The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake

Posted on | September 9, 2013 | 49 Comments

Barrett Brown promotes atheism on Fox News, January 2009

“Karen Lancaster always believed her only son was special” — that line in Alexander Zaitchik’s Rolling Stone profile of Barrett Brown stands out as explaining how this high-school dropout who started “dabbling” with heroin at age 19 was able to imagine himself as the hero of a psycho-drama in which he would “destroy” an FBI agent to vindicate himself against the conspiracy of which he accused his enemies.

Oh, the Special Snowflake! Couldn’t be bothered to obey the law, because the law isn’t meant to apply to Special Snowflakes:

Brown grew up in the affluent North Dallas neighborhood of Preston Hollow, where, following his parents’ divorce, he lived with his New Age mother. Karen Lancaster always believed her only son was special — he once wrote that she called him “an indigo child with an alien soul.” Among her house rules was that mother and son meditate together daily. She instructed him in the predictions of Nostradamus and made sure he kept a dream journal for the purpose, as Brown described it, “of helping him divine the future by way of my external connection to the collective unconscious.” (For her part, Brown’s mother says she was progressive, but not “New Age”, and that her son’s comments were made in jest.)
A precocious pre-adolescent reader and writer, Brown produced a newspaper on his family’s desktop computer while in elementary school. When he started writing for the student paper at his private high school in the mid-Nineties, he quickly clashed with the paper’s censors over his right to criticize the administration. “Barrett always challenged authority, even as a kid, and anytime you go up against authority, you’re going to get in trouble,” says Brown’s father, Robert. “You could sort of always see this coming.”
By the time he reached high school, Brown had discovered Ayn Rand and declared himself an atheist. He founded an Objectivist Society at school and distinguished himself from other Randians by placing second out of 5,000 entrants in a national Ayn Rand essay contest. (Brown now expresses regret over this.) By all accounts, Brown hated everything about organized education, preferring to follow his own curricula and chat up girls on the bulletin-board systems of a still-embryonic Internet.
After his sophomore year, Brown told his parents he wasn’t going back. He signed up for online courses and spent his junior year in Tanzania with his father, a Maserati-driving conservative, safari hunter and serial entrepreneur who was trying to launch a hardwood-harvesting business. “Barrett loved living in Africa,” says his father. “He preferred adventure to being in school with his peers. We weren’t far from the embassy that was bombed that year.”
Brown returned to the U.S. and in 2000 joined some of his childhood friends in Austin, where he spent two semesters taking writing classes at the University of Texas. After dropping out, he spent a summer doing what one friend calls a “heroic” amount of Ecstasy and acid before settling into the charmed life of a pre-crisis Austin slacker — working part-time, smoking pot and paying cheap rent in a series of group houses with enormous porches. Brown’s roommates remember his rooms as being strewn with leaning towers of books and magazines — he especially liked Gore Vidal, P.J. O’Rourke and Hunter S. Thompson — but say he was not especially political. “After 9/11 and Iraq, there were a lot of protests in Austin,” says Ian Holmes, a childhood friend of Brown’s. “I don’t remember him participating in it or being extra vocal, but he was against it all like everyone else.”
As Brown built up his clip book and matured as a writer, his ambitions began to outgrow Austin. In 2007, Brown moved to Brooklyn with a group of old friends that called itself “the Texadus.” Their Bushwick apartment emerged as a hub for Lone Star State refugees who liked to get high, crush beers and play video games. “People were always hanging out and coming and going,” says Caleb Pritchard, a childhood friend of Brown’s who lived with him in Austin and Brooklyn. Among the apartment’s large cast of characters were a crew of weed-delivery guys from Puerto Rico and Honduras who used the apartment as a daytime base of business operations. “They brought over an Xbox, bought us beer and food and played strategy games with us,” Pritchard says. “It was a good cultural exchange for a bunch of skinny white kids from Dallas.”
As virtual-world games grew increasingly sophisticated, Brown spent more time in front of his computer. But he didn’t play the games like most people. In Second Life, he linked up with a group of people known as “griefers,” the term for hackers who in the mid-00s became known for generating chaos inside video-game worlds. Socializing on the bulletin board 4chan.org, they formed the first cells of what would later become Anonymous. In the documentary We Are Legion, about the hacktivist group, Brown waxes nostalgic over his griefer period, when he’d spend entire nights “on Second Life riding around in a virtual spaceship with the words ‘faggery daggery doo’ written on it, wearing Afros, dropping virtual bombs on little villages while waving giant penises around. That was the most fun time I ever had in my life.”
When everyone else went out to the bars, Brown stayed in. Aside from video games and the odd afternoon of pick-up basketball, he also pounded out columns, diaries and blog posts for Vanity Fair, Daily Kos and McSweeney’s, as well as restaurant reviews and essays for weeklies like New York Press and The Onion’s A.V. Club. Though he had some paying gigs, he published most heavily in unpaid, self-edited community forums like Daily Kos and The Huffington Post. “Barrett wasn’t really working in New York so much as getting by with the help of friends and family,” says Pritchard. Among his unpaid gigs was his work as the spokesman for the Godless Americans PAC, which led to Brown’s first TV appearance, on the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends.
In Brooklyn, Brown resumed shooting heroin, which he’d dabbled in off and on since he was 19. Over the years, doctors have diagnosed him with ADHD and depression. Accurate or not, the diagnoses suggest Brown was drawn to opiates for more than just the high. “When I joined him in Brooklyn in ’08, Barrett was already basically a functional junkie,” says Pritchard.

