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Feb. 28, 2022 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
25:18
FEB 28 2022 - THE DOWNFALL OF JEFF ZUCKER WITH JAMES O’KEEFE

An exclusive interview and a compelling, important conversation between Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and Human Events Daily Host, Jack Posobiec where they discuss the deep seeded rot at the core of journalism, Jeff Zucker corruption and CNN's hypocrisy, nothing is off limits - no static - just truth!Here’s your Daily dose of Human Events with @JackPosobiec Support the Show.

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All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's edition of Human Events Daily.
Very special episode.
We're sitting down with my friend, the illustrious journalist, the Muckraker, the American dissident, none other than James O'Keefe himself.
James, welcome back to the show.
Good to see you, Jack.
You've been on quite a tear lately.
You've just announced new news.
You're bringing on a 25-year CNN executive, essentially, to come in to be part of Project Veritas.
You've just exposed the FDA. And I want to get into those, but I also want to say that there's something that's just happened very recently that you've played a huge role in.
I don't really think that a lot of people are realizing and giving Project Veritas the credit where it's due.
And not because you were trying to do this, but just because you were doing your job and telling the truth.
The downfall of Jeff Zucker.
The way that the bottom completely fell out on him.
This was a death of a thousand cuts of his own doing.
But it took the exposing of the truth and the exposing of his misdeeds By organizations like yourselves and like the brave whistleblowers who came forward there to tell the truth.
What do you think really went down with Jeff Zucker?
Well, first of all, Patrick Davis, he's off camera, but he's standing five feet away from me.
25-year veteran of CNN. We announced here at CPAC that we're hiring him as our top producer.
And he's been with us for three to four months and produced the DARPA story, produced the Rick Salibi story.
Nobody knew that.
Yeah.
Zucker has left CNN and now the company is rudderless because, and then Patrick has said this too, it's not that Zucker was a bad leader.
You can be a good leader in the authoritarian sense, like he was every day giving directives and all of the talent loyal to Jeff Zucker.
Okay.
But now that you've taken their god away, what do they actually believe in?
Because it's not telling the news.
And then there was a scandal that came out recently about Andrew Cuomo, and this is reported in New York Times and Megyn Kelly and other people, Wall Street Journal, that they were timing their news with Andrew Cuomo's press conferences, so unethical.
Everything they accuse you of and me of, they were doing themselves.
Of course, that's what they do.
They accuse their enemy of that which they are guilty of.
So, the extraordinary thing I learned from talking to Patrick, who was caught on a covert recording by Kerry Porch in 2019, and he said, all we got to do is tell the news.
Put a guy at the desk and tell the news.
Like the 1991, It was no-name people doing extraordinary journalism.
And this was the Ted Turner original vision for 24-7 News.
It really was the first to market in terms of this model of a 24-7 network that was totally dedicated to news.
And as you say, it was that Gulf War coverage that really put them in the front seat to say, look, we can cover this like a car chase, but we can be here all day every day.
Beautiful, amazing vision that Ted Turner came up with, you know, in early 1980s, and the Gulf War coverage, and then in 96, Fox came about, and MSNBC, and then it became a struggle for appointment viewership, and CNN had like 16 talent on an oval desk.
It was overkill.
There was no journalism.
So it was the opposite.
It was anathema to Ted Turner's vision.
So Patrick Davis says these things.
He did not know that he was being recorded in 2019.
We did 12 or so stories about CNN over the last decade.
And like you say, paper cuts to Jeff Zucker.
Jeff Zucker's strategy was always Voldemort.
Do not utter the words Project Veritas, make it go away.
That's what Zucker told his staff.
I remember you actually mentioned this to me once, that if you go on CNN.com and you run a search for your name or Project Veritas or a few of these other terms, and it's nowhere to be found.
So Zucker's strategy, yes, always say nothing.
Not even an attack.
But that might seem like a good strategy.
Right.
When it comes to some things, that can actually be a bad strategy.
You're in the Navy.
I mean, you can't have a universal rule like that, never utter a word about anything.
And then in December, we exposed Rick Salibi.
Who is a guy, Jake Dapper's producer, and you cover this.
Thank you, by the way, for your reporting on this.
That was the last time you were here.
That's exactly what we were talking about.
And I would say you were the number one journalist in America, maybe the only journalist in America, who covered that story.
