James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart (YouTube, ZUMApress.com)

On Wednesday morning, Salon.com published “James O’Keefe’s Race Problem,” an article by author Max Blumenthal that dug into the past of the 25-year-old activist whose hidden camera sting of ACORN offices devastated the community organizing group. Blumenthal described O’Keefe’s career as “a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment” and honed in an August 30, 2006 “race and conservatism” forum in Arlington, Va. The guests were African-American conservative activist Kevin Martin, National Review writer John Derbyshire, and white nationalist magazine editor Jared Taylor. According to Blumenthal, O’Keefe had helped “plan” the event with a fellow employee of the conservative Leadership Institute. The main piece of evidence: a cropped headshot of O’Keefe from the event and an account from the photographer, an investigator from the anti-racism group the One People’s Project.

[GOP1] The article trafficked around the web at a moderate pace. Because I attended the event, I wrote about it, and the Blumenthal story, here. Soon, other websites grabbed onto the story and added unsupportable spin. Little Green Footballs, whose editor Charles Johnson has made a splashy departure from the right, linked to the revelation about what he called a “white nationalist conference.” Alex Pareene of Gawker wrote that “James O’Keefe pals around with white supremacists,” a winking reference to an attack Sarah Palin made on Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign. Steven Thrasher of the Village Voice wrote that O’Keefe “organized a speaking forum for white supremacists.” Like Blumenthal, they linked the story to Andrew Breitbart, the conservative journalism mogul who ran O’Keefe’s ACORN tapes at his Big Government web site and who subsequently paid the activist for his “life rights” — and who had just finished getting MSNBC and other media outlets to back off on accusing O’Keefe of “wiretapping” the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), while lawyers and O’Keefe claimed he had only attempted to see if the phones were being tampered with.

Seven hours after the Salon story went up, Breitbart went to war. On his Twitter account, he wrote that “Salon, Max Blumenthal, Gawker, Village Voice (usual smear artists) [were] lying through teeth over James O’Keefe.” Larry O’Connor, a colleague from Big Government, called the One People’s Project and demanded more proof that O’Keefe had done what it and Blumenthal had claimed — that he hadn’t merely shown up, but that he’d organized the event and manned a table of racist literature. They called me for details, explaining that O’Keefe had acknowledged he was at the debate but insisted he was not involved with the planning. Afterward, Breitbart went back to Twitter to announce — correctly — that I’d confirmed that the “manning the table” charge was a “LIE.” Another week of Breitbart defending his reporter — and getting news organizations to retract parts of their stories — had commenced, with Blumenthal as the chief target. One Breitbart ally told TWI that his team was “suiting up for full war on this intellectually dishonest punk.”

By every indication, Breitbart’s full court press against the story — and the quick work he did debunking a key detail — has helped keep it out of the headlines. That pushback, coming in the wake of the Landrieu story, is a role reversal for Breitbart’s media network. The 40-year old mogul has won accolades from across the conservative movement for the aggressive reporting and media criticism engineered by his Big sites: Big Hollywood, Big Government, and Big Journalism. The impact of the ACORN tapes — which O’Keefe recorded on his own, before delivering the story to Big Government — was such that The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets were forced to explain why they hadn’t done similar investigations. On Friday night, Breitbart will introduce a film at the National Tea Party Convention.

Since that explosive 2009 ACORN story, Breitbart’s web sites have often kept unions and Obama administration officials on their heels. Big Government ran multiple stories about the activist past of Kevin Jennings, the founder of the gay, lesbian and transgender rights group GLSEN who joined Barack Obama’s administration as the “safe schools czar.” Big Government uncovered old brochures from Jenning’s group and linked the man himself to sex scandals. Sites like Media Matters — part of what Breitbart calls the “Democrat Media Complex” — invested time and resources into disproving facts in those stories and taking the air out of them. When O’Keefe became the focus of new media attention for the Landrieu debacle and the “race and conservatism” story, Breitbart was put into the same position, relentlessly demanding that media outlets retract unsupported allegations, and turning the narrative from what his employee was accused of to how the media had slanted and bungled the story.

