Ep. 344 – Is Western Culture Done For? mocks the absurdity of media narratives—from Putin vs. Trump’s "shirtless pectoral contest" to CNN’s Russia obsession—while James O’Keefe defends Project Veritas as the antidote, exposing elite lies through unfiltered footage. The episode pivots to cultural decay: leftists weaponizing "jihad," de Blasio’s cowardice in Hamburg, and Hollywood’s ghost-story revival as a rebellion against nihilism. Ultimately, it frames the clash between citizen journalism and mainstream media as the last stand for truth in a collapsing Western order. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week in a confab that lasted over two hours.
Ever since then, there have been conflicting reports of what happened during the exchange.
According to Russian sources, Putin and Trump began the meeting by tearing off their shirts to compare their pectoral muscles, a competition which the Russians say Putin clearly won with rippling pecks that were able to make his nipples rise and fall both individually and together.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, carefully reported every claim by the Russians and even consulted a Russian body language expert.
I'm actually not making this part up.
The expert said Putin completely triumphed over Trump, though whether he was referring specifically to the PEC contest was not specified in the Times article, or if it was, it was obscured by the fact that I was wrapping fish in the paper while I was reading it.
According to sources within the Putin camp, the meeting continued with an arm wrestling match, which resulted in the Russian president winning control over the state of Arkansas, as well as free lap dance privileges at several roadside gentlemen's clubs off the interstate between San Antonio and Albuquerque.
The Russian sources say Trump was forced to beg for mercy from Putin after Putin, quote, showed strength like great Russian bear, causing many females to faint in admiration, unquote.
A CNN panel discussing the Russian reports agreed that Trump had degraded the office of the presidency by not developing his biceps prior to the armed wrestling match.
Chris Cuomo called for an investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in order to throw the contest.
And CNN reporter Jim Acosta demanded Trump put him on camera right this minute so that everyone could see what a dynamic journalistic presence he was.
Acosta added that his not being on camera was a threat to the First Amendment since no one could see him.
According to the Russian sources, President Putin scolded President Trump for sending out mean tweets about the American media.
He explained that that was not as efficient as poisoning reporters with plutonium and pushing them out of windows.
According to the Russians, President Trump took careful notes throughout the exchange and said he wished he had thought of the plutonium thing himself.
Sources in the Putin camp said the meeting ended with President Trump swearing allegiance to the Russian government and hoping he could count on getting as much help in the next election as Putin had given him in the last one and promising to consult with Putin on all major decisions in the future.
CNN reporter Jim Acosta reacted to this report by calling for a full investigation into why he wasn't on camera.
American officials completely denied the Russian version of events.
They said Trump and Putin arranged a ceasefire in Syria, then Trump told Putin, stop mucking with American elections or he'd knock him into the middle of next week.
The officials did, however, confirm that Trump took notes during the part about poisoning reporters with plutonium and said they looked forward to their next confrontation with Jim Acosta.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing hunky donkey docky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It's want to sing!
Oh, ra-hooring!
Oh, hooray!
The Russians are coming!
The Russians are coming!
All right, that's the news.
It's the news every day.
We just play it every day.
It's the same news because they cannot stop themselves.
All right, we're back.
We'll talk a little bit about this, but I'm so bored of this ridiculous story.
I can't follow it anymore.
You know, so we're back on our wonderful news set, and hopefully, I know we had a lot of tech difficulties yesterday.
Mostly that's because our staff drink and around 10, 8 o'clock in the morning, they start hitting the sauce.
Talking About Flowers00:03:48
And by the time we get in here, they don't know what the hell they're doing.
And that's why, you know, that's why what's going wrong.
No, look, we're setting up this wonderful new set, and it will work, and it will be going forward.
But up until now, the drinking is just dragging us down.
The mailbag tomorrow.
So, yes, so come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe.
It is now, even now, it is only a lousy 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks for a year.
And with a year's subscription, you get to drink leftist tears out of this leftist tears mug.
I hope I'm drinking coffee out of this because it really does a great job in keeping the coffee hot.
I hope this is not the same leftist tears mug that Shapiro was drinking up because we all know that his saliva is made of acid.
And I don't want to get any of that in my particular coffee.
But today we have James O'Keefe.
Did we test the Skype for James O'Keefe?
All right.
All right.
We'll have James O'Keefe on, obviously, the guy who does the incredible Project Veritas reports, including the latest one on CNN that kind of stuck a fork into CNN.
But meanwhile, meanwhile, we should be talking about flowers.
Here's what you don't want happening with flowers.
You don't want to give your wife or your girlfriend flowers and have her say to you, all right, what did you do?
Okay, that's what happens if you never give your wife or girlfriend flowers, right?
If you never give her flowers, when you give them to her, she knows you did something bad.
So you want to be giving it to her on a regular basis.
