June 29, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:43
3728 Why Exposing Fake News Matters | James O’Keefe and Stefan Molyneux
Project Veritas and James O’Keefe have recently published undercover video exposing CNN’s coverage of the “Russia Hacked The Election” narrative to be dishonest, biased and motivated by a desire to attract ratings. James O’Keefe joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the importance of exposing fake news, media unwillingness to issue legitimate retractions, why the non-stop use of anonymous sources is illegitimate, the role postmodernism plays in modern journalism, the left’s false monopoly on virtue and what is coming next from Project Veritas. James O’Keefe is an award-winning journalist and the founder and President of both Project Veritas and Project Veritas Action, non-profit organizations dedicated to investigating corruption, dishonesty, waste and fraud in both public and private institutions. O’Keefe is also the author of the New York Times bestseller “Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy.”Website: http://www.projectveritas.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIIIBook: http://www.fdrurl.com/OKeefe-BreakthroughYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
I'm not even going to imagine you don't know who he is.
He's an award-winning journalist and the founder and president of both Project Veritas and Project Veritas Action, nonprofit organizations that take donations.
We'll put the donation link below and talk about why it's important in a little bit.
They're nonprofit organizations dedicated to investigating corruption, dishonesty, waste and fraud in both public and private institutions.
He's also the author of of the New York Times bestseller Breakthrough, our guerrilla war to expose fraud and save democracy.
You can check out the website at projectveritas.com and follow his excellent Twitter at twitter.com forward slash James O'Keefe, K-E-E-F-E-I-I, or the third, I suppose.
James, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Great to be with you.
How's your week been?
Anything new going on?
I think I've seen you pop up a little bit here and there.
What's been going on for you this week?
Well, today, it's 1.30 Eastern time right now.
I just staked out Jeff Zucker's house this morning.
We stood outside his house for an hour.
We knew he was leaving at 7 a.m.
And in fact, he spotted me.
So his routine is to leave his house on Upper East Side of Manhattan at 7 a.m.
This time...
He waited for an hour, his bodyguards assembled, and he sprinted to his car.
So moments ago, we just released that video of the confrontation with me and Jeff Zucker.
He ran away from me.
Tomorrow, we're planning on launching part three undercover on CNN, and it's a bombshell.
So the stars aligned here.
It's a little providential.
You know, we've ripped the heart.
We are beginning to rip the heart, the beating heart, out of the mainstream media, and it's a sight to behold.
It certainly is.
And it's funny for me, James, to see CNN seems very aggressive when they're the ones holding the microphone.
But over the last couple of days since your stories have begun to break and some serious questions have been aimed their way, it doesn't seem to be so much fun for them to be on the receiving end of the microphone.
And their sort of dodging and obfuscation seems to be extraordinary for such a tough-minded, get-to-the-truth kind of organization, at least as they claim to be.
Well, I'm glad you used the word obfuscation.
Gavin McGinnis said of the citizen journalist's role in media, he said, It's a spine-tingling true crime thriller about the quest for truth in the age of media obfuscation.
The obfuscation is, to me, the most potent weapon of the mainstream media.
And I have a couple quotes here from just the last 24 hours.
This is the Washington Post.
Stephan says, and I'm going to read from the Washington Post, which we'll get to later here, O'Keefe, who appears on the video as a kind of master of ceremonies...
Further this impression by saying the footage describes the real motivation.
So in other words, the Washington Post is writing that instead of being an anchor or I'm just hosting the series, I'm a, quote, master of ceremonies.
It's this language.
It's this characterization.
We are doing precisely what they've been doing for 50 years.
I mean, I'm not reading off a teleprompter, by the way, but I'm presenting the material as they always do.
If you watch the series, it's professionally produced.
In fact, I had...
I had producers direct message me from mainstream media outlets, because not all of them hate me, saying, James, that was very well done.
That was a very well put together piece of journalism.
And the Washington Post is writing, I'm a master of, like I'm a clown.
Another characterization, this is the Rolling Stone, quote, And in the next sentence of the Rolling Stone article, Rolling Stone says that CNN confirmed the legitimacy of the recording.
It's all, Stephan, it's all obfuscation and characterization.
It's all just words.
It doesn't mean anything.
Sorry to interrupt, but the very idea that Rolling Stone, of all organizations and outlets, would have any issue with someone else's reporting after the horrendous, horrifying set of lies that they published about the UVA rape and so on, the idea that they're now going to be out there lecturing.
And the other thing you see, of course, all the time is this word edited.com.
This magic word that allows people to escape what is right in front of their eyes.
Of course, everything's edited.
You know, I mean, I have a friend, Peter Schiff, who was on The Daily Show.
They interviewed him for a couple of hours, edited it down to like 15 or 20 seconds to make him look as bad as humanly possible.
I mean, this editing stuff happens all the time.
You can't release all the raw stuff and no one's going to watch it to find out where the good stuff is.
But they use this word edited, I guess, to mean manipulated and so on.
But, you know, it's not edited if the important stuff is right there.
Listen, I can't emphasize enough that we are right now at a tipping point, a sort of turning point.
We are not just exposing the CNN and the media and others.
We're exposing the whole matrix, okay?
The word edit...
Listen, I've been fighting this battle for seven years.
I've been fighting it sometimes in the shadows, sometimes in ways you see, some ways you don't see.
We include information that they edit out.
That's what you need to know.