“This is a monumentally hurtful, libelous, hurtful hit piece,” Breitbart told TWI. “There is no basis for any journalism here.”

Breitbart’s efforts to defuse the Salon story were met with some success. Interviewed by TWI, two of the key players in the story said that the most damaging parts of the original piece — that O’Keefe had organized the event, and that he’d helped peddle racist tracts — were unsupportable. Marcus Epstein, the controversial conservative activist who ran the Robert Taft Club — the conservative group that planned the event — told TWI that O’Keefe “did not collaborate” in putting it together.

Isis, the photographer who attended the event for the One People’s Project — she uses a pseudonym, she said, to protect herself from blowback from extremist groups — told TWI that her original characterization of O’Keefe’s involvement, cited by Salon, was not true.

“I don’t believe O’Keefe planned the event,” said Isis. “What I believe is that O’Keefe was there as a compatriot of Epstein’s and was sort of helping out with the event, sort of like when you go to a friend’s party and you decide to help them out.”

Epstein and Isis disagreed about whether O’Keefe had manned a table of racist literature — Epstein said he didn’t, while Isis said he did. She provided Blumenthal with a photo of the table, with copies of American Renaissance magazine (headlines included “The Genetics of Race” and “Black Racist Consciousness, Part I”) splayed across it. On Thursday, Blumenthal stuck by the story.

“O’Keefe admitted that he was there,” Blumenthal told TWI. “He has had a career marked by racial obsession, and this highlights that dimension of his career. Breitbart, who pays O’Keefe, has been exposed. Is anyone surprised that he’d freak out and muddy the water without facts?”

When the Landrieu story broke, Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) — who’s sponsored a congressional resolution honoring O’Keefe for the ACORN story — told TWI that “if recent events conclude that any laws were broken in the incident in Senator Landrieu’s office, that is not something I condone.” Asked for comment on the “race and conservatism” story, neither Olson nor the offices of other Republican congressmen who sponsored the resolution responded. And while a Pew study found that MSNBC spent fully 12 percent of its broadcast time covering the story of O’Keefe’s botched investigation of Landrieu during the week that the news broke, the network has barely touched the “race and conservatism” story. Reached by TWI, several liberal and conservative bloggers who had covered the Landrieu story said that doubts about the details of the Salon story — such as the headshot of O’Keefe that Salon pasted onto a cartoon body — kept them off the trail.

“That article claimed in its subhead to have photographic proof,” said Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com, “and then used an obviously Photoshopped image beneath it. I’m curious as to why that didn’t raise more red flags.”

For Breitbart, the pushback was personal. He has explained in the past that Democratic attacks against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas were the spark that made him a conservative. When Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) died, Breitbart unleashed a stream of tweets attacking him for what he said about Thomas. “Doing to the reputations of Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork what he did to [Chappaquiddick victim Mary Jo] Kopechne,” wrote Breitbart in The Washington Times, “only reinforced his value to the Democrat Media Complex as the memory of his brothers’ more authentic Camelot began to fade.”

On Thursday night, with the doubts about the latest O’Keefe story apparently killing its traction in other media, Breitbart started to have more fun. When the Landrieu story broke, Big Journalism introduced a “senior editor” named Retracto, the Correction Alpaca, a pseudononymous poster who matter-of-factly asked for retractions from organizations that accused O’Keefe of “wiretapping.” In an on-air interview, Breitbart got MSNBC’s David Shuster to retract the charge. And after another day of battling back on the Salon story, Breitbart warned web sites that had mentioned Salon’s story — like The Daily Beast — that the alpaca was making a comeback.

“Tina Brown,” wrote Breitbart, “Retracto is walking down the hillside…”

A zoomed-in headshot of James O’Keefe (after the jump), then working for the Leadership Institute, survived, although it cropped out the table he was sitting at, covered in controversial literature.

