to act the part of the interrogator. Further, such a response would suggest that there is some legitimate cause to suspect my good faith, to cause others to believe that perhaps I harbor a hidden hatred which must be rooted out and renounced.
Now see here, Raskolnikov, a student or formerly a student - all I'm doing is pointing out things that you have done. I haven't summoned you to my crazy Eastern European interrogation chamber in order to demand answers without telling you with what you are being charged. I'm just writing things about you - you know, that thing you yourself have been doing for years in opposition to your own enemies.
You invite me to a Maoist re-education camp, with yourself playing the role of commissar.
Why does it have to be a Maoist re-education camp? Maybe I'm inviting you to a party.
The cloud of suspicion is thrown upon me, and I must prove myself innocent!
Zounds!
Except that I don't. We live in a free society and I am not even a candidate for public office. I am not paid for having the correct opinion about anything. Opinions might be profitable to Bill Kristol or George Will, but I am not one of those big-shot pundits. It is my skill and hard work, and not my opinions, which are my stock in trade.
That's all very well and good. So why not simply admit that you're a white supremacist and then reinvent yourself as a white supremacist pundit? You have every right to express whatever views you may on anything you like. Likewise, I have the right to point out that you clearly hold such views.
What you and Johnson and others apparently wish to do is to cast upon me a stigma, which you may then use as part of a campaign of guilt-by-association smear against various of my friends. You seem to assume that my friends are fools and cowards, and will automatically disassociate themselves from me, lest you then say, "A-ha! So-and-so associates with Robert Stacy McCain, who is a hateful racist!"
What your various political allies do is none of my concern. That's a matter for the conservative punditry, not for me.
Except that I'm not a hateful racist. And this, sir, is the big point that you seem to have missed entirely.
I've never called you "hateful."
People know me, and the people who know me know that I have no hate in my heart, and if they felt it necessary to speak up on my behalf, you might be surprised at who would sing my praises. Their silence you mistake for fear, is rather an expression of their contempt for your malicious behavior.
Again, that's between you and your buddies.
Whatever you say about me, I am certain you will fail to convict me of hate, Barrett. I don't even hate you.
I don't hate you, either. I simply think that you have contempt for the Enlightenment principles upon which our republic was founded, and your past writings seem to bear that out. Sergey Romanov in particular has recently unearthed some staggering amount of things you wrote before you were in the public eye, and the general thrust of these writings is very clear - you are an apologist for slavery, an advocate of white control over non-white populations, and a proponent of the theocratic basis of government. You are not an American - you are a Confederate. This merits pointing out insomuch as that you are two degrees from such figures as Sarah Palin by way of the book you wrote with Lynn Vincent, as well as a single degree away from hundreds of conservative pundits, activists, and politicians.
Anyway, welcome to the 21st century.
Though McCain expended quite a great deal of time in discussing me and my attacks against him - even attempting to refute one or two of the less damning charges when not elsewhere claiming that his policy was to not refute any such charges lest he give credibility to his attackers - he has not been willing to engage me in any meaningful way of the sort that might allow him to address the major charges while requiring him to address crucial follow-up questions, such as by way of an e-mail exchange. I even provided him with the chance to write up to 2,000 words in which he could defend himself and attack me, an essay which I would agree to publish verbatim in this chapter no matter how devastating the result to myself. He turned this down.
Although a couple conservative bloggers here and there have since gone public in repudiating McCain, many others continue to defend him even in light of such things as we have seen above. Meanwhile, the conservative punditry as a whole has continued to degenerate to such a point as that there is no longer room for people such as Charles Johnson, who is of the sort to point out inconvenient facts about those with whom he may agree on certain major issues even if such facts could have the effect of damaging efforts to address those issues in such a way as he would like to see them address. Johnson worries over Islamic fundamentalism, but is unwilling to coddle others with the same opinion if those others happen to be aligned with neo-Nazi organizations, as is the case with certain of his former allies. And so Johnson must be denounced for the crime of ideological indiscretion, the only crime for which a conservative blogger can be denounced by his fellows, apparently.
***
As R.S. McCain himself was quick to point out at such time as I informed him I'd be including him in this book, he is nowhere near as notable as is Thomas Friedman or Charles Krauthammer or most others with whom this volume is concerned. McCain's relevance lies not in himself, but rather in the manner by which the conservative blogosphere as a whole has once again shown its true colors. Faced with a choice between a fellow who wrote an article for an unabashedly white supremacist publication under an assumed name and another fellow who, though having done more than his part to advance conservatism, feels compelled to disassociate himself with such other pundits who do such things as McCain has done, the conservative blogosphere chose the former. There is no room for such people as Charles Johnson in today's American conservative movement; it has all been taken up by such people as Robert Stacy McCain.