My Offer to R.S. McCain Regarding His Inclusion in My Upcoming Book

Earlier this week, I informed blogger, author, and American Spectator contributor Robert Stacy McCain that he would be the topical focus of one of the chapters of my upcoming book Hot, Fat, and Clouded: The Amazing and Amusing Failures of America’s Chattering Class, and also provided him with the opportunity to address in advance any subject dealt with in that chapter, including one matter in particular that has yet to be discussed publicly. He has taken the time to write a couple of posts in response, mostly concerning the book’s profitability, but he has for some reason not yet acknowledged my Wednesday proposition that the two of us engage in a back-and-forth e-mail exchange whereby he would have the opportunity to shoot down the various claims that have been made against him by myself and others regarding his activities within the white nationalist and neo-Nazi movements.

Though I have consistently linked directly to all of McCain’s various responses to the increasingly irritating and repetitive articles that I keep writing about him in hopes that some party or another within the conservative media will be forced to acknowledge the embarrassing fact of McCain’s background, McCain just as consistently refuses to provide his own readers with any real information about what it is that he and I have been discussing via e-mail and blog posts over the past couple of months, and in fact usually refrains from either linking to my posts when discussing them or even properly conveying what exactly those posts say. He has addressed several shaky claims that were made against him by someone else years ago and provided what now appears to be an extraordinarily disingenuous explanation of how he came to be connected to neo-Nazi leader Bill White, whom we are to believe was not a virulent racist just a year or two before becoming some well-known and highly-active white nationalist organizer. McCain has not managed to address how it is that he came to be writing for the white nationalist publication American Renaissance under an assumed name under which he also linked to White’s neo-Nazi website Overthrow; nor why it is that he had the fellow who runs the conservative website Free Republic delete all of his posts and comments a few years ago; nor why he spent so much time and energy in defending the institution of southern slavery; nor why it is that he is so obsessed with birth rates among whites as compared to non-whites and in fact defends teen pregnancy except in such cases as he is openly worrying about teen pregnancies among blacks and Hispanics; nor why he thinks the Confederacy to be so incredibly wonderful that he simply must be a member of such an organization as the League of the South, a radical anti-federal outfit which also has some bad qualities, such as its obvious keenness on a more theocratic sort of constitution.

Meanwhile, a small handful of conservative bloggers have deigned to acknowledge some of the evidence that has been laid out so far and sort-of-kind-of-maybe provided for the possibility that perhaps there is perhaps maybe something to all of this, maybe. The most prominent to have done so thus far is Patterico, who has rightfully acknowledged that at least one of the quotes to which McCain has not denied ownership is “indefensible.” For his part, McCain had previously explained the quote on his blog in the following, not particularly convincing manner:

Meanwhile, it has been noted that I elided the part of Ben Smith’s post where he described me as being opposed to interracial marriage. To explain: Both my time and the reader’s attention are limited quantities. A full-length explanation of the minute details of the accusations against me is ineffective and wasteful. The larger point is false — I’m not a “white supremacist” or an “avowed segregationist,” etc. — and a discussion of the details only lends credibility to the accuser. “Stay out of the tall grass.”

So, uh, there you go.

Although McCain has here and elsewhere asserted that he wishes to refrain from giving precious credibility to his various accusers by responding to their charges, he has elsewhere responded to some their charges, which is to say that his anti-credibility measures are obviously not actually any sort of policy so much as they are simply another excuse not to address the most damning pieces of evidence while elsewhere knocking down old or ambiguous evidence upon which the present arguments against him do not rely, these arguments being at this point being backed by an absurdly comprehensive array of quotes, revealed facts, and other indicators that clearly demonstrate McCain to be – as even some of his fellow conservatives are now coming to realize – a white supremacist with significant past ties to the neo-Nazi community.

In an open letter he wrote to me a few months back, McCain lamented that no one asks him about the evidence before making charges against him – a strange problem for a fellow who has otherwise vowed to not discuss the evidence lest he give credibility to the accuser, but to each his blatant contradictions. At any rate, I have provided McCain with an unusual opportunity to decide what will go into the chapter that I’ll be writing on him over the next two weeks, at which point the book will have to go to press. If my assertions are flimsy or otherwise refutable, he has the chance to humiliate me in my own book, as I have agreed to include any debate we conduct as-is, along with anything else he’d care to write about either me or the charges I’ve been making, assuming it is of reasonable length. If this offer were extended to me, I’d certainly take it. If McCain is confident in his ability to engage me with in a more substantive manner than he has so far, he will take it as well.

Amusingly-Timed Update

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs announces that the aforementioned  McCain associate and neo-Nazi leader Bill White was just convicted on four counts of making online threats. From the linked news account:

The head of a Roanoke neo-Nazi group, White was found guilty on charges that in one case involved threats intended to prevent residents of a Virginia Beach apartment complex from giving testimony in a housing discrimination case.

That’s kind of mean, isn’t it? One might well wonder what sort of now-amusing things McCain may have written about those of his ideological opponents who might have any similarly unsavory buddies. One might well! Wonder!