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March 28, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:37
3635 Speaking Truth To Power | James O'Keefe and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I am here with James O'Keefe.
Dear heavens above, I hope this isn't being recorded.
He is an award-winning journalist and the founder and president of both Project Veritas and Project Veritas Action, a non-profit organization dedicated to investigating corruption, dishonesty, waste and fraud in both public and private institutions.
Young Mr.
O'Keefe is also the spectacular author of the New York Times bestseller, Breakthrough on Guerrilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy.
The website, projectverites.com, and please follow him on Twitter at twitter.com forward slash James O'Keefe III, and we'll put links to all of that below.
James, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you for having me.
I am a big backstory kind of guy, so I'd like to know the origin story of where you were coming from.
So, you know, of course, I did my reading and background, and you majored in philosophy, and you had, as far as I understand it, two major mentors in your life, of course, Ben Wetmore and, of course, Andrew Breitbart.
So, can you tell me where this kind of – I mean, I remember you doing the stuff at the Lucky Charms in university and so on, so where did this approach to bringing truth to power come from for you, do you think?
Well, that's a great question, and I really appreciate the chance to actually get into the weeds.
Very few people have asked me questions I've never been asked before.
Where did it all come from?
Well, fundamentally, let's talk about journalism.
I was in college.
I was at Rutgers University, and I'm kind of an introverted person, so I would sit in the dining hall every day.
And instead of sort of making friends my freshman and sophomore year, I would read the New York Times every day, front to back every day.
As I read the New York Times, and I was not a political person, I still don't think that I'm overtly political.
The effects of our work may be political, but I read the New York Times and I was outraged by what I read because I felt as though the world was not being portrayed accurately by the New York Times.
It was that resentment, that feeling inside of me thinking that these journalists are not reporting things accurately.
It was just It wasn't any particular story.
It was just a sentiment that I got reading the New York Times.
And so just for those who haven't read it, the New York Times, it's composed of about half ads.
It's about a quarter bashing Republicans and it's about a quarter retractions.
But sorry, James, go ahead.
So I would read this paper every day and I was I was outraged by what I saw.
And it was journalism is fundamentally about exposing things for what they are and telling the American people what is actually going on and being accurate.
And the problem with most, and this is what I've learned through just reading a lot and just living in the world and watching news, is I was angry about the fact that these broadcasters and these reporters were not, they were mincing words.
They were omitting certain facts.
These are things that you and I see every day in media, but it just seemed like the media was not doing the job.
And I felt that deep inside myself.
That's what gave me The inspiration to start my own newspaper at Rutgers University called The Centurion.
Centurion after a Roman army.
I started my own newspaper at Rutgers University, this little 20-page magazine.
I would do things like report on how much money my professors made.
It's a public school.
Rutgers is the only state university not called the State University of New Jersey.
It's just called Rutgers.
I would go and issue FOIA requests, New Jersey public records requests, and how much salaries my professors made.
And I would print the amount of money, $200,000 a year for being a culture liaison officer or what have you.
No one even knows what that is.
And I would put the newspapers into the P.O. boxes of the professors so they would get their mail every morning.
They'd be like, why is he making more money than I am?
So I became sort of this campus muckety-muck muckraker.
In one newspaper, I went into the dumpster.
I went dumpster diving.
The secret society called Cap'n Skull at Rutgers.
It's called Skull and Bones at Yale.
I printed all the people in the secret society and exposed that all of the people in the so-called secret society were the who's who of student government and the LGBT organization and I revealed and henceforth they were no longer a secret society.
So this is what I did and what motivated me and of course there was the Lucky Charms ban where I was offended by political correctness so I took it to its logical extreme.
Trying to ban Lucky Charms because they're racist to Irish people, myself being an Irishman.
And the reason I did all this was because I wanted to really shake things up.
I wanted to show people what was happening and I was angry by what I read in the pages of the New York Times.
