Heroic Teacher Screwed Over By Acorn Pimp

By Irin Carmon | November 17, 2010 | 6:17pm

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James O’Keefe, unbowed by the CNN sex boat debacle, has since targeted a special education teacher once hailed for saving her students’ lives, concerned about her colleague’s use of the n-word. Those teacher’s unions are out of control! There’s video.

Basically, O’Keefe set an operative to chat up special education teacher Alissa Ploshnick at a conference last summer for a video called “Teacher’s Union Gone Wild.” Because the teachers are mostly chicks! After the operative bought her drinks, she described a colleague in the Passaic school system who had been demoted, but not fired, for calling a student the n-word. She did not know she was being recorded. Girls, will you never learn not to drink with strange men?

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Later, O’Keefe’s goons showed up at Ploshnick’s house and shoved a camera and a microphone in her face to ask her to repeat the story. She declined to talk. The school’s response? To suspend her for nine days and dock a pay raise. Because she said the word on video, apparently, even though she was criticizing someone else using it. (The superintendent also denied the incident she described took place.)

It’s not clear whether O’Keefe knew that his target has a rather storied past. As Think Progress reminds us,

In 1997, Ploshnick, upon seeing a runaway van about to strike a group of students, threw herself in front of the vehicle to save the students, landing herself in the hospital “with broken ribs, a fractured wrist, a badly bruised pelvis and glass cuts in her eyes.” Following the accident, President Bill Clinton sent her a letter thanking her for her act of courage, writing, “You are an example for all of us, and I applaud you for your sense of duty.”

All this is egregiously disingenuous concern for racist speech from a man who engaged in distortion to defame the largely African American staff of ACORN, not to mention his mentor Andrew Breitbart’s own doctored defamation of Shirley Sherrod. And who attended a conference alongside white nationalists, where he “manned a literature table filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites.” In college, Salon reported, O’Keefe was expelled from a dorm after his roommate told administrators that O’Keefe had used racist language to describe former floormates. (O’Keefe denied the charges and complained that he had to discuss them with “a black man” — the Dean.)

The word he used then? Guess.

Anti-Union O’Keefe Video Smears Teacher Who Jumped In Front Of Van To Save Students, Gets Her Suspended [Think Progress]
N.J. Teacher Is Suspended, Denied Pay Raise After Being Filmed On Hidden Video At NJEA Conference [Star Ledger]
Related: James O’Keefe’s Race Problem [Salon]
Earlier: CNN Anchor Was Set Up For Seduction By Fake Acorn Pimp