In a later post, I walked this back: While I’d been at the event, it was Isis, a photographer/investigator for the One People’s Project, who told me that her photo was actually a picture of O’Keefe at a table of controversial literature. But several e-mailers and commenters have pointed out that my first post appeared to endorse Blumenthal’s whole story. I want to quickly walk through that story and point out the parts that, based on my experience at the event and interviews with Isis and event organizer Marcus Epstein, were not true.

1) OPP has a “photo of O’Keefe at a 2006 conference on ‘Race and Conservatism’ that featured leading white nationalists.”

As Epstein’s August 28, 2006 post on the nativist site VDare.com makes clear, it was a two-hour debate, not a conference. I made this clear in my initial post. The only “white nationalist” onstage was Taylor. John Derbyshire has some controversial views on race, but co-panelist Kevin Martin is and was, as Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism delights in pointing out, African-American.

2) “The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance.”

Taylor, who is incredibly controversial — and pretty nakedly racist — was the source of the event’s controversy, but he was only one of three speakers.

3) “Together, O’Keefe and Epstein planned an event in August 2006 that would wed their extreme views on race with their ambitions.”

O’Keefe has denied any role in planning the event, and Epstein has backed him up. In an interview yesterday, Isis told me: “I don’t believe O’Keefe planned the event.”

4) “A speaker from the right-wing black front group Project 21, founded by white conservative David Almasi to shill for corporate clients and provide cover for conservative politicians, was added at the last minute.”

Kevin Martin and Project 21 have pushed back against this on their own, but I also asked Epstein when he invited Martin to join and balance the panel. He forwarded me this email, dated August 1, 2006 — 29 days before the event.

5) “According to One People’s 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.”

This is Blumenthal’s sourcing, but according to Larry O’Connor of Big Journalism, Jenkins cited me as a “witness.” I talked to Isis, not Jenkins. And I never told anyone that O’Keefe had “planned” the event or “manned” the table, because I could not confirm those things. I did tell Isis, after seeing her photo of O’Keefe, and hearing her description of the event — and remembering her walking around, taking photos — that her photo definitely jogged my memory of O’Keefe being there. And O’Keefe has confirmed that he was there.

In my original post, I wrote that “O’Keefe’s position at the Leadership Institute gave him some ownership of the event, but in general the crowd consisted of conservatives and libertarians who wanted to see some controversy.” What I meant was that unlike the reporters in the room or the college students watching the spectacle, O’Keefe was Epstein’s co-worker. He didn’t wander in off the street — he knew his colleague was planning an event, knew it was so controversial it was moved out of the building, and he tagged along. But to some readers, that sentence suggested that O’Keefe was, indeed, a planner of the event. He absolutely wasn’t.

I stand by the rest of my description of the event in my original post. But later that day, as Breitbart started pushing back against the story, I wrote: “I’m curious to see what Breitbart goes after — I was at the 2006 event that leads Blumenthal’s story and can confirm all the details about it.” That was sloppy phrasing — I meant that I could confirm all the stuff I’d already written. I had no idea that One People’s Project had told Breitbart’s reporter that I could confirm the facts as presented by them. They should stand by their own story — and they really, really need to produce a full photo of O’Keefe at the event.

I’m really not used to being part of a story like this. In one week, James O’Keefe — who I’ve been writing about for months — has been linked to an organization that gave me a fellowship (the Collegiate Network) and an event I happened to be at in 2006. So I apologize for giving the impression that I confirmed all the details of the OPP and Salon stories, and I’m glad that The Village Voice has clarified its own reporting using my research.

As for my original point that there’s a conservative subculture that indulges in extremist politics with the expectation that no one will find out and care — well, I stand by that, and I think this episode has gone some way toward changing that.

“I’ve made mistakes, which I paid for and addressed,” said Epstein, who has mostly ceased political activity since the 2009 revelation of his arrest in Georgetown. “I don’t want them to be used in false, guilt-by-association smears against others. I met James O’Keefe a number of times. It’s the Beltway — it’s a small circle. It’s the conservative movement. But he did not collaborate with me, definitely not on that event.”