And as a result of that, Jack, Rick Salibi left CNN. In fact, we later learned that Rick Salibi left the same day we launched the story, but CNN didn't utter a word about it.
Funny how that works.
A couple weeks later.
Same strategy, Voldemort's strategy.
Matt Dornick, CNN's one of their vice presidents.
He's the VP of Communications.
VP of Communications, replies to a tweet with three likes on it, and says, oh this is old news, he left a long time ago.
What an interesting, manipulative strategy.
He left directly because of what we exposed, and they made it seem like an anticlimax weeks later.
So this was Jeff's strategy.
But the problem with that strategy, says Patrick Davis, is when a guy is soliciting pictures of an underage girl, you say something.
If you're a newsman, you condemn it.
You don't just ignore it.
That's immoral.
So eventually this bit Jeff Zucker in the ass on all fronts.
Well, I think also...
The issue for him was, it's not 1991 anymore, and you can't keep thinking it is.
CNN is not the only source of news.
We have the decentralization of information now, the democratization of information, if you want to talk about that, right?
Protect democracy, isn't that the big thing lately?
So, we have social media, we have outlets like this, we have outlets like yourselves, your own social media, which is why they try to clamp you down, ban you on Twitter, et cetera, smear you on Wikipedia, and all the rest.
You have all of these other outlets now by which people can turn to and say, look, I might not be a fan of James O'Keefe or Jack Posobiec or Tucker, whoever it is, right?
But they're saying this, and they've got receipts to back it up.
And now I just heard that because this is the way news works now.
News is everywhere.
News is your alerts on your phone.
News is you're getting texted from your family members, your peers, your coworkers.
And so the Voldemort strategy used to work, which might work if you lived in Russia, You know, or China right now, it fundamentally doesn't work here.
Right, it doesn't, and I think you are seeing the democratization of tech, but the challenge for truth-tellers is that CNN, The New York Times, and these oligarchy of media have a partnership with tech, and that does allow them to inject their poison and their narrative into the minds of unwitting Americans,
because there still are a percentage of, I think that percentage is shrinking, There still is, I don't know what the numbers are, 10, 20, 30, 40% of the American people who believe what they see in the chyrons on CNN. And Patrick, you know, what I learned in the last couple weeks interviewing Patrick was that he told me that when he, when Sam Feist, the CNN bureau chief, still works at CNN, brought Patrick in to, usually they do like a Soviet-style recanting, you must take your statements away, you didn't mean what you said into the camera.
Patrick refused.
He said, no, I stand by what I said.
And in that room, let's say there was 30 to 50 people, people applauded him at CNN. What that tells you is that half, maybe even a little more than the majority of people, are actually decent people like you or anyone else here, but they're too afraid to say what he said.
And that's really where we are in this country, is this fear, this concern about losing your, I don't know, pension, job, mortgage.
And I think you saw it in Canada last month since I saw you.
I saw Canadians.
On the street in Ottawa saying, I think there was one guy who said, I'll give up my life.
That was an extraordinary...
I don't know if you saw that powerful clip.
This is a Canadian man.
These are not even American.
You almost think it's like a rugged individualist thing to say.
But they got pushed all the way past the brink.
And maybe that's going to happen here.
I hope it doesn't.
If it does, people will be pushed and they'll push back.
That's what's going to happen in society.
And it's happening with people like Patrick Davis at CNN. You know, I think...
I've talked to people at NBC behind the scenes.
I've talked to people also at CNN, people at some of these places where it's like they join up and they're working there because they believe in the stated vision and purpose and goals of the mission.
Then it's usually a couple of years in, once they've started to become vested, once they've started to build up their resume there, they realize where they are and they realize what's going on around them.
And at that point, it really does come down to one of those questions of, okay, can I continue doing this?
What's my bottom line look like?
Or can I get out and I go do something else with it?
And I think that because of what you're doing, because of the work you're doing, it's starting to give people the realization that they can.
They come out, they can speak the truth, and that they will be taken care of.
And so once you open that door once, the door actually gets wider.
It actually is a situation where you're going to have a follow-on effect.
It's not like one by one.
Courage is contagious.
I can't philosophize courage.
I don't want to persuade you to be courageous.
The only way I've found that you can get people to do it is when they see someone else do it.
And then they watch from the sideline and say, what's going to happen to this person?
Oh, this person survived.
Oh, well maybe I can do this.
And what's the definition of survival?
Is it making money?