This Washington Post article, which I focus on it only because it is such an it's on the front page of the style section today in the Washington Post.
And the headline is what the latest James O'Keefe video leaves out.
Now, the interesting thing about this article, Stefan, is that this is the article that if you only read the Washington Post, you'll only see this information if you don't go on social media or actually look at the raw information in this article.
They don't actually talk about anything in the video.
They don't they don't mention the substance of the video.
They they just call me, you know, characterize me and and label me.
And it's really about this.
We include information that they don't want you to see.
And I want to talk a little bit about here, hopefully get into some background about why they're doing this and who they are and what's in their soul.
Because I think it's important people understand the history of propaganda as as we fight the propaganda.
And one more quote from the pointer Institute is they call Veritas quote, right wing propagandists unquote.
Now listen, I'm not writing articles here.
I'm not characterizing what I see.
My sources are not anonymous.
The sources are in the video.
But John Bonifield is the source.
He's not an anonymous source.
He's talking into a camera.
It's his words, not mine.
So for them to call me a propagandist is the greatest deceit.
It's not even fake news.
We're beyond the fake news thing.
This is now some type of sick, twisted, perverted, devious deceit to call what we do propaganda when we're showing you them in their own words.
It's not my words.
I'm not even characterizing them.
It's their words.
And we should get in a little to why they are this way and the history of it.
I think so.
And I just wanted to point out something that I think has been a little bit under-commented on is that...
And Bonnefield, the producer from Atlanta, people are saying, well, you know, he was a medical producer, produces a health show and so on.
Okay, fair enough.
You know, I mean, that's something to take into account.
But the guy openly scorns journalistic ethics in this nihilistic, oh, that's adorable.
Oh, that's adorable.
You know, it's creepy and crawly.
You know, if there's one place, James, where I would think journalistic ethics or ethics as a whole would be very important, it's on a medical show.
Where you're presenting health information.
Ethics there would seem to be very important.
They say, well, it's just diversity of opinion.
He has no respect for journalistic ethics.
We put him in charge of a healthcare show.
That's not diversity of opinion.
You know, it's funny you mention that.
I'm going to reveal something on your show that I've never revealed to anybody else.
I can't get into all the sources and methods in terms of the techniques we use to get the information.
And frankly, it doesn't matter as much because I'm showing you, again, it's not an anonymous source.
He's speaking into a camera.
But we came to John Bonifield from a tipster, from a source, who is in fact suing CNN over a medical issue that he got wrong in his journalism.
So we initially, the storyline was not about Russia.
It was about fake news as it relates to his productions on the health issues.
But more so, and that's how he came to Bonifield.
The guy is not completely innocent.
We just never finished that part of the story.
But, you know, it's interesting to see Because we came to him not through Russia.
We came to him through other methods.
But this guy's talking about the culture of CNN. And the most damning part of the video is when he said the CEO, Jeff Zucker, in internal memos and meetings.
Because he says the CEO creates this culture where they're not allowing us to do other stories.
They say, get back to Russia.
And that's really why it's newsworthy.
People say, well, do we want to live in a world where our conversations and our elevators are recorded?
I say, no.
No.
We use a very powerful tool.
The hidden camera can't be abused.
We can't record people in their bedrooms.
And we can't record people for gratuitous reasons.
But this is a matter of extreme public interest.
Extreme public interest.
And in many ways, I don't feel sorry for the guy at all.
I mean, he's not a bad...
Nothing he's saying in that tape.
He's not a villain here, John Bonifield, with what he's saying.
It's naked honesty.
And we think it's absolutely justified.
So I don't think there's a question about that, but I think the most important thing to take away from the series is the culture of CNN right from the top, Jeff Zucker, and that's what Bonifield said.
Well, and people think that it's an isolated thing, but anyone who's worked for a large organization knows that the culture replicates and the people who disagree with the culture leave.
Like if I was a reporter, or I assume if you were a reporter, and someone at the top said, push this story, and you believe the story was false, you believe the story was misrepresentative, and like any sane human being, you believe that the story is highly toxic to the very democratic DNA of the republic that sustains and protects you, you'd quit, you'd leave, you'd say, you believe that the story is highly toxic to the very democratic DNA of the republic that sustains and protects you, you'd quit,
And so the people who stay at CNN, if it comes down from Zucker, as Bonifio claims, the people who stay are the people that they're like propagandist lapdogs willing to attack whoever their master points at with no regard to ethics.
That does permeate the entire culture from top all the way down to the guy in the mailroom.
And I just saw people are sending me these things now that we've done the story.
Someone wrote me a note and said, James, the order follower always bears more moral culpability than the order giver.
Because the order follower is the one who actually performed the action, who actually is taking part in such action.
So there is an argument that maybe he isn't as innocent as I previously thought.
You know, he's participating in a culture like the Planned Parenthood people were fired, and people said, well, James, don't you feel bad?
And many said, well, they're participating in an organization that is just so devious and participates in such law-breaking and such immorality.
So maybe it's the case that people should volunteer to opt out of this organization and Remind you, this is a big company.
There's thousands of people.
I'm sure there are some decent people at CNN, and maybe they'll either leak to us, or they'll leave on their own volition.
So there's something there, too.
Right.
So let's talk a little bit about how we got here.
It's very easy to look at the wave that smashes into the seaside town, but it is important to sort of figure out its origins, because I think people don't understand how much power the media's had.
