Late last week, the House of Representatives failed to pass a resolution introduced by Democrats to call on Perry to apologize for not immediately getting rid of a rock that read “Niggerhead” at hunting grounds he and his family leased.

The resolution also asks Perry to “condemn the use of this word as being totally offensive and inappropriate at anytime and anyplace in United States history” and to “list the names of all lawmakers, friends, and financial supporters he took with him on his hunting trips at ‘Niggerhead.’”

Perry has defended his family’s actions, saying that the rock was painted and then turned over many years ago.

Campaign manager’s controversial history on race

Perry’s campaign manager in South Carolina, Katon Dawson is the former head of the South Carolina Republican Party. He came under scrutiny in 2009 when he was running to be the chair of the Republican National Committee and it was revealed that he was a member of a “whites-only” country club.

When the press reported on his membership in the club, Dawson said he had been working to get the club to change its membership practices. Dawson was a member of the club for 12 years before he announced that he had resigned in 2009.

At the time, an interview with Dawson done in 2003 surfaced that seemed to indicate that Dawson became involved in politics because he disagreed with desegregation in the 1960s:

I, in the 1960s was a product of school segregation, where we took our schools and completely disbanded them, and made racial equality. Fifty-Fifty. And the kids had no choices. They closed Booker T. Washington, Blease, down here. A pretty good school. Closed it and sent the students to A. C. Flora, across town. And they did it over the summer because the laws had been changed by the politicians. And, the day that school opened, we were on CBS news with the busses turned upside down, and one of them lit on fire. By folks who didn’t want to go to school there. Not folks who did.

The end of that story was, I was standing in a bathroom in public school… This scar over here [pointing to his forehead] was from a baseball bat. I will tell you it was a pretty harsh environment. Government reached into my life and grabbed me and shook me at the age of fifteen. I remember how blatant it was that government just thought that they knew better, that government just thought they knew better what to do in my school. And I can’t say it was so much racial. I can say that people had a lot of stuff thrust on them because politicians thought they knew better. Whether they did or didn’t, I don’t know. But from that day on I’ve always been politically active, and wanted my voice heard. Not always right. And my opinion is not always consistent with everyone else’s. but I care greatly about the State we live in, and greatly about the idea of freedom.

The controversy died down until reporters in South Carolina found evidence of Dawson being involved in more whites-only clubs. Dawson was an officer in the Camellia Ball and the Columbia Ball, two clubs that restrict membership to white, privileged families.

And in 2010, the South Carolina-based Fits News reported Dawson hadn’t actually quit the whites-only club while he was running for RNC chair. The news outlet alleges that Dawson merely paid in advance for his membership while he took a leave from the club.

Anti-LGBT

Perry’s Iowa team has several members that are opposed to LGBT rights.

Matthew Whitaker is Perry’s Iowa co-chair. He was a federal prosecutor from 2004 to 2009.

In February 2007, Whitaker emceed an event for the Iowa Christian Alliance, an anti-gay group headed by Steve Scheffler. Whitaker’s involvement sparked criticism from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State which said members of the federal judicial system should remain impartial.

“Appearing at an event like this certainly raises legitimate questions,” Rob Boston, spokesman for Americans United told the Associated Press. “It’s important that our federal prosecutors present the image of impartiality and that they not be captive to the extreme agenda of special interest groups.”

Also in 2007, Whitaker brought an extortion case against openly gay Democratic Iowa state Sen. Matt McCoy who was quickly acquitted by a jury when the case went to trial in 2007. State Sen. McCoy and his attorney accused Whitaker of prosecuting the case based on politics.

McCoy told the Advocate at the time, “Since coming out as an openly gay man, I have been a continuous target of groups targeting gays to advance their own agendas of intolerance and hate. Clearly, there is significant speculation about what has motivated federal officials to take this action against me.”

Perry’s central Iowa field staffer, Dane Nealson, is the former chair of the Iowa Federation of College Republicans and he was livid when marriage equality for same-sex couples came to the state.

“I find it disturbing that a handful of activists in black robes have reversed the decision of our elected officials over a decade ago and gone against the will of the Iowan people,” he said in 2009. “But this is the problem you’ll run into when you’ve had ten years of Democratic Governors appointing liberal judges who legislate from the bench. It is especially disappointing to see Governor [Chet] Culver and Senator [Mike] Gronstal reversing earlier statements saying they were committed to protecting marriage as being between one man and one woman, even as their constituents look to them for leadership to defend marriage. Flip flopping on issues such as this is not leadership. Because of this, we must let Iowans decide. Let the citizens of our state make their voices heard in a vote on the issue.”

Some of Perry’s surrogates are more vocal in their opposition to gays and lesbians.

New Hampshire state Rep. Alfred Baldasaro made headlines in that state several weeks ago when he praised a GOP-debate audience for booing a gay soldier, Stephen Hill.

“He doesn’t realize it, but when the (expletive) hits the fan, you want your brothers covering your back, not looking at your back,” Baldasaro said.

Baldasaro endorsed Perry and has campaigned for him in New Hampshire. When Democrats called on him to apologize, he doubled down on his statement.