Well, and I don't know if you got this.
I studied philosophy in university as well.
And there is a kind of switch the light on thing that goes on in philosophy.
Philosophy is supposed to bring the firelights of curiosity to the dark recesses of society and bring to the attention of people things that were formerly obscured.
So I don't know if you were interested in philosophy and this was a branch of that or whether philosophy helped stimulate your desire to kind of switch on the light and see the bugs.
That's a great point.
I've always cared deeply about I was a minor in sociology.
Of course, in these classes, I was inundated with Marxist, Stalinist, literally Stalinist.
At Rutgers, Paul Robeson was an avowed Stalinist.
For those of you who don't know Paul Robeson, he's the guy who was the voice behind the Grinch.
You're a mean one, Mr.
Grinch.
That was Paul Robeson, who was an African-American alumnus of Rutgers University.
And there were buildings named after Paul Robeson at Rutgers.
Now, guess who else was a Rutgers graduate?
Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning free market economist.
And there were no buildings named after Milton Friedman.
He was a singer too, right?
Didn't he do Old Man River?
He was originating that role, if I remember rightly.
Right.
So, we tried to have a statue erected of Milton Friedman on the campus.
We got a reaction from the president of the university, and that taught me another thing.
It taught me that, wow, you can actually, not only can you make them live up to their own book of rules, as Alinsky said, by trying to ban Lucky Charms and then putting them in a difficult predicament, but you can also get reactions from those in power by being bold.
And that's what Veritas, you know, Years later would do.
We'd get reactions from multiple presidents.
We'd get reactions from congressional committees by exposing things.
So that was sort of the genesis.
And I could talk at length about it, but you tell me where you want to take the conversation.
Oh, listen.
Again, I mean, backstory we've got time for.
So Ben Wetmore and Andrew Breitbart, how did they influence what you ended up becoming?
Well, let me first say Andrew Breitbart.
Andrew Breitbart, there are very few people like him.
He was a force of nature.
And the thing that he used to do, in fact, I think you do it, by the way.
I'm an admirer of yours.
I'm an admirer of people like Mike Cernovich and people on Twitter who hold these people accountable.
Andrew was on the front lines of that.
Andrew would go after the journalists personally when they lied.
And he would do it on behalf of thousands of people.
He was always tweeting.
He'd tweet hundreds of times a day while he was running a company, while he was giving interviews.
He was like a machine.
Unfortunately, that's probably one of the reasons why he died so young because he lived a life that was ten times what you and I live.
I'll tell you one Andrew Breitbart story, a few stories that people have heard.
I talk to Andrew almost every day.
One time, I did a story on the New Jersey teachers' unions.
And it made the wire, made the Associated Press, as our story did last week.
But this is about six years ago.
It's called Teachers Gone Wild.
This public school teacher was bragging and gloating about how she could spend taxpayer money playing video games and doing other things.
And Chris Christie literally had just, just given a speech at some forum where he mentioned my video.
And he said, you've got to watch this Veritas video.
It's enlightening and it's enraging.
I had Chris Christie just finished speaking that Andrew Breitbart had transcribed the whole speech and wrote an article on Breitbart.com and called me to say, James, you've got to see what Chris Christie just said.
I said, Andrew, you're like an intern, a stenographer, a publicity agent, a tweeter, and a chairman of Breitbart.
How did you do that?
But that's the way that Andrew was.
And Andrew understood more than anyone I've ever met the power of how to play the media against itself.
He would play it like the piano.
He would say there's a performance art to it.
And he would earn media.
And when we did the Acorn story together with a pimp and prostitute going around and starting brothels, when I showed him those tapes, I said, Andrew, take a look at this.
He looked at the tape of them telling me how to start a child prostitution ring.
And he goes, James, we're going to embarrass the New York Times with this.
At first, I'm like, what are you talking about?
We're going to embarrass Acorn.
