May 3, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:02:40
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Joining me today is a guerrilla journalist, the head of Project Veritas, and the author of American Pravda. | ||
| James O'Keefe, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Great to be here. | ||
| Long overdue, I think, is the way I'm going to start this one, because you are sort of right in the center of a lot of the things that I'm constantly talking about, so it's good to have you. | ||
| Great to be here. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Okay, so before we get into all your work that I think most of my audience knows at least a portion of, I don't think anyone knows that much about you. | ||
| What do we need to know about James O'Keefe, the man? | ||
| How did he become this rogue reporter and guy that was unearthing all of the evil things that our tech overlords are doing to us? | ||
| Well, I started in college doing these undercover tapes. | ||
| I actually started 15 years ago. | ||
| I started a newspaper in college called the Centurion and I quickly learned that the way to expose these institutions is to sort of make them live up to their own principles like the Alinsky tactic. | ||
| I'd read "Rules for Radicals" by Saul Linsky in college, and I decided to expose hypocrisy | ||
| by making them live up to their own rules, and I realized that those rules were race and sex | ||
| and sort of abortion, these sort of sacred cow institutions, Planned Parenthood and ACORN, | ||
| and I decided to use hidden cameras. | ||
| I went into the dining hall at Rucker's on St. Patrick's Day | ||
| and I said that Lucky Charms offends my Irish heritage. | ||
| They took me seriously and told us they would remove Lucky Charms cereal. | ||
| It was the first video that I did. | ||
| And from there, I actually went on to work with Lila Rose, who you had on the show recently, | ||
| and did some Planned Parenthood investigations, ACORN with Andrew Breitbart, | ||
| and I have done some 200 undercover investigations in the last 10 years. | ||
| I assume as you do more undercover things, and now you've got other people that are doing a portion of them, it gets harder and harder to do as people know who you are and know the organization and things like that, right? | ||
| You'd be surprised. | ||
| I mean, the moment we rid society of waste, fraud, and abuse, I suppose we'll win the day, but people are always going to be, I mean, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and money. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And things develop, people are always going to be corrupt. | ||
| So I don't actually wear the camera these days very often. | ||
| I sort of go out into the field to be a leader to the troops. | ||
| But for the most part, it's we've got dozens of these people across the United States wearing | ||
| these little cameras. | ||
| You put them in, you can put them in a cup, you can put them in a book, you can put them | ||
| in a watch. | ||
| Should I ask you if there's more than four cameras in this studio right now? | ||
| Because I've got four. | ||
| There's a few over there, yes. | ||
| But as long as there's one party consenting to the conversation, as long as you're talking to someone, there's no expectation of privacy, we would argue. | ||
| And we won in federal court in Massachusetts a few months ago. | ||
| We changed the law. | ||
| So we believe that secretly recording someone is a fundamental human right. | ||
| It's a constitutional right. | ||
| Because I have no duty to keep confidential what you tell me. | ||
| So the hidden camera is an extension of the reporter notebook. | ||
| And cameras capture things that words don't. | ||
| I mean, cameras capture intonation, inflection. | ||
| So we believe that this is a kind of transparency revolution and there's a movement of people doing this. | ||
| In a weird way, is it a sort of depressing reality? | ||
| Like, when I've watched some of your videos and you get engineers at these companies, and we're going to talk about all of them, to admit things that we all are sort of thinking are true related to shadow banning or de-boosting or everything else, there's a piece of me, even when they're tipping off the information that I suspect is true, there's a piece of me that's like, There's something sort of depressing about this, that this is what we've been left with. | ||
| We have to go after mid-level and sometimes low-level engineers, and sometimes the bigger ones, because there's no transparency when it comes to these companies. | ||
| So it feels almost depressing to me. | ||
| Does that make sense to you? | ||
| Well, I think the way that I would put it is... It's unfortunate, I suppose. | ||
| Some people call it depressing. | ||
| Some people say we confirm suspicions. | ||
| I would say that what we do is summon righteous indignation at the tragedies in society, including in these organizations, because they run so counter to what were spoon-fed, the narratives that were spoon-fed by the media, by the powers that be. | ||
| So hidden camera journal investigative reporting, whether it's hidden camera or print, does that. | ||
| It summons what Ida Tarbell termed as righteous indignation at the tragedies. | ||
| And it kind of, you know, most people, I would say 80%, there's a sort of consensus around what we do. | ||
| People say, well, that's wrong or they deny it. | ||
| So Twitter The Twitter lobbyist in Congress under oath said we do not | ||
| shadow ban. | ||
| When his engineer clearly said what we do do is shadow ban. | ||
| And I don't know if we do that anymore. | ||
| That's what the engineer said. | ||
| Clearly meaning that he had shadow banned people. | ||
| So it's perjury to lie under oath. | ||
| And these hidden camera videos really show people what's going on. | ||
| It angers people. | ||
| I think the world is more polarized than it was 10 years ago, so maybe that 80% consensus is going down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you worried at all, though, that we'll always be videotaping each other and that there will be nothing that's private? | ||
| I mean, even now, if I go out to dinner, Like, I'm aware that I'm some level of a public person, and sometimes people recognize me, and sometimes... I was at the airport, and it was very obvious to me that the guy... I was sitting with somebody, but that the guy next to me clearly knew who I was, and he was on his computer, and the whole time I kept thinking, this guy could be recording me, you know, and just all, like, just this endless big brother thing, even if the intentions of what you're doing I do believe to be good. | ||
| Are you just worried about just that general state of, we're all gonna be recording each other all the time, there will be nothing private? | ||
| I'm not worried at all. | ||
| I mean, there's an element of risk every time you interact with strangers and you talk to them. | ||
| As long as there's one party present to the conversation, we would argue that it's ethical. | ||
| And again, we think that cameras, visuals, are merely an extension. | ||
| I mean, I could disseminate what you tell me in private. | ||
| I could write it down and shout it from the rooftops. | ||
| Upton Sinclair, when he wrote The Jungle, he saw everything and then he ran back to his hotel and wrote it all down. | ||
| So surely society would rather a situation where I accurately capture what it is that | ||
| you told me, and I have to use cameras. | ||
| They indemnify me because people call me a liar. | ||
| They say that didn't happen. | ||
| So I have to record the incidents because they would say that it did not happen the | ||
| way that I reported it. | ||
| And I also think that there are lines that we can't cross. | ||
| We don't go into people's bedrooms. | ||
| We try to stay away from the really personal, intimate, sexual details about people. | ||
| But this is a revolution that's aimed at the power structure, at this establishment, the powers that be, not against private citizens. | ||
| And I think there is a duty, there is a responsibility that investigative reporters have not to put people on blast unless it really meets a compelling public interest. | ||
| So, you mentioned you started this in college. | ||
| What was tipping you off to, like, that there was something wrong with the media? | ||
| I mean, what made you go, I gotta go in there and say I'm Irish and I'm offended by Lucky Charms? | ||
| Like, what really was happening that you were seeing that led to that? | ||
| Well, I was at Rutgers University in New Jersey and it was so, the political correctness was run amok like most schools. | ||
| Don't tell me there's something bad happening with the grease trucks, please. | ||
| The grease trucks, you know about the grease trucks. | ||
| I know the grease trucks. | ||
| Please tell me that they're okay. | ||
| For those of you who don't know, there's these trucks at Rucker's and it's like they're all in a parking lot. | ||
