Oct. 12, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:03
3856 Gatekeepers Exposed | James O'Keefe and Stefan Molyneux
Project Veritas and James O’Keefe have recently published undercover video exposing significant bias at the New York Times and questionable newsfeed “cultivation” at YouTube – raising serious ethical questions related to the involved companies. James O’Keefe joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the recent undercover video releases, the strange response from the New York Times, absurd claims of impartiality from biases mainstream media outlets, the use of lawfare to suppress honest journalism 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
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux here with James O'Keefe.
He is an award-winning journalist and the founder and president of both Project Veritas and Project Veritas Action, nonprofit organizations open and eager for your donations who are dedicated to investigating corruption, dishonesty, waste, We're good to go.
James, every day I wake up, check out YouTube, and I'm not at an odd angle in a public restaurant is a good day for me.
And I just, you are making everybody concerned about their public conversations.
The kind of thing, like every time one of your videos comes out, people on the left are like, okay, who did I talk to?
Who I didn't know over the past six months?
What's coming next? I mean, how has that been happening for you now that these two big new ones have dropped?
Well, I don't know if you saw, the managing editor of the New York Times put out a memo Internally at the New York Times and said, you know, there's been some people talking to supposed college students, you know, be on the lookout.
And I just went, too late.
And Don Trump Jr.
retweeted that. I think that it's a very interesting, people, it's not about Changing the bad behavior.
They wouldn't virtuously select the bad people in their ranks and fire them.
What they really are upset about is being exposed in the first place.
And that transcends Veritas' mission to a larger mission.
It's the Weinstein thing. It's everything in society.
People don't reform their behavior out of virtue.
They reform their behavior because there's pressure put on them by the people.
And that's really the larger mission that these videos serve.
Well, of course, the news organizations as a whole have wielded this giant club for decades, if not centuries.
And this club being the old argument, don't get into fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.
And they've had this power to go after individuals, which they have used fairly excessively, I think, in my opinion.
They've had this power to To make your day bad.
And it is interesting to see how they handle this kind of power now shifting to be a little bit more balanced between the news organizations and people like yourself.
Yeah, it's an interesting phenomenon that these so-called sacred cows, the New York Times, Planned Parenthood, these types of groups.
I mean, I think Weinstein this week, he's kind of a sacred cow, and you can't expose powerful people because they're sort of clubby.
There's a sort of clubbiness about it.
And that's where you're sort of bushwhacking.
You're going off the trail and doing something that no one has ever done before, going after these really powerful, self-interested groups.
Everyone wants something from the New York Times.
They want to get their book on the list or they want to work for them.
I call them the Holy Grail because they're kind of like the Bible for people who don't believe in that type of thing.
That is the one sacrosanct golden deal.
And by the way, Stephan, I was having coffee with a New York Times reporter over the summertime.
And I wasn't filming them.
I wasn't doing anything funny.
I just said, Jeremy, why are you considered news and we're not?
And Jeremy Peters was his name.
And he looked at me and he said, James, the reason that we're legitimate and you guys aren't It's because we, the New York Times, don't have a political agenda.
That's what he told me. He said, we don't have an agenda.
And I said, really? You mean to tell me, Jeremy, that in those little meetings at the New York Times, around the table, you don't think we need to take this guy down?
You don't say that ever?
And he was like, no, no, we really try to be fair.
So then it occurred to me that what we need to expose at Project Veritas was the fact that they do have a political agenda.
And that is the great lie, that these mainstream reporters aren't...
I would go so far as to argue that people like me and you have less of an agenda than they do.
So that's the great lie that the expose seeks to get to.
Don't have a political agenda?
Then where are the Republicans or the Libertarians or the Conservatives in the newsroom?
Don't have a political agenda?
90-plus, 95% of reporters in Washington gave to the Hillary Clinton campaign?
Don't have a political agenda?
The most terrifying thing about that, James, is that they probably honestly believe that it's true.
Because there's no dissenting voices at the table, so their political agenda is completely invisible to them.
Well, people ask, why are you calling it American Pravda, this series of CNN, New York Times, and then the next one?
I say because it's the old adage, the difference between the Soviet Union Pravda and The New York Times.
Pravda in the Soviet Union was the state-sponsored newspaper.
And Sholtsinitsyn created the Shamistad, which was the contrary, truthful, guerrilla news.
But the difference between the Soviet Pravda and the American news is that the people in the Soviet Union knew they were being lied to.
They participated in the lie.
