Archives for April 2013

Even plague-ridden weasels gotta pay their dues, play those small-venue tours. Alex Morris at NYMag finds a professional ratfcker at a low ebb in the electoral cycle:

The agents of truth are massing. They wear pleated slacks and wire-frame glasses, button-downs and blazers, sensible shoes. They congregate over muffins and oatmeal in a beigeish room on the twelfth floor of a Hilton in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. There are two people of color, but otherwise the agents appear blissfully Anglo-Saxon; some wear tea-party pins. The average age looks to be roughly 63, though that figure would be a few digits higher were it not for the eventual arrival of 28-year-old keynote speaker James O’Keefe, most famous for secretly filming a video that seems to show workers from the liberal community group acorn advising him on how to conceal income from an imaginary brothel. This, among other gonzo YouTube videos revealing alleged liberal misdeeds and hypocrisies, makes him a hero in this room. The agents of truth want to be like O’Keefe, rooting out liberal bias, shining light into the dark corners of corrupt government, and, perhaps most important, getting linked to by Drudge.

And so, on a sunny April morning, here they are at a Citizen Watchdog Summit aimed at training them in the art of citizen journalism, an event sponsored by the conservative Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which was created with support from David and Charles Koch…

O’Keefe assures his aging army that it’s a daunting task to break through the “media firewall” and portray the truth. There will be suffering, maybe even public disgrace, like what O’Keefe faced when he was arrested at the office of Senator Mary Landrieu after entering the federal property under false pretenses. “You can only imagine what it feels like to be shackled to your waist with a leather belt and chains and a Timothy McVeigh jumpsuit, put on the front page of the New York Times; you can only imagine how difficult it would be to continue. But I continued. Are you willing to make the sacrifices? Are you willing to be slandered and defamed, falsely accused?”

An older woman in a flowered turtleneck shirt raises her hand.

“Yes?”

“My husband and I are fighting with our local township,” she says, her voice brimming with indignation. “What they came and did was end the curb so all the road’s storm water runs down our driveway, and in the winter it makes our driveway one solid sheet of ice. And thank you for the YouTube. We have photographs of the icy driveway, and we’ll be working on publishing.”…

After his presentation, O’Keefe can be found at a window near the back that looks out over his home state’s highways and warehouses. As a part of his three-year probation, he can’t travel without permission from a judge, a U.S. attorney, and a probation officer, he says.* This makes it hard for him to round up his army of citizen watchdogs, though he tells me that, along with continuing to make his videos, it is “definitely one of the more important things that I do.” Not that the law is the only obstacle. “To be a disrupter, to go against the grain—the hardest part for me is just getting them to do that. They’re all 50-plus. They’re always older. Probably the most frustrating thing about what I do is that people who have lived through a lot can identify more, but once you have a family, a house, you’re entrenched.” He pauses. “People in their twenties are going to be more likely to make sacrifices, but they’re just not there yet.”

It’s like the old joke about the circus worker following the elephants with a shovel and a bucket. Sure, O’Keefe could find a (semi-) honest job fetching coffee and tweeting Reason links, but then he’d have to give up show business!
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Apart from the inescapable bucket work, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Open Thread: O’Keefe’s Old Folks ArmyPost + Comments (252)