| And you get real fat real quick. | ||
| Only a college kid can get away with that. | ||
| You know what, there was something wrong with the grease trucks. | ||
| They had put duct tape, this was in 2005, over these sandwiches. | ||
| Am I allowed to curse on them? | ||
| You can curse, you can curse. | ||
| There was one of them called the fat bitch and the fat... | ||
| and other words that were offensive. | ||
| And they had put duct tape over the names because these words were considered offensive. | ||
| That's what compelled me to try to ban Lucky Charms. | ||
| So I said, "This is ridiculous." | ||
| I also had professors who were Stalinists. | ||
| I had professors who were telling me how great communism was. | ||
| And I was not political, but I read the New York Times every day, front to back, in college, | ||
| I was sort of an introverted guy, and I'd read the paper, and I was just, I said, this doesn't accurately capture the world. | ||
| This doesn't tell people what's really going on. | ||
| So I felt compelled to do something about it, and it wasn't comfortable. | ||
| It's not comfortable to confront people with cameras and, you know, get into their faces. | ||
| I was willed to do it because I believed in the cause. | ||
| And the kind of Alinsky methodology, which is to make them accountable to their own principles, you know, you had these Marxist professors driving Bentleys and BMWs and had a little muckraking newspaper and it was like Lifestyles of the Rich and Marxist. | ||
| You know, track these people down. | ||
| I just feel that most people that do this, most insiders inside these companies coming to us, now have what I call a justice complex. | ||
| They think that there are things wrong with the world, and they feel compelled to do something about it. | ||
| It's hard to explain, but, you know, I'm sure you know people who have this complex, and these people are willing to basically jump on a grenade. | ||
| to wear a camera, to film their employer, some cases violating their own non-disclosure agreement, because they believe the public has a right to know what they're seeing. | ||
| Are you shocked at the amount of people at these big tech companies who now are willing to speak? | ||
| Because, I mean, I know insiders that I get some information from. | ||
| I mean, I'm talking about Google, Facebook, Twitter, like that. | ||
| Really, these things have become so huge. | ||
| That now their own people inside them are going, whoa, what did we help create here? | ||
| We've got a Frankenstein monster. | ||
| I mean, have you been to Menlo Park? | ||
| And you go to San Francisco, and I was there because I did this Facebook story, this Insider Inside Facebook. | ||
| And I went to try to locate these engineers and ask them for comment. | ||
| And there were just these buses, just hundreds of buses filled with millennials. | ||
| And if you go to the campus, people are sort of driving around these bicycles. | ||
| The best word I can describe it as their minions. It's just sort of this little totalitarian | ||
| little mini state within a state and it's just a groupthink Orwellian | ||
| place and I guess the word that it was described to me by the insiders | ||
| that they're all minions. They're very intelligent people but they don't | ||
| have a lot of common sense and I went there I was amazed by this Menlo Park | ||
| campus buses of young people being bused in. | ||
| And I think that it doesn't surprise me that people are willing to blow the whistle, because there's more to life than making a quarter million dollars a year and working for these companies. | ||
| People want to do something. | ||
| One of the things that I get told all the time, what can I do? | ||
| And there aren't a lot of choices for people. | ||
| You can watch the shows. | ||
| You can buy the books. | ||
| But some people want to actually participate in this country. | ||
| And solutions are increasingly outside the scope of government. | ||
| The legislative process does not seem to solve things. | ||
| So there needs to be a different counterweight. | ||
| There needs to be a different solution. | ||
| And I would say that .001% of people are like, put a camera on me. | ||
| That's a lot of people, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, right, right, right. | ||
| We're talking about a lot of people at the end of the day. | ||
| So when did you realize that, because you've mostly focused, or at least I think the work that has gotten you the most attention has been related to the tech companies, not necessarily going after politicians or academics per se, although you've done some of that. | ||
| When did you realize that focusing on the tech companies Well, because I think the media has all the power. | ||
| I think that I've known this for ever since I started this endeavor was that the media has so much more power than people realize. | ||
| Everyone knows the media is powerful, but I think that people fear the humiliating power of the press. | ||
| I think the press Including the big tech companies have more power than government. | ||
| They are more powerful than all three branches of government, the executive, judicial, legislative branch. | ||
| So somehow we need to hold these people accountable. | ||
| They're not held accountable by anybody who elects them. | ||
| And I don't know what the solutions are. | ||
| People say, well, should they be regulated? | ||
| I think they should be transparent. | ||
| Or they will need to be regulated, but they have to at least not deceive the people. | ||
| So because the media has all the power, I wrote this book called American Pravda, and I believe that people don't know that they're being lied to by CNN and the New York Times, and they don't know that they're being de-boosted and shadow banned by Twitter and Facebook. | ||
| And I think these companies need to tell you that they're doing it. | ||
| It's not so bad if they take your account down and restore it, but the thing that's really scary | ||
| about the de-boosting and the shadow banning is that you don't know that it is happening to you. | ||
| Right, you can kinda see it, you can kinda feel it. | ||
| There are times when everything I'm doing is on fire, and then sometimes where it's just like nothing happens, | ||
| and those usually have a certain political bent to them, and then you end up really feeling | ||
| like you're in a mental institution, 'cause if you don't have evidence of anything, | ||
| I don't wanna be the guy that's running around screaming everything's a conspiracy | ||
| and they're coming after me. | ||
| We're doing this on YouTube right now. | ||
| Even when you do have evidence, like we have videotape after tape of people inside Twitter, including the Twitter direct messaging guy, saying that they have certain keywords and they consider you to be a Russian bot if you tweet about God, guns, and the American flag. | ||
| Most of these engineers are not Some of them are not American citizens. | ||
| They don't share American values. | ||
| And this individual says, if you tweet about flies, he says, who talks like that? | ||
| Who talks about God? | ||
| You must be a Russian bot. | ||
| I have the videotape. | ||
| And they still say it's fake. | ||
| So I think that it's one of those things where people need to see this stuff. | ||
| And I just want these companies to be honest. | ||
| About what they're doing. | ||
| I just want them to be honest. | ||
| Do they have to be honest, though? | ||
| I mean, we want them to be honest, right? | ||
| So I'm with you. | ||
| I want them to be honest. | ||
| And the reason I apply as much pressure on them, on Twitter and YouTube particularly, is because I want them to be better, right? | ||
| Like, I always say this, it's like, I got a million subscribers, I put out a television quality show on YouTube for free, and I don't even have an email address as someone at YouTube. | ||
| I have no contact. | ||
| at someone at YouTube. | ||
| Like that's legitimately crazy. | ||
| They're a huge company that offers a product. | ||
| I'm a user of the product that helps make them money through advertising and all that stuff. | ||
| I can't even get a human there. | ||
| But I don't think I can force them to be better, right? | ||
| Well, it's the job of investigative reporting to hold people accountable, | ||
| to test and affirm what is an outrage to people. | ||
| And I think that you can't lie under oath. | ||
| Mark Zuckerberg said in Congress last spring some things that may be contradicted by some of the documents we've unearthed. | ||
| There are laws against perjury. | ||
| And what people have to remember is I don't have a position on whether these companies should be regulated. | ||
| I honestly don't know What should be done? | ||
| I do know that people need to know what is happening inside the companies. | ||
| And I think that because they're so powerful people have no idea. | ||
| When you digest content from CNN and the New York Times, all that stuff gets filtered through Facebook. | ||