They privately joked about these ridiculous things that the people at the Pravda said.
But when Jeremy Peters at the New York Times or anyone in the media says with a straight face that we don't have a political agenda, Stefan, you and I can laugh about it, but I don't know, 40 to 50% of the American people go, yeah, they're right.
They're true. They're the paper of record.
They're the old gray lady. So that is a huge difference and that is a difference that we must break that down for people.
We must show people the real common sense reality.
Well, I mean, it's a basic question of Socratic self-knowledge.
Now, you can say, I am aware of and I fight my own particular confirmation biases.
I try to get opposing information to make sure I end up somewhere in the middle.
We're aware of our political biases, but here are the checks and balances we have in place to attempt to reduce them.
But to say we have no political biases whatsoever, I mean, this is also to say that when Carla Slim of Mexico, you know, gives hundreds of millions of dollars or invests hundreds of millions of dollars, that this doesn't change their policy regarding immigration or illegal immigration and so on.
That's absolutely an astonishing statement.
And I think the only people who would believe that are people who are already so deep into that ideology that they think it's just physics.
You know, like, I don't have an ideology about physics.
You know, I throw a ball. I don't say, well, I... I really hope it comes down rather than just keeps going up because physics is just something you take for granted.
You can't really have an ideology about it.
But when it comes to Pollux, they claim nothing.
Nothing. No need. You're a complete pane of glass.
You're an absolute robot.
I mean, this is absolutely astounding.
What are the odds then that so many people who are on the left end up at the New York Times if there's no political bias at all?
That's really quite an astounding feat.
Well, yes, it's very well said.
I believe, though, that the reality, and we talked about this last time, is the sort of the common sense perceptions of people, when they look at these facts in a very visceral way, it confronts them and it changes their minds.
Again, in the Soviet Union, everyone knew That they were being lied to, that they were living in this sort of slave state, if you will.
I think that's the case.
And in America, a lot of people have these narrative constructs that exist on these very thin stilts, these artificial constructs.
And we're just taking the Veritas machete and we're just banging those stilts out from underneath them.
When Jeremy Peters looks at me in a straight face, and I really said to him, I didn't film this, but this is a very important moment.
I looked at Jeremy and I really was sincere and I said, Jeremy, come on.
You don't believe that, do you?
Come on. When you're in the coffee room, when you're at the water cooler at the New York Times, Your colleagues don't look at each other and go, we want to take this guy down.
You mean, really?
I mean, don't lie to me.
But I couldn't break him.
He had convinced himself of the lie.
So then, again, the mission statement here is to get as many people.
And then they're going to say, well, it's just an isolated incident.
This is a low-level rogue employee.
This is what they do. Recent hire. Recent hire.
Recent hire, junior associate, and then I have to release more evidence showing them that he has more power, but that's a separate style.
I believe it's this sort of common sense perception that we have to deliver the truth to people so that we can slice out that misconception.
If they say that there's no political agenda, it's hard to understand how, what is it, 95% of coverage of Trump from the mainstream media is negative?
It's really hard to think that there's no agenda when, you know, he won in a landslide from the Electoral College, but an overwhelming majority of news articles about him are negative.
And then to sit there and say there's no political agenda, the only thing more terrifying Then thinking he's lying is thinking that he genuinely believes that that's true.
I mean, that is so outside of even remotely statistical reality that it seems downright lunatic to me.
I mean, I think there are a lot of people in this country who have beliefs that defy common sense, right?
Veritas being the Latin word for truth.
There are common sense perceptions in the world around us, and I think if we just make those things very visceral and powerful for people like we do at Veritas, where in this video, number one, you have This guy Dudek, who is the lead video audience editor for the New York Times, and he's saying things like, we need to target and boycott Trump's businesses.
This is the type of thing an Antifa guy would say.
Not a New York Times reporter, right?
But you get these sort of, it's so powerful that, and this is what I said in this documentary that we did last week, is that when they stop They don't notice after this expose.
They didn't call me names.
They didn't say he's a criminal, he doctors video.
There was a sort of silence.
There was a sort of respect, respect, a begrudging respect from the managing editor at the New York Times who said, we're reviewing the situation.
He violated our ethical handbook.
They have this ethical policy, by the way, Stephan, at the New York Times that says you can't do anything that questions your professionalism and your neutrality.
This is like, they all violate this if you just film them, but we film them one by one.