You know, there's an old statement that says, try not to get in fights with people who buy ink by the barrel for...
And the media has had the power for hundreds of years to smash up people's lives with virtually no repercussions whatsoever.
Even the retractions, you know, the headline is top of the fold, retractions are like two-point squinto vision in the bottom left-hand side of page A19 or whatever it is.
So this power, I think the fact that the mainstream media, which has had this power to destroy, to make and break lives as they see fit, like ancient gods, now that they're running into the corrective power of the internet, it's a truly astounding phenomenon seeing this supposedly unstoppable force meeting this, I think, immovable object of fact-checking and pushback.
Let's talk a little bit about how the culture in the media has developed and I think how this power has corrupted them in many ways.
Well, it goes back to the 1920s.
Edward Bernays wrote a book called Propaganda.
I'm actually researching it quite a bit because it's all just a little bit of history repeating.
Now, the book itself wasn't anti-Semitic.
It was used as the propaganda function both for the Nazi era and the modern media.
But Edward Bernays says that people, that citizens, he says, are incapable of making their own decisions, that they are guided by, quote, Heard instincts and mere prejudice, and this stands in harsh contrast to, of course, the Veritas vision, which is to give people information and trust them.
Maybe it's the libertarian in me, but we believe that if people are given raw data, like reality, if people are just shown what's going on, they'll make the right decision.
In fact, that's what the founding fathers, I suppose, intended with the First Amendment.
That's the whole idea of a democratic republic.
People need to have raw information and make decisions.
That stands in harsh contrast to the vision laid out by the propagandists in the early 20th century.
They believe that people are stupid, that they can't be given the information.
If you look into the history of Marxism, my favorite book is this book called The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek.
And F.A. Hayek reminds us, and I'm going to quote him, every activity must derive its justification from a conscious social purpose.
That's Hayek talking about the Marxists and their beliefs.
So, in other words, These people historically believe that you can't give people information if that information is going to lead them to a conclusion that is contrary to your political objective.
That is the difference between the Marxist dialectic, the Machiavellian idea of giving people a conclusion versus giving people information.
And that's what you're seeing play out today, Stephan, in the social media.
You're seeing us just going, okay, here's some tape.
Watch it.
That's what we do.
Go watch this tape.
And don't watch that tape.
Don't look at that man behind the curtain.
Read our articles describing O'Keefe.
Read us talking about him.
This is the best way I can put it.
It's a propaganda war.
Don't read the Bible yourself.
We're going to interpret it for you.
And CNN did this very explicitly with the WikiLeaks release.
Don't read it.
It's illegal for you to read the source.
Just rely on us to interpret and frame it for you.
It's like, I'd actually like to look at the facts, not at other people's twisted propaganda brains to try and get some truth.
But historically speaking, and this has happened many, you know, it's all just a little bit of history repeating.
They don't want you to see the raw information.
It hurts them.
Listen, this tape is, if you watch these tapes, okay, it's naked in their honesty.
It's brutally honest.
It's actually kind of the way that you and I would talk.
I mean, yeah, you know, it's all BS and it's probably a witch hunt.
This is the way that human beings talk to one another.
And there's a sort of artifice.
In fact, I think the reason why Trump was elected because people were fed up with the emptiness and the artifice that pervades our country's body politic.
That's why Trump is successful.
He's a symbol.
And the media is doubling down on the propaganda and characterizations.
And I think it's fascinating because I've never seen anything like it.
I've been doing this for seven years, and they have the Washington Post literally print, you know, I'm the master of ceremonies of the video.
Are you kidding me?
It's called an anchor.
People have been doing it for 40 or 50 years on television.
They read off teleprompters.
I'm speaking from the heart.
I'm presenting the material.
But yeah, it goes back to propaganda.
And the role of journalism, in my view, is two things.
To present the world as it is.
So we're literally right now, we're seeing a crisis in journalism.
Because journalists don't believe the role is to present the world as it is.
They believe it is to shove narratives down our throats.
But the real purpose of journalism is to build moral consensus.
By testing the boundaries of what is moral.
By showing people the extremes.
By showing people things that bring people together.
85% of Americans look at these tapes and go, yep, that's pretty ridiculous.
And then you have these extremes or people who are pushing back.
So there's a history behind it and there's a lot to say there.
Right.
And this narrative of, you know, Russia hacked the election and the sort of insinuation or somewhat outright claim that the Trump administration is somehow illegitimate because of foreign meddling in the election is extraordinarily dangerous.
And for people who get fired up by this kind of stuff, you keep putting out these, you know, Trump is Hitler, punch a Nazi, everyone who's not on the hard left is a Nazi, and political violence, you know, the people who rushed stages or wanted to kill Trump and so on, they're activists, they're heroic, they're fighting back, resist.
All of this stuff is astonishingly provocative.
And, you know, most stable people will just read this and, you know, maybe get a little caught up in it, but move on.
on.
But of course, you know, there's a bell curve of stability.
And there are people on the extreme, I guess, left end who are going to get all fired up and generally start to plot violence.
And now, just today, of course, as you know, CNN is coming out and saying, well, there's a war against journalism.
It's like, no, there is not.
No, there isn't.
There's a war against lying.
There's a war against misrepresentation.
There's a war against propaganda.
And they say that they're concerned that Trump's aggression towards journalism is going to result in journalists getting hurt.
Now, that whole point saying that if you provoke a lot of people, then someone's going to get hurt.