| In fact, when I did the Facebook story, I was shocked. | ||
| By some people in media telling me, well, I love the story, but I don't know if I can cover it. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Because we derive most of our revenue from Facebook. | ||
| The same thing happened during the 2016 election when I did the Hillary Clinton tapes and Bob Cramer resigned. | ||
| I mean, people have to remember that these companies are publicly traded companies. | ||
| They get their broadcast license from the FCC in some circumstances. | ||
| They're sort of entanglements. | ||
| There's a symbiotic relationship between the corporate press and the government. | ||
| And for those reasons, again, to go back to the campaign to recruit insiders, | ||
| it's going to require citizens. | ||
| It's gonna require outsiders to blow the whistle because no one in the government is going to do it. | ||
| Indeed, many of them are on the take. | ||
| Okay, so let's just do each platform one at a time. | ||
| So you just mentioned Facebook, so let's go to Facebook. | ||
| What do we need to know about what's going on with the Facebook algorithm and the way they're banning people and suspending people and the rest of it? | ||
| Well, I can tell you what our insider told us. | ||
| I try to only speak about the things I know 100%. | ||
| The insider was working in the content review, the content review tool at Facebook. | ||
| And she was a contractor for the company and she leaked us documents inside the company showing I guess what would be called as a de-boost of a live stream video and she said she specifically saw this on Steven Crowder's page She saw it on a few other pages. | ||
| She took a screenshot of a Mike Cernovich page, and on the page it says, I Action Live Distribution. | ||
| This was apparently some type of algorithm written to, from what we could see, to reduce content that was suicidal or violent, but none of these individuals were talking or doing anything that would rise to that level. | ||
| Now, there's two different parts of Facebook people need to understand. | ||
| There's a task system, where it seems like Facebook, after the election, hired hundreds, if not thousands, of people to monitor. | ||
| And they do a fairly good job. | ||
| If your page gets taken down, it can be reinstated. | ||
| You can file a complaint, and they have a pretty good process. | ||
| But then there's another part of Facebook. | ||
| that this insider told us about, where this algorithm was occurring, | ||
| and it was occurring automatically. | ||
| And they were identifying certain key words. | ||
| So she leaks us this troll report. | ||
| It's called a troll report. | ||
| And after the election, Facebook decided to get more involved in things. | ||
| I guess they didn't like the outcome of the election. | ||
| And maybe that's what this-- | ||
| They didn't think? | ||
| It was really about, I mean, independent people having an impact on society, | ||
| they don't like that. | ||
| and their hand needs more control. | ||
| So they had this troll report with certain key words, words that were not racist or problematic really, but they were words that were appropriated by right-wing meme culture, words like lulz and normie and even the MSM, mainstream media, was in this troll report since typically right-wingers use MSM more than the left. | ||
| Right, and these are just words or phrases or acronyms that usually are just meant in meme, funny, shareable, silly ways. | ||
| These are not a threat to democracy. | ||
| Saying MSM, mainstream media, is not an implication of racism. | ||
| Well, they also brought up Lauren Chen. | ||
| They brought her up. | ||
| She was in there as an example of someone who is needs to be dealt with vis-a-vis | ||
| the product intervention at Facebook. | ||
| And I don't know, I'm not aware of any activities or problems with her videos. | ||
| I mean, she's just someone who's sharing her mind on YouTube. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not sure what order we're putting these up in, but I've got Lauren Chen coming in here in an hour. | ||
| So we'll dive into this. | ||
| This is a cosmic coincidence. | ||
| So she links us these documents. | ||
| We put the story out. | ||
| Instantly what happens is the press, The Verge was the name of the outlet, | ||
| comes out, comes to Facebook's defense. | ||
| It always happens, by the way. | ||
| We did this story on Twitter. | ||
| And instantly BuzzFeed comes out. | ||
| Twitter says they don't do this. | ||
| That's not journalism. | ||
| I mean, Twitter says. | ||
| The job of investigative reporting is to question what they tell you. | ||
| But it's always the case when we do these videos that people come out and they say they don't do this. | ||
| And they came to Facebook's defense. | ||
| But the truth is, these documents were real. | ||
| And the two engineers that we interviewed, a guy named Seiji Yamamoto and Danny Ben David, actually confronted these guys on the street in San Francisco with a film crew. | ||
| Because no one would give me any answers. | ||
| But the documents are pretty self-explanatory. | ||
| And it's definitely, I don't know if Mark Zuckerberg knows that these things are happening, but if he does, he was lying under oath. | ||
| Right, so wouldn't the sensible thing to do, if you were Mark Zuckerberg, would be make sure that you don't really know what's going on at your company, so that when you get put in the position where you're under oath, you can basically say anything, and I think this would stand true for Jack at Twitter and a bunch of these guys. | ||
| If the buck never stops with you, and I'm sure you saw Jack from Twitter on with Joe Rogan and Tim Pool, and it was like, He just struck me as, oh, I don't really know what's going on with my company, but that seems like it's by design. | ||
| That's not an accident. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| There's a book by Blake Harris out in the last couple weeks about Palmer Luckey and Facebook, and I encourage you to read it. | ||
| It's unbelievable that this guy, Palmer Luckey, who founded Oculus, the virtual reality software, was dealt with by Mark Zuckerberg directly inside the company. | ||
| He was told not to be a Trump supporter. | ||
| I think we're getting him on the show, actually. | ||
| So, I don't know whether that's true or not. | ||
| I did see Jack Dorsey. | ||
| He's never addressed anything we've exposed. | ||
| They don't want to deal with the actual evidence. | ||
| There's videotapes of Abhinav Bhadrevu saying one strategy is to shadow ban. | ||
| I mean there's they don't want to actually address the evidence they want to say well They don't know what they're talking about well You know and by the way there is a difference between I think anytime you have human beings in a room making content decisions Subjectively you're gonna have these problems these are hard problems to solve but it goes back to the original Point of hiring hundreds if not thousands of people do the content review I think at the end of the day these companies don't like an independent people Influencing the minds of other people that's what this is And that would actually be okay if they were transparent about it, sort of, because then it would allow competition to fill that void. | ||
| But this sort of neither here nor there-ness of it seems to be the problem. | ||
| So, okay, so de-boosting seems to be the main problem with Facebook. | ||
| And that's interesting that it was hitting Crowder videos and Lauren Chen and a couple other people. | ||
| And this means you're streaming, right? | ||
| So this means when he's streaming that the number, it's just not going to feed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's when you do a live stream video, there are special tags, there are special qualities in that live stream, and they downrank the video. | ||
| They take away some of the special qualities that make it automatically show up on other people's timelines. | ||
| According to the insider that we spoke to, the other thing about these videos that are live streamed is that they're converted to text automatically, and machine learning goes through the video and identifies these Keywords. | ||
| So yes, the video would be downranked. | ||
| It would have its special qualities taken away. | ||
| And I think that Crowder settled out of court in 2016 with Facebook. | ||
| That's what he told me. | ||
| And I think that he's in the process of doing some more litigation related to some of the things they're doing to his videos. | ||
| Yeah, is there anything else we need to know on the Facebook front? | ||
| You've said they've gotten a little bit better when it comes to, they would ban people and suspend people left and right all the time. | ||
| I used to have my friend Faisal Al Muttar, who's been on the show many times, who's an ex-Muslim from Iraq and really working to secularize the Arab world. | ||
| I mean, doing incredible, incredible work. | ||