Well, and I think, I mean, there is respect, and the degree of respect bound up with fear, I guess, will unravel over time, because I think everybody with half a brain has realized some of what you do, if I can put it this way, is you release a video which promotes a flurry of attacks and denials, and then you release a second video That proves your first video was just the tip of the iceberg.
So I think that they're a little bit cautious about using the selective editing phrase and so on, because they know that what's coming next is going to be worse and bigger than anything they're trying to deny now.
Yes, and it's like the reverse of Gandhi.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they win.
In our case, First they fight me, then they laugh at us, and then they ignore us.
It's sort of a reversal of that whole trope.
But we think that when they treat us fairly, they respect us.
In the CNN videos, which we did a couple months ago, this was a guy in the elevator in Atlanta at CNN saying, Russia stuff is just BS. CNN wrote, laughing out loud, we support diversity of opinion.
What was that reaction? In this case, we've got a serious reaction, and there's a lot more to come, and there's a lot to unpack here in these videos.
But I think maybe talking about the lawsuit thing might be an interesting...
Yeah, so, I mean, just to sort of presage this, I mean, there is the old saying that you only get flack when you're over the target, and it really bothers me.
How a fairly good legal system is so often co-opted by, to me, pretty corrupt elements to try and silence truth seekers.
So let's talk about some of the lawsuits that are floating around.
And, you know, when I read a lawsuit, often I can say, okay, well, I can see how that could be a problem, or I can see, I'm not a lawyer, but I can sort of follow reasoning and common sense.
But most of these, I can't make hide nor hair of how any of these could ever land with any legitimacy in a courtroom.
Well, this is how they're going to try to shut us down.
One of the most common questions I get asked, I never anticipated being asked this question, but I think a lot of people who do this type of work are asked this question is, do you fear for your life?
And I have no idea how to approach this type of question.
I actually, in the beginning, didn't think about it.
I'd say in the recent year, I've taken it very seriously What the enemy, if you will, or adversaries at least, are willing to do to stop us.
And I've been told by my advisors and my supporters and people that I trust to take this serious.
And we've done some things to protect ourselves.
But the way they really are going to try to shut me down is through the courts.
Historically, Media companies have been, I mean, in the 1980s and 1990s, they basically stopped doing undercover journalism because these corporations would sue.
Grocery store Food Lion sued ABC News for a billion dollars, tortious interference for when ABC filmed the meat, spoiled meat they were repackaging.
ABC News started doing these sort of cutesy bubblegum journalism, man on the street, hidden camera stuff, which didn't really take on anyone in power.
And they stopped doing this.
And there's a lot to unpack here, but it has to do with economic reasons.
It just doesn't serve the bottom line to go after powerful people.
And a lot of these news corporations would operate at a loss to do their investigative reporting.
They did so in the public interest.
That stopped happening with the consolidation of the news.
So now we're not really doing anything new.
It's more of like a renaissance. But I have been sued six times in the last two months.
Bob Kramer sued me for a million dollars.
In the video that we did on those Democracy Partners videos during the election with Hillary Clinton's campaign, doing dirty tricks and inciting violence, one of the people that we filmed, Scott Fovil, who was fired, said that he was bird-dogging and inciting violence on the ground using an activist named Shirley Teeter.
He said, Shirley Teeter was one of my bird doggers, one of Scott Fovil's bird doggers.
Now she sued me.
I don't know why she's suing me.
She should be suing Scott Fovil, the guy who made the claim.
But we believe there's probably some type of, I don't know, there's some type of DNC-backed or Kramer-backed effort, conspiracy behind all these lawsuits.
We have just lawsuits.
I mean, I can talk about all these lawsuits.
One of the most interesting thing about them is inside the lawsuits, the things they say I'll give you two examples.
In the Creamer lawsuit, he says on day one of this hidden camera filming, he made the statement that everything is confidential.
Very interesting statement.
You want to know why? Because we film everything on day one, and he never made that statement.
So it's funny how they make these spurious false claims when you're talking about a hidden camera journalist who films everything.
And then the second claim, and this is in the League of Conservation voters lawsuit against us.
By the way, there's so much to say here.
They went to the Attorney General of California, League of Conservation voters did, And asked him to indict us.
They went to the law enforcement agencies before we even released any videos.
We haven't released anything yet. And they said that O'Keefe, quote, degrades the public discourse, unquote.
That's not even an argument.
I don't know what that is.
That's a statement by people who just don't like the things we have to say.
In another case in Michigan, this is the Teachers By the way, the indictment thing, I mean, that's not civil.
