Reason Magazine editor Matt Welch begins a critique of Beck’s “The Puppet Master” series from last week with a sentence that captures the general approach of many other critics of the series: “I didn’t watch Glenn Beck’s three-part series on […] George Soros, but…”  He goes on to clarify that he had read at least parts of the transcript, but that’s never a promising way to begin an evaluation of anything.  The rest of his piece confirms that no, he definitely did not watch it and generally doesn’t know what he is talking about in evaluating it.

Welch doesn’t bother to address the main points of Beck’s argument, but he is confident he has caught Beck making embarrassing mistakes he can use to ruin Beck’s credibility.  He counters Beck’s evaluation of  Soros’ intentions regarding American sovereignty and independence from international governance with a non-sequitur about the original meaning of Karl Popper’s term “open society” – as though that proves Soros’ Open Society Institute couldn’t possibly be used for anything else.   But more amusing is Welch’s mocking this quote from Beck as evidence of Beck getting a “whole bunch of other stuff about Soros dead wrong:”

Along with currencies, Soros also collapses regimes with his Open Society fund. He helped to fund the Velvet Revolution in Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, he also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, Yugoslavia. So what is his target now? Us, America.

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It started with a blog post at something called One People’s Project, in which someone named Daryle Jenkins claimed:

(In 2006) ..there was this white supremacist forum that we had called attention to and eventually attended that featured American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor and National Review’s homophobe extraordinaire John Derbyshire. It was originally supposed to be held at the building of the conservative activist organization Leadership Institute until it was forced to move to another location…..

There was also a photographer there, and lo and behold this picture has surfaced of a now familiar face attending the forum - James O’Keefe.

O’Keefe was manning a table at a forum of suit-and-tie Nazis.

A DC area photographer snapped a photo of O’Keefe as he maintained a literature table near the panelists.

The photograph that One People’s Project shows as its proof (above) is cropped and just shows O’Keefe from the shoulders up.  It doesn’t show that he is sitting at all, let alone at a table, let alone “manning” the table at the event apparently hosted by the Robert Taft Club.

Max Blumenthal — son of Clinton apparatchik “Sid Vicious” Blumenthal — at Salon.com picked up on the story and extrapolated even more: (more…)