You can read the whole thing, which is part of the dishonest media campaign to portray Barrett Brown as a helpless victim, but insofar as Alexander Zaitchick tells us who Barrett Brown really is — a child of privilege, a mama’s boy, a Special Snowflake to whom the ordinary rules did not apply — it is certainly helpful in understanding why Barrett Brown is in federal custody, where he belongs.

You should read “The Kook Who Knew Too Much.” Hey, maybe I could have been a Special Snowflake, but I had to get a job.

For some reason, Evil Blogger Lady thinks this scene is relevant:

 

Comments

49 Responses to “Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake”

  1. MrEvilMatt
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:07 pm

    Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake: Barrett Brown promotes atheism on Fox News, January 2009 “Karen Lancaster al… http://t.co/gZigb6oJQ8

  2. CHideout
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:07 pm

    Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake: Barrett Brown promotes atheism on Fox News, January 2009 “Karen Lancaster al… http://t.co/v8Ss60ePWs

  3. Lockestep1776
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:07 pm

    Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake: Barrett Brown promotes atheism on Fox News, January 2009 “Karen Lancaster al… http://t.co/MmhFCbUkiy

  4. Citzcom
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:07 pm

    Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake: Barrett Brown promotes atheism on Fox News, January 2009 “Karen Lancaster al… http://t.co/nbWS04yox8

  5. jwbrown1969
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:07 pm

    Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake: Barrett Brown promotes atheism on Fox News, January 2009 “Karen Lancaster al… http://t.co/Mhp9qgOAUQ

  6. joethefatman1
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:15 pm

    Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake http://t.co/Yk2kikJ6Qv

  7. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:19 pm

    I like Office Space. I am sure Barrett Brown can watch it on the community space television when he is in prison. Provided the inmate whose protection he is under lets him do it (he better be on top of doing the laundry and chores for whoever he is sponsored by when he is there, in addition to those special activities–just lay back Barrett and think of Anonymous).

  8. Professor_Why
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:19 pm

    Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake http://t.co/vIYQTRAakh

  9. rmnixondeceased
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:21 pm

    Special Snowflake Syndrome, the root of so much idiocy from progressives. If these fools actually had to survive, build a life and be a responsible citizen they would fail as they do not possess the tools to overcome competition, be self sufficient and be personally responsible for their acts.
    Poor, poor Special Snowflakes. Perhaps the heat from reality will melt them …

  10. Bob Belvedere
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:23 pm

    Stacy wrote: You can read the whole thing, which is part of the dishonest coordinated media campaign to portray Barrett Brown as a helpless victim….

    There, FTFY.

  11. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:24 pm

    Barrett Brown and Kaitlyn Hunt have some similarities in upbringing, indulgent stupid parents who did not teach their children morals or boundaries.