And that way, when you give her the one because you did something wrong, she won't actually notice.
This is why you need to go to proflowers.com.
It is, you know, it means it will stop you.
You won't forget your anniversary.
You won't forget your wife's birthday.
You can go on.
It's so easy.
I recently went out and I got the let me see if I can remember what the name of the thing was.
It was, hold on, I'll tell you.
It was, I have it right here.
I wrote it down.
There it is.
It is the farmstand flowers.
The farm stand flowers.
My wife doesn't know about this yet because she's out of town today, so I sent it to her for Wednesday.
You can just tell them when to deliver it.
They will deliver it anytime you stay.
Farmstead flowers are really, it's just a beautiful, beautiful collection.
She's going to listen to this and it's going to give away the fact that I sent her flowers, but she'll get them tomorrow.
It's easy to surprise somebody.
And the farmstead flowers, you can get 20% off of this collection or any of the unique exclusive bouquets of $29 or more.
ProFlowers.com makes choosing the perfect surprise bouquet simple and quick.
The flowers are guaranteed to stay fresh for at least seven days of your money back.
I use this thing all the time.
So all this is true.
The flowers come, they're in great condition, or you can get your money back.
You get to pick the exact date.
Your unexpected surprise will arrive.
ProFlowers gives you more bloom for your buck.
Big, beautiful flowers with more stems for your money.
To get 20% off your farmstead flowers, here's what you do.
Any other bouquet over $29, go to proflowers.com and use my code AK.
See, they made it really simple because they know my audience.
My audience is just sitting around going, Clavin, how do you spell Clavin?
AK.
That's all you got to do.
Type in AK at checkout, proflowers.com, and the code AK.
Don't wait to make someone's day.
Go ahead and be unpredictable.
Again, I just ruined the surprise.
I sent these beautiful, they're really a gorgeous collection.
I sent these farmstand flowers to my wife, and now I've ruined the sweat.
I used them the other week, too.
Did you?
Yeah, it's amazing.
And the reaction you get, I know.
It's like you get really is.
Women fall for this stuff.
What can I say?
Women like flowers.
Who knows what women are thinking?
I know.
You do have to make an effort.
Absolutely.
You know, I want to tell a brief story.
Maybe it's not so brief, but I'll tell it anyway.
In my memoir, The Great Good Thing, I talk about, you know, I've said this on the air before.
I've lived two lives and one life from the age of my birth to the age of 28.
I was out of my mind.
I was miserable.
Proving Non-Existence00:08:22
I was twisted.
I was unhappy.
And then, really miraculously, I turned that around.
You can read the whole story.
I won't tell it here.
But during this time, one of the things I was was I was a fake.
I would fake.
I did no schoolwork.
For the first several years of my life, I did no schoolwork.
And I never read the books that I was assigned.
So like, you know, Moby Dick, a book I've now read three times, never read it.
And yet I took tests on Moby Dick.
I went to discussions on Moby Dick.
You know, it was incredible.
I got through it.
How did I do it?
Here was my con, okay?
I had a con.
The con was this.
All you have to do is say something shocking.
And nobody will notice that you haven't read the book, that you don't have anything.
You don't have this stuff you're talking about.
So you come out, Moby Dick, great classic, you say, I think it's overrated.
I think Moby Dick is overrated.
Only takes one sentence, right?
And now they're on the defensive, and it never occurs to them to say, oh yeah, what happens on page 15?
You know, it doesn't occur to them to test your knowledge.
War and peace, oh, it's so long and boring.
This worked every single time.
It only takes one second to say, oh, John F. Kennedy, you know, that bullet, that bullet could never have done what it did, you know, and it takes, it takes hours to prove that the bullet could have done exactly what it did because people don't know what they don't know.
They don't know the information they don't have.
And this is how, you know, and look, we do it on the right.
You know, there was that thing about the Pizzagate.
It only takes a second to say Hillary Clinton is peddling children for sex, right?
And it's so out of this world that it sounds believable somehow.
Who would say something like that if it weren't true?
And how do you disprove it?
How do you disprove that a pizza store, you know, is selling children in a tunnel underneath the White House or whatever the hell it was?
You know, it's very, very hard to do.
If you say something shocking, you know, this works, by the way, at the highest levels of thought.
If people say to you, you know, very soon, very soon, science is going to prove that the self doesn't exist.
It's simply a matter of chemicals and electricity.
It takes one second to say that.
It's nonsense.
It is nonsense.
There's a person sitting there proving to you that he doesn't exist and that he can tell that himself, yourself, is a hallucination.
There's a difference between a hallucination and reality.
And he, who is a hallucination, can tell the difference between hallucination, reality.
He's talking rot.
But it takes forever, forever to prove that it's not true.
This Russian thing, okay?
You know, now they've got this story, and it's a story.
I admit it's a story.
