Update: The day after I posted this diary, the blog was taken down. I have looked in the way back machine and google cache and not been able to find them again. Thanks to those of you who clicked on the links while they were still up.
Unless you are more disciplined then I am about avoiding nonsense and drivel, there is a good chance you saw the front page of today's NY Post, or flipped through Fox 'News' and saw an interview with a young white man dressed as a pimp. You probably flipped through or turned away, thinking it was something ridiculous about early Halloween costumes. But it wasn't. That was James O'Keefe, new hero of the right, and his pimp costume is what he wore while secretly video-taping Acorn employees.
If you somehow managed to avoid the story: here's the quick gist. O'Keefe makes "documentary" films on conservative topics. He's most well-known to this point for prank calls to Planned Parenthood requesting that his donation be targeted to "black babies." It's sophomoric stuff, but what else fires up the 9-12ers, the birthers and the tea-baggers?
In the current headline case, O'Keefe and his "whore" go to Acorn branches, asking for help financing a home. They video record (and later systematically edit) these conversations. In their ridiculous outfits, they imply that he's a pimp, the girl is a prostitute, and they need assistance in obtaining a house they can use as a brothel for a number of underage prostitutes from El Salvador. In the subsequent right-wing "news", the headline becomes that Acorn provides tax advice to a pimp. But what I saw when I watched the video was two over-privileged kids in silly costumes using a hidden camera to pick on people who frankly had no idea what was going on. When I watched the video, I wanted to know who was the little pimp who was making it his life's work to travel around the country with a scantily clad young lady in a crusade against community activism.
So I googled him.
The results are below if you keep reading. Some of it is unsurprising: he's a D-Bag. He founded a conservative monthly paper at Rutgers using Astroturf seed-money. He writes "slam poetry" about 9/11. And, oh yeah, he got kicked out of his Freshman dormitory at Rutgers for calling someone the N-word. He denies it, of course, but you be the judge (and seriously, I'll quote the poetry, it's terrible)...
... First, recent history. James O'Keefe founded The Rutgers Centurion, after he was kicked off the main Rutgers student paper. As documented in a 2005 Salon Article O'Keefe got the money and technical know-how for the paper from The Leadership Institute, a right-wing organization specializing in campus astro-turf grass-roots. By the way, the Leadership Institute also funds O'Keefe's video work: as shown by this post where he thanks "LI" for a $4000 monitor to make his movies.
But James O'Keefe probably has that stuff on his resume. It isn't interesting, really- it doesn't show what he's really like. His blog: Feathers of Steel does. He's a right-wing Holden Caulfield. Consider this quote, from a >January, 2006 post about arriving in Switzerland to study abroad.
I’m looking forward to going to Milan tomorrow – and mending my heart somehow– which is still broken after I spoke with Arielle yesterday – I’m still in love with her. I cried last night and earlier this afternoon I’m making this a diary as well as a travel guide as I need a place to just stream my consciousness and externalize, I don’t think my 4 readers or so will mind.
Earlier in the same post, O'Keefe notes approvingly how
The people of Lugano, Switzerland are somewhat different from the typical horn-blowing, goat-herding Swiss-German Stereotypes. But they are still fairly homogenous; they are tall, thin, tan and have brown hair.
and
Unlike those of other cities, no minorities or immigrants are in Lugano with the exception of maybe a few arabs on visas; tall swiss men do everything from waxing your floor to construction work (the sound of hammers and nails echo through the valley here) to serving you gas to checking your luggage. The Swiss government is very strict.
There's more of O'Keefe's particular obsession with race throughout his blog. In another post, Clubbing in Switzerland, he notes
Club "privlige" was crowded with bankers and businessmen wearing blazers, gold chains and tight jeans. Their skin was paler than the others clubs, a clearer sign of wealth and status in this darker Italian region.
But the Pimp didn't spend his whole youth running around Switzerland. He eventually made it to law school. Here's a great post that shows what he thought about what had gone wrong with law-school:
And the reformers have won largely, especially at more orthodox law schools, where races are probably represented exactly as they would be throughtout the general population, professors old fashioned socratic methods are watered down by Deans Circles and Queer Groups and reform-facilitators who can't handle a man in a suit telling them their wrong.
Here is a short part of a poem that the Pimp wrote about 9/11. I'm quoting it complete with his description and instructions:
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Tolerate This
By James O’Keefe
Note: This is an authentic "slam" poem written in the Winter of 2003 in my passionate, reactionary response to Annie DiFranco.
It is to be performed in the spoken-word/hip-hop format.
Very few people at Rutgers are about to agree with what I have to say
But because you believe in acceptance and diversity
I’m ‘bout to say it anyway
You think you’re all Peace?
You think I’m all war?
You don’t know what it is we’re fighting for
It’s kill or be killed and we’ve been killed before
You don’t seem to understand the fundamentals of war
Like anxious butterflies behind closed doors
You imply utopia, logic you ignore
You disagree with dieing hard likes its
Some choice to make
You defy society like it’s some claim to stake
Hurry up and bitch because tolerance won’t wait
But we can’t let impatient hippies determine our fate
You blame this nation
For what madmen have done
On the Eleventh of September, 2001
(THere is much more of this scary/hilarious poem on the blog.)
But finally, after all the comedy, there is a diary entry about the pivotal moment when James O'Keefe was kicked out of the Rutgers Dormitory. I'm let the pimp tell the story:
My freshman year of college I was placed in a triple room on the second floor of Campbell. One of my roomates was gay. The other was just bizarre. Two months in I volunteered to leave and was put on an all-black, floor, the Paul Robeson floor, on Mettler 3 in November. I was placed with, no joke, an Indian midget named "Hashish" who smelled like shit. Then he transfered. I had a single. For the month of January, I never left my room. Then on Valentines day, the one year anniversary of James/Arielle, in came a greek kid named Paul. Paul was an absolute nightmare.
But it gets worse...
Then, to my horror, he actually said to the all-black RAs that I called everyone on the floor "niggers." - a complete lie. It was my word against his. I was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and my situation, no friends, no one one 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.
James O'Keefe was then kicked out of the dorms Maybe it was all a lie, like he says, but either way now you can judge him for who he is, in his own words. And you have a more complete picture of the prick in the Pimp costume.