So yeah, the kid who dressed like a pimp to do his best to wreck ACORN?* Got his picture taken at a white nationalist enclave that was too crazy, even, for the Leadership Institute, which employed him at the time. Oh, and LI fired him for this, too, which…should sound familiar:
Meanwhile, O’Keefe lost his job at the Leadership Institute in 2007 after a prank call he made to an Ohio-based Planned Parenthood clinic. During the call, O’Keefe offered a donation to the clinic on the condition that it would be earmarked to pay for aborting African-American fetuses. “Because there's definitely way too many black people in Ohio,” O’Keefe remarked to the receptionist. “So, I'm just trying to do my part.” Leadership Institute founder Morton Blackwell said O'Keefe's stunts went beyond the right-wing group's standards. “He wanted to do sting operations that would affect legislation; he made some calls which have been covered in the news media to Planned Parenthood," Blackwell told the New York Times. "That was beyond the scope of what we had hired him to do. We are an educational organization. We are not an activist organization.” Blackwell told O'Keefe he had to choose between his job and his activism, "and he said he was committed to the activism," according to the Times.
BTW, in case you don’t get the “black babies” thing, that’s a big part of late Christian conservative pro-life belief: birth control and abortion rights are a remnant of eugenics beliefs and laws, and meant to keep the lower classes in check. Planned Parenthood is specifically maligned as a – literally Nazi, often – organization that’s all about making poor brown women abort their babies.
It’s a somewhat convincing story, if you want to be convinced, as Margaret Sanger was not a very pleasant or kind person, kinda racist like people decades back from where you’re standing tend to be, and yeah, a big promoter of eugenics. She worked with people who were involved in the German eugenics program that turned into The Final Solution, so…that doesn’t look good.
The lie of this version of the story, of course, is that it relies on people’s collective forgetting, based on shame – eugenics laws were barely dead and gone in my home state of Oregon when I hit high school in the eighties. Those things were huge, they were everywhere, this is crime we all own – you can’t even really point left or right on that one.
And uh, in real life, the Third Reich put a permanent stink on the whole idea, for most people. And Planned Parenthood is not the same organization it was at its founding, any more than recent abortion rights campaigns and movements – and continuing birth control fights – are the exact same thing as Sanger’s campaign to distribute birth control information through the US mail.
Also, this is like when conservatives claim to be feminist because Sarah Palin’s mocked for proving herself a fool over and over, or when they all wanted to dump all the Social Security funds into the stock market a few years ago: all about black men. (See, the story goes, black American men tend to die earlier, so they get the rawest deal of all on Social Security. No kidding.) All you really need to say to any of that is “Yeah, but you don’t give a fuck about women or black people, so you’re jerking my chain right now.”
Anyway, there’s more of O’Keefe’s story at Salon and One People’s Project, including the exciting tale of how he got kicked out of his dorm at Rutgers for…being a total racist. (He was also the kid who did the “Affirmative Action Bake Sale” a few years back…did not know that.)
And thanks, Doug, for the heads up on this. Whoo hoo.
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*Which didn’t actually happen, as it turned out – the organization’s bloodied, but ACORN came back swinging, so…been thinking I needed to do some volunteer work again, anyway. See where I land and if they’ve got any use for me, I guess.
