Fyi..


The man who has no imagination has no wings. 
Muhammad Ali


Rodney D. Coates
Professor

-----Original Message-----


James O'Keefe's Race Problem

By Max Blumenthal
Salon
Feb 3, 2010 
http://www.salon.com/news/james_okeefe/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/02/03/james_okeefe_white_nationalists

Many of the conservatives who gleefully promoted James
O'Keefe's past political stunts are feigning shock at
his arrest on charges that he and three associates
planned to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's
phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pundits hailed
the 25-year-old O'Keefe as a creative genius and model
of journalistic ethics. Andrew Breitbart, who has paid
O'Keefe, called him was one of the all-time "great
journalists" and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his
undercover ACORN video. Fox News' Bill O'Reilly declared
he should have earned a "congressional medal."

His right-wing admirers don't seem to mind that
O'Keefe's short but storied career has been defined by a
series of political stunts shot through with racial
resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors
hate groups has produced a photo of O'Keefe at a 2006
conference on "Race and Conservatism" that featured
leading white nationalists. The photo, first published
Jan. 30  on the Web site of the anti-racism group One
People's Project, shows O'Keefe at the gathering, which
was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership
Institute, which employed O'Keefe at the time, withdrew
its backing. But O'Keefe and fellow young conservative
provocateur Marcus Epstein soldiered on to give anti-
Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism
an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to
make inroads in the GOP.

According to One Peoples Project founder Daryle Jenkins,
O'Keefe was manning the literature table at the
gathering that brought together anti-Semites,
professional racists and proponents of Aryanism. OPP
covered the event at the time, sending a freelance
photographer to document the gathering. Jenkins told me
the table was filled with tracts from the white
supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic
publications that have called blacks and Latinos
genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and
the Occidental Quarterly.  The leading speaker was Jared
Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American
Renaissance. "We can say for certain that James O'Keefe
was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has
absolutely no way of denying that," Jenkins said.
O'Keefe's attorney did not respond to a request for
comment on his client's role in the conference.

O'Keefe's racial issues can be seen in many of his prior
stunts, of course. The notorious ACORN videos
highlighted images of himself dressed as a pimp,
deceptively edited through hidden camera footage as he
baited African-American office workers into making
statements that could be perceived as incriminating.
There were also lesser-known but equally inflammatory
spectacles like the "affirmative action bake sale"
O'Keefe and his conservative comrades held when they
were students at Rutgers University. During the event,
O'Keefe stood at a table in the center of campus
offering baked goods at reduced prices to Latinos and
African-Americans while whites were forced to pay
exorbitant amounts. (Native Americans, he announced,
would eat free.)

By O'Keefe's own account, his racial troubles became
acute when he entered the multicultural atmosphere of
Rutgers University's dormitory system. In an online
diary that has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not
before being captured on Daily Kos), he wrote that he
was forced to live on an all-black dormitory floor after
refusing to live with the gay roommate he was initially
assigned. O'Keefe claimed his next roommate was "an
Indian midget ... who smelled like shit." The roommate
left, however, and was replaced by "a greek kid." The
new roommate complained to a residential administrator
that O'Keefe had called his neighbors "niggers,"
prompting the school to expel him from the dorm. He
rejected the accusation as a "complete lie," writing, "I
was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and
my situation, no friends, no one one [sic] to talk to,
forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tolbert, to
defend myself and help explain that I did not call
anyone any names."

The following year, despite this record, O'Keefe secured
a dream job in the conservative movement, employed by
the Leadership Institute, a Northern Virginia-based
outfit that serves as the movement's most prolific youth
training operation. There, O'Keefe met Marcus Epstein, a
fellow ideologue who as editor of a conservative
publication at the College of William and Mary assailed
Martin Luther King Jr. for "philandering and plagiarism"
and challenged his patriotism and Christianity.

Together, O'Keefe and Epstein planned an event in August
2006 that would wed their extreme views on race with
their ambitions. Epstein invited white nationalist
Jared Taylor  and homophobic white-grievance peddler
John Derbyshire of the National Review to speak at the
Leadership Institute's Northern Virginia headquarters,
at a mock symposium called "Race and Conservatism."

