Jonathan Farley

On November 20, 2002, I published an essay about a taxpayer-funded statue of the founder of the Ku Klux Klan that had been erected relatively recently in Nashville, Tennessee. My recollection is that I received about 800 hate messages via email, some of which you can see below, and a number of letters. This doesn't include emails, calls, and letters sent to other people about me or websites made about me. I let my office answering machine fill up.

As I learned later, this had happened and continues to happen to many, many others, for instance, white Princeton University historian James McPherson, merely for mentioning the “thinly veiled support for white supremacy” of neo-Confederate organizations, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the League of the South, and the Council of Conservative Citizens, which urged its members to “gather a mob” to get me. To give a second example, in 2009 Arthur Dowdell, an Auburn, Alabama city councilman, removed four Confederate flags from a graveyard and received hundreds or thousands of hate messages and threats; he was also threatened with arrest.

These men are “guilty” of what neo-Confederates call a “heritage violation.” Their groups converge nationwide on a single individual, and they successfully intimidate third parties into remaining silent or even into believing that, if so many people could be angry, the person they are angry with must actually be at fault.

Despite the fact that these groups support the Ku Klux Klan, wish the Confederacy had won the Civil War, and some, like the Southern Independence Party of Tennessee and related groups (SIP Tennessee claims 3,000 members), even advocate the secession of the South from the United States today, the mainstream media and other institutions, bombarded with thousands of calls and emails from these groups in a coordinated effort, erroneously conclude that these groups represent mainstream opinion, and that they are the sane, stable parties. The offending individual is categorized as the unstable and insane party.

For example, according to the Nashville police, Wallace Earl Cook of Nashville threatened Gordon Gee, the head of Vanderbilt University, saying that he would go over to Gee’s office and “cut [Gee’s] heart out”. Henry Maston wrote that he hoped Gee would be “killed by the same worthless [racial slur] that kills Farley.”

Yet to the best of my knowledge, Gee has never criticized neo-Confederate organizations, not even these individuals. Indeed he refers to the neo-Confederates as “old friends,” while he called me “volatile”―without, of course, any evidence―in a book that shockingly was vetted by people with law degrees.

One definition of terrorism is the use of force or the threat of force to attain a political objective. The nationwide attack on me that began in 2002 and continued through 2005 is one of the main reasons I moved into counterterrorism, and sought permanent employment outside the United States, where the neo-Confederates would be unable to mount the usual sort of mass attack, involving death threats, libel, and other forms of intimidation against anyone who might potentially be bold enough to speak the truth about the antebellum South, the Confederacy, and the nightriders.

Some of the Vanderbilt University students who participated in the attack against me include Jacob Grier, formerly with the influential Cato Institute and now in Portland, Oregon, Ben Stark, now a lawyer in Atlanta, Jeff Woodhead, now a chemical engineering graduate student at North Carolina State University, and David Barzelay, now a lawyer with Fenwick and West LLP in Silicon Valley, California.

If you are wondering why, if what I am saying is true, you have never seen anyone else write about the true nature of neo-Confederate groups, then I suggest you do so yourself.

You will immediately find out.

Commutative Algebra, von Fotograf Marco Prenninger.

According to the Nashille Tennessean newspaper of January 17, 2003, Henry Maston wrote that he hoped Vanderbilt University head Gordon Gee would be “killed by the same worthless (racial slur) that kills Farley.”

Lunelle Siegel, editor of a Sons of Confederate Veterans newsletter that praises the Ku Klux Klan, adds on the Sierra Times website that the “KKK was created to protect women and children”. In a letter to the editor, someone responds, “[Farley’s] words inflamed me such that I wanted to put a minie [bullet] down the barrel of my Enfield [rifle], hunt him down, and shoot him like the dog he is.“

Lewis Goldberg writes, “In a more civilised era, [Farley and his fellow travelers’] treason would be dealt with by rope...”

Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 15:13:16 -0500
From: Jean Stork <geno73@bellatlantic.net>
To: farley@math.vanderbilt.edu
Subject: THE ANSWER FROM THIS NIGGER IS SIMPLE...HE WENT TO BERKLEY.

YOU HAD BETTER "WATCH YOUR BACK"...
Southern Confederate men and women who vow to stop this niggers remarks about our people, who freed many many niggers and that is why he is not picking cotton.

WE SAVED HIS BLACK ASS ONCE...BUT NO MORE...NOW HE AND HIS ILK WILL PAY.

From: "Michael O'Brien" < michael.obrien@sbcglobal.net>
To: <farley@math.vanderbilt.edu>
Subject:
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 10:03:21 -0600

Instead of hiding behind a computer and a constitutuion you hate, why don't you meet me in a place of your choosing and I'll show you Confederate cowardice. By the way, if you care to do a little actual study you'll find black Americans fought and died for the Confederate cause. But I suspect you already know this fact and it has resulted in your attitude. I'll keep you in my prayers anyway and wait for your response to my challange.

Mike O'Brien, Attorney-at-law.

I read about your piece in which you said that all Confederates should've been killed after the war. I know you've been getting a lot of hate mail from pissed SCV types, but here's one White Southerner who wants to sing your praises. You go, boy! (as you coloreds so colorfully put it). One good genocidal screed agin' Johnny Reb from a frothing coon like you does more to enrage them than all of today's jewsmedia reports of nigra rampages against White folks ever will, so by all means keep on verbally whipping the asses of these "Tolerate us, too! Please!"-puling "heritage" pussies. You provide an invaluable service to the cause of White redemption by making it crystal clear to the weak-kneed, wishful-thinking fools that Niggy Don' Play Dat; that the only things Uncle Shmuel has planned for them in the future are ever-increasing humiliation and high yeller grandchildren. When these flag fetishists finally wake up to that grim reality, then and only then will they stand up like men and begin to fight for the TRUE meaning of that banner. And when that blessed day comes at last, uppity niggers shall be snuffed by the ton, ending this disastrous experiment with inferior African farm machinery once & for all.

In the Vanderbilt student newspaper, The Hustler, Nia Toomer wrote, “On behalf of the Black Student Alliance, I would like to announce that we support everything that Dr. Jonathan Farley wrote about the Confederacy.” She also wrote Tennessean newspaper columnist Tim Chavez, who published her name explicitly in order to punish her for defending me. Nia Toomer later received the following email:

Hey, aids infested nigger bitch!!! When you send someone an e-mail calling them ignorant, be sure you do not show your ignorance as well, smelly jigaboo!!! T he war between your ears ended in 1865, not 1869, as you told that spic Chavez. You have about as much sense as that “communist nigger” Farley. (Damn, I am still laughing about that!!!) As far as your feelings about the right side winning, I have a piece of advice for you, ignorant nigger whore. Go and see the movie “Gangs of New York”. It is one of my favorite movies. Niggers are lynched and burned. People call Abraham Lincoln (who was a White Supremacist) a nigger-lover intent on destroying the White race. Racism is rampant. There is a lot of Confederate sympathy. Oh, did I mention that the movie, extremely factual and historically accurate, takes place in NEW YORK CITY??? Go and see it, if you dare to experience some TRUTH, instead of the lies you spew out of your smelly, cavity infested mouth!!! Lick my toilet bowl’s insides clean!!! Black power, under your arms!!! Nigger.