| I mean, this is a good man. | ||
| He would get banned all the time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I had a contact there, so I was able to help him get back on. | ||
| That seems to be happening a little bit less now. | ||
| I logged in there. | ||
| The insiders showed me how it works. | ||
| There's what you call a task function. | ||
| There are independent people in the company, low-level people, who just make arbitrary decisions to remove people, and that's wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And they shouldn't do that. | ||
| But there are adult supervision in the room. | ||
| There are people, there's like a conversation thread under each task. | ||
| They convert these things into what they call tasks. | ||
| And there are adults that say, well, that's no good. | ||
| And there are relationships with a lot of the publishers for entities such as your own. | ||
| And there's a relationship between a sales rep at Facebook. | ||
| And there seemed to be adult supervision. | ||
| But the problem is with the algorithm side of things, as far as I can see. | ||
| So is part of it that the algorithm, in many cases, the algorithms were written by people, you know, 10 years ago or 15 years ago who probably aren't at the company anymore? | ||
| Nobody really, like, who really understands what's going on with these algorithms? | ||
| Do the engineers at these companies even have a sense of what's really going on and how can they make sure that they're not manipulated by the low-level people and all that? | ||
| Well one of the problems I have as a reporter doing this is trying to, I'm not a tech person, I don't claim to have any special expertise, is trying to, people's eyes glaze over when you start talking about machine learning and SSI, live stream distribution, so it's trying to Get the people indignant about something that they have no idea what this means. | ||
| But yes, I think Danny Ben David wrote the algorithm at Facebook in 2017 and it was apparently intended to address violence or suicidal content. | ||
| And we believe that it was applied to politics and it was used for ill. | ||
| That seems to be what happened at Facebook. | ||
| So you're saying the road to hell is paved with good intention. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Is that what you're telling me? | ||
| Anything else going on at Facebook that we need to know about? | ||
| And do you sense that Zuckerberg, maybe because of being hauled in front of Congress, will do anything? | ||
| I can tell you that everyone inside the company knows what we did. | ||
| And there's, I don't know how many, 60,000 employees. | ||
| They all know exactly what we did. | ||
| And I think that when we personalize it by going to the, I mean, we went to the engineer's doors. | ||
| We went to the train station where the guy gets on the train every morning and I interviewed him and he said, I fear for my safety. | ||
| He's like, I'm scared. | ||
| I'm like, you're scared? | ||
| I should be afraid for my safety. | ||
| I mean, you guys are the ones spying on us and taking our videos down, and not to that, but I'm going after this trillion-dollar company. | ||
| But we personalized it, and I think that there's a lot. | ||
| Since I released this tape a month ago, there have been Many people inside the company that have approached me and I'm trying to, you know, it's always the question of, do you want to wear a camera or do you just want to feed me things anonymously? | ||
| My medium is video. | ||
| I think that there has to be video because if we don't tape these things, no one will believe it. | ||
| So then the person has to basically lose their job and I'll hire them. | ||
| And that's how our model tends to work these days. | ||
| How do you make sure that when someone reaches out to you that they're not just trolling you? | ||
| Like a triple agent? | ||
| Yeah, well basically that they would reach out to you knowing that you throw up one bad thing, and there's been little moments we can get into, that's gonna blow up all of the other good work that you've done. | ||
| So there's high incentive for somebody to do that? | ||
| Well, it's a risk. | ||
| I mean, listen, what we do is very high risk for many different reasons, which we can get into, I guess. | ||
| But what we do is extremely risky. | ||
| And in undercover work, you're going to get burned. | ||
| You try to use common sense. | ||
| There are things that we do. | ||
| You go very carefully. | ||
| You do your due diligence. | ||
| Oftentimes they send you something. | ||
| There's something called "portious interference" with violating a nondisclosure agreement. | ||
| It's a lot of complex legal analysis, but essentially they have to tell us something | ||
| first and then we can tell them to film what they have told us. | ||
| So we have to be very careful. | ||
| And we have been burned, by the way. | ||
| And he probably knows about some of those things. | ||
| But for the most part, we're 95 to 98% successful. | ||
| Not everything that people bring to us, do we publish. | ||
| Not every secret conversation that I've recorded, do we publish. | ||
| I think it's the choosing to publish something, the video that we've obtained, is really where the ethical calculation comes in. | ||
| All right, well, we could probably do a show just on Facebook, but let's move to the others because in a certain way, I think Facebook is becoming increasingly irrelevant, at least in the political space. | ||
| My judgment of that may be slightly off, but I just don't see that much traction anymore with young people. | ||
| Do you think that's basically fair? | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| I think that Facebook, I think that the majority of these companies disseminate their content through the social media platform. | ||
| So I think that they're always gonna be relevant and they dominate the market in terms of advertising revenue. | ||
| Even the big news organizations disseminate their content through Facebook, so I think they are relevant. | ||
| I don't know what the trajectory of that is. | ||
| Yeah, I don't mean that they're irrelevant, but it seems to me that the conversation that I really think is important about all this seems to be happening much more on Twitter. | ||
| Not necessarily that the money and the advertising and the mainstream media reach and all those things aren't relevant on Facebook, but that the real sort of, I don't know, the gestalt of this or something is on Twitter and YouTube. | ||
| So let's shift there for a second. | ||
| So Twitter, I'm sure you see me tweeting all the time about the shadow bans and the rest of it. | ||
| So what the hell is going on with Twitter? | ||
| Well, we went undercover into Twitter last year, in early 2018, and we caught a number of engineers describing shadow banning, removing posts when people don't know that they're sharing their content, they don't know that they're being banned. | ||
| We actually have quotes from the engineers talking about what they have done. | ||
| I mentioned earlier this direct messaging expert, a guy named Pranay Singh, who works on the Twitter DM team, Says that he can peruse all of your messages, your private DMs. | ||
| He says that there are keywords that Twitter uses to filter tweets, the American flag, God, guns, and then that we talked to another engineer. | ||
| Let's not jump over the first one there. | ||
| So they can literally look at your direct messages? | ||
| That's what they told us. | ||
| You were sending private direct messages? | ||
| They said they have teams, this is a guy named Clay Haines, said they have hundreds plus of people, and he says, quote, I've seen a lot of dick pics, unquote. | ||
| So I understand they have to do some of this to ban pornography and gore and content, but apparently this is what they told us. | ||
| Well, I don't know why they'd have to look at your private messages. | ||
| And they've also said that they don't do that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's the thing. | ||
| Why do they say one thing in public and another thing in private is what we've found. | ||
| But again, I try to only speak to what I can actually videotape of what the engineer said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And this Abhinav Bhadrevu guy, there was a congressional hearing with a lobbyist. | ||
| Ted Cruz did ask him, do you do this? | ||
| And he says, we do not do that. | ||
| Well, then why did your engineer say they were doing it? | ||
| So I just think they're being dishonest. | ||
| So that's the type of sort of underhanded tactic that they're using, | ||
| the shadowbanning, 'cause you have no idea. | ||
| Again, you just don't know when you put something out. | ||
| Is this getting to all of my people, or is it not? | ||
| Or can some people not retweet it? | ||
| Or the rest of it, I mean, it's a pretty clever, if they were trying to silence people, | ||
| it's a pretty clever way of doing it, right? | ||
| I think that's the unethical part. | ||