Epstein went into the background of the event and forwarded me emails that he says he exchanged with Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist American Renaissance magazine. He was, at the time, working at the Leadership Institute, as was O’Keefe.

“At that time, I was the only person involved with the Robert Taft Club,” said Epstein. Other Taft Club organizers like Daniel McCarthy (now of the American Conservative) joined later when he organized larger events with speakers like Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) — by that time, said Epstein, O’Keefe had left LI and Washington.

Marcus Epstein (left) at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 1, 2007 (Photo by: Dave Weigel)

According to Epstein, LI did not fund the event — the only outside group to aid with Taft Club events was the American Cause, where Epstein worked from 2006 through 2009. The event was originally scheduled to take place inside of the Leadership Institute, but was moved across the street after police — who, said Epstein, had been monitoring the One People’s Project investigative reports on the event — warned LI to expect protesters. Epstein paid $250 of his own money to rent a new room, and offered to pay the travel expenses of the speakers: Jared Taylor, John Derbyshire and Kevin Martin. Derbyshire, who was coming from New York, declined Epstein’s offer. (Derbyshire, who is or was a member of a controversial listserv on “human biodiversity,” appeared at another Taft Club event in 2007.) Apart from that, Epstein paid for pizza by “passing a hat around.” The literature table that has attracted so much attention was not, he said, set up by the Taft Club. Much of the 40-odd member audience was composed of LI interns and staffers who’d heard about the event at work.

Epstein stood by the content of the event, describing it (accurately, in my view) as a debate, not a forum for Taylor. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the event,” said Epstein. “Jared Taylor has debated Queen Latifah and [anti-racist writer] Tim Wise.” At one point, remembered Epstein, Derbyshire laid into Taylor’s tactics and racism, calling him a “sower of discord” and remarking that “we know where sowers of discord end up” — that is, hell.

“I thought that was a bit extreme,” said Epstein, “but there’s nothing wrong with having a debate.”

Epstein acknowledged that his dabbling in extremist politics, and his 2007 arrest, had made him a sort of toxic figure.

“I’m used to being smeared, and these guys have more or less successfully harmed my career, so I don’t see what else they could do to me,” said Epstein. “A lot of stuff they said about me wasn’t true, but I definitely made a few mistakes. I just don’t want anyone to use me to smear James O’Keefe.”

The Taylor appearance was buffeted by controversy and moved, at the last minute, to a location a few blocks away from its original location near the Clarendon metro stop in Virginia. It was strange enough to draw out people like me and a photographer for the One People’s Project, who snapped pictures of the attendees, wrote a report — and then, unfortunately, had most of the photos seized by the FBI. A zoomed-in headshot of James O’Keefe (after the jump), then working for the Leadership Institute, survived, although it cropped out the table he was sitting at, covered in controversial literature. O’Keefe’s position at the Leadership Institute gave him some ownership of the event, but in general the crowd consisted of conservatives and libertarians who wanted to see some controversy, some fireworks — not so much of people who agreed with Taylor.

One People's Project

Last week the One People’s Project posted the headshot and an account of the event. Today, Max Blumenthal uses that event as a jumping-off point for a story on O’Keefe’s problems with race. A related story that hasn’t really been written is the acceptance of really extreme racial theorizing — some would just call it racism — among a small segment of the campus conservative movement.

When I talked to many veterans of the same programs that produced James O’Keefe for my story on the more under-the-radar success of the conservatives-on-campus programs, they remembered, not fondly, people like Marcus Epstein who signed up with conservative groups in order to say shocking things about race or immigration. And for several years, Epstein was employed by the Leadership Institute, Bay Buchanan, and Tom Tancredo. His willingness to push the envelope and invite extremists to public forums was seen more as intellectual bravery than as something controversial that would come back to haunt him – until last year.