They're asking, isn't it correct that they're asking for some sort of criminal investigation over what you did on the grounds that it somehow doesn't serve the public discourse, which is truly totalitarian?
It is. I guess the silver lining to all this stuff is it really shows them for who they are.
They wanted me to go to jail simply because they didn't like what we might expose.
We've reached a new level.
Now they react before even the release of the video.
In Michigan, in the teachers' union, I can't really speak about what we have or what's coming, but they filed an injunction, the head, Of the National Teachers Union filed an injunction against me.
This was like last week. I can't even say what we might have, but how you know they're afraid?
They went to court and actually got a judge to stop me from publishing what it is that I have.
It is a totalitarianism.
There's so much to unpack here.
I think the totalitarianism angle, I think we're boldly going.
No citizen journalist has ever gone before, and they're going to try to shut me down with these lawsuits.
And there's a lot of money involved in these kinds of lawsuits, not just in terms of what they're asking for, but even funding them.
And funding the process of going through it is quite expensive.
And to me, I'm always curious.
I mean, I can understand it with the teachers' unions and so on, but I'm always curious where the money is coming from to fund these things which, in my amateur opinion, aren't going to go too far.
Yes. And I thought about whether or not I even wanted to speak about this on YouTube.
Some of my advisors said, by virtue, James, of you saying that these things are annoying to you, they're going to keep putting out more lawsuits.
But I believe that Veritas tries to be very transparent and We try to have integrity, and I think the audience needs to know about this.
A million-dollar lawsuit, our insurance companies, it's tough.
The premiums go up, and it doesn't matter whether it's true or not.
It's sort of that tactic used by the left where they just overwhelm the system with bogus complaints to shut down the opposition.
But I think that one of the things that we're going to try to do is find out who's funding them.
Right, right. So six, you just said in the past two months, are there others floating around that are worth mentioning?
I mean, every time we do an investigation, here's another one, Steve Wentz from Kansas.
He said, quote, I will kick your effing ass to a student and said he would want to beat them up.
And he's suing us.
I think what's happening, if I had to speculate, is somebody is going to every single person in these hidden camera videos and saying, want to join the parade?
Want to go after O'Keefe?
Want to gang up?
And this guy, Bob Kramer, was really fired by Hillary Clinton, we exposed.
He was a very powerful guy.
And I think he's going to spend the rest of his natural life trying to make my life difficult.
The one silver lining to all these lawsuits, Stephan, is that they're very frivolous.
There's no real merit to them.
It's just a deterrent to other people doing this type of work.
Let me put it to you this way.
The head of the entire American Teachers Union, I believe that education reform is a civil rights era of our time.
The head of the government-sponsored AFT, Randy Weingarten, Got involved in Michigan and got a judge to literally stop us from publishing our information.
You want to know the good news? That Randy Weingarten is now involved in a cover-up of whatever it is that we have on Hidden Camera.
Well, it is funny, too, because when I was younger, I guess maybe I had a more naive view of the legal system, but I was always like, wow, someone's getting sued.
I wonder what they did wrong.
That was kind of my perspective.
I don't really feel that way anymore, particularly when I look at the content of lawsuits now.
It's like, oh, someone is having legal action against them.
I wonder what they did right.
And it's a very cynical, in a way, place to be, but it's hard to deny that perspective based on accumulating evidence over the last couple of years.
Well, one of the other things to talk about is the positives that the media use, like James O'Keefe, comma, who settled with Acorn for $100,000, comma, or Project Veritas, who is discredited after one lawsuit settlement, which Didn't actually affect the accuracy of our reporting.
It had to do with these two-party consent laws in California recording people without their permission.
But when you look at the actual...
This is the thing that I've realized.
When you look at the media landscape, news corporations settle lawsuits all the time.
NBC News settled with General Motors after the fiery car crash that was fakely staged.
ABC News settled...
A very large defamation lawsuit with Beef Products Incorporated for falsely maligning that meat manufacturer.
John Oliver and HBO are being sued by a coal company for false and malicious coverage.
Rolling Stone Magazine, you don't see them, Rolling Stone, comma, which was sued for defamation for the fake rape case at UVA. Why do all these media companies get a pass in the culture when they over and over and over again have settled defamation lawsuits?
Katie Couric was sued for defamation by the people that she targeted and doctored out the audio from the gun documentary where she made them look like they were pausing and they were stupid.
I would never make an edit like that.
But on Wikipedia and in the culture, Which it's always Veritas controversial for their editing techniques.
I have never in my life been sued for an editing technique.