It's a small story, but Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner were suckered into a meeting with this Russian lawyer and some music promoter in England who was connected to Trump in some weird way said, oh, she has information that is part of, according to this latest email, it's part of a Russian attempt to get stuff on Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Now, nothing came of this, right?
The lawyer herself says she was, this Russian lawyer says she has no connection to the Kremlin.
That doesn't mean that much because everybody in Russia with any power whatsoever has some connection to the Kremlin because that's where all the power in Russia is, okay?
But they sat down at this meeting.
Obviously, nothing happened.
Really, the whole thing was some kind of dodge to get in and talk about this Magnitsky Act, which basically keeps Russians from banking here, which is their whole point and purpose in life.
And they keep saying it's about Russian adoption.
The Russians struck back against this act by preventing Americans from adopting Russian children.
You know, fine, whatever.
They had a meeting.
It didn't mean anything.
Six weeks from now, I promise you, you are not going to care about this anymore because the summer will be over and then real news will start happening again and they'll stop running this stuff.
They only run this stuff.
They only time this stuff because they knew Trump had a successful trip and they're bringing it out now.
I'm sure they've sat on it until now.
And it's just, it's not like it's nothing, but this idea that, oh, now we have the smoking gun.
Let me ask you this.
If the Trump campaign, if the Trump campaign were colluding with Russia, if the Trump campaign were colluding with Russia, why would Donald Trump Jr. care about an email saying they had information from the Russian government?
If they were colluding with them, they'd already have the information.
They would already have the information.
Clearly, they just got suckered into this nothing meeting, and they look like they look a little three-stooges.
You know, I mean, probably the Trump campaign.
Look, these guys weren't politicians.
I'm not letting them off the hook, you know.
And does it break the law?
You know, this country is so over-regulated that you can't brush your teeth without breaking a federal law.
But this is, it's highly questionable whether they broke the law.
The law says, the law says you cannot, a campaign can't receive money or anything of value from a foreign national.
So was this something of value?
Obviously, they receive nothing of value.
Usually, those laws are meant to say you can't funnel, Russia can't funnel campaign France, anybody can't funnel money through this campaign.
But I just, you know, to me, to me, this news, the thing that I want to go back and talk about, and this will lead in to James O'Keefe, who we're going to stay on Facebook and YouTube so you can watch O'Keefe.
I think he's an important figure right at this moment.
And I think he has a chance also, he should have a chance to talk about, to defend himself basically against what the left is saying about him.
But to me, the incredible thing that has been coming out over this last week is the difference who the left is, who the left is.
In Hamburg, you had these riots, the left burning the city to the ground, leaving people, they're destroying their work, their shops, hurting, injuring people, hurting cops.
Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, leaves his city while there is a vigil for this murdered policewoman, right?
This woman who's sitting, she's a mother of three.
She's sitting in a car in a gang-infested area, and somebody just walks in and blows her away.
And Bill de Blasio is joining the fight.
He's joining the resistance in Hamburg.
And this mayor is about to get re-elected.
He's going to get re-elected.
I mean, there's nobody to oppose him.
There are no Republicans left in New York.
A police officer yesterday, I don't think we have his name.
I don't think he gave his name.
A police officer went on a rant and he posted it online.
Take a listen to this because this is the voice of a guy who has dedicated his life to keeping you safe, to keeping the bad guys from hurting you, no matter what color you are.
He doesn't care what color you are.
He just cares who are the sheep and who are the wolves.
He is out to corral the wolves.
That's his job.
And he's watching this go on.
And here's part of his reaction.
The one thing I want to know is where the hell are all the celebrities now?
Where's all the sports teams wearing NYPD stuff?
Where's the hands-up don't shoot people?
Where are you right now?
Why is it every thug, every career criminal, every piece of garbage, low-life scum of the earth gets the attention when they're shot and killed for breaking the law, for threatening others, for victimizing people?
When they're shot and killed by the police, they become heroes.
Their families become millionaires.
You got a New York City police officer, mother of three, out there sitting in a gang-infested precinct, sitting there in a high-visibility post to deter crime.
She's just sitting in a vehicle.
And this coward walks up and shoots her right in the head.
That's a victim.
Of course, these morons will swing it that this guy was a, you know, a misunderstood youth victim of the system, and he was angry at the police.
And others will say it's the police's job.
The risks are there.
They know the risks.
So they get killed and get killed.
That's a person that chose that job to make a difference.
That's a mother of three children.
She went to work and didn't come home.
An honest man out in the street who's just lost a colleague.
Why Are You Now Going After CNN?00:15:08
And here's what the left is talking about.
The Russian's not coming!
The Russia's not coming!
So President Trump, I mean, in keeping with this, right, in the same theme here, President Trump goes and makes his speech in Poland where he talks about Western civilization and whether Western civilization has the will to survive.
And the people are waving American flags and they're chanting his name and they're cheering for him.
