“This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation.…This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the US Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

I cite this as precedent in three realms: An African-American defining a lynching beyond the traditional mob beating and hanging of black people; a Supreme Court Justice not known for opinions sympathetic to minorities here asserting racism as the cause in a line of inquiry; and the U.S. Congress’s acceptance of this definition as they hastily approved the minimally experienced Thomas following his scathing complaints.

The history of lynching in America is considerable. From 1882-1968, nearly 5000 lynchings occurred in the United States.  Lynching is vigilantism and extrajudicial decision by a group of people, a violent act by a mob that does not believe their agenda will be met by law, aware they are acting out of the law, but in effect being the law. There is rarely accountability for those involved.  In fact, the display of the victim hanging for all to see is meant to scare off others, violators of perceived segregation or threats to authority.

A perceived wrong to white women was often used as justification. Fueled by prejudice and untruths, urged by a perceived threat or need for immediate justice, lynchings often occurred for reasons other than the alleged crime, like a land or business dispute. Lynchings occurred primarily with blacks men dying at the hands of a white mob, but white people were also targeted, for activism or outspokenness.  

This would seem to be the case in Kentucky, where a white census worker was murdered, left hanged, naked, hands taped together, gagged, his ID taped to him and “FED” scrawled across his chest.  To dispute that this heinous crime qualifies as a lynching is a very dangerous road to go down, even from people who email White House watermelon pictures. Nonetheless, some are inhumanly quick to venture any number of defamatory theories, blaming a victim who can no longer speak for himself, rather than acknowledge what is plain as day.

The manner in which Bill Sparkman was left to be found makes it clear that this was meant as a message. His body didn’t have “Bill” scrawled on it, or “Guy Who Wronged Me Personally In Ways That The Legal Process Will Not Adjudicate Fairly.” No, it said simply, “FED,” as in, what else is there to say?  He was a federal employee—how dare he?  But why on earth would someone want to kill a federal employee (outside of postal-worker-on-postal-worker violence)?  How could population counting of American citizens to allot them equitable representation and public resources make them want to kill you?

Fanatical fear mongers, such as wrist-slasher and Rep. Michelle Bachman, R-Minn., have sought to create fears of this census process that occurs every 10 years, alleging surveillance and plans to build government camps. She has been notably dodging the issue since Sparkman’s murder, but she had plenty of unfounded fears to share about the census just months ago:

As you can see from this clip, ACORN has already been conflated with the right wing paranoia about the census, with Fox’s Megyn Kelly re-enforcing these misperceptions up until Bachmann evokes the Japanese internment camps in World War II as reason for us to be suspicious today. That ACORN is raised as a specter in the same breath as the internment of Japanese-Americans by the U.S. government post-Pearl Harbor reveals the far-flung misimpressions of this community umbrella organization. ACORN sounds like COBRA.

The census worker lynching in Kentucky indicates that this violent fervor is still alive and well, and being fed some of the purest baloney that the right wing fear machine can mass-produce in their all-out efforts at relevance. The only danger presented by both census-taking and ACORN’s voter registration is the counting and empowerment of Brown people. As the population includes more minorities—on their way to becoming the majority—plenty of bigoted white people feel their sense of prestige endangered. Census data goes into districting, and thus proportional representation in government.  More Brown people voting further threatens the status quo.

By the standard of a high-tech lynching, ACORN’s travails are commensurate. The attacks on ACORN have been ongoing, involving the Justice Department, the White House, and the Republican National Committee, well before a couple of privileged white kids in costumes wandered into poor communities across the country hoping to make social workers look stupid and lose their jobs. This is a mob Karl Rove started years ago.

James O’Keefe III is serving Karl Rove, knowingly or unknowingly. His very identification of ACORN as what had to be taken down a notch — not Goldman Sachs, not the Treasury, not U.S. companies with off-shore accounts — why would O’Keefe even know what ACORN is?

This extensive report on the media’s failure to objectively cover ACORN, just released by the Occidental College Urban & Environmental Policy Institute shows the rampant inequity of media coverage and lack of accuracy in reporting on ACORN for the past year. If someone were to see solely this much negative press, they would probably hold an unfavorable view of ACORN as well, as some 67 percent people do, according to a recent poll Karl Rove Tweeted.

