Query from Barrett Brown

Howdy-

I wanted to check and see if the Observer might have an interest in running an excerpt from my second book, Caught, Fat, and Clouded, which will be released in April and which concerns the manner in which our nation's most respected columnists - Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, and Richard Cohen, for instance - have gained and maintained their positions of prominence despite having made all sorts of failed predictions, contradicted themselves on rather important issues, and otherwise contributed to the general public misunderstanding.

As for me, I was born and raised in Dallas and spent seven years in Austin before moving on to New York. I'm now a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, Skeptic, and True/Slant, and my other work has appeared in dozens of additional publications. My first book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny, was released in 2007 to praise from Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School as well as Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, among other kindly folks. I occasionally lecture on philosophy and other subjects at New York-area universities such as Rutgers and also serve as director of communications for the political action committee Enlighten the Vote.

In addition to book excerpts, I've also got a story idea for you if you're interested, although it's more of a regional story of relevance to former Confederate states than it is something dealing specifically with Texas. A few months ago I wrote an article for Huffington Postconcerning conservative pundit Robert Stacy McCain (wrote a crappy book with Palin ghostwriter Lynn Vincent of Going Rogue fame, longtime contributor to American Spectator and other pubs, former Washington Times editor, increasingly popular blogger) and the racist writings he's been found to have composed under a Confederate-inspired pen name years back as well as his past neo-Nazi connections. Afterwards I was contacted by former Professor Jonathan Farley, who was one of the nation's most promising young mathematicians as well as a progressive activist until 2002, when he wrote an op-ed for a Tennessee newspaper to the effect that the Confederates were traitors and that the presence of a local statue of KKK co-founder Nathan Bedford Forrest was a travesty, thereby sparking what developed into a major controversy at Vanderbilt, where he was teaching at the time. McCain, who was at the time still an editor and reporter for The Washington Times, wrote a ridiculously slanted "news" article on the subsequent dispute between Farley, who is black, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans - an organization of which McCain was actually a member. McCain even gave a speech to the SCV just a few months after his article in which he talked about how it's the duty of all Southerners to defend the Confederacy from those engaged in "insulting heroes" (also in 2002, McCain wrote a piece for the white supremacist publication American Renaissance in which he warned of the dangers of "race suicide" among whites, and did so under the Confederate-inspired nickname "Robert Lewis Dabney").

Farley himself had already received death threats (of which I've seen a selection and managed to determine that some came from presumably-armed military veterans living within a half-hour away from the professor) and racist e-mails immediately after the publication of this piece, but of course the rate of these increased dramatically after McCain's story helped to take the controversy national. Meanwhile, the administration at Vanderbilt attempted to distance themselves from Farley and were otherwise less than sympathetic to his circumstances; Chancellor Gordon Gee received a single death threat over the incident and had campus police in his office for the rest of the day, whereas Farley - a black, leftist academic who had written the piece in question and who had of course received over a dozen death threats at this point - was never offered any protection whatsoever. I also have a letter from then-Dean Richard McCarty which he wrote to Farley in 2004 in response to the latter's request for an extension of his unpaid leave of absence. Here's a telling excerpt:

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.

Note that McCarty does not even acknowledge the fact that Farley had indeed received a great number of death threats even though they had been forwarded to Nashville police and could have been easily verified as having existed, and, even more bizarrely, refrains from admitting that any controversy had taken place, even though it was a major event at Vanderbilt and was of course well-documented. These and other incidents seem to indicate severe mistreatment of Farley on the part of the administration, which was collectively more interested in damage control and disciplining Farley than they were in backing their own tenured professor or even protecting him from whatever potential violence that had so worried Chancellor Gee. I interviewed McCarty, who's since been promoted to provost, two months ago regarding all of this; he did not have any particularly good answers as to why he did not bother to verify if Farley had indeed received a great deal of death threats or even been involved in a major controversy, most likely because he knew perfectly well that both of these things were the case.

Farley was continually harassed at subsequent professorships he went on to take at MIT and other institutions, often by anonymous e-mails from alleged "students" to his higher-ups; the following, for instance, was sent on Farley's first day of teaching a new class:

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.

Farley eventually gave up on the U.S. and took a position at Johannes Kepler University in Linz. He's refrained from speaking to the press up until contacting me, largely out of understandable mistrust. I've told him that I'd try to get the story placed somewhere, as both McCain's conflict of interest and other ethical lapses as well as the Vanderbilt's administration's conduct in this incident are both, I think, indicative of serious problems within the media and higher education, respectively. McCain, not-so-incidentally, has yet to be thrown out of polite conservative society for his increasingly-evident racial views.

Anyway, let me know if you'd be interested in either the Farley story or a book excerpt, and thanks for having taken the time to read through this unfortunately lengthy query.

Thanks again,

Barrett Brown

Brooklyn, NY

512-560-2302