You know you’re having a bad day, Joan Walsh, when it’s just you and Max Blumenthal alone in a foxhole while you’re being overwhelmed by the truth. Because David Weigel, one of your sources for Blumenthal’s story and Max’s own blog posts that James O’Keefe once helped organize a “racist conference,”  has now “clarified” his remarks and guess what?  Your story just fell apart.  Read it and weep:

Clarification — and Mea Culpa — on James O’Keefe and ‘Race and Conservatism’

On Wednesday, I wrote a post reacting to Max Blumenthal’s story “James O’Keefe’s Race Problem” and was too quick with a description of the August 30, 2006 Robert Taft Club event on “race and conservatism.” Specifically, I wrote this:

“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.

There follows five points of material error in Blumenthal’s story and in the original post at the “anti-racist” website, One People’ s Project (whose site is adorned with the old Soviet Union colors of red and gold, and features a Soviet-style logo).   Among the revelations: (more…)

In Max Blumenthal’s article “James O’Keefe’s race problem” for Salon.com of February 3, 2010, Mr. Blumenthal makes a number of unverifiable and provably false claims regarding James O’Keefe’s attendance at a 2006 conference called “Race and Conservatism.”  Below are the list of quotes containing misinformation and an explanation of why they need to be addressed by the editors of your publication.

From left: Marcus Epstein, Jared Taylor, Kevin Martin, and John Derbyshire at what Max Blumenthal dubbed “a white-nationalist confab”

We kindly request corrections to all:

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.

As noted in this post here by Larry O’Connor, we contacted Mr. Jenkins, who identified David Weigel as his source for the claim that Mr. O’Keefe was manning the table.  Mr. Weigel has denied that Mr. O’Keefe manned the table and has no knowledge to suggest Mr. O’Keefe was involved in the orchestration of the event at any level. In an interview with BigJournalism.com, Mr. O’Keefe denied having planned the event.

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