Weigel

In Which James O’Keefe Re-Enacts the Original “Black and White” Video

This exists.

The music (auto-tuned singing, too) and dancing begins at around 2:45. The jokes continue through the credits – one assistant is thanked for “light editing.” The arrest of O’Keefe and three associates in New Orleans last year got massive coverage, and supporters of O’Keefe’s work definitely got the tense that the media was preemptively dancing in the endzone, thinking it had seen the last of the video stingers.

UPDATE: I talked to director Christian Hartsock, who confirmed that autotune was used, despite being declared “dead” two years ago by Jay-Z.

“James and I had been talking about doing something like this around the time of his arraignment,” wrote Hartsock in an e-mail. “We were inspired by George Michael’s 1998 video ‘Outside’ and Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White’ – both of which were released as kind of fuck-you-to-the-system pieces after those artist’s run-ins with the law. We brainstormed, he put together a track with Tony Dini, and I wrote a script and packaged a cast and crew and we went ahead and shot it.”