| They don't tell people that they are doing, and they don't tell people their political positions. | ||
| I just want them to be transparent. | ||
| I think Facebook had a thing, not to go back to Facebook, but they put out a thing, we are banning white nationalists. | ||
| Well, at least they're telling us where they stand. | ||
| Not that that is a good thing, white nationalism, but if they were to do more of that sort of thing and say, we are taking an editorial perspective. | ||
| In the New York Times, the Washington Post, you can see on the op-ed pages what they believe in. | ||
| They're rather transparent about it, I would say, more so. | ||
| So I think that these companies should take an editorial position. | ||
| But when we hear Pranay Singh at Twitter, on the hidden camera, say, who talks like that? | ||
| Who talks about God and the American flag and guns? | ||
| Must be a Russian bot, says Pranay Singh at Twitter. | ||
| Well, I'm fine with that as long as you say it publicly, as long as you make it part of your editorial position so that people know, okay, this company is extremely left-wing. | ||
| Do any of the bannings or any of this ever happen to people on the left? | ||
| I know there are some instances, maybe with Antifa accounts or a couple things like that, but it always seems like you have conservatives and people on the right talking about this. | ||
| Yeah, not to my knowledge. | ||
| I think our reporting overwhelmingly focused on They even mentioned Donald Trump's account and insinuated that they were working with the government to give information to, I don't know, deep state individuals. | ||
| This is Clay Haynes, a network security engineer at Twitter, told us about Donald Trump's accounts. | ||
| I've never seen anything on the other end of the spectrum from my vantage point. | ||
| When Trump's account got taken down for those couple hours and then it turned out to be just, what was it? | ||
| They said it was some accident or some young, some low-level guy did it. | ||
| For you, that must have been like a, whoa, that just shows you the power that any individual here would have access to be able to shut down the president. | ||
| For our purposes, I'm always trying to prove it. | ||
| I want to get them on tape admitting why they did it. | ||
| But there are these, You know, I guess you could call them low-level people that do things that are not acceptable, and it's policed, more so at Facebook, I would say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anything else going on with Twitter? | ||
| That's all that we reported on. | ||
| The shadow banning, the private DM messages, and the shadow banning were the big ones. | ||
| What do you make generally of the politicization of Twitter specifically? | ||
| So if you were to click on the search bar on Twitter on any given day and you see the Twitter moments, they're always showing you the trans story of the day or whatever the left is leaning with that day, they're always sort of pushing that down your throat. | ||
| Is that just consistent with everything else you view these companies as? | ||
| What I will say is that we have more stories coming on that sort of thing, so I would hold my tongue because I don't want to scoop myself. | ||
| We've got a number of people on the inside that are maybe focusing on the search functions at these organizations, so you'll have to stay tuned to see what we uncover. | ||
| Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. | ||
| I mean, when I search certain people, even if they're verified, if they happen to be on the right, sometimes they don't pop up, but I get a zillion random accounts before that. | ||
| Or I often think that the trending tab seems like it's completely manipulated, you know, what they are commenting on and what they're, you know, because sometimes there's a comment beneath the trend or whatever. | ||
| It all just seems made up and... | ||
| And for Project Veritas, the priority is to prove it, is to catch them on tape admitting it. | ||
| And that is what we will do. | ||
| And we will have more stories soon on all this. | ||
| All right, so let's move to YouTube. | ||
| We're on YouTube right now. | ||
| had people in the past, years ago, when I did, at one time I did have an email address | ||
| of someone at YouTube, and they told me, 'cause I kept saying people keep complaining | ||
| that they're unsubscribed from my channel. | ||
| I kept getting emails every day. | ||
| And one time, someone from YouTube admitted to me, they said, "There's a bug on your channel, | ||
| "and we're trying to work it out." | ||
| With a couple weeks after that, after I followed up a few times, | ||
| and then I couldn't get more information, I got an email from the guy saying, | ||
| "I'm no longer handling this case, "and now you have to go to the, | ||
| "you don't have an email address to respond to anymore. | ||
| "Go to the general tab and complain," or whatever. | ||
| So I have to publicly shame them all the time. | ||
| You probably see me doing this with Team YouTube on Twitter every time I get demonetized. | ||
| I fight them and then they usually, not always, Lila Rose for example, they did not re-monetize. | ||
| They didn't re-monetize? | ||
| They did not re-monetize that one. | ||
| It was demonetized by the algorithm and then confirmed by manual review. | ||
| Now that's their right to do that. | ||
| Again, you want some transparency with it. | ||
| But unsubscribes, videos not going out to feeds, all of these things, what evidence do we actually have that these things are happening? | ||
| Well, we did a story in 2017 between a New York Times reporter named Nick Dudik and YouTube. | ||
| And again, I can only talk about what I report. | ||
| That's my rule. | ||
| So I don't like to comment on things that I haven't had personal experience with. | ||
| But there was a relationship between these networks like the New York Times and the Huffington Post and YouTube. | ||
| And there are favors given to these organizations over, say, your show. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And that's something that we've reported on and exposed. | ||
| So what would a favor look like? | ||
| Well, preferential treatment. | ||
| And getting into the scientifics of it, I'm not sure, but preferential treatment where the video | ||
| would show up more frequently at the top of the search query. | ||
| It's very, it's-- | ||
| This guy Nick Dudick, who was a social accounts video editor for the New York Times, talked about his relationship with this guy inside YouTube. | ||
| So there's a sort of, you know, There's a two-way street there between the two companies where favors are done with the New York Times. | ||
| Now, why are they doing them favors? | ||
| That's what I was talking about earlier, where these companies have enormous power because even the likes of the old media transmit their messages through the new media. | ||
| That's where the majority of people get their information from. | ||
| But that guy, Nick Dudick, actually the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet is his name. | ||
| Actually, we believe, let that guy go. | ||
| He actually terminated Nick Dudick for telling us this stuff. | ||
| No one reported on that. | ||
| But I don't know whether they terminated him for telling the truth or for lying about what he had said. | ||
| So how do you combat that? | ||
| The part where every time you guys release something that I look at it and I'm always hesitant to retweet it. | ||
| I've shared some of your videos sometimes, but I'm always like, ah, if this is the one where, you know, he got duped or, you know, it's only being shared by Breitbart or whatever, then it's like, ah. | ||
| Basically, that you have some sort of secondary layer of censorship to get through. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you what, we've done 200. | ||
| You know what I mean, because Huffington Post and BuzzFeed and CNN, they ain't touching any of this. | ||
| Well, they have touched it. | ||
| I mean, Anderson Cooper reported on the stuff we did during the 2016 election on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. | ||
| Our stories in the 2018 election made the New York Times. | ||
| We've gotten a lot of local media coverage. | ||
| We've been, in terms of being duped, Out of 200 undercover investigators, they say things are edited. | ||
| They're edited out of context. | ||
| They're not real. | ||
| I mean, and you actually ask them, what specific edits are you talking about? | ||
| Because to say that video is edited, it's like saying words are arranged. | ||
| All journalism is edited to tell a story. | ||
| And they say, well, you didn't wear the pimp costume in the ACORN office. | ||
| Well, you know, OK. | ||
| But I presented myself as a pimp. | ||
| And even the New York Times said that. | ||
| And pimp protocol doesn't require wearing a pimp for it to be a pimp. | ||
| You don't have to wear a big pink jacket and drive a Cadillac. | ||
| No. | ||