Enter James O’Keefe III to take that ball of misinformation and run with it. On Fox & Friends, James O’Keefe III is introduced at the beginning of the interview, wearing a fur coat over his preppy blazer, as he waves a cane. The host is quick to excuse his appearance: “You’re not a pimp, you’re just playing one on our show.”

O’Keefe replies: “I’m one of the whitest guys ever, I just wear ridiculous stuff and put people in ridiculous situations.” That is how he assures us he is not a pimp—he is one of the Whitest Guys Ever, therefore on the opposite end of the spectrum from the Blackest Guys Ever, who normally tend to this kind of thing.

Implicit is this: ‘I am so white, I had to dress up like a pimp caricature to look black, and it actually worked. That they acknowledged me despite my outlandish attire shows that they are so gullible and base, I was mistaken for a real pimp, which they all must know, being minorities. Once disguised in this clownish attire, they spoke to me as one of their own, so therefore this is how they all behave throughout their organization. Had I not been dressed as Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch, the ACORN employees would have known that I was white, and therefore been on their best behavior, as we can expect them to be to us white people when we come around to check on them.’

Just by walking in the door dressed like this, O’Keefe is casting aspersions that people like this would go there (not just sex workers—clueless sex workers). O’Keefe even pleaded with one alarmed ACORN worker to not call the cops for assistance, so that later O’Keefe can fault him for not calling the cops.  As O’Keefe says in the above clip coldly, “That’s who these people are.”

O’Keefe is quick to generalize an entire national organization based on a singular intrusive experience, despite other ACORN offices not taking his bait, after admitting he went in there to prove they were thugs.  If that’s who these people really are, why not release the videotapes in their entirety to show that, including those tapes shot in cities that did not humor O’Keefe, like Los Angeles or Philadelphia, where the ACORN office filed a police report about the pimp and ho spectacle?

As O’Keefe insists in the clip above, ACORN’s allegation that the tapes appear doctored is “a lie,” so he shouldn’t have a problem proving it by releasing the full unedited tapes, which would likely be part of ACORN’s lawsuit against him. Refuting the “moral equivalence,” O’Keefe decries that doctoring tapes does not even compare with child prostitution — suggesting that to O’Keefe, the ends justify the means.  Was this about the truth, or making ACORN look bad?

Lost in all of the sensationalism of O’Keefe’s hyperbole and selective truths was that there has been no other connection between ACORN and underage prostitution, until O’Keefe walked in and started talking about it to any ACORN employee he could get to listen to him.

Try to explain this to the anti-ACORN vandalism that appeared immediately after O’Keefe’s videos, notably at Shepard Fairy’s art studio in Santa Monica.  The stencil reading “ACORN Funded Prostitution Zone” doesn’t take into account that there has been no evidence of actual prostitution, or that Shepard Fairy doesn’t even have any connection to ACORN—but he made a poster for Obama, so they’re all connected?   This is the kind of hasty reaction that ties a bunch of unrelated things together in a mob’s mind, searching for some easy target.

Many in the crankosphere were quick to chest-beat: “To defend ACORN is to defend child prostitution itself.  No one can defend them now!” Actually, you can defend ACORN, and many have, because decades of real work in communities across our country still amounts to more than a fleeting image to a bunch of anonymous people in Gotcha Mode who do not know the reality of what ACORN is and will not bother to learn.

But once again, this is beside the point: Do I have to defend everything that ACORN has or has not done to decry this unjust process? Myself and others have attested to ACORN’s greater good, but there is a critical need to refute gross misrepresentation and be vigilant in truth to rebuff future pitchfork-wavers.

In the wake of the fallout from the Pimp-Ho videos, the first government tie to drop ACORN was the Census Bureau, even though they do not pay ACORN for their service.  Rep. Daniel Issa of Orange County introduced a measure to strip ACORN of all federal funding, which quickly passed with few questions. It passed so quickly, no one realized it could apply to all defense contractors, as it might should.  Now, Democrats are falling over each other trying to score a major win for Republicans and enact a new measure to re-de-fund ACORN, just to be safe.

This is another characteristic of lynching: That it is not just the hate mongers doing it. This was carried out by the community.  James Allen’s Without Sanctuary, a book of postcards from the turn of the 20^th century when lynching photos were like trading cards, includes this observation from Pullitzer Prize-winning historian Leon F. Litwack wrote:

“The photographs stretch our credulity, even numb our minds and senses to the full extent of the horror, but they must be examined if we are to understand how normal men and women could live with, participate in, and defend such atrocities, even reinterpret them so they would not see themselves or be perceived as less than civilized. The men and women who tortured, dismembered, and murdered in this fashion understood perfectly well what they were doing and thought of themselves as perfectly normal human beings. Few had any ethical qualms about their actions. This was not the outburst of crazed men or uncontrolled barbarians but the triumph of a belief system that defined one people as less human than another. For the men and women who comprised these mobs, as for those who remained silent and indifferent or who provided scholarly or scientific explanations, this was the highest idealism in the service of their race. One has only to view the self-satisfied expressions on their faces as they posed beneath black people hanging from a rope or next to the charred remains of a Negro who had been burned to death. What is most disturbing about these scenes is the discovery that the perpetrators of the crimes were ordinary people, not so different from ourselves — merchants, farmers, laborers, machine operators, teachers, doctors, lawyers, policemen, students; they were family men and women, good churchgoing folk who came to believe that keeping black people in their place was nothing less than pest control, a way of combating an epidemic or virus that if not checked would be detrimental to the health and security of the community.”

James Allen himself reflects on the postcards of lynchings as pornographic fodder:

“I believe the photographer was more than a perceptive spectator at lynchings. The photographic art played as significant a role in the ritual as torture or souvenir grabbing — a sort of two-dimensional biblical swine, a receptacle for a collective sinful self. Lust propelled their commercial reproduction and distribution, facilitating the endless replay of anguish. Even dead, the victims were without sanctuary. “

On James O’Keefe III’s Facebook page, one of his many new supporters posted, “Is there some way to outlaw ACORN? And then anyone giving them money would be breaking the law.”

While such strong federal government intervention seems to be counter to the Right’s constant outcry of preventing such intrusion, it does aspire to bend the law to punish those who disagree, and set an example.

In no way am I suggesting that O’Keefe was, or is, consciously promoting racial violence, or even responsible for any that occurs in the wake of his smear job.

But at a lynching a hundred years ago, James O’Keefe III would have been the one taking the picture.

John Wellington Ennis is a filmmaker whose most recent documentary, FREE FOR ALL! was hailed by critic Roger Eberg as “engrossing, even enraging.” His production company Shoot First Inc., in Beverly Hills, specializes in unscripted entertainment, such as documentaries, reality TV, comedy, and live music. He blogs at johnennis.tv.

That the House of Representatives has moved swiftly on anything is stunning in and of itself. More stunning, this is in response to a single independent report by conservative activists, with no follow-up investigation, no hearings, not even being provided a copy of the full, unedited video tapes shot by conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles at a couple of ACORN offices.

This is serious stuff here. This is not a game of gotcha, of cheap political points, of practical jokes — not when this is money that helps in many real ways in impoverished communities around our country.

It is vital to assess how this backlash was accepted so quickly in light of videos that were from someone whose films are funded by conservative backers, videos that misrepresented ACORN through editing and not disclosing other failed attempts at their desired response, and may well have been dubbed over, if O’Keefe would dare to release the unedited tapes in their real context to prove otherwise.

A significant reason that this ACORN backlash has moved through Congress like Montezuma’s Revenge is that this particular hidden camera stunt had the ring of “child prostitution” in it, which most politicians of either party would run from rather than dispute its irrelevance. “Anyone defending ACORN is for child prostitution” is an immediate fallacious meme. It’s not like we’re talking about the Catholic Church here, which still gets federal funding.

Noteworthy is that there have not been any previous allegations between child prostitution and ACORN. In this weekend’s LA Times, O’Keefe himself asserts that this ruse had nothing to do with prostitution, importing underage sex workers, or tax help for starting up a business.

“Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization,” he said. “No one was holding this organization accountable. No one in the media is putting pressure on them. We wanted to do a stunt and see what we could find.”

That’s what this is really about: the elections, and the threat that has been hyped tirelessly that ACORN is in some way stealing your vote.

Before I digress into the long campaign to smear ACORN because of its successful voter registration, I don’t want to be accused to changing the subject to the elections. O’Keefe clearly stated that is what these stunts were about from the beginning.

There is much to dispute in O’Keefe’s quote. There is no evidence whatsoever that politicians are getting elected single-handedly by ACORN, and it is a wild exaggeration. Many claims of voter fraud are made, few instances ever occur.

What has been distorted is that these allegations surround voter registrations, not actual votes, and that ACORN has regularly flagged forms that were incomplete, duplicate, or unverifiable. By law, anyone collecting voter registration forms has to turn in all that are used, even if they know the forms will not be processed.

Far-fetched is the idea that no one in the media has been putting pressure on ACORN. That O’Keefe would even think ACORN could elect politicians single-handedly is because of FOX News’ rampant coverage and conflation of ACORN conspiracies and allegations, to the extent that John McCain worked it into his stump speech by the end of the 2008 Presidential Election.

The red herring of voter fraud as an excuse to deny others the right to vote is a well-worn claim. Voter suppression, specifically using the fear of “voter fraud” to advance voter suppression, is a topic I have explored and documented in-depth in my documentary FREE FOR ALL! which you can see online for free right now. I also produced a video about ACORN with Video the Vote focusing on the fraud of voter fraud.

David Iglesias, a Republican U.S. Prosecutor for New Mexico, investigated allegations of voter fraud throughout the state at the urging of Republican leaders, and when he found no evidence and would not prosecute falsely, he was fired, as asserted by David Iglesias in his testimony before Congress and emails recently declassified from Karl Rove.

But again, I don’t want to be accused of dodging the issue–I am just looking to rebut the persistent falsehood which directly affected this kid’s motivation to punk a community organization into losing millions of dollars to help the poor.

O’Keefe is comparable to the FBI informant who brought down the Bronx terrorist plot — only that there would not have been any actual plot were it not for this FBI informant actively recruiting mentally challenged Muslims from Mosques for this plot, which apparently involved entrapping people who were dumb enough to listen to him.

O’Keefe could well have actually attempted to show something about ACORN’s voting registration controversies–like speak to registrants who admitted falsifying voter registration forms, or followed up on who registered and who voted, or even interview ACORN directly. But none of those would have involved a minister’s daughter dressing slutty, so you can’t really blame him.

So it came to pass that in this effort to dispute voter registration that Giles and O’Keefe conceived of the worst sounding scandal they could invoke, and traveled the country to ACORN offices across the country to find someone to take their time to humor them in the improv game of “Yes, And.”

And they eventually found some clueless ACORN employees, people far too eager to offer good customer service than employ any common sense. A couple of workers comply with O’Keefe’s outlandish inquiry for underage brothels in dispensing tax advice.

The well-publicized clips are shocking enough, and have been exploited as much as any couple of minutes of video can be. Glenn Beck taunted other networks for not covering it. Even Jon Stewart bunted on it, as if his guest interview were Sistah Souljah. As a potent testament to Stewart’s “Most Trusted Newsman” gatekeeper status, the House next day voted to cut all federal funding for ACORN.

It is worth noting here that what transpired on O’Keefe’s videotape were conversations about hypothetical situations–not actual prostitution, no actual crime, and not proof of an agency-wide policy or program involving prostitution or illegal immigrants. In fact, O’Keefe’s experiment proves this–that several other ACORN offices would not be ensnared by their absurd scenario, and turned away these provocateurs. One office in Philadelphia filed a police report because they were alarmed by the pair.

Ironically, the only thing illegal in some of these tapes is that O’Keefe is filming illegally. States like California and Maryland have strict consent laws about surreptitious recording, which is why the news and entertainment industries have long figured out workarounds for hidden cameras. (Hint: Vegas.)

As the crankosphere raves over how the Media didn’t uncover this, it is worth pointing out that not only are the tactics against the standard of journalism, the lack of disclosure and misrepresentation pushes this expose well out of the range of journalism and in to the realm of entrapment.

As it was, O’Keefe had to misrepresent a conversation where a woman stated up front that their inquiry was illegal, but played along because she figured it was a gag. Another misrepresentation by FOX was the breathless uproar about a woman who joked that she had killed her husband–well after it was established that her husband was alive, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and others kept repeating the ridiculous claim for another day, demanding an investigation, since they obviously didn’t have the resources as a major news network to confirm that this guy was alive.

Nor is this O’Keefe’s first foray into being the Tucker Max of conservative hacks. He pulled a stunt on Planned Parenthood entrapping receptionists and donation reps into conversations where he said he wanted to kill off black people, while his compatriot Lila Rose called and claimed to be underage to see if the clinics would report statutory rape. (Lila Rose just recently called for abortions to be held in public squares to create the mass gross-out that would therefore make them all illegal)

In a detailed response from Bertha Lewis and Steven Kest :

O’Keefe has a sordid history of preying on receptionists and other front-line service workers for respected organizations. In 2008 he pulled a similar stunt on Planned Parenthood when he and another female colleague secretly recorded phone conversations with staff who handle fundraising calls at a few of the organization’s affiliates. During the calls, O’Keefe pretended to be interested in setting up funds for low-income women in need of health care. Once the conversation hit a comfortable stride, O’Keefe would change his tune and explain, in explicit language, that his real intent was to target women of color in an effort to control minority populations. The audio recordings were edited in an attempt to make it appear that Planned Parenthood was complicit in accepting donations for racist purposes. O’Keefe’s intent then, as it is now, was to entrap an organization whose mission he is ideologically opposed to, and masquerade his efforts as investigative journalism rather than the propaganda videos they are.

This effort caused a conflict with a collaborator over misrepresenting their targets, as reported by the New York Times:

Not everyone among Mr. O’Keefe’s acquaintances agrees. Liz Farkas, a Rutgers student who called Mr. O’Keefe “a nice guy and a loyal friend,” said she grew disillusioned after he asked her to help edit the script of a Planned Parenthood sting.

“It was snippets to make the Planned Parenthood nurse look bad,” Ms. Farkas said. “I said: ‘It has no context. You’re just cherry-picking the nurse’s answers.’ He said, ‘Okay’ — and then he just ran it.”

Asked whether the left-leaning documentaries of Michael Moore do not do the same, Ms. Farkas said: “Michael Moore goes after the rich and powerful. James isn’t doing that. He goes after low-level bureaucrats and people who are trying to help low-income people.”

And in college, O’Keefe showed women their place with his video wit, as reported by Media Matters:

As a Rutgers University undergraduate, O’Keefe videotaped a classmate distributing to a Women in Culture and Society lecture a handout that emphasized that a “good wife always knows her place.”

And most tastefully of all, O’Keefe drove around posing as a Publisher’s Clearing House van offering big checks to people, only to taunt them that the money is what was going to bank bailouts. Black people sure are suckers for that one!

Do not-so-subtly racist or sexist stunts count as courts of law? Shouldn’t there be a requirement that they at least be funny, besides mean for the sake of mean?

Is this same adolescent accountability accepted by defense contractors, when Blackwater and its owner Erik Prince are implicated in murder? He just keeps getting contracts. Rep. Darrel Issa from San Diego sent out a letter bragging of cutting ACORN’s money for all of us, then asked us to give him money. San Diego has had political scandals that have led to actual convictions, not simply recordings of speculative conversations. Isn’t it time to slash San Diego’s federal funding? All of this is not to get off subject, though. Whatever angry conservatives want to insist the subject is.

It is natural for many to shirk away from defending ACORN in light of this footage. But this particular exchange is not just cherry-picked—it was planted, nurtured, and harvested, the latest to take down an organization that empowers the numbers that vote Republicans out of office.

John Wellington Ennis is a filmmaker whose most recent documentary, FREE FOR ALL! was hailed by critic Roger Eberg as “engrossing, even enraging.” His production company Shoot First Inc., in Beverly Hills, specializes in unscripted entertainment, such as documentaries, reality TV, comedy, and live music. He blogs at johnennis.tv.