He said, no, the New York Times is going to come out And they're going to either ignore it or they're going to say that it's an isolated incident.
So he was playing chess in his head about how to play the media.
And soon enough, when we broke the story, New York Times would not talk about it.
The Congress of the United States defunded ACORN before the New York Times even assigned a reporter to the story.
And that forced the New York Times to apologize.
The New York Times actually issued an apology for not reporting the story.
And Andrew predicted it.
That is, to me, some of the most powerful work that you do, is to point out not the frailties of individual human beings, but the giant cover-up that the media has to those who are left-inclined or big government-inclined or Democrat-inclined.
And it's a shame to me that individual sacrifices, in a sense, need to be made to show the large layer of obfuscation that passes for objective news in America.
That's exactly right.
There was one more story along those lines.
Andrew would tell me the media is everything.
The media is everything.
In fact, one time my attorney got into an argument with Andrew.
This was about six years ago.
I was arrested and I was falsely accused.
I posed as a telephone repairman in order to get a government worker to admit to me that they were shutting their phones down.
I wasn't trying to do anything illegal.
I was trying to get a candid admission.
And sometimes to get people to open up to you, you have to pretend to be something you are not.
This is a storied tradition of undercover reporters.
So, of course, the government would overcharge me with a crime I didn't commit and Andrew Breitbart said, James, just go on ABC News dressed like you were in the video.
You look like the village people.
This is not exactly a Verizon technician.
You had a goofy fluorescent vest on and it was silly.
And my lawyer said, don't do that.
My lawyer said, don't do that because it's risky.
You'll piss off the prosecutors and so forth.
And Andrew said to my lawyer, James, you got to tell your lawyer, the media is everything.
Politics is downstream from culture in this country.
Unfortunately, our Justice Department has been so politicized under the Obama administration that he said, James, you've got to tell the people what the truth is and the people will put pressure on, unfortunately, the prosecutors.
That's just the way the system works.
My mentors taught me the media is everything.
And politics is downstream from culture.
That's Andrew Breitbart.
And there's so much more to say, but that's a lot.
Oh, let's do one more.
I love Breitbart stories.
So if you have another one on the tip of your tongue, I'd love to hear it.
Yeah, there's another story.
Andrew was self-described, and he was very public about this, his so-called ADD. And, you know, he was – the internet – I guess he'd say the internet cured him because it allowed his brain to function the way that it did.
I mean, he could tweet and copy and paste things and put them all on Twitter and everything.
At one time, we were going down the street in Westwood, California, where he lived, Los Angeles.
And we're going to the ATM. And all he had to do was put his card into the ATM and deposit a check.
And we stood there for 20 minutes as he He hit the wrong button and then went on a tangent about the media and the New York Times and hit the wrong button again.
I realized I was standing there for 20 minutes.
He wasn't putting the check into the ATM. In many ways, him and I were similar along those lines, but Andrew and I were very different people in many respects.
He was more of an extroverted, getting people's faces.
I tend to be more introverted.
I tend to be more behind the scenes.
But we definitely connected.
And frankly, it was a huge loss.
It was a huge loss when he died because there wasn't...
I think now, by the way, there are a series of voices.
But there wasn't anyone who would kind of stand up for me at the time he died.
I didn't really have any allies in the media.
And I have very few in the established media.
So it was a tremendous loss.
Let's turn to a philosophical question that I think cuts to the essence of some of the conflicts between what you do and the mainstream media, which is the question, you know, I've seen a bunch of interviews with you, James, and people are always like, well, you're not a journalist, you're an activist.
Like, there are these two separate categories.
Journalism, you see, is...
Objective.
It's true.
It's verified.
It's factual.
It's professional.
Whereas activism is selective and biased.
And this, of course, all from the left-wing people who are all radical subjectivists when it comes to ethics.
But somehow they can carve out this epistemological corner of the universe where they're perfectly valid and true.
I mean, to me, every choice you make is informed by your values.