I think people just place more of a primary value these days on their conscience than they did a decade ago.
I see it happening everywhere.
And a lot of the comments I get from a crowd, like I'm at CPAC here, I would say the majority of comments from people are kind of like, well, nothing ever happens to these people.
Your work doesn't matter.
And I'm sure you get this.
No one's going to be prosecuted.
Like, they just, this cynicism.
And I say, well, with that attitude, nothing will happen.
Because you'll manifest that.
But inside of each and every one of us is this seed of courage, is this American ideals, right?
The e pluribus unum and equality before the law and the First Amendment.
These are beautiful, incredible, incredibly timeless things.
And that exists in all of us.
And you can choose to believe that nothing matters or you can tap into that thing inside of you and do something.
A lot of people want to complain.
Well, let me find the people who are willing to do something.
And I think you're right.
You've talked to sources inside of all these groups.
I do too.
They're on the brink.
They're ready and willing to go forward and publish something about what's going on.
They want to see that To your point, people have different motivations for why they do what they do, but I do think you're also right in the sense that for someone to be motivated to become a whistleblower, it does also, one of the biggest motivations is that something will come of it.
That it will have an effect.
That, okay, they're making a risk, a great risk to their personal security, their personal financial status, their economic well-being, if they have children, if they have a family, etc.
But at the same time, they want to know what's going to be worth it.
Is the risk worth the reward?
And so will there be a reward?
And so when I look at the downfall of Jeff Zucker, I can't help but think that that is tied to all of his actions that were exposed by Project Veritas, by the whistleblowers, by this entire movement that's come forward to simply tell the truth.
To tell the truth about what's going on behind the scenes.
Look, we could see what they do on air, right?
And we could see the malfeasance.
But once you understand the way that place operates, and the way it is behind the scenes, and the fact that there are good people that would like to see it righted, wouldn't it be wonderful if we actually had a truth-telling news network in the United States?
And actually, two hopeful notes.
How cool would it be if CNN does go back to doing it?
And that's possible.
Imagine CNN airing our stories, airing your stories.
Hey, that's possible.
I think the talent, based upon what I've heard, the talent is the problem.
I'm making a generalization.
I think it's a safe generalization to report because it's what I've been Told by people inside the network, I think it's almost like everyone else is good except the talent.
I mean, you have people behind the scenes all saying the same things.
But there is a, information is accountability.
Information is the accountability that people seek.
Because it's either that, it's either you persuade by informing people and by educating them, or you persuade through violence.
I don't believe in violence.
But I think a lot of people want coercion.
They want arrest them.
Well, unless you get Half your countrymen, or 60%, or whatever the numbers are, to agree with you?
The only way you're going to accomplish that objective is through violence.
We're not there yet.
We don't want to be there.
No, no.
Again, not Russia, not China.
The mission is education.
We have to form consensus.
It's a hard mission, but it's the only way forward.
I believe we actually have the majority of people who do agree with us.
You don't see that by watching cable news.
We've got to figure out, at the same time, people have to look at this and say, you know, it's kind of like, when I was in the Navy, you know, when you're turning an aircraft carrier, right, those things don't turn on a dime, right?
It's little incremental movements, but then eventually, once you realize that a new course has been charted, You are stuck on that course and you're stuck there for a long time.
I think it's also eternal vigilance.
Benjamin Franklin said, this is all on American Muckraker, this book I wrote, newspapers are more important than government.
Abraham Lincoln, public opinion is everything.
These are things that are so self-evident, it's like common sense, that we forget that, I just did a panel on Andrew Breitbart, he said politics is downstream from culture, you've heard that a million times, and culture is downstream from information.
We have an oligarchy.
It's getting worse, Jack.
I'm not even on Twitter.
Haven't been for a year.
Instagram does not allow you to tag me, which is its own sort of badge of honor.
But where is this headed?
And I worry because, God, there's so many truth social and parlor and this thing.
I can't keep track of all these new mediums.
But the problem is, do you want to preach to the choir?
Do you want to only speak things to people who agree with you?
I warn people not to only use those media.
My take on that is twofold.
People will ask me, they say, Jack, why don't you get off of Twitter completely?
Why don't you voluntarily take yourself off and only use those platforms?
I have a maximalist approach here.
I'm going to use Getter and Truth and Rumble and Parler and everything else that comes out.
And I want those things to exist.
Do you know why?
Because you need lifeboats.