| And they'll say, well, there was a scene change in the NPR investigation. | ||
| OK, is that the best you got? | ||
| I mean, there was a cutaway shot where the guy was laughing and I was narrating over it. | ||
| And 200 investigations. | ||
| I mean, they've printed 300 corrections and retractions about me. | ||
| I have a wall in my office called the wall of shame and it's all these corrections and retractions about me. | ||
| The Washington Post said I went after Acorn due to an animus about African-Americans voting. | ||
| They made it up. | ||
| Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Carol Lennon just made something up out of whole cloth. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I think there is a I think it's not about the, um, what we do is real. | ||
| The tapes you see, there's never been a case where what you saw wasn't real. | ||
| There was one thing with the Washington Post that blew up. | ||
| They turned their cameras back around on us and everyone, you know, said, well, that's unethical. | ||
| What exactly was unethical about it? | ||
| Because we went undercover into CNN. | ||
| We infiltrated something called Rain Bros, which was a gay group where this producer was in. | ||
| Nobody questioned the ethics of it. | ||
| Nobody questioned the ethics because the end was so obvious. | ||
| And whether or not you think that the means are justified depends upon whether you think there's a compelling public interest in what you are exposing. | ||
| So when these things get interrupted, then people say it's unethical. | ||
| But we think that undercover work is justified, particularly into the Big Ten companies and the big media, due to the urgency of the circumstances. | ||
| But in all of our work, no one's ever able to actually say what exactly has been fake about it. | ||
| And that's from my perspective. | ||
| So are you shocked at actually how the collapse of mainstream media has precipitated so quickly at this point? | ||
| Like, it seems to me that it's just, it's over. | ||
| I mean, now, just in the last couple of weeks now with Trump and Russia, and just the amount that these people have just lied over and over. | ||
| And finally, thanks to Twitter and YouTube and the rest of it, if we're not being shadowbanned and everything else, there's enough of us that can get a counter-narrative out there. | ||
| But they just keep doing it. | ||
| Well, I think it's the death of, I think it's, you've covered, because I watch your show, a lot of the political reasons why media is dying. | ||
| But I actually think it's, it goes back to what Jeff Zucker said in the last two weeks about, I don't know if you saw that tweet, where Brian Stelter said, we're not investigators. | ||
| Well, that was an unbelievable moment, because that's really, they're not investigative reporters, and people have to remember. | ||
| Right, talking about CNN. | ||
| Talking about CNN. | ||
| CNN, we're not investigators. | ||
| We're journalists. | ||
| Now, here's the thing. | ||
| This is very important. | ||
| People talk about politics. | ||
| People talk about, you know, the media's algorithms. | ||
| But it's also economics. | ||
| Investigative reporting is very, very expensive. | ||
| And it's a naturally philanthropic activity. | ||
| Investigative reporting, going back 40, 50 years, it was always a lost leader on the company's balance sheets. | ||
| People have to remember, these are businesses. | ||
| They're not interested in the public interest. | ||
| They're interested in generating a profit. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| But don't pretend that you serve the public interest. | ||
| We had a CNN insider on tape, John Bonifield, said this is a business. | ||
| The CEO of CNN, Jeff Zucker, told us Stop talking about the climate accords. | ||
| Let's get back to Russia. | ||
| It's about ratings It's not about ethics and it's been it's been it's important to illustrate though You're not saying there's anything inherently wrong with that. | ||
| He's allowed to make money. | ||
| He's allowed to do business But but don't pretend you're operating in the public interest because investigative reporting let me let me you had mentioned that you know people don't you People are wary of what we do. | ||
| It's naturally the tip of the spear. | ||
| You have to use deception to a degree. | ||
| Either you deceive your source or you deceive your audience. | ||
| The problem with journalism and the reason why it's in decline is because these leakers, these sources and government and elsewhere intentionally transmit stuff to the media and they parrot it to the masses. | ||
| A.I.E. | ||
| Jeff Zucker saying we don't investigate what we're told. | ||
| And that's what has been referred to as a pseudo-event. | ||
| They create something, they transmit it unquestionably, and there's the economic factor. | ||
| There's a symbiotic relationship between people and power. | ||
| What we do at Veritas is we go undercover and we completely defy the narrative. | ||
| And most networks don't want to air it because it's risky, because it's questioning the normative order of things. | ||
| It's easier to do little videos about squirrels on skateboards. | ||
| Now, I did this big story during the election. | ||
| Bob Kramer resigned from the Hillary Clinton campaign. | ||
| And a lot of these companies say, we're afraid that if Hillary Clinton wins, she'll take away our FCC license. | ||
| So it's this economic issue that is inherent in media and it requires independent people to do something about it because the networks are not going to do something about it. | ||
| They are in the business of generating a profit. | ||
| It's so fascinating to me, because it's like, they're not even in the business, right, I get it, so they're in the business of making a profit, and that's fine, that is what business is, but they're not even in the business of pretending anymore, because it's like during the whole Mueller investigation, every week there was another leak to the New York Times, and it's always an anonymous leak, and then for the last two years, they ran anonymous leak stories, and it's like, shouldn't have somebody have been investigating why the Mueller operation is leaking? | ||
| That actually would have been a story. | ||
| Where was that story out of the New York Times? | ||
| Well, they had James Clapper and John Brennan. | ||
| James Clapper, who lied under oath! | ||
| These are intelligence agency people, and maybe not the most always ethical people, and they're just parroting what they're told on TV. | ||
| And again, I go back to this whole distinction, because when you report from a podium, when you say something at a press conference, The damage to society done by broadcasting what you are told on the record is often more pernicious than the damage that, say, I do by deceiving some guy in a bar so that I can get the truth out of them. | ||
| It is a huge difference and I think that journalists tend to be, you sort of have to play confidence games, you know, you have to Seduce your source, so to speak. | ||
| But there's a relationship between sources and the media that I think has become corrupt. | ||
| I think that the reliance upon anonymous sources has become corrupted. | ||
| You look at Bob Woodward, legendary reporter, I think he's a great journalist. | ||
| By the way, I don't think these journalists are bad journalists. | ||
| I don't even think they're bad people. | ||
| I think they're part of an industrial system of production that manufactures the public's consent. | ||
| But you look at Bob Woodward. | ||
| He writes a book called Fear, and he uses quotes second-hand from anonymous sources on background, on deep background, hearsay quotes, and then he recreates events, and he puts those events in quotation marks. | ||
| And I get attacked for selective editing? | ||
| I don't report anything unless you can hear and see it come out of the person's own mouth. | ||
| So I think that journalism has become corrupted due to this over-reliance upon sources, anonymous sources especially, and I think that that's why we need videotapes. | ||
| I literally remember being in like junior high school and watching CNN and they would say a source on Capitol Hill. | ||
| And I would always think this is insane. | ||
| A source on Capitol Hill, anyone can be on Capitol Hill. | ||
| It could be the guy that's walking his dog on Capitol Hill, who's the janitor for the fast food joint. | ||
| He's a source on Capitol Hill. | ||
| We don't see that source's face. | ||
| We don't know what motivates that person. | ||
| We don't know what words were used by that source. | ||
| We don't know if that person exists. | ||
| We don't know if that person exists. | ||
| I mean, can you imagine if I said, there are sources inside CNN who says that Jeff Zucker said. | ||
| They'd call me a liar. | ||
| And there's an analogy here. | ||
| I heard someone say that when you use anonymous source, it's like you're taking withdrawal out of a bank account of credibility. | ||