Every substantial choice you make in life is informed by your values.
And for people to say, well, values don't inform my choices, all they would be saying is that they act randomly, completely randomly.
And of course, reporters have their values, which help them make their choices, usually the wrong choices in my opinion.
And you have your values, I have my values, which help us decide what we're going to do.
Why am I talking to you rather than someone else?
Well, because of my values and values that we share and so on.
So how is it possible for them to have bamboozled this idea across?
I mean, after things like the witch hunt after Joseph McCarthy and things like that and after Richard Nixon and then changing their values completely for Bill Clinton, how can they possibly claim to be objective and create these separate categories called biased activism versus objective journalism?
By the way, I love the question.
I'm so happy we're having this conversation because this is the most important question.
And I'm glad you brought epistemology.
By the way, that's a word Mike Cernovich used on 60 Minutes.
Beautiful.
Beautiful.
This is the question.
Make no bones about it.
What is a journalist and who is a journalist?
There's something called the Shield Law that's being debated in Congress, which has been.
I would argue the First Amendment is our license to do journalism.
We are all journalists.
If you happen to get someone on the street with your iPhone, you film a car accident, congratulations.
You're a journalist.
Journalism is not an identity, it's an activity.
That's the main distinction.
It's like writer.
Right.
The statists want it to be an identity.
They're identitarians.
They're identity politics, which, by the way, I think is going to become extinct.
But they want to control information.
Veritas is the Latin word for truth.
I call it cinema verite.
Cinema verite exposes the world for what it is.
Whether I have...
Let's say someone funded my investigation.
Our stories are crowdsource funded, but let's just assume someone paid me to film something.
Just because someone pays you to film something doesn't change the nature of what you filmed.
It is real.
Tucker Carlson said about our NPR investigation, well, you can debate the ethics of it, but it's aesthetically true.
The guy is there talking on video.
What makes us so special, what makes What we do so unique is that unlike a journalist, as you say, with values, it doesn't matter what my values are because I'm filming someone talking.
And what he's saying, he said it, it's true.
If he had to go under oath and testify in a court of law that he said what he said, that's what he has to do.
So what we do is aesthetically true.
It's real.
It's cinema verite.
It's reality.
Which makes our work so unique in journalism.
It's actually closer to the truth than if someone is writing an article.
Because when you write an article, you can mince words, you can slice and dice words and sentences to portray a picture.
But when you're just filming something...
So that's why I believe...
I'm also a writer.
I love to write.
But I chose the video as the medium.
Because you cannot...
You cannot change reality when you film something.
Now, they'll say that we doctor and edit, but we've actually...
I get the reverse criticism when I dump 300 hours of raw tape and people say, why didn't you edit?
What do you want from me?
So I have to be careful, but that is the question.
And by the way, this is not a new question.
The question about whether someone can be objective goes back decades.
The Pulitzer Committee in the 1970s debated this question at length.
On whether there can be an objective journalism.
My answer and my solution to it is to film.
It's to get sources on tape.
If the New York Times and the Associated Press and the Washington Post and Politico.com can build their entire business models off anonymous sources, which by the way, every single thing all of these companies, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press, predicted in the election was wrong.
Not just wrong, but profoundly wrong.
Every single statement, every single prediction has been proven to be a hoax.
And yet they want us to trust them on their anonymous sources.
I guarantee you that if we filmed their sources and opened up their reporter notebooks, we would see a far different reality than what we see in their articles.
And that is why I do what I do.
That is why Project Veritas exists.
Because if you film the source, if you show people the information, they're going to see a different picture.
Well, whenever I hear anonymous sources, I just think of some guy talking to a hand puppet in the back of a car.
I don't take that at all seriously.
Now, when you first started doing the work that you did, and I first came across you with the acorn stuff that you were working on, I had one of these, like, I love these moments in life.
Like, electricity goes through my spine, I get goosebumps.