“Oh no, I thought the audience, when they booed (Hill), I thought it was great,” he said.

He told the Union Leader that he doesn’t speak for Perry. “I’m not speaking for Governor Rick Perry. I’m speaking for myself as an American with a First Amendment right to free speech,” he said.

Perry’s traveling press secretary, Robert Black, once compared the Log Cabin Republicans to the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1998, the Republican Party of Texas denied the Texas Log Cabin Republicans a booth at the state convention and Black, who was communications director for the party at the time, told the press the Log Cabin Republicans were a “deviant group” like the Ku Klux Klan and, “We don’t allow pedophiles, transvestites and cross- dressers, either.”

Perry also picked an anti-gay activist to chair his Florida debate team. John Stemberger is head of the Florida Family Policy Council and successfully spearheaded the campaign to add a ban on same-sex marriage to the Florida Constitution.

Stemberger has made some controversial statements in his time amongst the religious right in Florida.

Stemberger was caught in a flap over adoption by same-sex couples when his group used a false picture to make a lesbian couple look bad. He also compared same-sex marriage to suicide.

An attorney, Stemberger once sued a company for renting a car to someone of Irish descent because they are likely to get drunk. In court papers, Stemberger argued that the company “knew or should have known about the unique cultural and ethnic customs existing in Ireland which involve the regular consumption of alcohol at ‘Pubs’ as a major component to Irish social life.” He added the car company “knew or should have known that Sean McGrath would have a high propensity to drink alcohol.”

The Florida Bar filed a misconduct complaint against Stemberger last year for his involvement in a high-profile case of a Muslim teen who converted to Christianity and ran away from her Ohio home to Florida. It was eventually dropped.

New Apostolic Reformation and The Response

Perhaps the most controversial of Perry’s surrogates are those affiliated with a controversial branch of Christianity, the New Apostolic Reformation, and The Response, a gathering of conservative Christians in Texas this summer.

Stemberger’s partner in Perry’s campaign is Pam Olsen. Olsen is a member of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), which believes harmful spirits such as Baal have taken over geographic and political areas and, through spiritual mapping, they can be identified and eliminated.

Olsen is the head of the Tallahassee branch of the International House of Prayer which helped organize Perry’s The Response event in Texas two months ago.

Olsen says God will bring natural disasters to America because of the legalization of gay rights. She also says in the “end times,” God will give her the power to raise the dead.

Mainstream evangelicals have criticized Perry’s involvement with NAR members. Brannon Howse, who hosts a series of “Worldview Weekends around the Midwest and South, criticized the movement and those who latch onto it for political support.

“This is what people think is Christianity and it is not. This isn’t biblical orthodox Christianity,” Howse said recently on his radio program.

Perry’s deputy communications director Eric Bearse was also involved in The Response, as the event’s spokesperson. He appeared on the radio program of the American Family Association, an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center calls an anti-gay hate group, to explain that the event was intended for people of all faiths to get to know Jesus Christ.

“A lot of people want to criticize what we’re doing, as if we’re somehow being exclusive of other faiths,” he said. “But anyone who comes to this solemn assembly regardless of their faith tradition or background, will feel the love, grace, and warmth of Jesus Christ in that assembly hall, in that arena. And that’s what we want to convey, that there’s acceptance and that there’s love and that there’s hope if people will seek out the living Christ. And that’s the message we want to spread on August 6.”

Along with the International House of Prayer, TheCall Ministries, a national prayer organization founded by evangelist Lou Engle, helped organize The Response. Engle has called for the need to convert gays, lesbians and Muslims, among other harsh rhetoric about the LGBT community. Engle led a rally of around 1,300 people in Uganda in May 2010 in support of the country’s “Kill the Gays” bill.

Leaders of the NAR movement, though not working for Perry’s campaign, have a demonstrated history of making controversial assertions.

Cindy Jacobs, a prophet in the movement, recently said the United States is cursed because Native Americans, who “did blood sacrifice,” “were cannibals” and “ate people.” She said The Response, led by Perry, was a key to eliminating that curse.

“[T]he land is starting to rejoice, you see, because of that prayer,” said Jacobs.

In the last three weeks, at least two incidents of racist graffiti have occurred in two different dorms. In one instance, the racist message was written on the dorm room dry erase board of a black student. In the other, racist graffiti using the same racial epithet as well as sexually explicit graphics, was found on several walls in another residence hall. A third incident came to light on Tuesday. Students say when they went to a lab on campus, they found a black rag doll hanged by a makeshift noose.

Kent Cassella, spokesperson for MSU, said the MSU police continue to investigate them both as individual incidents as well as potentially as a series of events that are related. He said MSU has not called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation as of Tuesday night as the police department was waiting for preliminary investigatory reports to be completed.

Acting Vice President of Student Affairs Dr. Denise Maybanks said that, to her knowledge, the university had initiated its bias incident response plan, but was not able to verify that Tuesday night.