I’ve known campus conservative activists for a decade, and I know the people who put together the 2006 forum quite well. Extremism — theories about race, right-wing European politics, anti-immigration rhetoric — is seen in these circles as something of a lark. It’s forbidden knowledge. It terrifies liberals. But people like Marcus Epstein and James O’Keefe feel (or felt) like they can get away with playing around in these circles before getting down to serious politics. And once they make that leap — as Epstein did with Buchanan, or as O’Keefe did with his ACORN tapes — the idea of being brought down by controversy is laughable. They’d faced down the Southern Poverty Law Center and won, so what do they have to fear?

Blumenthal’s article is worth reading for the background on O’Keefe’s race obsession at various points in his career. It makes a connection that liberals have had trouble making, between the right’s attacks on ACORN and the organization’s work registering poor, mostly non-white voters. But the new attention on the 2006 Robert Taft Club event suggests that young campus activists with big ambitions are going to find their dabblings in extreme politics coming back to haunt them. In other words, can the tactics conservatives used to attack Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings or Green Jobs Czar Van Jones–digging into their associations, reporting that they attended scary-sounding events, finding out-of-context, radical-sounding quotes from their earlier careers–be used against conservative activists?

At about 10 am on July 8th, in the District of Columbia Superior Court, Judge Anderson dismissed the case against Marcus Epstein, who had pled guilty to a class 6 felony hate crime; the prosecutor declined to continue sentencing. It was determined that Epstein, head of Pat Buchanan’s American Cause and executive director of Tom Tancredo’s Team America, had completed his sentence.

Much more about the case here.

I am sorry but we are not going to grant you a press pass due to the disparaging things you have said about our organization and our conference.

I think they’re talking about this.

–

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Winning Working America: How to regain the Hillary Democrats
– Peter Brimelow, Editor, VDARE.com
– Ward Connerly, President, American Civil Rights Institute
– Lou Barletta, Mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania

So, that’s the editor of an anti-immigration Website, a man who travels the country organizating anti-affirmative initiatives, and a Pennsylvania mayor who lost his 2002 and 2008 runs for Congress in the northeastern Pennsylvania counties that went for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the presidential primary. This seems to read much more into Clinton’s infamous comment that she was winning “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans” than she meant.

The stories about Marcus were for the most part inaccurate and incomplete.  Yet, the left wing bloggers ran with this little factoid because the assailant worked for organizations associated with Pat Buchanan and Tom Tancredo. What happened next was a modern day lynching by a faceless, angry, ignorant mob who reveled in the collective assault on their victim.

Speaking just for myself, as someone who knew Epstein socially, for three years, I think Buchanan gets at the point, then whiffs.

Yes, bloggers ran with this because Epstein worked with Pat Buchanan and former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) — two men who were making their way across the airwaves and the pages of popular news sites arguing that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was a “racist.” They did all of this knowing that they employed a troubled employee who not only had pled guilty to a racially charged assault, but who had a years-long record of white nationalist writing and associations.

I usually despise the “what if X has said this” framing of a controversy (which Bay Buchanan used to call Sotomayor a “bigot”), but consider — how would Buchanan and Tancredo react if, to pick an example totally at random, a Latina judge employed a top-level assistant who had written thousands of words for a Hispanic nationalist site, and who had pled guility to hitting a white woman and calling her a “cracker”? Would they stay mum or worry, publicly, about the possible “lynching” of this employee? Or would they, you know, call this judge a racist?

He said Monday that he didn’t know about the incident until it surfaced on the website of One People’s Project, an anti-racism group.

“I’m assuming that the only thing that makes (the incident) even newsworthy is the fact that it comes in the context of the Sotomayor thing,” Tancredo said. “I don’t have any day-to-day control over the organization.”

It’s true that Tancredo stepped away from Team America PAC for a long time, but the arrest occured in July 2007 and the then-presidential candidate kept Epstein in his circle. Epstein was the go-between between Tancredo and Youth for Western Civilization, which brought the former congressman a new burst of attention when it scheduled campus speeches that were shouted down and shut down by students. One People’s Project claims that its discovery of the arrest and plea bargain records was unrelated to Tancredo’s position on Sonia Sotomayor — and they did post the documents before Sotomayor was nominated.

Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) and Pat Buchanan (Getty Images)

On July 7, 2007, Marcus Epstein had too much to drink and stumbled onto Georgetown’s scenic, shop-lined M Street, walking in no particular direction. At 7:15 p.m., he bumped into a black woman, called her a “nigger,” and struck her in the head with an open hand. An off-duty Secret Service agent was watching. Epstein “jogged away,” according to the agent’s affidavit, and when Epstein was finally chased down, he “continued to flail his arms while being taken into custody.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

After this, say Epstein’s friends, the then-24-year-old conservative activist radically changed his life. He swore off drinking and started attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. He started treating the bipolar depression that had gone undiagnosed until that run-in with the law. In January 2008 Epstein plea bargained to a charge of simple assault, as part of a settlement that included a letter of apology to his victim and a $1,000 donation to the United Negro College Fund. He will be in court again July 8, but because he met the terms of his settlement, Epstein’s employers expect the ordeal to end then and there. Epstein could not be reached for comment on Monday.

Epstein was, and still is, one of the utility players in the immigration restrictionist fringe of the conservative movement, the executive director of both Pat Buchanan’s American Cause and former Rep. Tom Tancredo’s (R-Colo.) Team America PAC. Before and after the 2007 incident, Epstein worked (in an unofficial capacity) with Tancredo on his immigration-focused presidential campaign. He organized policy debates between conservative writers and leaders, including one with Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) that was broadcast on C-SPAN. Epstein built coalitions and hobnobbed at Washington parties without much trouble, despite a record of controversial race- and immigration-focused writings and awareness that something bad — the details weren’t clear — had happened in 2007 that convinced him to go on the wagon.

“In college you have this culture of drinking all the time, and he kicked it cold,” said Kevin DeAnna, a friend of Epstein and the founder of Youth for Western Civilization, a student group founded in 2008 of which Tancredo is the honorary chairman. “It’s unfortunate that he’s getting hit from this now, years after he stopped doing this kind of thing.”

Since May 19, when the watchdog group One People’s Project released the legal documents detailing Epstein’s arrest, the activist and his employers have come under fire. By late Monday, the University of Virginia Law School was telling reporters that Epstein would not be joining the class of 2012, even though he had planned to retire from his jobs at the end of June and “more or less suspend my political activities” to attend the school. But Epstein’s career up through yesterday was marked by controversial articles and speeches, happy feuds with politically correct organizations like the One People’s Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and no serious blowback from the mainstream conservative movement. (In 2008, Epstein contributed to the Southern Poverty Law Center in order to win a place on its “Wall of Tolerance” and to warn the group that it was “just one degree of separation away” from him.) Epstein’s past only became an issue after his patrons, Tancredo and Buchanan, spent a week bashing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as a “racist” and an an “affirmative action” candidate.

“It’s a huge breakthrough,” said Darrell Jenkins, a co-founder of the nine-year-old One People’s Project. “This game that keeps being played on the right, the way that their leaders will say anything and claim that they’re not racist — that got knocked out the window. Now we have proof that someone of that stature is running around like an idiot in the streets. Why would a Tom Tancredo associate himself with a Marcus Epstein? If he’s going to go after Sotomayor for an out-of-context quote from 2001, he’s got to answer for this.” Jenkins added that he would “be in the courtroom” when Epstein is sentenced.