Well, I mean, where was this sensibility during the Mike Brown thing with the hands up, don't shoot?
Have they ever done exposés on Antifa and other left wing violence?
Have done exposés on the fact that if you're on the right and you try and give a public speech, you do so sometimes at peril of your own physical safety.
They haven't engaged in any of that.
And that to me just shows the agenda very clearly and in a very ugly way.
And I think that feeds right into the next point here, which is the monopoly on virtue.
There's two main other themes here.
The monopoly on virtue, and I hate to use the word left-right because I really don't believe what we do is ideological.
So I don't want to characterize myself or Veritas, my team.
As a right-wing effort because I can't be right-wing.
I can only show people the world.
I can only show people reality.
Reality is reality.
It's not left or right.
It just is.
Jon Stewart would say that the world is left of center.
I would say the world is probably right of center because you're shifting the Overton window away from what the media presents.
But nevertheless, there is a monopoly on virtue and you're seeing it now today with Chris Cuomo.
We may have his staff on tape, by the way.
Hint, hint.
Chris Cuomo is saying, well, you know, they're becoming martyrs and all that.
It's a monopoly on virtue and they're very good at this.
They're very good storytellers and they're very good at presenting themselves as the moral one.
And if you can, and we are evil and they are the good guys.
And as long as they're presenting information, it's a propaganda war.
As long as they're presenting it as they're good and we're evil, which is the exact opposite of the case for reasons I'll get into, as long as they're presenting in moral terms, we will always lose.
As long as they're saying, well, if you want to cut one dime from anyone government spending, you hate black people.
You hate, you want it, you want them to die.
And of course, as an investigative reporter, I'm showing all this fraud and waste and abuse.
And I've got a hundred million people who support that type of initiative, but it doesn't matter.
I hate poor people because I want them to die.
If you want to repeal Obamacare, it's because you want to watch people die of terrible diseases in the gutter.
I mean, there's no compromise.
There's no reasoning with any of that.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
There's no debate.
But guess what, Stephan?
We can fight back using their exact methodology.
I can fight back, and here's how.
We can be storytellers.
We can tell the story on our...
In our movement of truth, in the citizenry movement of truth, I can tell so many stories.
I had a judge destroy my evidence.
My colleague David Daleiden at AR-15s pointed at him as the state of California confiscated his hard drives because he investigated Planned Parenthood, which gave money to the California Attorney General.
Those stories are compelling.
People read that stuff and they go, you want to talk about David versus Goliath?
Take a look at what we're doing.
Take a look at, you know, where were you people?
Where were the mainstream media when I was jailed?
When I spent four years under the federal government's thumb?
When the prosecutors resigned in disgrace, in my case, when they destroyed my evidence, let's play the moral game here.
Let's do a little virtue signaling.
Let's talk about how we're the good guys and they're the evil guys.
Washington Post's motto is, democracy dies in darkness.
Well, I would say the Washington Post is going to die in sunlight because we're going after them too.
CNN is not the only media company that we have on tape.
It's just the first one.
But we can play the moral virtue signaling game as well.
In fact, we're the righteous ones because we have the truth on our side.
So I would encourage this audience and the people watching this broadcast to think about that.
To stop playing defense.
To stop saying, no, no, no, no, no, we're not evil.
We don't hate poor people.
Listen, we are the moral ones.
And we have to learn from their techniques because we're righteous.
We're trying to fight the propaganda and that's how we do it.
Right.
And, of course, I mean, the basic empirical fact is that both blacks and the poor were doing far better before the government got big enough to start destroying their communities and their families with perverse incentives and all of this kind of mess.
And, of course, where was the media when Obama was pursuing whistleblowers and reporters and jailing them and harassing them and so on?
Well, they didn't care because he was their guy.
It's a sports team.
Now, they claim that it's some kind of big moral thing.
It's just a thirst for power.
I mean, there are studies that show that...
Political power can be as addictive as cocaine.
They're addicts to power.
And like all addicts, they'll say whatever they can to get their drug.
And I think that's a lot of what is driving this anti-Trump narrative, that they just – they had it in the bag, they felt.
They had it for certain because, you know, they misread or mispalled all of the people and didn't understand what was going on in America.
They didn't get their drug and they're lashing out.
They didn't get the power that they felt was theirs and which would have cemented their power, I think, permanently with massive immigration changes and so on.
And the fact that they were so close and they felt it was just snatched away.
This seems to me one of the driving motives for this truly deranged hatred against the Trump administration.
CBS News president called it a profound lack of empathy and the service of endless posturing, which is the best description I've ever heard.
This is self-described.
Self-described.
Sometimes they do practice introspection when they're forced to.
And what I said last time I was with you is, and I want to get into this anonymous sources BS because that's really the heart of the matter here.
We rip apart the propaganda.
It's ripping apart their characterizations.
They got everything wrong.
They got everything wrong.
They predicted everything wrong during the election.
And yet Trump still won.
He won with no help from the mainstream media, yet he still won.
Can you imagine what's going to happen if the mainstream media's power is taken away?
So they're basically being dragged kicking and screaming, and they're doubling down.
But I'd love to get into the anonymous sources thing.
Yeah, that seems like a strange one to me.
So unverifiable, so unsourceable, and I don't know what the difference is between claiming an anonymous source that you'll never reveal and have no documentation on and just making something up.
