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Jan. 18, 2022 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
23:51
JAN 18 2021 - JAMES O’KEEFE RELEASES ‘AMERICAN MUCKRAKER’ BOOK, CALLS OUT DR. FAUCI

A can’t miss interview with Human Events Daily host Jack Posobiec and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe. They discuss O’Keefe’s new book “American Muckraker”, the destruction of the free press and the future of news in modern society.Here’s your Daily dose of Human Events with @JackPosobiec Support the Show.

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard for today's very special edition of Human Events Daily.
We've got on James O'Keefe, the founder, the director of Project Veritas, and the author of a brand new book that is actually out today.
The book is American Muckraker, and this is an academic and philosophical explanation of undercover journalism and the overall history of undercover journalism intertwined with his own life experiences.
James, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about this today.
Jack, thanks for having me on.
Just to point a clarification, it's out on the 25th, so one week from now.
It'll be out.
It'll be out.
You have an advanced copy.
We've sent you an advanced copy of American Muckraker.
Oh, spoiler alerts.
So spoiler alerts, folks.
If there's anything you want to come out.
You know, when people think of Project Veritas, I think they know you and they know Veritas from various stories that are always, you know, snapshots in time that they sort of pop up and then they go, but this is one unbroken narrative that I feel that nobody's really seen unless they've actually been James O'Keefe.
And that's what you're doing.
You're putting people through this book in the driver's seat of what it's like being behind the control board, you know, as it were, of Project Veritas.
So tell me about the process of writing this book.
Well, this took me five years to write.
I basically downloaded everything I possibly could on journalism ethics, on secrecy, on privacy, on themes of undercover techniques, deception.
People say we lie, we deceive undercover.
So I read everything I could get my hands on.
And to the point where I exhausted all research, I went to the NYU database, undercover database.
I read all of Gunter Walriff's books, Mike Wallace's books.
Upton Sinclair's books and the things that Upton Sinclair wrote about him.
And then I really interviewed all of our whistleblowers and I really grappled with themes of struggle and suffering.
And you might say, well, what the hell does suffering have to do with it?
Well, suffering is the first...
Preface the chapter of his book.
It's about struggle.
And then that brought me to Solzhenitsyn and The Dream of the Ridiculous Man and some of the Russian novelists, because I think we're entering clown world.
I think we live in a bizarre, dystopian scenario.
I don't think we're yet...
Across the Rubicon to complete societal breakdown, but we're pretty close.
I would say we're standing at the gates.
And the only thing that's preventing us from entering those gates are we the people.
And the only thing that scares the power structure is people's access to actual real information.
So this book is a how-to manual for how to tell the truth and what you're going to have to endure and the way the game is played and how you have to conduct You're reporting as a citizen journalist in a world where, for example, the FBI and the New York Times and big pharmaceutical companies are all coordinating with each other.
That's the world we're living in.
And George Orwell writes, the power, the freedom, two plus two equals five, the freedom to say that makes all the difference in the world.
So that's what this book is about.
It's a very ambitious project of mine.
I've been doing for five years and it's out a week from today.
Well, look, I threw something up on Twitter the other night where I said, we're in a situation economically now where the shelves on the markets are bare.
My wife, who was born in the Soviet Union, went out shopping the other day to the U.S. and said, look, this reminds me of what it was like when I was little.
This reminds me of going to the store when I was little.
You can't go out and buy anything you want.
You can't get fresh food, fresh produce.
Meanwhile, if you tweet something about it, you're going to get fact checked and you're going to be attacked from apparatchiks that are from state approved media, state backed media in some cases.
And she said, you know, all of this seems strikingly similar to the system that I fought very hard to get away from and to come to a place where she could, you know, she and I met here in D.C. and we got married and we're having our kids.
And she said, look, I wanted to be in a place where we could flourish and have the opportunity to get away from such things.
And yet all of this seems just very disturbingly familiar.
Well, they say it's disinformation, misinformation.
These are brand new words.
These are not words that were in our vocabulary 10 years ago.
And what's interesting about these words, Joe Biden used this word and certainly referred to a report on Anthony Fauci last week featuring documents from the Department of Defense.
These are not my claims.
I didn't make any claims.
This was a Marine Corps major.
These were literally Pentagon papers that Project Veritas were releasing.
You had Anthony Fauci and Joe Biden talking about misinformation.
But disinformation, misinformation really means distrusting people to draw the acceptable conclusions based upon facts that are admittedly true.
So it's not so much that what we report at Project Veritas is false, it's that it is true.
And the more true it gets, the worse it gets.
To quote the protagonist in the movie The Insider, the guy who portrayed executive producer at 60 Minutes, the more true the information is, the more disinformation it becomes.