Not just because of what you're doing, which is powerful in and of itself, James, but it's also because it shows me what Other people aren't doing.
And I think that's the great danger to the established media that you show, because what you do is relatively cheap.
It takes courage.
It takes leadership.
It takes imagination.
It takes follow-through.
It takes organization.
But it's not like, well, you know, if I don't have a billion dollars, I can't possibly do what James O'Keefe does.
So not only are you showing what is there...
But you're also showing what everyone else is not doing, and I think that has kneecapped to the mainstream media in many ways, because people now look back over time and say, where the hell have you guys?
Why haven't you been doing this stuff?
That's what Jon Stewart said after the Acorn story.
He said, quote, where the hell were you?
I'm a fake journalist, and I'm embarrassed these guys scooped me.
I mean, he said two kids from the cast of High School Musical 3 dressed in their grandmother's chinchilla coat, and you got nothing?
CNN must have...
CNN, it cost CNN just to turn on their hologram machine.
It cost them $3,000.
So that's the cost of the investigation.
But let's talk about why people don't do what we do.
And listen, courage is definitely a virtue that...
As Chesterton said, Chesterton is probably my favorite philosopher.
He said that courage is the virtue that sustains all other virtues.
And the New York Times' motto going back 100 years was without fear or favor.
Without fear or favor.
In other words, people are either afraid or they're bought and sold.
That's the bottom line in life.
Most people are afraid and most people are compromised.
So the reason why people don't do what we do is obviously fear, but it's also a couple other things that are a little...
You know, it's hard to fault some people because, first of all, the media has been consolidated so much, the corporatization of the media.
If you read a book by Noam Chomsky called Manufacturing Consent, I know Chomsky's a leftist, but there are some points in there that are not left-wing, that are just factual.
The media has been consolidated, and the advertisers...
You're not going to do a critical story of a source that you get your access to or the source you get your information from.
And you're not going to be critical when shaking the boat is not good for your business model.
I have had people in recent months tell me inside of these corporations that they cannot air my stories.
Not because my stories are false, but because my stories are true.
And the more true it gets, as a quote from Al Pacino's The Insider with the Michael Mann screenplay, the more true it gets...
The worse it gets.
That is the rub.
That is profoundly troubling for our country.
It's not that the information is wrong.
It's that the information, the more lethal, the more you expose, the closer to the truth you get, the darker it gets and the worse it gets for the establishment.
ABC News is owned by Disney.
Disney Corporation.
Andrew Breitbart once said, I won't use the F-bomb, but he said, you're F-ing with Disney when you go on with George Stephanopoulos.
These people don't play games.
Fox Corporate has spiked my stories.
I don't know if you've seen the back and forth between me and Bret Baier and some of these folks.
I'm not going to cite specifics because I don't want to break confidence, but Fox Corporate is a publicly traded company.
They have an interest in the bottom line.
They're in it to make money.
Project Veritas is a foundation.
I'm not in it to make money.
I'm in it to make impact.
People will support my mission and donate.
Investigative journalism has had no business model for the last 30 years.
The Boston Globe that did the story on the pedophiles in the Catholic Church, that was enormously expensive and millions of dollars.
It took a year.
No venture capitalist is going to agree to fund For profit reasons, that type of activity.
It's just too risky.
There's a lack of investigative journalism.
People are unwilling to do it.
They're unwilling to face the fire, and they're unwilling to take the risk.
This is really what it takes.
It takes a small number of people with enormous courage, deeply passionate, And they're unafraid of the retaliation and they have to work under what we are which is a tax-exempt foundation.
And we can't break any laws.
We have to be very careful.
I've been accused of breaking the law but we have very good lawyers who vet everything we do.
But those are some of the reasons why other people don't do what we do.
Well, it's a collision of business models.
And to put it in the realm of business sounds a little shallow and cheap, but we all have to eat.
We all have to pay our bills.
The mainstream media is not in the business of delivering the news to you.