Like, philosophically, epistemologically, I can't figure out the difference between an invisible friend telling you something and an anonymous source.
I love when you said you called anonymous sources sock puppets in the back of the car.
I think that was a great metaphor.
You're probably right.
Probably worse than that, by the way.
One of our investigations, we're going to have someone in the back of the car holding up little socks on their hands.
I'm an anonymous source.
Literally, that's what it's going to be.
It's not even going to be a joke.
I love the metaphor.
Here's what I heard about the anonymous sources, which I really want to share with you.
It's like you're at a bank, and every media company has a deposit box or has a bank account.
And every time you use an anonymous source where you don't reveal, you don't show your audience the person making the statement and you don't reveal their name, you're withdrawing $1,000 from your bank account or even $100,000.
And you're relying on the credibility of your network to use an anonymous source.
I think someone may have said this at actually a journalism school.
I think it was an NYU journalism school someone said this.
And you can't just keep making withdrawals from that bank account, never actually showing people source material.
Okay?
You can't do that.
You're in a negative balance.
You have no credibility left.
Yet, every story we've seen, Stefan, there is no veniality in the Russia stuff.
In fact, now you have producers saying there is no Russia stuff, which is, that stuff's over now.
But that's an example of There's no veniality.
There's no proof.
There's no evidence because there's no sources.
And if you actually were able to interview the sources or listen to them, you could verify their testimony.
You could listen to them speak.
You could evaluate yourself whether they're telling the truth because it's all hearsay.
There's no evidence.
They're just talking.
So every time you use an anonymous source, you're withdrawing upon your credibility.
Now, let's take a look at the opposite extreme, Veritas.
Okay?
Our sources are all filmed.
Our sources are not our undercover journalists.
No.
Our sources are the people on the other side of the camera.
And you can hear and see everything they say.
You can listen to Bonifield.
You can look into his eyes.
You can evaluate his naked honesty.
You can verify whether yourself, whether he's telling the truth.
And guess what?
CNN told us that he was telling the truth when they backed him up.
And they said, we support his opinions and his statements.
So now we have a verified statement from CNN that That Bonifield was expressing his opinion in an honest way.
So these are the two extremes.
Can you imagine, Stephan, if Project Veritas came out and said, I have an anonymous source within CNN that told me that another official told him that the CEO told him that the whole thing is just bunk.
Everyone would say that I'm full of it.
They still say I'm full of it.
So what I say, and the national conclusion of all of this stuff, is for the American people to say we don't I don't believe you.
Show us your sources, New York Times.
Open up your notebooks, New York Times.
I don't believe you.
Why don't I believe you?
Because everything you predicted during the 2016 election was false.
All your polls were false.
Everything you stated, Politico.com, was false.
Every projection you said in Georgia was false.
So now that you have no credibility left, we need to see your sources.
I'm not against anonymous sources, Stefan.
I think you should use them some of the time.
25% of the time.
Not 100% of the time.
Well, and anonymous sources, you can, I guess in the analogy, withdraw less if their story pans out and turns out to be true.
That's a great point.
You can withdraw less.
It's a sort of give and take here.
But you can't just keep making withdrawals upon a credibility bank with no credibility in it.
Now, let's talk about what's going on with the Washington Post reporter, Paul Farhi.
And this may seem like a small detail, but again, to me, it shows a cultural issue within the Washington Post.
Yes, I have the article printed out here, and I want to show your audience something in particular.
You're right.
Why am I focusing on this detail?
Because this is the most clear...
It can't possibly be more clear, okay?
I reported in video number one, and I said...
I have a little document here I'm going to hold up to the screen.
I printed it out.
I reported what I said, and this is in video number one.
Video number one we released on John Bonifield in my on-camera, which just is me introducing the segment.
I said, quote, I'd like to introduce to you CNN supervising producer John Bonifield in Atlanta.
That's what I said.
Here's what the Washington Post reported the next day.
Quote, it also doesn't disclose...
That he is based in Atlanta.
Not in Washington or New York, where most of CNN's coverage of national affairs and politics are produced.
It can't possibly be more of a clear need for a retraction.
Again, I'm going to say this again.
I said, quote, I'd like to introduce you to CNN supervising producer John Bonifield in Atlanta.
Washington Post reporter describes the video, quote, James O'Keefe video also doesn't disclose that he is based in Atlanta.
Stephan, it can't possibly be.
More of a lie than that.
More of an error than that.
We don't know if he, like, knew that he was lying, but now he does, because I sent him an email, and here's what the Washington Post reporter said.
Quote, sorry, James.
Editors have said no correction necessary on my story.
I sent him the quotes.
Paul, I'm going to give you one more chance here to correct your story.
And he writes, sorry, James.
Out of luck.
I believe that these people...
Are going to be sued.
I'll tell this on your show.
Eventually I'm going to have to sue him for defamation because now he knows it's false.
Eventually I will.
I'm not going to do it right now because I've got more important things to do.
And they're going to be in a courtroom and be held in contempt of court.
And they're going to hang themselves on a cross because they're not going to correct a simple fact.
We live in a post-fact world now.
This is the turning point here.
And what I need your audience to do, I'm going to have an action item for you.
You guys need to do this.
Please tweet at Paul Fari.
That's F-A-R-H-I. He's a Washington Post reporter.
And please put pressure on him.
To correct this crap, this error, and let's see what happens here.
This is really fascinating.