You need a place where you can be safe.
You need safe houses.
What leads someone to say to you, don't Tell the truth on Twitter.
The other thing that I look at this is that I say, I am not going to leave the field of battle because the battlefield is dangerous.
Why would people find you?
That's like saying, don't speak the truth out there in the street.
Only whisper in your bedroom what the truth is.
Wait, this is the public square.
We're going to go to the public square.
And I see it on the right.
I'm going to call that out because I don't understand that.
Andrew Breitbart, again, he died 10 years ago Tuesday.
He was a mentor of mine and someone I really respected.
He was all about getting in the mainstream media.
And this is before Instagram, so Walter Cronkite, if you go back to the 80s, go back to the 70s.
There were Walter Cronkite.
You've got to get covered by the mainstream media.
You do have these silos, right?
You have these multiple silos around, but by using multiple social medias or going to different media outlets like that...
I support using them.
I just don't support limiting yourself.
Right, that's how you cross over.
So if you can cross over and you can get past, and even for Project Veritas when I think every single one of your last few videos, whether it be the two-part FDA story, exposing the FDA on vaccines, and the effectiveness, and what their plans are for the rollouts, or even just anything.
Anything that you put out has been taken down by Twitter within usually about 12 hours.
I know they usually come out around 8 p.m., and then I'll tweet it out, and then by the next morning it's down.
So what I've got in the habit now of doing is saving it, so I make sure I've got other ways to do it.
But that being said, Whatever the person, and there's a million even people watching.
The story's still there.
I'll tell you, half people think, why would you put your stuff on Twitter?
That mentality is what I'm fighting against.
The mentality that we're not supposed to tell the truth to people who disagree with us.
It's a weird zero-sum mentality.
It's a Manichaean mentality.
Veritas' mission is revelation.
It's revealing what's going on.
It's exposing the truth.
And I grant you that I want to be on all of these things.
I'm on the Truth Social.
I think we're getting set up today here.
Instagram, but we have to distribute.
We have to be covered by the mainstream media.
Distribution is power when it comes to information.
Yes.
Distribution.
And the more you can get out, and whether you have to have anonymous accounts in order to get it out, or if they...
Somebody asked me once, they said, John, what would you do if they shut you down on everything?
Ham radio.
Exactly.
I'll get my ham radio, and I'll set it up, and the biggest generator I can find, and all the rest of it.
In the very early part, I was in jail, I was being attacked in a horrible way.
I was at the lowest point someone could be, and I said, what do I do?
My mother and sister, who are wonderful people, gave me this advice and said, James, even if one person is going to listen to what you have to say, you tell them what is true.
That's a pretty low point to be when you decide, okay, there's one person who will listen to me.
You do whatever you have to do.
But I also believe if the content is good enough, like the FDA guys' shocking statements, the DARPA documents, I mean, shocking statements.
Anthony Fauci mentioned us by name in that Senate hearing.
I'm not even on Twitter.
And the story was number one on Twitter.
So content is king, to quote the late Viacom chairman, he said, content is king.
If the visuals are shocking enough, they'll sort of effuse their way into all the different mediums.
So the real mission is to get the stuff that's really going to shock people.
That's what you do very well, and what I do, and what others do, That's the mission.
But I will say this, because there's so many people and they'll say, oh, you know, he's just posting this for retweets, he's just, you know, doing this, they're just trying to make money, they're just trying to do this.
Look, I was just trying to make money.
I find lots of ways, lots of easier ways to make money.
Well, that's what all these, that's what all these all sort of, Media companies, when they're monetizing, that's what they're doing.
It's so funny how people will always accuse you of that which they are guilty of.
Right.
Because that's the soup they swim in.
When someone makes an accusation, like an ad hominem, it's always because that's what they actually think.
That's how they think.
They're actually telling you how they think.
They're telling you how, it's a psychological thing.
And we're actually a philanthropic news organization.
There's no, in my opinion, there's no business model for investigative reporting.
You have to be like a masochist or a sociopath.
You have to like pain to be an investigative reporter because some of our stories cost a million dollars to do, and we don't make a penny off them.
I don't settle lawsuits.
I subject myself to discovery and litigation.
I subject myself to jury trials.
I'm probably one of the only men you'll ever meet unless you, well, you were in the armed forces.
So maybe you met a terrorist or a drug dealer or a sex trafficker once or twice.