And people don't really understand that.
They're in the business of delivering your eyeballs to their advertisers.
That is the entire business model.
Now, people like yourself or myself who aren't funded through advertising and who have the kind of flexibility, we have built up an audience which is dependent upon us accurately bringing the truth to the audience.
We are actually in the business of delivering that, and they pay us because we do that.
That fundamental stripping of a foundational conflict of interest, I think, is two business models that are currently colliding, like these two carpets being pushed together.
And I think that the alternative model or the truth-to-power, truth-to-the-audience model It has to win out if there's a shred of integrity left in the planet at all.
I hope so.
I'm not an economist, nor am I a venture capitalist, so my business plan, if you will, is just do a lot of impactful stuff.
Tell the truth.
That's the whole plan.
Hopefully, people send me enough $100 checks to sustain this.
We have a good team, and we have 30 people or so.
We're hiring more undercover journalists.
If anyone's watching this broadcast, recruitment at ProjectVeritas.com if you want to be a Veritas spy.
But my business model is just do good work.
I told a couple people I was going to go in.
I had a pimp outfit.
I'm going to go into these government offices and they said, Are you nuts?
Are you crazy?
Are you on drugs?
I mean, it was so...
The idea that you would strap a camera to your body, go into a government bureau, pretend to be something you're not, get them on tape, force them to resign.
I mean, that whole concept is beyond the pale.
Most people would be afraid of getting a parking ticket, parking outside of the place.
But I'm wired to have a huge propensity for risk.
And I don't If you look at my hierarchy of needs, survival is like number 27.
I'm thinking, how do I get that story?
And this is very important because I think people are fascinated by the virtues here.
You have to be wired.
You have to be so dedicated and so passionate about truth.
That has to come...
Way above any of your self-desire for safety or for how do I feed myself.
You can't even think that way.
You have to think, I'm going to do whatever it takes to get the story.
I've had soldiers.
I've had people in the military who, by the way, make far more of a sacrifice than anyone on my team.
A lot of people out there are more afraid of risking their reputation on the internet than they are their personal physical safety.
And that is not me saying this.
This is a people who have come to me saying, James, when the Huffington Post did that hit piece on you, whatever, in January where you got counterstung and there was all that, I would rather die than have my name dragged through the mud like yours was and have my Wikipedia page muddied up like it is.
I don't want my family to see that.
I don't want my children to grow up where they're reading bad things about their father.
That's the way that people in this country think.
Good people.
That's what they're afraid of.
And what I'm telling you is my call to action for your audience is if you're watching this broadcast and you're like, you know what?
I'm with James.
I don't give a shit.
I'm telling you to email me because those are the types of people that we need.
We need people who are...
Not that they're haphazard, but that they...
They are so passionate and focused on the prize of exposing injustice that those other concerns are not as important to them.
Well, I think it's a maxim of history that individual survival is universal demise.
If we all just try and focus on what's best for us in the moment, our civilization as a whole slides completely off a cliff.
And there have been studies, James, it's actually very...
They're not kidding, some of these soldiers.
There have been studies that show that ostracism and humiliation, social humiliation, hits the same pain centers as physical torture within the mind.
So you do have to have a big dedication to the truth, and it is a great challenge.
I wanted to ask you as well...
Every time I watch your videos, and I definitely want to get to what you're doing with the schools these days, every time I watch your videos, James, this sort of scrolling marquee in my brain, thou shalt not bear false witness.
And I know as a Christian, how do your values, your Christian values, inform what it is that you do?
Because you certainly seem to be the embodiment of at least, I'm sure more than one, but at least one of the Ten Commandments.
And do you mean that in a sense of like, thou should not bear witness what the subjects are doing?
Yeah, the subjects.
Do not lie, do not misrepresent, do not obfuscate.
Bob Garfield at NPR once said to me, how can you be a Christian if you lie and you're undercover?