And I just wanted to highlight that for you because it couldn't possibly be more clear than that.
Right.
The fact that this avenue exists is so unprecedented.
And I wish I could take the internet back with me in a backpack and a time machine and give the power that it had in past events.
I'm thinking McCarthyism would have gone an entirely different way.
Maybe the Nixon stuff would have gone an entirely different way.
And for sure, for sure...
The invasion of Iraq, I think, would have gone a different way if we could go back in time.
And the fact that this evolution of power and control in the mainstream media has been almost unchallenged because there was, you know, the gatekeepers are very solid.
You don't know.
CNN says, we welcome diversity of opinion.
What a lot of crap.
I mean, yeah, try being not on the left and getting a job at CNN. Good luck with that.
That was the most unbelievable response, by the way.
That was the response to our video.
We support diversity, but what does that even mean?
I mean, I can't even begin to tell you how ridiculous that is, but I think everyone saw that as ridiculous, which is a good thing.
I guess, is it just diversity of opinion, James, to have no respect for journalistic ethics if you're a producer of a journalist show?
It's just a diversity of opinion.
You know, some of our doctors in the hospital really, really want to cure people, and other people, other doctors, they just want to kill people.
It's just diversity.
Don't you like more colors in your rainbow?
I mean, it's crazy.
Well, that plays in that whole postmodernism thing.
I don't know if we have time to get into that, but that's interesting.
The philosophy behind why these people are the way they are.
So the three transcendentals, the true, the good, and the beautiful, and the notion that nothing is more...
This is great, because they're sort of forced to digest their own philosophy, which is their self-destruction.
So they believe that nothing is more true than anything else.
That's why we support diversity of opinion.
Well, guess what, CNN? When your whole prerogative is to support diversity of journalism ethics and to compromise on those ethics, diversity kind of hurts you a bit.
There's a standard of integrity, and you can't break the standards of integrity.
Well, you can't support a diversity of integrity, and that kind of plays into that whole discussion about When our mainstream media doesn't have standards of truth and ethics and integrity.
That's an interesting thing.
Well, the postmodern contradiction to me has always been very fascinating that they say there's no such thing as objective truth and virtue, but everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi who should be punished.
You know, hey, if there's no such thing as truth and goodness, why are you opposed to racism?
I mean, I'm opposed to racism, you're opposed to racism, but that's because we have a moral standard that's not purely subjective.
And so this combination, I think that they teach you there's no such thing as the good and the true and the beautiful.
So that you have no defense against their vicious French Revolution-style defamatory attacks.
I think that they want to weaken your sense of morality so they have more control over you and less of a pushback, which is why they go against Christianity so hard.
I think what you said right there, it's the control over other people.
It's the virtue signaling.
There's a column by David Ernst in The Federalist, and he says this is just that, that The answer is one of mankind's oldest stories.
Confessing other people's sins, real or imagined, and inflicting punishment on them has ever been human beings' preferred path to feeling good about themselves.
It's a sort of moral preening, virtue signaling superiority complex.
The good news is, because I don't want to be despairing and cynical here, I don't want to complain about it, I believe that we can turn the same moral lynch mob against them.
How do you do that?
Easy.
by exposing their Achilles heels.
You mentioned African-Americans.
It's a civil rights issue.
Civil rights is extraordinarily important to people like you and me.
We believe strongly in human equality and potential.
And I said last time, I'm from Newark, New Jersey.
New Jersey is the worst public schools in the United States is in New Jersey.
And to see these poor children who can't escape the depravity You want to talk about moral lynch mob?
Let's go into the public schools.
Let's do it.
We're going to do it, by the way.
I promise you that.
And get the white...
That's right.
I'm going to use their racial division here.
The white executives in this public school system talking about black children and how it serves their political interests to keep African-American people down And in these poor districts so that they can prevent them from having opportunity and success and actualizing their potential.
So I believe that the postmodern experiment is doomed for failure with cinema verite.
When you actually expose the motivations, you can turn the moral lynch mob against evildoers and we'll be all better for it.
Oh, and I think that government schools are the very largest dam keeping back the potential of minorities and of poor people and so on.
And so I'll follow that very closely because there's not nearly enough of an expose into the corruption within government schools.
I look forward to that.
Now, you released today, of course, your, I guess, mild chase of Zucker, who I think won the Olympic dash to the car, which is not an easy thing to win these days.
What's going to come out tomorrow?
I mean, give me this Christmas morning feeling that I get every day that you're going to release something.
Well, the reason I'm choosing to come on your show, I have a lot of respect for you.
I like that we get into these serious philosophical or foundational issues today.
I think it's so important for people to understand the why.
Not just the what, but the why.
The way these people are.
So I will give you a little tease.
I don't want to reveal who it is, but we do have a bombshell.
If you wanted to rate them, I would say it's in between the Van Jones clip and the Bonnefield clip.
It's a producer, editor, person in New York.
So remember when Washington Post attacked me?
Oh, that guy's in Atlanta.
Well, first of all, Atlanta's the headquarters, so I don't get the criticism.
But he's in New York, and he's part of someone you very well know on CNN's AM broadcast, and it's really bad.
He's saying some awful things, disclosing the bias, talking specifically about Trump and how they engineer the coverage of Trump.
And I think it's very powerful.
I think each of these pieces is powerful in their own way.
Bonnefield is the non-villain, naked, honest guy.