Here is Jeff Zelini, who is now, I guess he's now with CNN, but he used to be with the New York Times.
He is the guy who famously, when he was the political reporter of the New York Times, asked President Obama, got a chance to ask the President of the United States a question.
And his question was, what enchants you about being president of the United States?
This is that clown, right?
This is the guy.
They give a Pulitzer Prize to this guy.
And here is what he said.
Listen carefully to this, because this tells you everything about where the left is, what he said about the defense of Western civilization.
I would argue that this speech is one of the best speeches in terms of a thematics and staying on message and sort of offering a worldview that he's given yet.
And the setting was interesting.
He was in the Krasinski Square in Warsaw.
Thousands and thousands of people were waving American flags and Polish flags.
So this is not a speech he could have given really anyplace else.
And this is a white America first kind of speech.
He was offering a very stark view, actually, about migration, about immigration, about other things.
It wasn't a modern day speech, if you will.
It was sort of a throwback speech.
But he was offering a sense that be afraid of what is happening in the world now.
This is a Stephen Miller written speech.
He's one of his top policy advisors here.
And it was praised in a lot of corners, but he probably couldn't have given that speech here in America.
So it wasn't a modern day speech.
It was a throwback speech, which implies that Jeff Zelany knows where the future is going and what is in the past.
He knows that the past was one thing and the future will be another thing.
And this is the oldest socialist lie of all.
The communists in Russia, in the Soviet Union, were justified in persecuting people and killing people en masse because they knew where the future was going and these people were in the way.
That was their justification, that history would justify them because history worked in a scientific way.
If you want to see the comic version of that, watch the Cone brothers Hail Caesar, where the communists call themselves the future and they're constantly talking, they're trying to convince this stupid actor played by George Clooney, oddly enough, that they know the future and that the future works in a very specific way.
So that's the first assumption.
The second assumption was he couldn't have made this speech in America because here in America, we're living in the modern world.
What he means that he couldn't have made this speech in the offices of CNN.
Could he have made the speech defending Western civilization in your neighborhood?
Could he have made it in your theater?
All these people who showed up for Donald Trump's speeches, who wound up around, you know, lined up winding around the corner in all these places all over America, could he have made the speech there?
Of course he could have.
He just couldn't have made it to Jeff Zelane.
For Jeff Zelany, it's the past because he knows the future.
This is the thing.
Western civilization, and oh, and the other thing, of course, was this white America, America first, white America.
He slipped that in there.
They can't hear the idea that black America, that brown America, that lady America could not participate in the values, the successful, brilliant, freedom-loving values that were first formulated by white males.
The idea that these values aren't suitable for everybody.
The idea that if your tribe discovers fire, I can't use fire because it's your tribe.
It can't be unavailable.
Because it's your tribe, and I don't want to step outside of my tribe and use your lousy fire, so I'm going to live in the darkness.
This is the madness of the left.
And meanwhile, we had Linda Sarcer, you remember, calling for jihad against Donald Trump and the left, the same left, who thinks that Western civilization is a code word for whiteness, same left.
Time magazine runs a piece that says women's march organizer Linda Sarcer spoke of jihad, but she wasn't talking about violence.
Sarcer herself compared herself to Martin Luther King, by the way.
She said she was just walking in the steps of Martin Luther King, like when he called for jihad.
Mark Lamont Hill, the college professor who has just become really an angry, angry man, he says, he tweets out, the people disagreeing with Linda Sarcer clearly don't understand what jihad means.
How could we be confused about what jihad?
What are we, fools?
How could we be confused?
Legal editor BuzzFeed, Chris Geidner, hey, you people scare sharing Linda Sarcer's speech.
Read the transcription, which I just made because you're all trash misquoting her.
So Bill Desplasio is in Hamburg protesting while a New York City police officer lies dead in his town, and their subways are falling apart.
And Linda Sarcer's Jihad is just calling for, you know, it's just an intellectual struggle, a spiritual struggle.
And Western civilization is a racial.
How on earth, I mean, do they believe they can sell this?
Do they believe that we are going to be confused by all this talk?
Let's play it one more time, Bailey, all this talk.
They believe we're going to be confused by this.
The Russians are coming!
The Russians aren't coming!
That's it.
Pay no attention to the trashing of Western civilization.
Pay no attention to the celebration of jihad.
Pay no attention to the riots in Hamburg while a police officer dies in the mayor's city.
Pay no attention.
The Russians are coming.
The Russians are coming.
And, you know, this is the benefit of owning the culture.
This is the benefit of owning the news.
Have we got O'Keefe?
All right, we got O'Keefe.
This is why I want to bring on James O'Keefe today.
This is the benefit of owning the news.
James O'Keefe is obviously the award-winning journalist and writer who has started Project Veritas and Project Veritas action.