Marcus Epstein (left) at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 1, 2007 (Photo by: Dave Weigel)

Epstein, who turned 26 in May, has spent his entire adult life courting controversy. In 2003, as the president of College Libertarians and the editor of the conservative newspaper at the College of William and Mary, he argued that conservatives erred by appropriating the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr. instead of remembering his “philandering and plagiarism.” Before and after graduation Epstein carved out an online identity as an old-line, nativist conservative, contributing to the immigration restrictionist web site VDare.com. When he began working for American Cause, Epstein became a young and energetic proponent of ideas that were often attributed to angry, aging white men. “Pat graciously gave me an audio CD version of the book,” Epstein wrote in an article criticizing National Review for not reviewing Buchanan’s “State of Emergency,” an anti-immigration jeremiad. “The facts that he laid out in the book, made me so impassioned, upset, and often angry, that on more than one occasion, I literally had to pull over to a rest stop to compose myself for fear that I would get in a road rage incident.”

In 2006, Epstein co-founded a new paleoconservative group, the Robert Taft Club, with DeAnna; the leadership circle later expanded to include conservative writer Richard Spencer. The group easily drew in thinkers and activists from the mainstream and extreme right. Fox News pundit Jim Pinkerton and National Review writer John Derbyshire appeared, as did Belgian extremist politician Filip Dewinter and Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, a race-conscious conservative magazine which invited British extremist politician Nick Griffin to its 2006 conference. None of this was secretive — the events were on the record and included panelists who vehemently disagreed with one another. None of it backfired on the attendees, despite SPLC reports and other exposes. (Note: The writer of this story attended several Robert Taft Club events as a journalist.) The club’s best-attended events were organized after Epstein’s 2007 arrest, the details of which did not become known until this week. Now, some of the people Epstein had brought out for public debates worry about the effects of the One People’s Project’s revelations and the increased scrutiny that has come with Tancredo and Buchanan’s Sotomayor statements.

“It’s the sort of thing the left typically does,” Taylor told TWI. “The One People’s Project published my home phone number and home address, more or less inviting somebody to pitch a brick through my window. The Southern Poverty Law Center will be crowing and whooping about this. It’s typical of the other side and it’s an ungentlemanly way to conduct politics.”

On Monday, Bay Buchanan — the co-chairman of Team America PAC and the president of American Cause — defended Epstein and castigated the One People’s Project for dredging up the arrest details. Buchanan managed Tancredo’s presidential campaign, and Epstein did some volunteer speechwriting for the campaign before and after the arrest. Buchanan said he has worked through his problems, making it all the more mysterious that he should be targeted for them now.

“This is something that happened two years ago that Marcus has paid a price for,” said Buchanan. “Are people allowed a second chance in this life when they realize their mistakes and their errors? I think so.”

Tancredo and Pat Buchanan have not commented on the news of Epstein’s 2007 arrest, but DeAnna’s Youth for Western Civilization got out ahead of the story with a May 29 statement that Epstein had no affiliation with the group apart from scheduling Tancredo’s speeches on college campuses. Pinkerton chose not to address the charges against Epstein, but he wondered what effect the rush by Tancredo and Buchanan to accuse Sotomayor of racism was having on the Supreme Court debate and on the conservative movement in particular.

“The ‘R’ word is a tough word,” said Pinkerton. “My immediate reaction to Sotomayor’s ‘wise Latina’ comment was ‘tell that to the people whose faces are on Mount Rushmore. They were pretty wise and they weren’t Latina females.’ That being the case, we all are blessed with the vocabularies to choose different words. In our culture, ‘racist’ is really up there in the Richter scale of words.”

Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee of Justice, has been optimistic about the right’s fight against Sotomayor, but he admitted to TWI that he “underestimated the degree to which a few conservatives would say a few extreme things, and that would be characterized as what all conservatives think.”

For Epstein’s friends, this aspect of the Supreme Court debate has simply been surprising and sad. “I hope he can live it down,” said Taylor of American Renaissance. “I would have thought Dick Morris would never live down his $150 an hour hooker. I would never have thought Bill Clinton would live down what happened between him and Monica Lewinsky. In the end, those people were welcomed back into the fold. It’s just that liberals tend to be very unforgiving about things of this kind.”

[UPDATE: This article originally misstated the name of one of the Robert Taft Club's leaders. It was Richard Spencer, not Robert Spencer.]