Which brings us back to George Orwell's 1984.
Double think, to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them.
To forget any fact that becomes inconvenient and then when it becomes necessary again to draw it back from oblivion for just so long it is as needed to deny the existence of objective reality.
That's what these people are doing.
And you could be hopeless and cynical.
But I think what's different than your wife's native country and the Soviet Union is, this is America.
This is the United States of America.
And not the whole rhetoric of people have guns.
Forget that argument.
Forget that rationale.
This is a place where we place a primary value on the First Amendment.
The First Amendment comes first for a reason.
And it's very important that people understand that we do live in a country where I think there's a lot more people who agree with us.
They're just scared.
They're just afraid.
And in the communist countries, 98% of people perhaps were afraid as well, but they couldn't do anything about it.
So we have the ability to give people information through these whistleblowers.
Who are releasing information against the consent of the powerful organizations they work for.
Jack, what was interesting recently in my case involving the FBI in the Southern District of New York, they raided my home and took my phones, was the US attorneys said in court documents that I'm not a journalist.
Of course, there's no difference between what I do and the reporters that the New York Times do in terms of taking documents or receiving documents that were stolen.
In my case, I didn't even know.
It turns out it wasn't stolen, the Biden diary.
But journalists receive stolen documents all the time.
Here at Human Events, we, on a regular basis, receive government documents, receive documents from inside corporations that have been given to us or obtained to us through information.
insiders, whistleblowers, leakers.
This is the bread and butter of journalism in the United States, not just right.
I mean, this is a daily occurrence here in Washington, D.C.
Now, in some cases, what it seems to be, though, and for me, having operated here now, I come from the world where I was an intelligence officer.
I was somebody who was on the other side of the table, so to speak, in many in terms of this.
But now that I'm looking at it from this side, I say, you know, it seems interesting that when there's leaks to the New York Times or to the Washington Post or in some cases, the Wall Street Journal, it seems as though those are approved leaks.
But when there's leaks to James O'Keefe and Jack Posobiec and Andy Ngo and others, well, those are disinformation and that's disapproved leaks.
And yet, the only difference seems to be the type of information that's coming out.
That's right.
The leak is effectively a bona fide press conference, right?
When you have a two-star general leaking to the New York – Dan Boorstin talks about in this book called The Image, which I talk about extensively in this book, American Mock Rager.
When you have leaks that are sanctioned leaks, authorized leaks, well, it's even worse because you don't have the intonation, the inflection of what the person said.
They're using the New York Times and the Washington Post as the ombudsman for the Pentagon.
They're using them as the ombudsman for Anthony Fauci.
You are not allowed to question what's called the authorized knowers in society.
And taking information from sources that are presumed credible often reduces investigative expense.
I mean, one-third of my nonprofit budget, which is getting larger now, is legal.
It's all about defending myself in court.
When your imperative is a commercial one, and I'm not trying to bemoan capitalism, but I'm a non-profit.
Profit is not my motive.
My motive is truth-telling.
If your priority is to save money, I would have settled those lawsuits, but I'll spend 20 times more money to go to court and to go to trial and win.
So there's an economic issue here in journalism, with the newspapers being completely destroyed, and the tech companies gobbling up all of that domain, and you have the complete consolidation of news.
In fact, you and I, we get a lot of our messages out on Instagram.
So because of that, it's becoming increasingly more difficult to tell the truth.
And they attack your reputation, which, by the way, in modern society, losing your reputation is the modern-day version of something much worse 100 years ago.
But if you keep going, if you don't stop, You send a message to other people that they can do it too, to paraphrase my late mentor, Andrew Breitbart.
And what I've seen in the last year is very inspiring.
One thing that I do want to ask you about is, and you know, you mentioned the Soviet Union, but also we've certainly seen in some cases For the people that have gone to Veritas and other places as well, though, as whistleblowers, that they've had some of those same type of tactics used against them.
They've been blacklisted.
They've been declared unemployable.
They've been declared, you know, all sorts of things.
Given that case, why then would it be, you know, talk to me about this.
You mentioned suffering and struggle.
What is the psychology of a whistleblower as you come to see it?
Well, this is an excellent point, and this is the heart and soul of what maybe fuels me and fuels my brothers and sisters who become whistleblowers.
It's going to be much easier not to say anything, right?
Well, there's actually a chapter in this book which is quite personal to me.
It's called Suffering, and David Daleiden, you all know who he is, the guy who broke land-parented body parts.
He was raided by the California SWAT team, Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris?
Attorney General.
Now Vice President, right.
Andy Ngo, cement milkshakes thrown at him.