Van Jones is the total hypocrite who said one thing in public, another in private.
And tomorrow you get to see one of these engineers in New York, one of these producers who is behind someone you all know well.
And I can't wait to release it.
We're working around the clock.
I haven't slept in days.
I'm just high off life, adrenaline and truth here.
We're working as fast as we can.
Our undercover people are still in the field right now.
And we're going to launch this tomorrow morning.
And I won't let the audience down.
This is good stuff.
And you guys, I need your help to get it out.
Now, just if you can, James, because I have this theory about the sequence of release.
It is something to do like a tennis game with what you release and what they respond with, right?
So you release, of course, the guy from Atlanta and they say...
Well, you know, he's not a politics guy.
And then you release the politics guy.
Oh, well, you know, he's not in the headquarters.
And then you release...
Is there a sort of a plan of how you're going to approach this back and forth with the denials followed by the next video?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, sometimes it's...
What do they say?
Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.
So sometimes it's providential.
Sometimes...
I mean, there is a strategy.
We can't always perfect the strategy.
But Andrew Breitbart taught me this.
I mean...
I mean, Andrew Breitbart would play the media.
And I don't mean that manipulate things.
That's not what I mean.
I mean, when you're dealing with a propaganda apparatus which exists to destroy you, what do you think?
You can just put all the stuff out in a silver...
No, you have to be strategic.
And you have to know that they're going to lie about you.
I mean, Brian Stelter's response about diversity and saying...
And there's a bunch of responses to, well, he doesn't involve in the Russia coverage.
Well, then we release someone who is involved in the Russia coverage.
So it's a kind of chess game.
It's a truth chess game.
Because we are at a severe disadvantage and a golf handicap here.
A severe disadvantage.
I mean, I am fighting.
We are fighting.
I would say we're fighting Goliath, but now I feel like we are Goliath.
I feel like you and me and all these people on Twitter, our audience, we're very much more powerful than even CNN at this point.
Nevertheless, nevertheless, they control the American providence.
They control the apparatus that delivers the information that shames people.
That's the key term.
Shames those in power because the last thing a Republican wants to do is be attacked by the Washington Post.
Shame on them.
Shame on the Republicans for being afraid of that.
But they control the apparatus.
So we have to play this strategic chess game where we say, okay, which and what am I going to release?
And these are decisions that my team makes.
We all sit around and say, how do we release the information, be transparent with the information?
And let me give you something else.
Veritas did not just do CNN. We have on our hard drives and servers, in fact, we have them in multiple locations in case someone burns down my building or what have you.
We have footage on other media corporations.
And it's really bad.
In fact, they say the Kim Kardashian thing broke the internet.
Trust me.
It gets worse.
John Bonnefield is not the worst.
There are others.
I can't reveal too much because we've got people working in the field, but we're going to go after all the media corporations.
This is the year of Veritas exposing mainstream media, and we're calling the series American Pravda.
Well, and I, as this stuff started pouring out, James, I mean, I sort of put myself in the, you know, evil pointy slippers of the mainstream media and I'd be like, who did I talk to?
Who I didn't know?
What did I say?
And I hope that this kind of shocks them into recognizing that this untrammeled dishonesty and manipulation is going to have some consequences.
You know, I'm always, always concerned with people who say, listen to my words, I will interpret reality for you and provide it to you.
The only reason that people want to give you an interpreted version of reality rather than, as you point out, people honestly saying things is because they don't want you to see reality because they want you to become dependent upon their perceptions rather than actual reality that disempowers everyone.
That's it.
That's the one message that people need to know.
It's what you just said.
That's it.
That's everything.
That's everything everyone needs to know.
They do not want to show you reality.
I call it veritas.
Veritas is the Latin word for truth.
Cinema verite.
I don't want to...
I think it was St.
Augustine who said that truth is like a lying.
You just let it out.
You don't characterize truth.
There's no need to.
There's no need to defend the truth and there's no need to attack the truth.
It just is.
It just exists.
I can't make a banana purple.
I can't make CNN true if it's false.
So I don't think we need to have a battle of conjecture.
I don't think we need to have a battle of explanation.
I think what we're doing right now, explaining these concepts, are a good idea.
But I go on these radio shows.
Everyone says, come on my radio show.
I have nothing to say.
I say, roll the tape.
What do you think, James?
What I think doesn't matter.
What matters is what John Bonifield thinks, what Van Jones thinks, and what this New York CNN producer Tomorrow thinks.
That's what matters.
I wasn't even there.
My team, my guy was undercover for a few months.
And I want to talk a little about one thing, teamwork.
It's not the James O'Keefe show.
I'm so proud of my team.
We have the best journalism team in the country.
We have well over dozens of people now, but we have well over a dozen skilled investigators.
And here's something interesting, Stephan.
The White House has more leaks than the Iraqi Navy.
They're leaking stuff left and right.
Why?
And I think Trump needs to surround himself with better people, of course, but because they live in a world of angles where everyone's trying to leak stuff and feel good about themselves, and we don't even know who the leakers are.
No one would ever leak from within Project Veritas.
Within the walls of this institution that I'm sitting in right now, I got a great team.
Why?
Because we believe.
We believe in what we're doing.
And the immense pride that is ours to be part of something special, we have people who really believe in what we're doing.
We had a thousand applications for undercover journalists, and we narrowed that down to a handful of people through an intense vetting process.
What do they call it?
