With many among the left having lately been bogged down to some extent in a relatively wonkish debate over health care in general and the question of best-versus-possible in particular, it's easy to forget that the somewhat more fundamental conflict among conservatives regarding the future of the movement is still ongoing, with most of the goings-on in question being conducted online. Among the most telling of the battles within the larger civil war - if such martial terminology is appropriate for describing something conducted largely from swivel chairs, which I suppose it is not - is the one being fought between Charles Johnson of the blog Little Green Footballs on the one hand and dozens of conservative bloggers on the other. Even I got a piece of the action.
Until recently, Charles Johnson was among the most celebrated of right-wing bloggers, with his particular brand of opposition to Islamic radicalism and certain aspects of the left seeming to have filled a niche in the early days of the political blogosphere. That a largely unknown individual quickly gained a massive readership by the direct means of the internet served as a clear indicator of things to come. And in 2004, when Johnson took a leading role in exposing as forgeries the Killian documents put forward by CBS as proof that Bush had drawn on favoritism in order to shirk his Vietnam-era duties, it became all the more clear that the traditional news outlets had lost their monopoly on mass media.
Johnson would eventually discover that he had very little in common with the conservatives of the present day or even the bulk of his own readership, being a secularist and also very easily put off by what he came to see as dishonesty and anti-intellectualism; his open criticism of other right-wing bloggers of course led to a number of disputes with same. The final straw, though, was Johnson's ongoing campaign to get commentator Robert Stacy McCain drummed out of polite society or at least the movement conservative equivalent thereof. McCain is a former editor of The Washington Times and the co-author of Donkey Cons, an anti-liberal volume the fellow wrote with Lynn Vincent; the latter went on to ghostwrite Sarah Palin's undoubtedly erudite Going Rogue, while McCain is now a regular contributor to American Spectator as well as a prolific blogger. That he's since been revealed to have written a 2003 article warning of Caucasian "race suicide" for the white supremacist publication American Renaissance and done so under a pen name derived from that of slavery apologist Robert Lewis Dabney does not seem to have put much of a dent in his reputation among his colleagues, some of whom have defended the fellow even as the evidence continues to mount that the guy who wrote for a white supremacist publication may very well be a white supremacist.
In September, I noticed that McCain seemed to worry over teen pregnancy only in such cases wherein the teens in question are black or Hispanic, and so I wrote an article to that effect for The Huffington Post, after which point I was informed of the American Renaissance piece and then just went totally nuts. I must have done about a dozen articles and blog posts on the guy in the space of perhaps three months. New evidence just kept popping up - he'd posted all of these message board comments in defense of certain aspects of southern slavery, he'd hung around with now-imprisoned anarchist-turned-neo-Nazi Bill White, he'd expressed opposition to interracial marriage, and he didn't seem to be sure if preferring not to do business with a black bank teller constitutes racism. Better yet, every time I wrote something about him, he'd do something crazy and interesting. One time he posted an "open letter" in which he compared my conduct to that of a Maoist interrogator, and also maybe a 19th century Russian police detective but I'm not sure. Another time he declared, "Barrett Brown: He'll get his in turn," and on still another occasion he accused me of having enjoyed Avatar as well as of being an anti-Semite, although he was just joking about Avatar. I grew addicted to Robert Stacy McCain, having never had an enemy so responsive, so prone to take things in bizarre directions. I was totally gay for him as an object of criticism.
Having meanwhile made Johnson's acquaintance due to our mutual interest in harassing McCain, I found him to be a fine fellow and quite reasonable, and so the two of began to collaborate on, you know, harassing McCain. This allowed me to inherit a few of Johnson's enemies, which was a fine thing since my own enemies and I had run out of things to say about each other. A pro-southern secession group called the League of the South pointed out that I was the spokesman for an atheism-oriented PAC. Conservative commentator Donald Douglas pointed out that I was the spokesman for an atheism-oriented PAC. A bunch of other people pointed out that I'm the spokesman for an atheism-oriented PAC. I pointed out that McCain is clearly a white supremacist. We all ran out of things to say about each other as well. I guess I'll start dating again. Probably not, though.
Irritated that McCain is still being treated as a respectable commentator and otherwise pissed off that such mediocre people as Thomas Friedman are even more respectable while also being incredibly mediocre, Johnson and I have since decided to channel our general crankiness into something productive. He's agreed to work with me in organizing some sort of decentralized and non-ideological blogger network with the ad hoc goal of bringing pressure to bear on bad commentators and those who employ them, with the effort to potentially be coupled with software currently in development by open-source advocate Andrew Stein which itself will allow bloggers to take better advantage of their medium. Although Johnson has experience in such things insomuch as that he co-founded the conservative blog outlet Pajamas Media back in 2004 before later repudiating it as "just another right-wing parrot organization," it occurs to me now that I've nonetheless bitten off quite a bit in having already bragged to a bunch of people that I'm going to have some major hand in reforming the political blogosphere and bring wider attention to the failures of the news media at large. Now I have to actually do all that or I'm going to look like an asshole. A bigger asshole, rather.
In conclusion, Robert Stacy McCain is a white supremacist.
Barrett Brown is the author of Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny. His second book, Caught, Fat, and Clouded: The Amazing and Amusing Failures of America's Chattering Class, is set for release in April. He's a regular contributor to Skeptic and The Huffington Post; his other work has appeared in The Onion, National Lampoon, Cracked, McSweeney's, and dozens of other publications. He currently serves as director of communications for Enlighten the Vote, a political action committee that advocates for the Establishment Clause and provides campaign assistance to politicians who do likewise.