Justin Elliott of TPM Muckraker points to a new story in the New York Times about Ben Wetmore, a 28-year-old conservative activist who let anti-ACORN provocateur James O'Keefe and his merry band crash at his New Orleans home prior to their arrest for allegedly attempting to tamper with Sen. Mary Landrieu's phones.

According to the New York Times, Wetmore was a mentor to a network of right wing provocateurs who embraced various forms of political theater to dramatize their issues on college campuses. Marcy Wheeler's commenter cinnamonape connected the dots between Ben Wetmore and James O'Keefe last Friday.

The page BenWetmore.com now redirects automatically to Newsbusters. A WHOIS search for that domain delivers no information. However, the cached version looks like the personal blog of the now infamous Ben Wetmore, campus provocateur.

The cached site is Countermedia. The author, who replies to blog commenters under the name "Ben" writes bitterly about his tenure the Leadership Institute, the conservative group where Wetmore and O'Keefe used to work. Amongst other things, Ben assails the Leadership Institute for trying to take undeserved credit for O'Keefe's early video successes. "All the good things at the Institute while I was there happened despite the management, or by going around them. I was nearly fired, as was my boss [former] Cong. Steve Stockman, for buying the initial video equipment that James [O'Keefe] used," Ben wrote last September. He seemed especially bitter that the LI hired and fired idealistic young conservatives capriciously. Where's a union when you need one, eh?

This post, dated Oct 21, 2009, survives in the Google cache:

Disrupting speeches on the cheap Leftists disrupt speeches by throwing pies, calling names, and chanting stupid stuff. So uncreative. Personally I've given advice to disrupt malcontents like Michael Moore using track phones going off with obscenely loud ringers in various locations, as well as a variety of other crazy schemes that I'd rather not go into.

In a cached post dated Sept. 18, 2009 at BenWetmore.com floats the idea of impersonating Barack Obama in a robocall.

[Original reporting, please credit Lindsay Beyerstein.]