So I don't know if that was the, because that's a debate, by the way, going back to the, again, to the 1960s.
Reporters don't do undercover work anymore because, and I don't agree with this criticism, but they say that it's unethical to lie.
And my response to that is, and maybe this kind of fits in with your question, when you go to the White House and you have your little notebook, reporter notebook with your microphone, or you go up to any politician, and you simply write down what the politician tells you, are you a journalist not lying to your audience?
I mean, it's not what the politician tells you.
It's what the truth is.
It's not what the union official tells you on the record.
It's what the truth is.
So my response to Bob Garfield when he said, well, how can you be a Christian And deceive these people by going undercover.
How can we trust anything you say when you use the lie as subterfuge?
And I said, Bob, we're not deceiving our audience.
That's the difference.
We need to tell the truth to the people.
We may deceive our subjects.
Deception is used by the CIA. It's used by the FBI. It's used to catch a predator.
But deception It's a tricky ethical issue.
I don't know.
For me, if the FBI is allowed to pose as guys on the internet trying to get 12-year-old girls to go on dates, which I'm fine with.
There's certain overreaches of government power I'm not fine with, just as you would.
But certain, can you go undercover as a cop?
Can you set up a sting operation to catch someone who's being corrupt?
Can you pretend to be someone you're not on the internet in order to figure out who's a nasty piece of work who needs to be dealt with?
I, you know...
We'd have to shut down a lot more places before we even got to where you are.
Cops are allowed to lie to you in an interrogation.
Again, the ethics of that are a challenge.
This is what the people, this is what the criticism is.
And it's a silly criticism, but it goes back, as a philosophy, it goes back to utilitarian ethics.
And if you really want to get philosophical, which we don't have time for, but it goes down to the fact, is your deception greater than what you're exposing?
In our case, it never is.
I mean, I would never, there are certain lines I would never cross.
I would never go into someone's private bedroom.
I would never, and I have never, released a video exposing the private sexual nature, pillow talk stuff that people say.
The audio tape of Trump on the bus with his comment, arguably, he's a public official, he's running for president, so fine, but I don't, what men say privately in a bedroom environment, not my cup of tea, something I wouldn't do.
Of course it's justified, but in terms of thou shall not bear false witness, the most important thing for me is exposing the way people really are.
How do people really behave and there's so much fraud.
With this Obamacare thing, I wrote a post on Facebook and what I said was the Republicans will never make cuts.
They're all in fear or favor.
They will never do anything so long as the media is out there to humiliate them, target them, show pictures of dead children.
You've on your Twitter posted some of these things.
They post pictures of dead, dying children when they want to take $1 out of the budget.
And you know what?
If Veritas exposed all the waste, fraud, abuse, corruption, kickbacks, bribery, quid pro quos, do you know how much waste and fraud there is in the federal government?
Yet our media is propagandizing us with images of dead children anytime they want to make one cut.
So this is what drives me.
It's the need to show people what really happens and the media is so corrupt.
It's so corrupt.
Not only are they not doing journalism, they're literally doing anti-journalism.
That's what we used to call them, anti-journalists, Jack Cashel and I. They literally are investigating the investigators.
They've made the investigative journalists their target.
So now I have made the media my target.
And it started with the CNN leaks, but we're going to be doing a lot of stories this year.
Some of these are sting operations themselves where we expose inside the newsrooms, we go deep, deep, their editors, their engineers, how they wire their stories and how they lie to the public.
Well, I'll start believing leftists and their horrors about cutting government spending when they, if and when they stop wanting to bring in massive groups of third worlders who disproportionately consume social resources, because that seems to me a bit of a loss to the taxpayer as a whole.
Now, you have focused a little bit over the career, but more recently, on American schools.
Now, you mentioned the investigation into the Catholic Church and pedophilia and so on.
And, of course, the statistics are very clear.
You're far more likely to be sexually molested or abused by a government school teacher, even by ratio, than you ever would be by a Catholic priest.