He has done all these hidden camera, you know, Andrew Breitbart used to stand up at the end of his speeches and hold up his phone and say, if you have a phone like this, meaning a camera phone, you are a journalist.
Obviously, James O'Keefe has pulled this to a new level.
He caught them on the phone agreeing to concentrate on aborting black children.
I mean, amazing, amazing stuff.
Obviously, the Acorn expose that really virtually destroyed that organization.
And now he's gone after CNN and says he's going after the mainstream media.
James, how you doing?
Been a long time.
I haven't seen you since the NRO cruise, I think it was.
Yeah, we were on that National Review vote, and I was giving a presentation on voter fraud.
Great to see you again.
It's nice to see you, too.
And you certainly have gotten yourself into more trouble.
Always.
Yes, always.
So let's start with this.
I mean, one of the things that the left loves to do is they love to take guys like you or Fox News or Rush Limbaugh and demonize them to the point where all the left has to do is speak your name and it seems to refute the points that you're making.
So all the left ever does is they say, oh, that's Fox News.
Oh, that's James O'Keefe.
That's Russia.
So they've put you in this position.
And so I wanted to bring you on to let you talk back into that.
Let's start with this.
You've gone after Planned Piranhood.
You went after Acorn.
You went after NPR.
Why are you now going after ⁇ you say you're just starting with CNN, right?
Is that why are you going after the news media?
You know, you're someone who likes to bring Andrew Breitbart's name up a lot, and I do too, because he was kind of a media mentor of mine.
The media is everything.
The media, Dinesh D'Souza says the Republicans have, they're afraid of the terrifying power of the press's narratives.
The ability for the media to shame the Republican Party.
It's not based in any type of truth or sort of reality.
It's based in shame.
And the political left has a sort of monopoly on virtue in this country.
They're the evil, we're good.
It's not just right and wrong.
It's not just logic.
It's we're good and they're evil.
And as long as the media is able to create this false dichotomy where they're literally wanting to kill poor people and hate black people, it's not true, but as long as the media is able to create these artificial constructs, then we're not governed the right way.
So what we want to do is expose the media's real political motivations.
And this Russia stuff that we exposed in the CNN was pretty earth-shaking because it showed senior CNN leadership were doing things they knew that was, in their words, BS, in order to make profit and to advance this agenda.
And that's the reason why we're doing it.
Andrew Breitbart said, the media is everything, James.
The media is everything.
The media has more power than we think it does.
And we're at a crossroads in our country where that power is now shifting away from the established media towards the citizen press.
Well, that is exactly my next question, because I agree with everything that you just said.
I mean, obviously, they have created an atmosphere, an intellectual atmosphere, where it's almost hard to think because if you're not a leftist, you're a racist.
If you're not a leftist, you're a sexist.
If you're not a leftist, you're hateful.
That's the way basically they have taught everybody to think.
And even sometimes you hear the right talking about this.
So you just said at the end of what you were saying, you said the power is shifting away.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that the mainstream media is being beaten back?
To an extent, we're at the tipping point, and we're not yet, we haven't quite crossed it.
The CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, ABC News still has power, a certain type of power.
They have power over certain people, the Republican Party.
They have power over the Republican Party.
They don't have power over the voters.
Voters voted for Trump despite the media.
I don't think Trump had any, a single cheerleader in any media, and Trump won despite them.
But they have power over Mitch McConnell.
The media has power over Paul Ryan.
I mean, incredible power.
In fact, if you're a Republican in D.C., you have 17 microphones pointing in your face.
Any human being that cares about their own survival and self-interest.
It takes an enormous amount of moral courage living in Washington, D.C.
I can't live in D.C., and I'm sure you couldn't either.
To live in that environment and be pummeled by this gaggle every day of people who, why do you hate black people?
Why do you want Susie to die and take away her wheelchair?
You can't do it.
So the media has certain types of power, and you're seeing this shift, this incredible thing that's happening where the voters are becoming even more disenfranchised.
They have no one to speak for them.
The New York Times is, I said on Twitter today, we'll go down with this ship.
They will go down with the Russia story, even if it's fake.
They're so invested in it that if they were, Dinesh D'Souza said again, he said, only one person is going to be victorious, the media or Trump.
It's one or the other.
It's a fight to the finish.
They're so invested in this Russia crap that they will do anything, even if it means inventing a new Nixon and manufacturing the crime.
They'll do anything to win.
So you're seeing a lot of things happen right now.
So what does Veritas do?
My organization, we are exposing the media with hidden cameras.
And CNN is only part one.
Well, that's what I wanted to ask you again.
I mean, CNN, CNN is great because it has this aura of being the kind of the news station, the cable news station, even though.
Not anymore.
That was kind of nasty of you to do that to them.
But of course, the big fish, the big fish are the Times, CBS, NBC, ABC.
I mean, people don't realize that the networks have 10 times the viewers of cable stations.