Intense vetting or whatever the term was for the immigrants coming in.
Extreme vetting, I think was the phrase, yeah.
We used extreme vetting and it worked.
We vetted out a lot of plants and moles, people trying to sting me.
And we really believe we have a strong team.
And we could never do this if we were located in Washington, D.C. because invariably someone would get a job here that had ulterior motives.
I don't mean just trying to sting me.
me.
I mean, trying to leak to develop a relationship with these power brokers instead of serving our mission.
So I just want to say that I'm very proud of my team.
It's not it's not just me.
It's we have a great team.
And that's very important in this society to find people around you who you can trust and who are all who all believe in that in that mission statement.
Well, and I think it's hard for politicians and people in the mainstream media to understand what loyalty means because they don't seem to have any to truth the republic reality or journalistic
Now, the last thing I wanted to mention before we talk about the resources that your organization needs, it seems to me that, I mean, my goal, I was not involved in politics at all for many, many years, but my goal was I saw through Trump and through the work that you do and other people do the opportunity to push back Trying to have a rational conversation in the modern world with the mainstream media is like trying to talk metaphysics in a disco.
It's like a rational conversation.
Can't even get one location corrected, right?
Fact, factual, yeah.
And so because, you know, anytime you talk about racial issues, racism, anytime you talk about gender issues, sexism, like there's this giant thunderclap of conversation destroying nonsense that is drowning out our rational discourse.
And I think it has bled the spine out of the Republicans.
So it seems to me if we can push back the mainstream media, it will give the Republicans more room to act to pursue their agenda because they've been fighting this rear guard and losing game against this monolithic soul and family and reputation destroying power of the leftist media.
And I think pushing back their power gives more room for the right to achieve or at least the non-left to achieve some of their goals.
And I want to make a point about that because I think that's, you know, aside from your point about people seeing reality, that's one of the most important points as well.
The Republicans are governed by the media's shame.
And the media's shame is based upon what you say, this gobbledygook about racism and sexism.
Well, the first thing we need to do is expose their racism, like these African-American children in public schools.
That's something that Veritas is definitely going to be exposing.
These poor children can't get out, and that's how we expose their racism.
But Dinesh D'Souza said the Republican Party is governed by the shame they receive in the media or simply, quote, the terrifying power of the press's narrative.
So the politicians in D.C., particularly these establishment types, are governed by And afraid of bad things said about them on the interwebs, particularly in mainstream corporations, because these are the people that they cabal with.
And listen, I know what it feels like.
I face the fire.
It hurts.
It hurts to have people that are established, intelligent, suit-wearing, you know, you know, Establishment people who think ill of you, but it's not based in reality.
It's based in a lie.
So the brilliance of Trump, the synergy, we're radically different people with maybe even radically different views of the world, but the synergy between Veritas and Trump is that we punch back harder.
When they say, they've called me everything you can imagine.
Liar, criminal, rapist.
None of it's true.
I was falsely accused.
I mean, I've been through everything.
Every name in the world.
But it doesn't matter, Stephan, because we keep releasing more footage.
The Republicans, if they're smart, the only thing they need to do, Stephan, the only thing they need to do is ignore what the media says about them.
And I don't believe they have the moral courage to do it.
Because there's one thing, oh, physical courage, physical courage.
Listen, that's...
Let's put that aside.
You need moral courage.
You need to be able to say, I don't believe you and I don't care what you say about me.
Because in my heart, I believe that this policy thing or this thing I want to advance, I believe it's the right thing to do for just reasons.
Now, if you're just doing it because a donor tells you to do it, that's not going to work.
You have to believe that it's a good thing for society.
And I don't know if it is a good thing for society, some of the things they're pushing, but that's not the point.
You can't be governed by the media's shame.
And that's the most important thing.
Let's not be governed by the shame.
Let's punch back harder.
Let's understand that if we believe in what we're doing, let's just continue to do it.
Now, let's talk about some of the resources that you need, and I want to remind everyone that a donation to James' organization, Project Veritas, is, I think, a very, very positive thing to do, something to help out Western civilization.
You know, there's confusion that people say, he switched on the light and there was the body.
That doesn't mean he's the murderer.
That means he's the guy taking pictures of the murderer and trying to hold it up for people to see.
Help people understand, you know, the resources you need, how they can help you out, and where they can go to do so.
I'd like everyone to go to ProjectVeritas.com.
That's V-E-R-I-T-A-S. Project Truth.
ProjectVeritas.com.
And just donate $10.
Donate $10.
I don't know how many people are going to watch this video.
A few hundred thousand, maybe a million.
I hired, I can't say how many people, but we hired a lot of journalists and they're great.
And they have to pay them full-time salaries.
They have to live in the New York metropolitan area.
And it's expensive.
So if you guys, the more you give, the more I can do.
I am crowdsource funded.
No one has fiduciary control over me.
I do.
We do.
We're a team.
We do what we believe is right.
And we can only expose what is real.
We can't create an image of something.
So if you guys all donate $10 to ProjectVeritas.com, I can hire more investigative reporters.
And that's all there is to it.
And it is a race to the truth.
It is a race of truth versus lies and everybody needs their fuel to get ahead.
So thanks, James, so much for your time today.
I want to remind people, yes, he said, projectveritas.com.
Follow him on Twitter, twitter.com forward slash James O'Keefe, I-I-I, James O'Keefe III. Thanks so much for all of the work you've done this week.