I've been sued for invasion of privacy and for tortious interference.
In other words, being effective.
I've been sued because we have results.
But here's what you don't understand, James.
Let me school you on this. The reason why Project Veritas gets these comma, controversial things is because clearly, James, you are not a legitimate news source.
And this, of course, brings us to the next topic, which we can dip into the New York Times thing in a sec.
But what you came out recently with YouTube and this, boy, talk about a euphemism, curating YouTube.
Curating is wonderful.
It's preserving old Viking statues.
Perhaps it's something to do with growing tiny bonsai trees, but it sounds so harmless.
It's pruning a hedge. It's curating.
There are other words that pop into mind when it comes to changing the algorithms of what's promoted on YouTube, but I wonder if you can give people a little bit of background about why that's important.
Well, we just released a video yesterday where I don't think anyone's ever done this before.
We went undercover into YouTube.
We built a relationship with an influencer, an access agent inside of YouTube.com.
His name is Ernest Petty.
And over a series of meetings, he's a very tempered man, not the type of guy that speaks bombastically or speaks flippantly, but we gradually got him to admit that this news carousel on YouTube, this is a tape that was released yesterday, he says that this news carousel, there is the ability to determine what content is legitimate versus illegitimate.
And he actually specifically calls out Alex Jones.
I mean, a lot of people don't like Alex Jones, a lot of people do like Alex Jones, but he specifically says that this is the type of thing that they would not allow to be in this so-called news carousel, that people would have to manually bypass this and go find him manually, because he's not, quote, legitimate, unquote, news.
And that begs the question, who determines what is legitimate?
I mean, their mission statement says that they're supposed to be No human involvement.
Everything is sort of naturally selected to the top.
But here you finally have, and again, this doesn't shock you, it doesn't shock me, it doesn't shock anyone, but we've never had someone actually saying this into a camera.
And that's what was released yesterday.
What bothers me about this in particular is those of us who are creating content for YouTube, myself and yourself and millions of others, I want it to be an even playing field.
I want to compete honestly and openly with everyone else producing content.
I think that is what is going to produce the very best content, is having this even playing field.
It's sort of like if you play the lottery, you expect the numbers to be randomly generated.
You don't expect the lottery company to be adjusting the numbers to benefit their friends.
And if you find that out, it seems to me that the lottery has some explaining to do.
And to me, if YouTube says, okay, well, we're gonna start curating this stuff, we're gonna handpick this, we don't like, and again, the Alex Jones, the quote, right-wing thing, they wouldn't necessarily say this about, I don't know, we don't want any Antifa videos.
Rising to the top, right? It always tends to be sort of one side.
If they say, look, we like mainstream news organizations.
We don't want to be, I think the term he used was embarrassed.
We don't want to be embarrassed by what's floating up there.
We don't like who we perceive as the right wing.
So we're going to start promoting mainstream and leftist causes.
We're going to start denigrating or downvoting right wing causes.
Then it's okay. Well, you can make your decision about what platform you want based on information.
But if this stuff's all happening behind the scenes, behind the curtain, That's what I think is, well, they could be more forthright about what's going on.
Yeah, according to our reporting in this series of videos that we've released so far, two videos, I mean, YouTube, their mission is sort of, quote, we believe everyone should have a chance to be discovered, build a business, and succeed on their own terms, and that people, not gatekeepers, decide what's popular.
Yet, according to this New York Times guy, which we filmed, YouTube has gatekeepers of its own.
They have relationships with people in the mainstream media partners, Huffington Post, Black Lives Matter.
This is one of the things that Ernie Petit at YouTube actually says.
Black Lives Matter is a specific quote-unquote partner.
Now, why and how does Google determine that Black Lives Matter has more legitimacy as an institution, as a purveyor of news?
Because Black Lives Matter has their own messaging, their own PR, their own advertising.
Why are they more legitimate than, say, Alex Jones?
That is an arbitrary and capricious decision by a human being that completely contradicts the mission of YouTube.
YouTube is owned by Google.
And these are powerful people.
And you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg in these series of meetings we have with Ernie Petit, is his name.
He was very tempered.
He was very careful. If you watch his body language, he says, At the very least, we can determine some things so that we bypass people like Alex Jones, at the very least.
And he says very rare, very rare, repeatedly.
Yes, he says very rare, he says at the very least, but that's the importance of undercover work is getting this guy to trust you enough to divulge all the dirty details.
But this guy, Nick Dudek, now this guy has loose lips.