I don't want to give anything away, but are you going to move on to these bigger fish?
Yes.
I'll just say that.
Okay.
All right.
Yes.
We already have footage on our hard drives secured in multiple locations.
So if anything were to happen to me, it'd come out.
People always say, well, do you save the footage someplace other than what?
I say, yes.
The footage exists securely, and we already have it.
And I would say you're going to see stuff come out certainly in the fall, maybe sooner.
We do undercover work, so the moment we release a tape, it burns the person on the inside.
So we can release a tape now, but it would prevent our journalists from getting even more.
The Bonnefield tape you saw with CNN, some of that material was got literally five days before we released it.
That was a four-month, five-month investigation.
So undercover work is tricky because you always have to sort of pull the plug, and sometimes it's more of an art than a science.
Now, the other thing, I mean, I noticed after you did that powerful Acorn expose, the New York Times basically buried that story.
They wouldn't cover it.
And finally, they did.
But then you got arrested during one of your escapades, and they put your mug shot above the fold on the front page.
And I remember saying, I was at PJ TV at the time, and I remember saying, if the thing that he does isn't a big story, why is his arrest a big story?
That doesn't actually make any sense.
So they had put in a lot of effort into demonizing you.
And of course, the big thing that they always say is the tape is edited.
This is heavily edited tape.
And so answer that.
Because I see even on my Twitter feed where people are sympathetic, I hear people say, well, he does edit his tapes.
I mean, that's the greatest lie.
It's a deceit of epic proportions.
This is no longer fake news.
It's now a contamination.
It's twisted.
Roger Simon wrote a great piece here.
It's more amazing than I could write.
And he writes that all videos are basically unfairly edited, as Sergei Eisenstein and the early Soviet directors demonstrated.
It's the nature of the medium.
Some things get left in and some things get left out.
But of course, if you look at the actual aesthetics of it, what we show is true.
We don't take anything out of context.
The word edit is an obfuscation.
I mean, the New York Times edits their articles.
You don't get to see the anonymous sources.
You don't get to hear the intonation of the source talk to the reporter.
You don't get to, they paint a portrait with adjectives and words.
What Veritas does is show you the videotape.
It's inherently real.
It's more real than any other type of journalism.
And what I've discovered in doing this is this whole Veritas isn't just exposing corruption and fraud and deceit.
We're exposing the whole matrix.
We're exposing the greatest lie.
The lie that, for example, teachers' unions care about children.
And then we got the teachers' union president say, we hate children, it's all about the money.
They can't, they can't, they cannot accept the reality that we deliver.
Exposing the Greatest Lie00:06:30
So the instinct of any organization or individual survival.
So they call me names, I'm a criminal, I'm this, I'm that.
But when it comes to the editing thing, all journalism is edited.
The difference is, Andrew, we leave in what they omit.
We show the things they don't want you to show.
So really, it's not so much that we edit.
They would argue that we're reductionists, that we that, well, but teachers' unions are good because they give money to the Democrats.
They just have this cognitive dissonance, this rationalization, so it comes out, well, he edits the film.
Well, there's no out-of-context edit.
Van Jones did indeed say that Russia is a nothing burger.
But was he told him?
But they'll say, but that's bad that you're showing the American people that because the American people will come to the wrong conclusion about Trump.
It's a rationalization that you're seeing.
When Van Jones said that, was he talking about the entire Russia story or is he talking about a specific story?
He's talking about the Russia.
He says, well, this is the hidden camera.
We approach Van Jones.
This is the big story, one of the big stories on CNN.
And he goes, oh, Russia's just a nothing burger.
There's nothing you can do about that.
And that's a little open to interpretation.
What does he mean?
He was explaining himself awkwardly on Anderson Cooper the other night, and it was really hilarious to watch.
But the point to you is there's a conflict of visions between us, you and I, citizens, who believe that the American people deserve to have unfiltered, raw, true information, and the New York Times and CNN, which says, no, no, no, don't show the American people the raw information because the raw information might lead them to vote for Trump, might lead them to vote against the teachers' unions, might lead them to say we need to reform welfare.
In other words, the mainstream media depends upon selective editing and obfuscation and camouflage through flowery written articles.
And Veritas presents to you raw, unfiltered information.
So to answer your question is, of course they have to say that don't look at that tape.
Don't look at that tape.
And that's what this all comes down to.
It comes down to a war and a conflict of visions between these two competing forces.
You've actually been kind of persecuted for doing this, haven't you?
I mean, that's not a, obviously you haven't been hung upside down and tortured, but you've been given a really hard time by actual legal authorities.
Isn't that true?
I've been arrested.
I've been falsely accused.
In Louisiana, it was not true.
I always say to the people on Twitter, I say, well, you're a convicted criminal.
I said, yes, I have a Class B misdemeanor, a Class B misdemeanor.