Students from the university’s Black Student Alliance organized the event on Tuesday evening to discuss with the community how to respond to the situations. There was some discussion about marching to protest what was going on, but no final decision was made at the meeting. Organizers told students they would email them regarding the next steps by Friday.

“We wanted to bring it to the forefront, see how the community feels about it and what they want to do about it,” said Dedrick Cotton, the Black Student Alliance special events coordinator.

“Those are the tip of the iceberg. This is not the first time that we’ve seen or heard anything like this, but as blatant and as frequent as it has been in the past couple of years, this was about as quick as it happen in a school year,” Cotton said.

This is not the first time MSU has made headlines for alleged racial activity on the campus. Over the past decade a couple of student groups have invited controversial and some say racist speakers to the campus. In the most recent incident, MSU Sons of Liberty invited Nick Griffin, the head of the openly racist British National Party, to the campus to speak. Griffin withdrew from the event when his invitation to speak at another event in Washington D.C. was cancelled.

James Gill, vice president of the state NAACP, was at the Conrad community meeting as well.

“We’re always concerned when there are racial issues that come out,” said Gill, who is a detective with the Lansing Police Department. “We know that there are racist people in the world. We just want to know who they are so we can take care of it from there.”

Gill says that the incidents, while shocking, are not necessarily surprising given the recent history at MSU, as well as political fights in Washington D.C.

“When people in the U.S. Congress, in the U.S. Senate act like that to the President of the United States, then other people think it’s open day. We can go ahead and do that and nothing’s gonna happen to us,” said Gill. “So it’s totally wrong. Yes, I think it does stem from what those people are doing in Washington D.C.”

Cotton was not quite as certain as Gill, but said he was willing to give the university the benefit of the doubt in dealing with the incidents — though he says the administration has not responded adequately to the situation thus far.

“I wouldn’t say that we’re feeling threatened as of now,” Cotton said. “We don’t feel everything has been up to par, or taken as seriously as we think it should have been taken.”

The video concludes with the text, “When the vote was taken, every Republican agreed with Sen. Hall and voted to cut desegregation funds.”

The K-12 education omnibus bill in the House and Senate would take funding from integration and desegregation programs in the Twin Cities and Duluth and shift them to statewide programs for literacy. The bill also repeals the unfunded portions of Minnesota law dealing with desegregation.

Sen. Scott Dibble (DFL-Minneapolis) has significant problems with the bill. “Let’s talk about how segregated many of our communities still are,” he said. “Minneapolis over the last 40 years has been intensely engaged in desegregation and integration. With this bill, all that is now knocked away without any hearings.”

Dibble said the bill would harm college-readiness programs, college and career centers and magnet schools which have helped foster diverse learning environments, improved opportunities for minority students, higher adult incomes for low-income students and low-income students completing more years of higher education.

“I fear what we see here the is the politics of envy and division and protecting our own,” he said, “not the ‘one Minnesota’ we hearken back to.”

Freshman Sen. Hal’s statement on the Senate floor seemed to back up some of Dibble’s concerns. Hall backs taking the integration funds and using them for statewide literacy programs.

“Well, I don’t speak up too often, but this one has pushed my buttons. I am a product of the Minneapolis school system, completing all of my years, all the different schools,” said Hall. “I graduated with a 6th grade reading ability. I struggled my whole life. We need to teach kids how to read.”

“I watched Minneapolis get destroyed, so I not only didn’t want my kids in the school system… I took them out of Minneapolis because they ruined our neighborhoods with integration and segregation.”

He said he applauded the teachers and coaches he had growing up, but said, “The system is broke. My best friends are minority, they think integration in foolish. It’s a ploy to get more money.”

He added, “Treat everyone equally and with respect. Right down the line I teach my kids. I teach them every day we treat everyone with respect. It’s disrespectful to tell my friends, my minority friends that they can’t make it without extra special help.”

The K-12 education omnibus bill passed the Senate on Thursday by a party-line vote. A bill with a similar repeal of desegregation programs passed the House as well. Both are headed to conference committee to hash out any differences before heading to Gov. Mark Dayton.

But the episode didn’t stop there. On Friday, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann picked up the story, naming Krikorian “the world’s worst person” on that evening’s airing of “Countdown.”

That prompted a response from Krikorian, who subsequently told the Huffington Post that Olbermann “is a buffoon for not checking his sources.” That’s the reaction we might have expected. The reaction we didn’t expect was Krikorian’s claim that Olbermann and MSNBC aired the story only because Yalamanchili once worked for one of the show’s corporate sponsors.

“Here’s one thing I will state for the record: Last night’s program was sponsored by Procter & Gamble’s Oil of Olay brand, which is the exact brand that Surya Yalamanchili worked for,” Krikorian said.

So how did they cover that story last night? Because I’m sure that Keith Olbermann is not reading the Cincinnati press. So our folks think that the Oil of Olay brand people — Procter and Gamble in particular — were advancing their former employee. And that’s how it got in there.

We’ll know soon enough the effects of the alleged Olbermann-P&G conspiracy. The Krikorian-Yalamanchili primary vote is taking place today.

h/t: ThinkProgress.

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.”

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.

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?