According to a post on the white supremacist Web site
Stormfront, Taylor and Derbyshire debate "the role of
race in policy decisions and the racial future of the
Republican party."

When the Southern Poverty Law Center denounced Taylor's
participation in the event, sparking damaging publicity
for the Institute, Epstein shifted it across the street,
where he played host under the auspices of a
"traditionalist" group he founded called the Robert A.
Taft Club. O'Keefe joined him after the last-minute
move. A speaker from the right-wing black front group
Project 21, founded by white conservative James Almasi
to shill for corporate clients and provide cover for
conservative politicians, was added at the last minute.

According to One People's Project, which dispatched an
undercover reporter to the event, about 40 people
attended the event, including several white
supremacists. They included Willis Carto, founder of the
far-right group the Liberty Lobby. A notorious Holocaust
denier, Carto once  declared, "Hitler's defeat was the
defeat of Europe. And of America ... The blame, it
seems, must be laid at the door of the international
Jews." Also in attendance was Michael Hart, a Jewish
astrophysicist and advocate of racially partitioning the
U.S., who once clashed with David Duke at a conference
over the Ku Klux Klan leader's anti-Semitism.

The event's headline speaker, Jared Taylor, is the
publisher of one of the white supremacist movement's
foremost journals, American Renaissance, which seeks to
apply an academic gloss to the racialist screeds
contained on its pages. According to a report on the
conference published in Taylor's magazine, Taylor argued
that a taboo against discussing the alleged criminal
behavior and lower intelligence of blacks and Latinos
twisted political discourse, and he advocated a strong
white nationalism to counter it. Derbyshire denounced
"this whole rickety apparatus of affirmative action,
discrimination lawsuits, corporate shakedowns, profiling
protests and 'speech codes.'" But the National Review
editor expressed doubt that a sufficiently large white
nationalist movement could be mustered to do much about
it.

Epstein and O'Keefe moved on from the "Race and
Conservatism" conference to better things. After
graduating from the Leadership Institute, Epstein held
jobs as executive director of both former Republican
Rep. Tom Tancredo's Team America PAC and Pat Buchanan's
American Cause. He also started a group called Youth for
Western Civilization that dedicated itself to "defending
the West on campus." An essay featured on the group's
Web site complaining that "largely Jewish intellectual
elites have utterly transformed American social and
political discourse" suggested that Epstein's outfit was
only his latest attempt to push white nationalism and
anti-Semitism into the conservative mainstream.

Epstein's career unraveled in June 2009, when a violent
racial assault he committed two years earlier was
disclosed. According to a court affidavit, Epstein had
karate-chopped a random African-American woman in the
face and called her a "nigger" during a drunken late-
night romp bar-hopping on Washington's M Street in 2007,
leading to his arrest by an off-duty Secret Service
agent. He signed a plea bargain requiring him to attend
alcohol rehabilitation courses and donate $1,000 to the
United Negro College Fund as a token of his contrition.

Meanwhile, O'Keefe lost his job at the Leadership
Institute in 2008 for a prank call he made to an Ohio-
based Planned Parenthood clinic. During the call,
O'Keefe offered a donation to the clinic on the
condition that it would be earmarked to pay for aborting
African-American fetuses. "Because there's definitely
way too many black people in Ohio," O'Keefe remarked to
the receptionist. "So, I'm just trying to do my part."

O'Keefe's termination by the Leadership Institute hardly
ended his career as a conservative activist. Right-wing
online publicist Andrew Breitbart, hearing of the merry
prankster's exploits, hired him to carry out the ACORN
operation that would make him famous. Since his arrest,
however, some of O'Keefe's former associates are
scrambling to save face. "I am shocked by the reports of
this behavior," declared O'Keefe's collaborator on the
ACORN operation, Hannah Giles. (Giles had tarted up as a
prostitute for the stunt.)

O'Keefe has now hired a defense attorney and is waging a
high publicity battle against charges that could land
him in prison for nearly a year. Some of his old allies,
like Breitbart, remain in his corner. Fox News' Sean
Hannity hosted O'Keefe for a sympathetic sitdown Feb. 1,
where the young right-winger played victim, claiming he
was being persecuted by "flat-out slandering" and
"journalistic malpractice."

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