Bob Kramer is a convicted felon.
He's best friends with Barack Obama.
Martin Luther King was a convicted criminal.
Throughout the 20th century, history is replete with examples of people who pursue justice and are falsely accused.
And you'd think the left would understand this concept of falsely accused.
This is like they don't understand.
Like, I don't understand.
We're doing something that has never been done before.
We're taking hidden camera.
We're combining it with crowdsourcing technology and we're distributing it to the masses.
No one has ever done that the way that we're doing it.
And I stood falsely accused in Louisiana.
The prosecutors resigned in disgrace.
They destroyed my evidence.
If I was doing this to the NRA, I'm sure that we would have Nobel Peace Prizes, Academy Awards.
But I choose to go after the sacred cows.
And I don't complain about it.
I believe that it's kind of more fun to go against the grain, but it is what it is.
Well, let me ask you this as a final question.
Are you hopeful at this moment?
I mean, the mainstream media, one of the things I really like about Donald Trump is what he has done to the mainstream media and that he has become a voice of all these people who, as you say, have been demonized by the mainstream media.
And he has become their voice.
They think it's a glitch, a bug that he attacks them.
Most Americans, I think, think it's a feature that he attacks them.
Right this moment, are you hopeful that the grip they have on our national conversation can be actually broken?
That's a great question.
Here's my twofold answer.
Number one, I think that Trump has the ability to transcend his presidency by going after the media because we are at a turning point.
I think things are lined up for a pendulum shift right now away from the 50-year centralization of social control that the mainstream media has over our ⁇ it's a propaganda war.
I mean, it is what it is.
It's a propaganda war.
They've been doing this since the 1920s.
The idea that you can filter information.
The New York Times, and by the way, hint, hint, we may have some of these media people on tape saying what I'm saying right now, like in their own word, their motivation.
Cool.
They do not want you to see the truth.
Because if you do, if people could see Lois Lerner from the IRS saying, let's go after those conservatives because we don't like them, there would be riots in the streets.
Forget the hearings.
Forget the political gamemanship of D.C. People would say, I don't believe in the system anymore.
And the media has an interest in protecting the status quo.
So when you get these people on tape saying that, and Donald Trump tweeted our, embedded our videos in Instagram, Donald Trump, the press secretary of the United States, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said, go watch these Project Veritas videos.
When you have a president who has the brass balls to say, hey, media, calling you out, this has the potential to transcend his presidency and expose the media once and for all.
So I think things, I am hopeful, but also, Andrew, I know that the New York Times will go down with the ship.
They will die on the cross.
It doesn't matter how fake or unreal the Russia stuff is.
They will never, ever admit they are wrong.
I don't know if you saw the thing I did with the Washington Post where I framed the retraction.
I framed the front page retraction.
This is my way, my way of showing the American people that, yeah, they're going down with the ship.
I mean, I put the retractions front and center so people can see it.
Well, James, I think really this is truly important work.
I think you made the right choice in who you're going after.
Ghost Story Footsteps00:08:16
And I'm looking forward to see what you do next.
And I hope you'll come back and talk about it.
We'll be back, I promise you.
All right.
Thanks a lot, James.
Good to see you.
Thank you.
All right.
Stuff I like.
You know, it really does matter.
I mean, this thing, he's absolutely right that this is where the battle is being fought.
It is being fought in the level of information, not just in the news media, but also in the academy, also in Hollywood.
And personally, I think we're really at a turning point.
And I think we have a true chance of winning.
That doesn't mean we will win, but I think we have a true chance of winning.
Stuff I like.
We got to do stuff I like.
And I'm running out of time.
I saw a ghost story, a ghost story, which is this new picture by David Lowery.
What are the pictures he's done?
Some bodies of them saints.
Oh, he did Pete Straggen, too.
He did Pete Straggling.
A24 is the studio.
They're the ones who did The Witch, Ex Machina, Green Room, Moonlight.
This is part of this new small intellectual ghost story trend, the which The Babadook was one.
It follows was one.
Ex Machina kind of won, sort of more science fiction.
Green Room, which I haven't seen, but which I heard is really tense and interesting.
But ghost story is different.
And it is variety, the trade paper, called it intermittently successful.
And I would say that that is right.
There is a moment in the middle of this picture that really works.
And basically what it is, is it's Casey.
This is not giving you, this is just the premise.
Casey Affleck and Rooney Marie, young lovers, he dies, and he comes back as a ghost who looks like a Halloween joke.
He is just a sheet with eye holes in it.
That's what he is.
And he follows her around.
And it is a story about loss, about the meaning of life, about whether or not, as one spectacular scene with Will Oldham, who's a musician, gives a speech about how no matter how we try to be remembered, the meaninglessness, the nihilistic meaninglessness of life outstrips all our efforts.
But while he's saying that, the ghost is watching him, which kind of throws the whole speech into doubt, you know, and so it's got some really, really interesting stuff in it.