  12. Currahee88
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:24 pm

    RT “@joethefatman1: Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake http://t.co/XjgRjmT1gU”

  13. rsmccain
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:44 pm

    “Barrett Brown … a child of privilege, a mama’s boy, a Special Snowflake to whom the ordinary rules did not apply” http://t.co/hYdAQxLq2f

  14. rsmccain
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:44 pm

    RT @Currahee88: RT “@joethefatman1: Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake http://t.co/XjgRjmT1gU”

  15. rsmccain
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:45 pm

    Hey, @AceofSpadesHQ , wouldn’t you like to be a Special Snowflake? http://t.co/hYdAQxLq2f

  16. FoxNewsMom
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:48 pm

    RT @rsmccain: “Barrett Brown … a child of privilege, a mama’s boy, a Special Snowflake to whom the ordinary rules did not apply” http://t…

  17. CFLancop
    September 9th, 2013 @ 2:55 pm

    RT @rsmccain: Hey, @AceofSpadesHQ , wouldn’t you like to be a Special Snowflake? http://t.co/hYdAQxLq2f

  18. robcrawford2
    September 9th, 2013 @ 3:05 pm

    ” In Second Life, he linked up with a group of people known as “griefers,” the term for hackers who in the mid-00s became known for generating chaos inside video-game worlds. ”

    For this alone, he deserves prison time.

  19. The Barrett Brown Whitewash Continues : The Other McCain
    September 9th, 2013 @ 3:12 pm

    […] UPDATE: “Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake.” […]

  20. robertstacymccain
    September 9th, 2013 @ 3:15 pm

    And not in white-collar resort prison, but federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

  21. R8D_Red
    September 9th, 2013 @ 3:22 pm

    .I wanna be a #SpecialSnowflake RT@rsmccain “Barrett Brown …a Special Snowflake to whom the…rules didnot apply” http://t.co/FGMRjBWczD

  22. Buck McKeon: Syria on a Sunday | Regular Right Guy
    September 9th, 2013 @ 3:53 pm

    […] Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake […]

  23. richard mcenroe
    September 9th, 2013 @ 4:20 pm

    OT but Putin and Assad just played Obama and Kerry say Luke hooked trout.

  24. Dana
    September 9th, 2013 @ 4:47 pm

    Well, being a Special Snowflake does get your picture and multiple articles about you on The Other McCain, which is certainly part of your Fifteen Minutes.

    Those of us who do boring things like work for a living and not snort cocaine don’t get to be Special Snowflakes; we are so jealous.

  25. Katie Scarlet
    September 9th, 2013 @ 4:55 pm

    “He signed up for online courses and spent his junior year in Tanzania
    with his father, a Maserati-driving conservative, safari hunter and
    serial entrepreneur who was trying to launch a hardwood-harvesting
    business.”

    Ok, I read that sentence three times. You’re makin’ that shit up about the father, right?

  26. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 9th, 2013 @ 5:05 pm

    Well jealous until the go to “federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison” part kicks in. Then, not so much.

    Except for Andrew Sullivan when he thinks of “rough trade.”

  27. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 9th, 2013 @ 5:08 pm
  28. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 9th, 2013 @ 5:10 pm
  29. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 9th, 2013 @ 5:21 pm

    Obama and Kerry are not even steelhead, but more opening day hatchery trout that the kids catch with a bit of wonder bread on a hook on a Zebco pole

    I am no fan of Putin, but he knows how to fish. .

  30. Finrod Felagund
    September 9th, 2013 @ 6:06 pm

    Offtopic good news: John Fund reports over on NRO that leading Virginia Democrat David “Mudcat” Saunders has endorsed Ken Cuccinelli for governor:

    http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/358025/leading-democrat-endorses-cuccinelli-john-fund

  31. DaveO
    September 9th, 2013 @ 6:14 pm

    What is the purpose behind coordinated MSM beatification of Brown? Is someone trying to smoke out Anonymous now that we know the NSA can break their encryption?
    Brown is a cut-out, the stooge set up to be given to the Feds while his cohorts go into hibernation.

  32. Steve Skubinna
    September 9th, 2013 @ 6:16 pm

    but say he was not especially political.

    This is amusing, coming from a denizen of an Austin subculture so steeped in politics that they don’t even see it. Explaining “politics” to these guys would be like explaining “water” to a fish. It’s like one OWS member saying about another one that “he’s not really political.”