And yet, of course, the media steps over this because, being on the left, they tend to be anti-religion and pro-government unions for obvious reasons.
Where do you think it's going to go with regards to government schools?
I mean, I think that the waste and the abuse and the corruption that goes on there is almost a Dostoevsky in hell with no bottom.
You know, Dan, he just keeps drilling and comes out in China.
Where do you think that's going to go and what do you have in the works?
Well, it's low-hanging fruit.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
It's low-hanging fruit.
It's unconscionable.
It's one of those things where...
Why won't Democrats ever throw a union member under the bus?
Because that's where they get all their money from.
I mean, they can't.
They can't do it.
They're literally held captive.
And the union investigations we've done, we did a couple last year that didn't get a ton of attention.
It got local press.
One union official in Westchester, New York, literally said, quote, just lie.
This is what she's telling this to a child molester who approaches her.
And she says to this guy, she says, Just lie.
Just make it up.
Just fake it.
Now, this is the president of the teachers' union in Westchester, New York, one of the largest teachers' unions in the country, encouraging a child molester to lie.
Now, what happens?
Fired, right?
No.
No.
She was not fired.
Charges were filed against her.
The inspector general put out a report defending my investigation, the Democrat inspector general, and they can't fire her.
They can't do it.
It's one of those areas in society.
I'm probably the most passionate about this issue because I believe that education reform is the civil rights era of my time.
Why?
Because I'm from New Jersey and in Newark, New Jersey, where I'm close to being raised, there are African-American children who cannot get out of the prison system, which is the New Jersey public schools.
There's a 10% graduation rate in some parts.
There's a movie made about this called The Cartel.
Where they're literally crying.
Their tears are streaming down their faces because they're desperate to escape and get into a charter school and the state says you can't do that.
So if you want to talk about racism, if CNN is interested, if Don Lemon or if any of those folks, Anderson Cooper, want to do a story about racism, you go to Newark, New Jersey, the public school system, and you care about dead children and the welfare of children.
They didn't even talk about our story involving New York City.
Where Mitchell Rubinstein bragged about how he defended a rapist with a knife who forced a child to give him oral sex.
There's thousands and thousands of these stories.
And it's not even about the pedophilia or the sex.
It's about the power that covers it up.
Which the Catholic Church, let's be honest, that was another powerful institution which covered it up in Boston.
Myself being Catholic.
And it's an outrage that these people...
So what do we got to do?
Well, we got to get them on tape bragging about how powerful they are and how much they don't like children.
And just like they said in 1980, the guy in New York said, when children start paying union dues, I'll care about children.
We just need more statements like that.
And my vision is to get a hundred such statements, release them one by one, create fires all over the country.
We just create a fire in San Francisco where the guy was suspended.
They are investigating.
Of course, that just will go away.
But we keep on putting pressure and lighting fires under the butts of all these politicians and say, do something, and there will be a moral consensus to do something.
That is the only way to save our republic is to create moral consensus through organic citizen journalism that forces resignations, that requires people who are only interested in self-preservation to do something about it.
That is my vision.
I don't know how anything else can save our country.
And certainly save public education, accept transparency.
I'm going to leave that rousing speech at the end of the interview.
Thanks so much, James.
Just wanted to remind people, please go to ProjectVaritas.com, help James out and his team with what he's doing, and Twitter.com slash James O'Keefe III, I-I-I. Pick up Breakthrough, a guerrilla war to expose fraud and save democracy.
It's a great, great read.
Thanks so much for your time.
Would you mind giving that email out for anybody who might want to join your team one more time?
more time.
Yeah, if you've listened to this broadcast and you're interested and you're courageous and you're willing to do whatever it takes and you care about this cause, it's recruiting, recruiting@projectveritas.com.
Send me a letter explaining your interest and we'll get right in touch with you.
Appreciate everything you do, and I appreciate your time today.
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