But I'm probably the only man you'll ever know who's been put in handcuffs twice by the FBI. And I'm an American journalist.
That's a pretty extraordinary statement.
So, no, we're not, we haven't never made money doing this.
And I don't think if you're doing investigative work, investigative journalism, I don't think you can because of how expensive the work is and how little profit there is in it.
And, you know, Twitter, trillion dollar company, Google, trillion dollar company.
I think I saw some stats on these new social media networks.
They're making like $7 million a year.
It pales in comparison to the power they have.
You're going up against billionaires every day.
Billionaires, yes.
That's the way you have to look at it.
If you don't understand that, going into this, then you're not going to do well.
But there are some things more powerful than money.
Like, Laura Logan said this to me so poignantly.
She says, James, we're nothing.
I mean, I'm nothing.
I don't have any political power.
I don't want any political power.
I don't want to be an elected representative ever.
So, we are nothing, but we're also not alone.
I would say that so many people agree with us, even inside these institutions.
See, this is what the other, whatever you want to call it, establishment, you know, that is one of their greatest tricks.
It's to make you feel isolated, atomized, individualized, that I'm the only person who thinks this way.
That I'm totally alone.
Look, I mean, we're here at CPAC. We're at Turning Point.
Thousands and thousands of people are flocking to this now.
People are sharing it.
The TSA guys, the Uber driver, the hairdresser, not even CPAC because that's self-evident here, but I'm talking about the people that you would never expect.
Maybe the people in my apartment that morning, the FBI raided me.
It's hard to know the body language of a Fed because they might be trying to pretend to be something, but what struck me about their body language was 4 out of 10 of those agents were almost like they were fans of market.
But they were just following orders, right?
They were just following orders to, you know, my pension, my pension.
Well, there are some things more important than your pension, right?
And that's where we are right now.
And Veritas is a breeding ground for these people.
And I think you're going to see an explosion of truth-tellers and whistleblowers, Jack, as people get pushed to the brink.
As we wrap things up, let us know and let everybody know where can we follow you, if you're able to tell us anything you're working on, and what's next on the mission plan for Veritas going into 22.
What is next?
I think the best place to follow us is actually Telegram because you can download the minute-long video and upload.
I know you do that, like you do distribution by proxy, so we'll send you the click-to-tweet link and it'll automatically embed the video clip into your Twitter.
What's coming is a lot more...
We have an election coming up in the midterms, so what we find is that politicians in swing states tend to mislead voters.
They tend to lie about what they actually believe in to get elected.
You'll see some of that.
You'll see some inside big media corporations.
We got a big one coming out soon.
Just this morning, we released a video, if you have not seen it, It's a 15 minute long sort of Barbara Walters style interview with a 25 year veteran of CNN who's come to work for me.
Extraordinarily powerful interview that I encourage you on.
I mean I love having the ability to pick the brain of someone who is in one of these machines and to understand How it works, how the gears move, what's the interplay, what are the hydraulic pressure valves, what do they care about, what's the actual, and this is something we used to talk about in the intelligence community, but strategic intent.
And that's the only thing that you can get from another human being.
You can't get that when you're in the military and you're trying to say, are they about to invade, whoever it is.
Well, you can see it from the satellites.
You can see where they are.
And signals, you know, that could be disinformation, but strategic intent is what you get from human intelligence, and you can only get that from talking to trusted sources.
That is correct, and if you have not seen this 15-minute interview that Patrick gave us on YouTube, by the way, we're still on YouTube.
That might surprise people.
Why are you surprising?
Because we don't opine.
Again, I don't even make claims in our reports.
I just do the five W's, who, what, what, what, why.
And I'm usually quoting the authorized knowers, the FDA, Pfizer, CNN. I'm never quoting a conservative.
I'm quoting the New York Times, Pfizer, CNN, all these people that they tell you to, the experts.
I'm quoting the expert.
The Pentagon.
So I think they're probably afraid that I'm going to sue them and win because we haven't lost a lawsuit.
So I think there's some fear.
I think they're more afraid, Jack, of us than we are afraid of them.
I think that's actually a true statement.
And what they fear most is being...
The thing about communists, and for lack of a better word, that's what I'll call this modern I think Whitaker Chambers wrote this in Witness that the only thing that communists fear is exposure.
They don't really fear government or death, but they fear someone.
They fear being disinfected by that.
So let's go out and expose what's going on.
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