Post-worker Richard Hopkins, remember that one where they sent the deep state inspector general dude out of central casting from the- As someone who served at Guantanamo, one of the worst interrogations I've ever heard.
Well, and it was recorded.
The guy Russell Strasser was trying to get him to do a Soviet-like recanting.
I've been coming in to harness the storm.
I'm going to trick you so your mind can kick in.
And there's this sort of moment in space and time when you're really suffering.
I mean, I spent three years...
I was effectively confined on supervised federal probation.
I couldn't go anywhere without permission.
This was 10, 11 years ago.
It is Martin Luther King Day.
I'm going to quote Martin Luther King.
In other words, the world is round.
These bad people that do these bad things.
By the way...
Martin Luther King, another victim of FBI wiretapping, paid informants, disinformation, and threats, by the way.
But I think the world is round, and I think that what I've learned, even in my 37 years on this planet, is that bad people do bad things for a little while, but it always catches up to them.
Whether you're Robespierre, or the Attorney General of New York, Eric Schneiderman, or the US Attorney in New Orleans who resigned in disgrace after anonymously blogging about me.
I wrote about this suffering, this struggle, and the hardest part about doing this is the attack on your reputation.
There's two different types of moral courage.
One is physical courage.
The other is perhaps even more different form of courage, which is to face that reputational hazard, and they attack you by virtue of their own decree that they're credible.
They call themselves credible journalists.
By virtue of the fact, by their own decree, and they often use anonymous sources that bring evidence that's directly contradictory to evidence that you can see and hear.
It's like incontrovertible evidence.
So the deprivation of your reputation is by those in a self-anointed raka, and that's hard.
But after a while, what I see the whistleblowers, Jack, the thing that they're faced with is what Solzhenitsyn was faced with when he wrote the Gulag Archipelago.
You're faced with a decision, and you have two directions you can go in.
On one direction, you're gonna lose your, let's just call it lose your life, lose your reputation.
And in the other direction, you're gonna lose your conscience.
And increasingly what I find is people place more value on doing something to follow their own conscience, even if it comes against their own reputation.
And at a certain point it becomes about the salvation of your own soul.
And when you take the path of least resistance, that is to say, when you want to survive at any price, I will do anything to survive.
In fact, let me give you something more closer to home for your audience.
I will do anything not to lose my Twitter account.
I've known a lot, I'm not going to name names, but everyone, not everyone, 99% of people, including on the right, there's a little piece of, well, I don't know if I should tweet that document out.
Now that's a slippery slope that you're trying to climb because when you want to, as Solzhenitsyn describes, survive at any price.
Well, ultimately what happened in the 1930s after the Russian Revolution is that you effectively had a society where it was completely corrupted.
And the lie became a permanent source of existence.
And when the lie becomes a permanent form of existence, you betray everyone and everything.
You sell out your own children, okay?
And I don't want to live in that world and neither do you.
This idea of lies and the question of deception.
If you Google Project Veritas, the very first thing, it's always sort of the attack on Veritas.
Deceptive practices, deceptive practices, deceptive practices.
They use deceptive editing and deceptive practices to interview subjects.
They don't even realize they're being interviewed.
As an intel officer looking at this, I say, well, you're just using elicitation.
You're not telling anyone to say anything.
This is a basic investigative tool that's used in every single law enforcement agency probably in the world.
And certainly, every actual journalist should be trained in this process, the process of elicitation.
Yet, why is it then that you believe they use this specific term for attacking Veritas?
Well, they'll say and do anything to attack Veritas.
But I mean, yeah, there's a great quote in the chapter three of this book.
It's all about deception.
And what I learned was that, well, the quote is, if the use of undisclosed or false identities were wrong per se as a form of fraud or deception, we'd have to be willing to allow restaurants to sue restaurant critics, landlords to sue fair housing testers, and stores to sue secret shoppers who, as it turns out, I have no real intention to buy the product.
I mean, give me a break.
This is a question of relative deception.
You have two choices if you're a journalist.
You can present yourself as such to the powers that be.
Hey, please tell me all the fraud you're committing.
That'll work.
Or you can present yourself as not a journalist, And record as long as you're part of the conversation and tell the truth to the audience.
And in a world where telling the truth to the audience is paramount, you have to choose the other path.
What matters is the truth to the audience.
You have to tell the truth to the people.
And I will write a $10,000 check to anybody I'll write a personal $10,000 check if you can name one example of a situation where I have lied to my audience.
Going undercover is not lying to the audience.
It's telling the truth to the audience by the subject not knowing that you are a journalist.
Jack, the three instances they always give is the Washington Post being compromised, me being arrested in New Orleans, I don't even remember the third.
Oh, pimp.
I didn't wear the pimp costume inside the pimp in the office.