It's self-indulgent, and it has a scene close to the opening where Rooney Mara eats a pie.
The camera stays in one place.
Did you see this, Austin?
I hope you'll see it because I'd like to know what you think.
I mean, the camera stays in one place and she eats this pie for what must be five minutes.
I thought, I seriously thought my wife was going to just get up and walk out.
It was like watching paint dry.
And you could have accomplished every single thing in the scene in 30 to 40 seconds.
I mean, every single emotional beat, every single piece of meaning could have been.
So it's kind of, it's kind of annoying.
And I wanted to bring in, I couldn't find the clip of the guy speaking.
So, but it did, as you know, I love ghost stories.
I am, I just cannot tell you how much I love them.
And ghost stories kind of came into their own right about the turn of the last century, right around 1900, with M.R. James and people like that.
Some of the great, and mostly in Britain, some of the great British ghost stories.
If you've never read The Monkey's Paw, you should really read The Monkey's Paw.
I'm sure you've seen the movie The Monkey's Paw.
I'm sure you've seen the story embedded somewhere.
But if you've never read it, you really should read it.
But the ghost story is coming back, and that's a really interesting thing.
A lot of times they say the ghost story is connected to World War I and all the death and people trying to deal with all the death of World War I.
I don't believe that's true at all.
I believe it has to do with the rise of what I've been calling scientific logic.
Not the rise of science, but the rise of scientific logic, scientism, it's sometimes called.
Science has given us all the great blessings in the world, all the cures, all the technology, all the wonderful things that we have, the way we travel, all this stuff.
But it has done it at a price.
And the price has been that it has said to us, in order to believe in our science, you have to stop believing in anything else.
You have to believe that we have this hammer and therefore everything is a nail.
And I believe that logic is collapsing because if you follow that logic to its end, it would mean that you don't exist, essentially.
It would mean that you have no will, free will.
It would mean that you have no spirit.
It would mean that all your observations are in doubt.
They don't mean anything.
That was basically the story that was sold to you, that your observations are not reliable when so often your observations are reliable.
And the only way you can tell they were unreliable is because often they're reliable.
Otherwise, how would you know they were unreliable if they weren't so often reliable?
All the logic of scientism is collapsing.
And that's why I think ghost stories are making a kind of a comeback.
Very recently, there have been some terrific ones.
Paranormal activity, I think, is very close to being a classic and has, this is the moment.
I'm just going to show you this one moment from Paranormal Activity, because to me it's one of the great things about ghost stories.
I don't like horror stories.
I like ghost stories because of moments like this one.
There's no first step sound.
Oh, God.
Eternal light, babe.
Just go, let's go downstairs.
It's still here, let's go!
I don't know where it came from.
Where is it?
What?
The prints stop over here.
They sent me a trap!
Please, let's go!
Oh, my God.
So what I love about this is that one line.
They've laid out powder because this invisible creature keeps visiting them.
And he says, there's footsteps in, but there's no footsteps out.
I mean, that to me is how a ghost story works.
And she says, oh my God, that's, you know, that's all you need.
That's all you need.
There are footsteps in, the footsteps out.
And when you first watch that movie, a chill goes up your spine when he says this.
I know we're going a little long, but let me, I kept James on because he was really interesting.
Let me just play this one scene from the ring, another of my very favorite ghost story movies that has come out recently.
This is the opening sequence.
It's based on a Japanese novel and then a Japanese film, but the actual American film with Naomi Watts is the best version of it that I read.
I read the book.
I saw the Japanese film.
This is the best version of it.
And so there's two teenage girls watching television and bored out of their minds.
Here it is.
You can pick something.
I don't care.
Hello.
Any idea how many electrorays are traveling through our head every second?
I got a better one.
Have you heard about this videotape that kills you when you watch it?
What kind of tape?
A tape.
A regular tape.
People run in.
I don't know.
We start to play it, and it's like somebody's nightmare.
Then suddenly, this woman comes on, smiling at you, right?
Seeing you through the screen.
And as soon as it's over, your phone rings.
Someone knows you've watched it.
And what they say is, you will die in seven days.
And exactly seven days later.
Who told you that?
Somebody from Rivera.
Who told you?
What's your problem?
I've watched it.
I just love this stuff.
You don't have to show anything.
Nothing has to jump out of you.
Nobody has to bleed.
You tell a ghost story and she says, I'm in it.
I watched that tape.
I am in that ghost story.
And the thing works every step of the way.
The rest of the movie, it's really a terrifying film.
And yet there's not a lot of gore, not a lot of blood in it, not even a lot of boost scares, which I find very cheap.
One of the reasons I hate horror movies is I hate things jumping out at me.
All right, we got to go.
Good show.
I hope it came over.
Our tech worked all right.
Austin, three cheers for Austin.
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