| But you have to deposit into the bank account trust with the audience. | ||
| And nowadays we don't see these We don't see these anonymous sources. | ||
| We see an over-reliance upon, and every time you actually open the reporter's notebook, every time you look at the transcript, every time you see the raw data, there is a difference between what you are told and by the people that are asking you to trust them. | ||
| But that's the bottom line. | ||
| These media companies don't trust us with the raw information. | ||
| They don't want us to have the raw, unfiltered truth. | ||
| They need to propagandize us with their version of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's crazy once you see it, right? | ||
| Like once you really clearly see it. | ||
| Like I was actually in the green room with Jordan Peterson while he was being interviewed by Nellie Bowles, who was the author of the New York Times, who made that whole brouhaha about enforced monogamy. | ||
| And it's like, that is not what this conversation was about. | ||
| Or I had a whole day here, literally an entire day from 8 a.m. | ||
| to about 8 p.m. | ||
| with a journalist, a journalist, from Der Spiegel, who then wrote a piece about me and labeled me the grand illusionist of the alt-right. | ||
| Yeah, they leave their labels. | ||
| And you know what they did? | ||
| There's a law, I didn't know this at the time, but there's a law in Germany that if you're gonna print something, a quote from somebody, you have to get the quote cleared. | ||
| So he spends all day with me. | ||
| Hours of talking. | ||
| Hours and hours and hours. | ||
| He doesn't quote me once. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I mean, that's the level that these guys... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They called me the Master of Ceremonies instead of an anchor. | ||
| They used Master of Ceremonies. | ||
| I mean, it's like the Washington Post guy. | ||
| Sounds like Grandmaster. | ||
| The Washington Post has printed like five retractions just in reporting about me. | ||
| It's like, these guys have the audacity to claim that I'm a liar. | ||
| In one article they said, what the latest Project Veritas video leaves out, and the actual fact that I allegedly left out was that this CNN producer that we recorded was based in Atlanta. Supposedly this was a big fact. But I didn't | ||
| leave it out. It was in the video. | ||
| The Washington Post had to print a retraction. They didn't change the headline what the video | ||
| left out. They retracted the entire thing. There's another thing in the Washington Post about this | ||
| book, Fear. And there was a quote that said, "There's no evidence that he did not say the | ||
| things attributed to him." | ||
| In referencing, there's no evidence he did not say. | ||
| We live in this weird world and I think that videotape cuts through all the propaganda like a hot knife through butter. | ||
| If you catch these people on videotape, They're forced to address it. | ||
| And I think that video is, that's why we choose the medium of video, because words do not transfix in a way that video does. | ||
| And I think that words are the, frankly, the propagandist's tool, because they put you in a box by calling you names like that, by calling me masters of ceremonies, by calling you what you were. | ||
| You're not what that is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You are you. | ||
| God, I know we could trade these stories all day long. | ||
| I'll just give you one more. | ||
| But that same reporter from New York Times, Nellie Bowles, she wrote the story when Peterson and I left Patreon. | ||
| They actually did a story on it, which was quite shocking. | ||
| It's a horrible story filled with factual errors. | ||
| But in there, there's a quote from the head of trust and safety at Patreon where she says, you know, you're not allowed to say these words on our platform except So as I'm sure you know, Carl Benjamin's argument, | ||
| I've never said those words on their platform. | ||
| I contacted the author and it's like, she just doesn't care. | ||
| And she knows she's not gonna get fired and why even tell the truth? | ||
| So it's like, they just don't stop. | ||
| One thing that people are doing in more frequency is recording their interviews with these people. | ||
| And that's something that I would encourage as long as it's legal to do so. | ||
| But you're on the record. | ||
| So it's legal because they're consenting to the conversation, even in California. | ||
| And we had one individual inside CNN record Allison Cameron. | ||
| She did this long panel discussion about voter fraud. | ||
| They cut the tape right before the guy actually brought up instances. | ||
| So something that people are doing now is they're audio recording these interviews for that reason and releasing the full interview on YouTube. | ||
| Right, so we've seen a lot of that, actually. | ||
| Tommy Robinson has done that. | ||
| This guy Avi Yemeni has done that with this Jim Jefferies video. | ||
| I would implore your audience, never do an interview with the press unless you audio tape it. | ||
| And that's for your own protection, for sure. | ||
| The other thing you can do, at least in our situation, is I really only do these shows now if it's live. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If it's live, you can't edit me. | ||
| You might be able to sandbag me, and I have to be smart enough to work with that, but you at least can't edit me. | ||
| Well, Andrew Breitbart was one of my mentors, and we were different people, but he would take this perspective of, you know, just as much press as possible. | ||
| I'm proudly who I am. | ||
| I guess it was a different world 10 years ago, but he would just give them everything. | ||
| I think that there's two different ways to play it, but certainly to record the interviews is a good path, and some people are leaking us these audiotapes. | ||
| We put the long version out on Twitter, and Alison Camerota at CNN was so humiliated by this raw version of the interview that she actually removed, she left Twitter because people were tweeting at her all these angry tweets. | ||
| So we talked a little bit about anonymous sources. | ||
| What do you make of just like the anonymous accounts all over the platforms that often are the drivers of a lot of the bad behavior? | ||
| So for example, there are anonymous accounts that have 20, 30, 40,000 followers that I see all day long selectively editing video clips of me or of just any decent human being. | ||
| And it's like they can do it with complete impunity because their names aren't attached to any of this. | ||
| And what are you gonna do? | ||
| What do we do in situations like that? | ||
| I mean, I've got people impersonating me, and I'm not verified. | ||
| I've got 500,000 followers. | ||
| I noticed that this morning, actually. | ||
| I don't know who else. | ||
| I guess there's Julian Assange, who's also not verified. | ||
| I don't know how to solve these problems. | ||
| I don't know what the public policy solutions are. | ||
| My perspective, when everyone asks me, what do we do about it? | ||
| I say, the solution is to inform the people. | ||
| The solution is to show people the rot, the corruption, to rake the muck, as it were, to be a muckraker, to illuminate all the problems. | ||
| Because I think the solutions become self-evident when people know that there's a guy in a room in San Francisco arbitrarily determining, well, we're going to take away the blue checkmark. | ||
| We don't like that guy's politics. | ||
| Film that. | ||
| Show people those conversations behind closed doors. | ||
| There's impunity. | ||
| They can't get away with it. | ||
| And that is the solution. | ||
| The solution is to expose it. | ||
| On one hand, I don't want to complain about it because it makes me feel like I'm ingratiating myself to Twitter. | ||
| I'm not a verified human being on the platform. | ||
| And why not? | ||
| What is the definition of being verified? | ||
| But certainly, when you are verified, it does help your stories get out. | ||
| Well, the point is that people know that it's actually you. | ||
| And as you said, you've had people... Many people impersonate me. | ||
| I don't know what the solution is, but I know that to find the solution, we have to properly identify the problem and educate the people with what they're saying. | ||
| You need a mole in the verified department who can just click that button. | ||
| Maybe we already have one. | ||
| The always question is whether to cut bait. | ||
| If you will be verified with your blue check by the time this video goes up, I will be very impressed. | ||
| That would be amazing. | ||
| That would be interesting. | ||
| Somehow I think you haven't been sitting on that one. | ||
| No, well, the question with undercover work is when do you cut bait? | ||
| Because you have these people who are on the inside, and then you have to make an editorial decision on when do we release the story. | ||
