Subject: corrections
From: Jonathan Farley <lattice.theory@gmail.com>
Date: 1/4/10, 17:49
To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>

Hi,

Thanks for this.

Please change "Fulbright Distinguished Scholar" to "Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to the United Kingdom"

More importantly: Vanderbilt had nothing to do with the Ku (not Klu) Klux Klan statue, nor was the Klan statue near Vanderbilt's campus.  That's what makes the attempt to drag me into the Vanderbilt court case so insidious.  You could change

"and likewise ditching a nearby statue commemorating Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had assisted in the creation of the Klu Klux Klan"

to

"; nearby, there was a statue commemorating Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had assisted in the creation of the Ku Klux Klan"

Regarding

"ought to have been executed for treason after the war and had their property be dispersed among former slaves"

I agree with this sentiment, but since this became the crux of the matter, what is more accurate is the following:

"deserved to have been executed for treason after the war, and race relations would be better today had their property been dispersed among former slaves"

You mention Memphis twice: I was actually in Nashville, which I think is a 3-hour drive from Memphis.

And remember that the Tim Chavez quote by the 66 year-old was republished as if it were a response to my essay, when if anything my essay was a response to that quote (which was first published by Chavez in, I believe, October 2002, one month or more before I published the essay).

And the quote allegedly by me was (a) not "posted" anywhere (this implies I sent it to the public, thus justifying McCain's re-publishing it), and (b) in fact, I told The Tennessean, where McCain got the quotes from, that I neither confirmed nor denied writing the email, but if they published it, I might take legal action.  Unfortunately, my lawyer quit on me, I assume worried that this was getting out of control; Tim Chavez published his name, David Danner, in the newspaper anyway.  As I wrote in my recent email to McCain, I do support the sentiments in this email ostensibly by me: what's wrong with forming armies when the neo-Confederate Klan supporters are formed into military battalions?



"belong" should probably be "belonging"

"an increasingly" should be "An increasingly"

I loved the "Apollo" bit, especially the beginning and the end. Incidentally, there is a Parthenon in Nashville, with a 40-foot statue of Pallas Athena.

Is it "Ramna" or "Ranma"?

I also liked the comment about the mattress.

I thought McCain was in the League of the South?  (Maybe he's also in SCV.)


Is it "Each of these get" or "Each of these gets"? (Maybe it doesn't matter.)

"note how innocuous is McCain's article is" should be "note how innocuous McCain's article is "


When you write
"of which he also happens to be a member"
it may be unclear who "he" is:  Perhaps it would be better to write:

"of which McCain also happens to be a member"



You write

" 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"

I made the decision well before and independently of the neo-Confederate attack.  So it is better to write,

"After all of this, Farley decided that it would be best to extricate himself from Vanderbilt for a while; previously, he had requested an unpaid leave of absence, which he was granted"

You write:

"the Daughters of the Confederacy was apparently in the process of initiating a lawsuit regarding the matter"

They had filed the suit months before. It would be better to write:

' the Daughters of the Confederacy was apparently in the process of dragging Farley into its lawsuit regarding the "Confederate" dorm '

Also please note that I wrote the letter to Richard McCarty in 2005.  Your readers might be confused. You could write, instead of

"Disinclined to get further involved, "

"Two years later, disinclined to get dragged into the Confederate lawsuit that apparently had lain dormant waiting for him to return to Nashville,"


You write "were in the possession of the university".  Technically, this is true since people wrote threats about me to them.  But except for sending samples of threats to the student newspaper, The Vanderbilt Hustler, I'm not sure if I sent the threats to the university administration.  I sent the threats to the Nashville police and to The Tennessean newspaper.  But you don't need to revise what you have written here.  The Tennessean reported the threats, and that they had seen them (on-line: the print version just said I had made claims), and The Hustler reprinted part of one of the threats.  I was told by the wife of a colleague that she had heard from McCarty's wife that McCarty had received a threat.

I would write, instead of

"a leave of absence extended"

"an unpaid leave of absence extended"


This sentence

"Even after resigning from Vanderbilt in disgust at his treatment,"
is accurate, but it might be better to say

"Even after resigning from Vanderbilt so as to avoid the Confederate courtroom trap, with its concomitant death threats and libel,"

You write: "and in fact spoke to no journalists for seven years"

I did write some journalists, for example, the journalist who did the cover story about me for the NAACP's magazine The Crisis, but nobody ever did anything.  I also wrote one of the authors of the Wall Street Journal story about the drug use of Gee's wife, who asked me to send her more information, but she never wrote anything.  And I spoke with an editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A quick fix is to just eliminate this phrase.

Actually, I stopped speaking publically for several years, cancelling at least four paid speaking engagements that I had at the time, and I stopped writing for several years.  This was to prevent the neo-Confederates from saying I was a "public individual," who could therefore be libeled with impunity.  When I saw my chances at Caltech were ruined, I began writing about the Vanderbilt incident. The student who sent the anonymous email (I actually filed a charge of racial harassment against the only student who didn't write anonymously, Daniel Lo, who also was writing my "bosses" at Caltech, and was ready to file a charge against another one) may have seen my November 2007 essay for The Guardian newspaper called, "The DNA of the KKK," at the end of which I discuss what happened to me at Vanderbilt.  So, yes, people were watching and this information was used against me.  Two days after I filed a claim of racial harassment against the chairman of Caltech's math department, Matthias Flach, and one day after I published a piece in the New York Times, Flach wrote something libelous about me to the New York Times through his secretary.  So he was searching on the web for stories about me too.

Also note that I have given up on the United States and came to Austria in 2008 to avoid the racism, but I did leave for Jamaica (2006-2007) for the same reason.  The article from the Jamaica Observer wonders why it didn't work out for me there.  I also wonder why.  Although it is a black country, I suspect that they got wind of the Vanderbilt story after they had made me the offer, but before I arrived.  This is just speculation, however.


You write: "but which turned out be fraudulent"

I know what the enemy of my enemy is, but my understanding is that the documents were *claimed* to have been fraudulent, because the superscript "th" was not available as a font at the time the documents were supposed to have been typewritten.  But in fact the superscript "th" was available for that typewriter even going back to the 1930's.  It's the rabbit-like skittishness of the modern media in the face of the conservative hurricane that caused CBS to back away---not unlike my case.  It might be better to write:

"but which conservatives claimed were fraudulent"

"memorabble" should probably be "memorable"

"at least 2002" should probably be "at least until 2002"

"in his capacity and his editor" should perhaps be "in his capacity as editor"

"himsein" should be "himself in"


My email ends with your saying you will include McCain's letter to you, but I see nothing.

Thanks,
Jonathan

2010/1/4 Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Here's the draft of the chapter; please read over and make sure everything's accurate.

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 affair 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. He's since sent sent me a selection of them, and I have managed to determine that several 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 after all the rest. 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! Go me!

    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: “There’s 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, that’s not the case.”

Well, that settles it, eh? Despite the blip in teen pregnancy, teenagers actually aren’t 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 America’s 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 Times’s story, which in nearly 900 words didn’t 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 Jackson’s 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.
 &nbs@ll 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: