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The truth of David Mills’s conduct toward me
In his initial article at Huffington Post on May 3, 2007 in which he published David Horowitz’s e-mail to him about me on May 14, 2006, David Mills, the Undercover Black Man, wrote:
I have corresponded with Auster in the past, sometimes amicably. I like mixing it up with white nationalists; call me nutty. I even donated money when Auster passed the hat online to raise funds for the completion of his latest anti-immigration tract. That is something I now regret.At some point I may write a full account of my contacts with David Mills; in fact, I may print our entire friendly e-mail correspondence that took place between June 2006 and December 2006. Here I just want to provide the basic timeline, to give an idea of Mills’s actual behavior. I. In April 2006 I had my first encounter with Undercover Black Man, who wrote to me that I was using a double standard in harshly condemning the anti-Semitism at the American Renaissance online forum but not condemning the anti-black attitudes in the same venue. As can be seen by anyone who reads the linked blog entry, I treated his question seriously and answered at length. In reply he ignored what I had said and continued in the same accusatory tone, until I got fed up, said he showed a lack of rational thinking, and ended the exchange. II. As we now know from Mills’s publication of David Horowitz’s correspondence last week, and from Horowitz’s confirmation to me that this correspondence indeed occurred, in May 2006 Mills sent Horowitz an 11-page letter with quotes from my articles that was aimed at convincing Horowitz that I am a racist. The letter had its intended effect, probably beyond Mills’s wildest hopes: Horowitz wrote to Mills on May 14, 2006: “I think it’s a persuasive argument for not running Auster unless he publicly repudiates these positions which are racist and offensive.” III. On June 3, 2006, Undercover Black Man wrote to me out of the blue with information about my paternal grandmother. UBM had researched my family online and figured out who my parents were, who my uncles were, and in particular he had figured out that the novelist Paul Auster is my cousin. I asked him, if he was interested in that, why didn’t he just ask me? He told me that that would have defeated his purpose, which was to prove to me that he is smart, and to do it in a way that would stun and surprise me, which he wanted to do after I had dismissed him in my exchange with him at my website in April. At first I was openly suspicious of what he was about, but as he came up with more and more interesting historical material about my family, I was impressed and intrigued by what he had found and how he had found it, the correspondence developed, and we became friendly. Around this time he told me his name was David Mills. After the genealogical topic came to an end, we continued corresponding intermitttantly on a variety of topics until December 2006. IV. On July 8, 2006, Mills sent me a Paypal donation of $200 to assist in my work. I was stunned by this and wrote him a warm thank you note. V. Finally, returning to where we started, on May 3, 2007, Mills wrote:
I have corresponded with Auster in the past, sometimes amicably. I like mixing it up with white nationalists; call me nutty. I even donated money when Auster passed the hat online to raise funds for the completion of his latest anti-immigration tract. That is something I now regret.This makes it seem that AFTER Mills’s amicable correspondence with me, and AFTER he donated money to support my work, he THEN realized that I am a nasty racist and regretted having sent the donation. But as we now know, his successful effort to destroy my writing career at FrontPage Magazine took place BEFORE his amicable correspondence with me and BEFORE he sent me a donation. Further, his characterization of his correspondence with me as “I have corresponded with Auster in the past, sometimes amicably. I like mixing it up with white nationalists,” is misleading. Virtually all our correspondence between June 2006 and December 2006 was amicable (in December 2006 he did something unethical toward another right-wing blogger and I stopped communicating with him), and we weren’t mixing it up about “white nationalism” but addressing in a non-confrontational way a variety of topics, some having nothing to do with race, ranging from methods of geneological research to the evolution controversy. Also consider the kind of language he is now using about me, his repeated description of me as a “race-baiter,” both in his May 3 post and his May 7 post, his claim that I wrote my articles in “bad faith,” his use of language to make me sound as though I were some bent individual with a bigoted fixation on blacks. For a sample of how Mills now speaks about me, look at his blog entry from May 4. There really are no words to describe someone who takes deliberate action to harm a person’s reputation and career, succeeds, and then, without letting on what he has done, commences a friendly, intellectual correspondence with that person and even sends him a contribution, and then a year later launches a nasty personal attack on that person aimed at blackening his name. Others can come up with adjectives and descriptions for Mills’s behavior and character. I don’t want to do that. I’m just providing the facts. If I post my June-December 2006 e-mail correspondence with Mills, showing our friendly and respectful communications on a variety of subjects over a period of several months, all of which, again, took place AFTER he had secretly destroyed my writing outlet at FP, then the nature of his conduct will become even plainer.
Mark Jaws wrote (before the above entry was posted):
I would not have given UBM the time of day. Our destiny is no way bound to what nincompoops like him think or say.LA replies:
Well, after my experience with Mills, with whom I had a friendly and extensive e-mail correspondence, imagine how likely I am in the future to entertain any other blacks who like Mills challenge me while also claiming to be interested in discussion with me.John D. writes:
I’ve been reading with great interest and a good deal of sadness (regarding the episode in itself), the discussion and reader’s comments regarding the betrayal of you by David Horowitz and would like to comment on a thought you posted just recently. In replying to Mark Jaws you were speaking of the predicament that Mills would likely find himself in, that being, with a lack of a future captive audience of conservative whites because of his treasonous behavior toward you. Should not the same standard apply to Horowitz? How can he ever expect honest, intellectual thought and discourse in the future from any other writer after the repulsively disloyal manner in which he has treated you, someone with whom he has had a rather long and beneficial relationship? Does he think that his other contributors to FPM will not have this in the forefront of their mind? Horowitz should be labeled the one-man destroyer of intellectual traditionalist honesty.LA replies:
Thank you very much for the words of support, but do you see any sign that conservatives in general are aware of this? This has played on blogs, not elsewhere. Other than being attacked by UBM and his commenters at Huffington, and by James Wolcott and his commenters at Vanity Fair, and by a bunch of liberal blogs (who mostly don’t use arguments at all but just nasty words to describe all conservatives—their intellectual level is amazingly low), Horowitz has not paid any visible price so far among conservatives. Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 07, 2007 11:24 PM | Send Email entry |