While I was filming at CPAC for a forthcoming project, I was confronted by Hannah Giles, Andrew Breitbart and a mob of crazed teabaggers. They were enraged by an article I wrote for Salon.com about James O'Keefe's attendance of and assistance with a white nationalist event featuring open racialists Jared Taylor and John Derbyshire as well as Kevin Martin of the right-wing front group Project 21. Project 21, by the way, is a black front group created and operated by white conservative operatives to provide cover to figures like Taylor.
Did O'Keefe plan the event with his friend, the white nationalist Marcus Epstein, the Tancredo aide who pled guilty to randomly attacking a black woman and calling her the n-word? O'Keefe's role in helping out with and freely attending the event, along with his palling around with characters like Epstein and Taylor highlighted a career filled with racist pranks, from his ACORN pimp costume minstrel show (see Bradblog on the deceptive means Breitbart used to push the pimp costume myth) to his "affirmative action bake sale," in which he and his friends charged white students extra for baked goods while minorities ate for little or nothing. Then there are his diaries about the hell of living in a multicultural university environment. James O'Keefe, the apparent hero of the conservative movement's youth wing, is what racism looks like today.
The only time Breitbart and his goon squad get upset about racism is when they think it is somehow being directed against white people like themselves. That's why a particularly manic mob member (who wouldn't stop using the pretentious word "rubric") seemed to argue to me against the existence of the Congressional Black Caucus because it would not allow a hostile conservative congressman to join. And it's why when CPAC chose as its keynote speaker the race-baiter Glenn Beck, who claimed Obama has "a deep-seated hatred for white people."
It is also worth noting that CPAC played host to Thomas Woods, a former leader of the white supremacist League of the South and contributor to the neo-secessionist Southern Partisan magazine. And that CPAC held a seminar called "Abraham Lincoln: Friend or Foe of Liberty?" led by Thomas DiLorenzo, another League of the South figure who insists Lincoln was the very embodiment of evil. The presence at CPAC of Islamophobes Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller (Geller once argued Obama was "involved with a crack whore in his youth"), promoters of the European neo-fascist Geert Wilders, can not be overlooked either. And stay tuned for my interview with Birther leader Philip Berg, who insisted Obama was actually an Indonesian Muslim who should be tried for treason and possibly executed. These people must have left their sheets at the dry cleaners.
Breitbart's tirade against me was filled with irony. The most glaring projection was that I was using "Alinsky tactics," referring to left-wing community organizer Saul Alinsky. For the record, I skimmed Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" about 14 years ago and can hardly remember what was in it. However, Breitbart's boy, James O'Keefe, boasted to the LA Times that Alinsky's book was the blueprint for his work.
Breitbart went on to say that calling someone a racist was the worst thing anyone could do. Actually, there is something worse than that: promoting and paying a racist. And that's what Breitbart is doing with O'Keefe. Meanwhile, Breitbart has some interesting views of his own on racial issues. Besides calling the Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn a "multiculturalist, just like the black studies and the lesbian studies majors on college campuses," Breitbart has howled about "black studies intimidation." As usual, he only sees racism when it is supposedly directed against white people like himself.
According to a recent study by the Pew Center on the States, one out of every 100 adults in the United States is in prison. One of every nine black males between the ages of 20 and 34 has been behind bars, a scandalous statistic owing itself in part to the failed and racially biased drug war, which mandates the warehousing of non-violent drug offenders for long periods of time.
I look forward to working with James O'Keefe on prison reform.