| Like, we have people right now, right now, as I speak, inside the big networks, who work for them. | ||
| They come to me, and they are so sick by how these companies project themselves, you know, all the news that's fit to print, the most trusted name in news. | ||
| That is not what they hear in the newsrooms. | ||
| They hear -- I mean, we had one person say that people were crying. | ||
| They were crying the night of the election at The Washington Post. | ||
| Everyone was sobbing. | ||
| And the things that were being said that night would shock you. | ||
| So these people come to me. | ||
| We're calling it the Be Brave initiative. | ||
| And we think that the heroes are these individuals on the inside. | ||
| And I think that they'll blow the whistle, they'll tape the networks, and hopefully that that will change people's perception of big media once and for all. | ||
| How do you think Trump somehow understood this? | ||
| How is it that this orange man with crazy hair somehow understood that. | ||
| He was always sort of a Twitter troll and doing his thing and he understood celebrity and he understood public relations and business, obviously. | ||
| But this very specific thing that we've been talking about for the last hour, Trump really seems to understand this. | ||
| Do you have any sense of what that is? | ||
| My perspective is that it was about earned media. | ||
| It was about generating earned media. | ||
| I think that there was something written about this where his advisor said, you can't run this campaign on earned media alone. | ||
| You have to be more traditional. | ||
| I said, the hell I can't. | ||
| Watch me. | ||
| And he got some, I don't know how much it was, five, ten billion dollars in earned media. | ||
| It's this notion of, I think a lot of people, particularly on the conservative side of the spectrum, tend to complain about, whine about, you know, the mainstream media. | ||
| I call it the conservative ghetto. | ||
| They stay talking to themselves, but But then there's this other vision where you hack the media, you participate in the media. | ||
| Again, going back to Andrew Breitbart, he would love to go on these shows. | ||
| The definition of success is being covered by the mainstream media. | ||
| And it's a tough dance because they attack you, they call you Jordan names and those sorts of things. | ||
| But if you play it the right way and get covered by the media, that's real power. | ||
| And Trump understood that. | ||
| He could win the election with earned media. | ||
| It was absolutely brilliant. | ||
| Nobody else saw it. | ||
| Everyone thought he was nuts. | ||
| But he won the election on earned media, on getting these big ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times to cover him, to talk about him. | ||
| It was brilliant. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| And everyone thought it couldn't be done. | ||
| And he did it. | ||
| And by the way, I have the same vision, although on a you know, lesser degree, I tell my team, I tell my | ||
| employees, the definition of success is on the front page of the New York Times. | ||
| Because in Manhattan, what people have to realize is that if it is not in the New York | ||
| Times, it does not exist. | ||
| They don't pay attention to things on the outside. | ||
| I hate to give them that power, but it's still true to a degree. | ||
| So to be successful is to be covered by the people that we hate, and also not to get stuck where we want to be loved by those people. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because that's the problem. | ||
| That is the problem. | ||
| We want to be loved. | ||
| And Rush Limbaugh says, you know, I learned that to be hated is a sign of success. | ||
| And that's where a lot of Republicans go wrong. | ||
| Trump did not go wrong. | ||
| A lot of Republicans want to be loved by the New York Times, by Politico. | ||
| It's tempting. | ||
| I want to be loved. | ||
| Everyone wants to be loved. | ||
| But we're going to be hated for what we say and do. | ||
| So Trump's getting covered by them, but he also calls them fake news. | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| It's Andrew Breitbart 2.0. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So in summation here, if you had to If you were in the predictions game, where do you see the platforms? | ||
| Do you sense that the way we communicate right now where we're all on these things and we're all subjected to these subjective rules and seemingly arbitrary decisions and all of those things, do you sense that five, ten years from now it's going to still be the same or do you think that things are going to massively change? | ||
| They are only going to change if independent citizens have the courage and the willpower to do something about it. | ||
| I don't trust the politicians. | ||
| I don't trust the people on television to do anything about it because they're stuck in the status quo and they're fat and happy. | ||
| It's going to require citizens, independent people. | ||
| You know some of these insiders. | ||
| I know some of them and others. | ||
| They have to blow the whistle. | ||
| They have to summon the righteous indignation. | ||
| I think that journalism has the power to change hearts and minds, real investigative reporting, to be what has been called the custodians of conscience. | ||
| And if we can shock the people, show them what's going on behind the closed doors, I think it can change things. | ||
| If that does not happen, I think we'll enter a brave new world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, if that doesn't happen, we're long gone, right? | |
| But there are people, I know these people, they're gonna blow the whistle, but if that does not happen, Then we're going to enter a brave new world where the story has to be so big. | ||
| Here's the silver lining. | ||
| Even if we get banned, even if you get banned, I get banned, everyone gets banned, the stories will come out and other people will share them. | ||
| Proxies will share them. | ||
| And they'll share the information that people will have a right to know, that will want to see. | ||
| But I think it's going to require an effort by Independent citizens and brave patriots willing to blow the whistle. | ||
| That is the only saving grace I can see for this country. | ||
| The heroes amongst us that they can, to pitch a little bit, they can go to our website and I will give them a camera. | ||
| I will pay their legal bills. | ||
| I will hire them. | ||
| If they are fired by their employer. | ||
| Twitter and Facebook have not sued me. | ||
| I get sued a lot. | ||
| I have not been sued by those companies. | ||
| They do not want to give heft and weight to the stories that we have unmasked. | ||
| They do not want to give us free publicity. | ||
| So there is a strategy here to hold these people accountable. | ||
| I'm going to ask you one more, actually, which is I've asked this of a few of my guests that I think are on the forefront of saying unpopular things or doing work that is challenging in an interesting way. | ||
| What is it about you? | ||
| Why do you, James O'Keefe, put your ass on the line? | ||
| If Veritas went away tomorrow and I had no employees, I'd be out hustling on the street with a camcorder. | ||
| This is what I was born to do. | ||
| I can't do anything else. | ||
| And it goes back to this whole idea of a justice complex. | ||
| Like the Acorn investigation? | ||
| That cost me a thousand dollars to do. | ||
| I borrowed my grandmother's chinchilla coat, a camcorder that a friend gave me, and a borrowed copy of Final Cut Pro. | ||
| And ACORN was defunded. | ||
| Both houses of Congress were democratically controlled. | ||
| President Obama signed the bill. | ||
| It doesn't take money to do this. | ||
| It doesn't take power to do this. | ||
| It takes will. | ||
| It takes a belief in justice. | ||
| It takes a desire to expose something, to inform your fellow citizens, and finding people who are like-minded. | ||
| If they were to take away my organization, I'd be doing this for the rest of my life. | ||
| I had nothing else I could do, because I believe in it. | ||
| I actually believe in what I'm doing. | ||
| And the people that I find, I have a profound responsibility to serve the people, to tell the truth to the people. | ||
| And people coming forward that want to blow the whistle, this is why Veritas now exists, is to equip those people and to protect I'd be willing to go to jail to protect a source. | ||
| I have been to jail. | ||
| I've been incarcerated. | ||
| I've been sued. | ||
| I've been set up. | ||
| It's not the worst thing. | ||
| The worst thing is not to serve the people that come to me and want to tell a story. | ||
| And that's why we exist and we're going to keep doing it until people are honest. | ||
| On that note, you can follow James and Project Veritas on Twitter for as long as they're still on Twitter. |
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