  33. BobBelvedere
    September 9th, 2013 @ 6:52 pm

    RT @rsmccain: Hey, @AceofSpadesHQ , wouldn’t you like to be a Special Snowflake? http://t.co/hYdAQxLq2f

  34. BobBelvedere
    September 9th, 2013 @ 6:52 pm

    RT @rsmccain: “Barrett Brown … a child of privilege, a mama’s boy, a Special Snowflake to whom the ordinary rules did not apply” http://t…

  35. angelarwalker
    September 9th, 2013 @ 6:59 pm

    RT @rsmccain: “Barrett Brown … a child of privilege, a mama’s boy, a Special Snowflake to whom the ordinary rules did not apply” http://t…

  36. Barrett Brown and ‘Team Themis’ : The Other McCain
    September 9th, 2013 @ 6:59 pm

    […] Sept. 9: Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake […]

  37. rsmccain
    September 9th, 2013 @ 7:02 pm

    RT @R8D_Red: .I wanna be a #SpecialSnowflake RT@rsmccain “Barrett Brown …a Special Snowflake to whom the…rules didnot apply” http://t.c…

  38. SnakebiteJones
    September 9th, 2013 @ 7:03 pm

    RT @R8D_Red: .I wanna be a #SpecialSnowflake RT@rsmccain “Barrett Brown …a Special Snowflake to whom the…rules didnot apply” http://t.c…

  39. Quartermaster
    September 9th, 2013 @ 7:11 pm

    We all know and understand that little Barrett is a special snowflake. OTOH, we all know that RSM is special, even if he isn’t a special Snowflake. I’m sure Kirby will regale us with many tales of the “Real TOM,” if we ask real nice.

    Howze about it Kirby? It’d be better than reading about Barrett.

  40. Dana
    September 9th, 2013 @ 7:23 pm

    Snowflakes are, of course, white, and that certainly has not been an issue with either Kaitlyn Hunt or Barrett Brown.

    However, surely, surely! the killed-over-a-Skittles® hero Trayvon Martin would also be a Special Snowflake as far as our friends on the left are concerned, and if we are to raise him to Special Snowflakehood, would that not be saying that white=good?

    Basically, the whole Special Snowflake concept is Caucasian-normative, and thus clearly racist. We must, therefore, come up with a clearly racially/ ethnically/ sexually/ orientationally/ neutral term, or we will have exposed ourselves as members of the heteronormative nativist racist patriarchy.

  41. MattRoss
    September 9th, 2013 @ 7:35 pm

    And this folks, is the blog comment of the day!

  42. Dana_TFSJ
    September 9th, 2013 @ 7:43 pm

    RT @R8D_Red: .I wanna be a #SpecialSnowflake RT@rsmccain “Barrett Brown …a Special Snowflake to whom the…rules didnot apply” http://t.c…

  43. SwiperTheFox
    September 9th, 2013 @ 8:28 pm

    >In the documentary ‘We Are Legion’, about the hacktivist group, Brown waxes nostalgic over his griefer period, when he’d spend entire nights “on Second Life riding around in a virtual spaceship with the words ‘faggery daggery doo’ written on it, wearing Afros, dropping virtual bombs on little villages while waving giant penises around. That was the most fun time I ever had in my life.”

    Once again, a left-wing activist turns out to be a racist, sexist, homophobic attention-slut with a bad, bad case of projection .. why am I not surprised…

  44. Southern Air Pirate
    September 10th, 2013 @ 12:25 am

    This is the money quote:
    “she once wrote that she called him ‘an indigo child with an alien soul.'”

    Do some research the history of the “indigo child” movement and you will see it is an attempt by the new age hippies to explain away why their children who maybe suffering from ADD/ADHD or just plain poor parenting why the child is acting out and why the kids are being kicked out of “normal” society.

    Mr. McCain, also dollars to donuts that the recent spat of special snowflakes all were identified by their parents as being “Indigos”. Whether it is this special snowflake, the Ephebophilia types like Ms Hunt or any of the others that you have profiled which have advocated that sex tween adults and teens should be normalized.

  45. M. Thompson
    September 10th, 2013 @ 12:25 am

    Special Snowflake Syndrome. There are a few good ways to fix it, but it requires a level of character that Mr. Brown does not have.

  46. Fareedi al Laayla al Qakhaul
    September 10th, 2013 @ 1:26 am

    Did you know that the son of 0’s Death Panel Czarina, Kathleen “Some People Live, Some People Die” Sebelius is the creator of this year’s hottest new board game?

  47. OwainPenllyn
    September 10th, 2013 @ 9:55 am

    Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake http://t.co/yPr0J7DP3P via @rsmccain #tcot #tgdn #twisters #txcot #FreeBarrettBrown

  48. rsmccain
    September 10th, 2013 @ 10:18 am

    RT @OwainPenllyn: Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake http://t.co/yPr0J7DP3P via @rsmccain #tcot #tgdn #twisters #txcot #FreeBarrettBrown

  49. FMJRA 2.0: Caffeine Zombie : The Other McCain
    September 15th, 2013 @ 7:03 pm

    […] Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake […]