Truth And Consequences

Speaking of brain trusts, James O'Keefe has built up one of his own at Project Veritas, a name that is more wishful thinking than reality. It's very difficult to expose the truth when you don't have the faintest idea how to determine what is true and what is false. People who depend on self-aggrandizing belief systems instead of facts tend to think that a fact is anything that they want to be true.

For instance, someone named Brian Meinders, director of communications at Veritas, in his wisdom and through the use of his keen analytical reasoning, informed Charles Seife, a journalism professor at New York University, that Veritas was owed an apology for something Mr. Seife said on his blog.

Professor,

My name is Brian Meinders, and I'm the Director of Communications for Project Veritas. I've read your blog entry on James and Project Veritas, and am writing to express my concern with several factual errors contained in your post. You wrote that we broke the law by accepting tax deductible donations before having been approved by the IRS as a nonprofit. IRS regulations permit organizations with pending applications to collect donations which become fully tax deductible when the application is processed and accepted. All of the donations in question were consequently fully tax deductible; we did nothing wrong in soliciting them and those of our donors who made them and wrote them off on their taxes also did nothing wrong.

Poor Mr. Meinders. It must be very difficult to embark on a national project of shaming and humiliating our evil liberal evil academic overlords when you are working from a mental and moral disadvantage. You try and try to reveal the truth to the world while, entirely coincidentally, racking up a little fame, money and access to young women, but something always seems to go wrong....

From Professor Seife's response:

Dear Brian,

You were in violation of IRS regulations by claiming that you were 501(c)(3) when your status was pending. If you were a 501(c)(3) as you claimed, you would have been required to furnish it as you yourself admit.

You also told donors that their contributions would be tax deductible when you had no right to say so. As you admit, the contributions only become tax deductible when the 501(c)(3) status is granted.

The fact that the 501(c)(3) status became official later, and those donations did, in fact, become tax deductible are irrelevant to the fact that when I was requesting information -- under the erroneous assumption that your website was accurate about your 501(c)(3) status -- you were in violation of IRS regulations.

Indeed, it seems you were fully aware that you were not in compliance with the law once I pointed it out. Could you explain why you removed the claim of 501(c)(3) status and tax-deductible donations very shortly after I got into contact with Ms. Kluck?

In short, it seems to me that my blog post is entirely factually correct. That being said, though, if you could point to a specific phrase or clause that you believe is factually incorrect, please let me know, and I'll see if a correction is warranted. (Regardless, I am posting your communication to my blog so that your concerns about my post are properly aired.)

Mr. Meinders, through stupidity or malevolence or both, overlooked one little detail--Project Veritas said it had tax-exempt status when it did not; status was pending, not granted. Just as James O'Keefe repeatedly ignored the laws he was breaking in his attempt to humiliate anyone whom he might be able to use as a footstool in his attempts to gain fame and fortune.  Stupid people with stupid goals using stupid methods. Failure is both inevitable and, fortunately, very funny.

Right now Mr. O'Keefe has more than a few problems on his plate. It seems that unattractive but horny young men with neither brains nor morals end up with all sorts of difficulties.

It's a right-wing rabble-rouser showdown! Jazz-handed pimp impersonator James O'Keefe is at "#WAR" with a former Project Veritas colleague who is now blogging an O'Keefe tell-all involving stolen panties, drugged beers, a "rape barn," "taped intimate moments," a $20K pay-off, and barbs about "black welfare queens." James O'Keefe has graduated from creepy seductions to a full-blown sex scandal.
Harvard grad student Nadia Naffe recently filed a criminal harassment complaint against James. Citing insufficient evidence, a judge dismissed the case. Now Nadia is on a scorched earth cyber rampage. "If he wants a fight, bring it on. This is #WAR," she tweeted last night, after retweeting outraged utterances from an unofficial Rubio4President account about James' "rape barn." On her personal blog, she is currently on part two of a sprawling anti-O'Keefe opus.

Since Nadia Naffe also worked with O'Keefe her own character is questionable as well, but as a graduate student at Harvard she is presumably much smarter than O'Keefe. So far O'Keefe has managed to do more damage to others than himself, but it is only a matter of time before he manages to self-immolate.

I'll bring the marshmallows.