Give me a break.
Whenever we're burned or compromised, they jump to wild conclusions about our intentions, but our intentions are to tell the truth to the audience, and sometimes you have to wear a disguise to get people to be honest with you.
I mean, you've seen this for years.
PETA, by the way, uses this all the time when they go undercover at factory farms.
They'll go in, they'll have a job, they'll be working there for months in some cases, collecting footage, it gets released, and that gets written up immediately.
And so I always look at that and I say, well, isn't this the exact same thing that Project Veritas and James do?
Yet for some reason, this is lauded and praised and it's brought to Congress.
And, you know, I don't know, maybe some of those practices should be looked at.
Obviously, they should all be looked at.
But my question is, what's the difference between what you do?
There isn't.
It's an example of George Orwell's doublethink.
It's completely asinine and borders on communism.
David Daleiden was raided for recording people at Planned Parenthood, but it's never about the methods.
It's about the findings.
They don't like the findings, is what it's really about.
And, you know, in terms of justifying the morality and ethics of deceiving a subject to extract illicit truth out of them, I can't justify that in the abstract.
That's a philosophical conundrum, you know, Kant's categorical imperative.
It's like one ethicist described justifying undercover techniques like trying to invent dry water or fireproof coal.
You can't justify a lie in the abstract, but it's always a situational evaluation.
And by the way, the situational evaluation is going to depend entirely on whether you think it's a compelling public interest to expose Planned Parenthood.
And because our country is becoming more divided, that's the scapegoat.
Well, actually, I would always say that, and actually in preparing for this interview, the first thing I thought of that I wanted to say is One of the biggest differences that I see in terms of all of this is the target matters.
It is the target that always matters.
Is this someone that is influencing the public through their public position, whether the highest paid, most powerful unelected bureaucrat in the United States, whether they be a U.S. leader, a U.S. corporation, and I've only ever seen you target people like that, or The media, on the other hand, who do they target?
They target the little guy.
They'll target people in their homes.
They'll target somebody who had a Facebook post they didn't like.
Well, let's name names.
Mike Schmidt at the New York Times.
My wrists are so sore from the handcuffs that were just put on me.
And as the 10 to 12 federal agents leave my apartment with two plastic baggies with my two iPhones in them, guess who text messages me?
Well, I'm still sitting there in a state of shock.
Oh, it's Mike Schmidt at the New York Times who somehow knows the secret grand jury subpoena information.
Again, I haven't been charged with anything, but somehow knows what's in the document that I'm holding in my hand.
And guess what?
The neighbors didn't tip him off to that.
So I think what this comes down to, and there's one way to say this, I write this in the book.
Deceit is morally wrong.
Lying to anybody is.
But there are circumstances can arise in which undercover deceptions is relatively less wrong than other possible courses of action, like coordinating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to target American journalists.
You should be ashamed of yourself, Dean Baquet.
Ben Smith at the New York Times defended me.
And by the way, I find it odd that Ben Smith is now leaving the New York Times.
He's leaving, yeah.
He's leaving.
Well, Ben Smith defended me while Mike Schmidt wanted me led to the execution chamber for receiving a document, which is what journalists do, by the way.
It's called Tuesday at the New York Times when they receive stolen material.
I don't even know if the document was stolen.
Even if it was, I'd be protected under Nikki V. Vopper.
So we are dealing with a post-truth Orwellian dystopia, and that's the bad news.
The good news is there's so many people that are reaching out to Veritas right now, and you too, Jack.
You're one of the only other investigative reporters, as far as I'm concerned, alive.
Thank you.
And I encourage you to not be afraid.
I can guarantee you that they're far more afraid than I am.
They're actually desperate, which is evidenced by their actions of raiding the homes of journalists.
Fauci mentioned us in the hearing last week.
He's also afraid of what we have coming out.
So I encourage people to not live in fear and to not live by lies.
I think there's hope still.
And the society has not collapsed yet.
The pendulum can swing back.
But we, the people, have to be willing to tell the truth.
James, we are just about out of time.
Tell us, where can people go to find out more about the book, to find out more about the tour?
Well, two things.
The book is on presale.
We ask you to buy it.
All proceeds go to our nonprofit.
Project Veritas helps pay our salaries and our reporters' salaries.
So American Muckraker is the book.
You can buy it on Amazon.
AmericanMuckraker.com is where you can buy the book.
Also, there's a party in Miami, a book launch party in Miami, Florida, on January 29th of this month.
And there's still a few tickets left.
That's projectveritasexperience.com.
Please come to our party in South Florida to launch this book January 29th.
January 29th.
James O'Keefe, always a pleasure.
The book is American Muckraker.
Thank you so much.
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