He says that he did a video about Facebook at the New York Times.
He didn't like The story about negatively affecting Facebook, and he, quote, choose to put it in a spot that he knew wouldn't do well, keeping it, quote, hush-hush from his bosses.
That's one of the reasons he's in trouble.
But this guy at YouTube really corroborates what the New York Times said.
And by the way, Stephan, the reason we were able to get to this source inside YouTube is from our informants, is from people inside these Silicon Valley companies.
And I know that a lot of people who watch your broadcast here may be inside one of these companies, and we will protect you.
We definitely will protect you if you send us a message.
That's how we got this information.
They told us where the sort of bodies are buried, and then we sent our undercover reporter in.
And it seems to me that this line between allowing the sort of honest democracy of views and upvotes and trending and so on to be automated, it's just a math game, that to me is a very central principle.
Once you cross that Rubicon and once you say, okay, we're just going to tweak things a little bit, I have no idea where that process eventually stops.
But I have absolutely no faith If there are left-wing activists working in these organizations, I have absolutely no faith that it's going to stay on the edges.
I have absolutely no faith that it's not going to be a slippery slope of increasing intervention just based upon how I've seen things play out before.
So I do think that it's incumbent upon YouTube and other places either fess up and say that you are manipulating results for a political agenda or stop doing it completely and have it audited and verified from the outside.
Well, they'll never admit that unless it's into a hidden camera.
Well, they kind of have now, so...
And just the tippy-top of the iceberg.
But I will say this is the next step of an evolutionary...
The Silicon Valley companies are the media.
Sheryl Sandberg was on MSNBC this morning, an hour-long town hall session or something, and I was listening, and And she was asked repeatedly, are you a media company, Facebook?
Are you a media company?
And she had all these rehearsed sort of lawyerly responses that didn't really say anything substantive.
But Senator Dick Durbin drafted legislation a few years ago attempting to define what a journalist was.
It had like 400 words.
I mean, it was so arbitrary.
It was so... It was so arbitrary.
And this is one of the central beliefs I have, is that Aristotle said, you are what you repeatedly do.
Journalism, again, is not an identity.
It is an activity.
It could be both, but it's certainly an activity.
Journalism is a thing.
It's a product. You judge the content by how true it is and how real it is.
And our main premise in this American Pravda series is that those people, At YouTube, at the New York Times, which is what you've seen so far, at CNN, those folks have an agenda that is probably more stalwart than the citizen.
I don't have advertisers.
Roger Veritas has no advertisers.
No one has fiduciary control over me.
We're crowdsource funded.
But you look at someone like Jeff Zucker at CNN, who's basically a game show host, driven totally by ratings.
Or the Black Lives Matter guy.
Ernest Petty at YouTube is wearing a sweater that says Black Lives Matter with Google on the sleeve.
Or Nick Dudick, who reveals a sociopathic personal motive in his explanation of what drives him.
My argument is that they have none of the virtues of the citizen journalists, and their vices are to the tenth power of ours.
So hypocrisy is an understatement.
But this is all just the evolution of this sort of identity thing about what is journalism.
Journalism is an activity, and you have to judge people for what they do and the journalism they produce, not whether they're credentialed or not.
Well, a credential is just an ultimate gatekeeper, and the way it works in academia is you have to conform to a general propagandist, usually leftist narrative, in order to get your degree.
And that way, the only people who are considered to have authority are those who've bent the knee to leftist ideology, and therefore they can be safe to be released into the wild knowing that they're not going to disturb the intellectual status quo one tiny bit.
I like what, on what you just said, I like what Jordan Peterson said when he talks about universities and like, what are universities?
Because that's another identity thing.
And he says, well, universities are wherever learning happens.
Learning doesn't happen on college campuses anymore.
So he says learning happens in whether it be videos like this or online forums or places where people can actually get real information.
I think the same thing applies to journalism.
Journalism and university education are, I guess, under the same sort of...
Meta item.
So I think journalism is wherever learning happens.
So YouTube and Facebook are media companies.
Let me put it this way.
There's no place else for me to go, Stephan.
My story inside of Hillary Clinton's campaign was spiked by Sinclair, was spiked by Fox News.
I believe because those people, those executives Some of them are very good people, but they were afraid of retaliation by Hillary's Department of Justice.
They literally were self-interested.
And that's fine. I get it.
That's self-interested economics.
But there's no place else for me to go.
If I get kicked off YouTube and Twitter and Facebook, I mean, I guess I'm not really an IT guy, but I guess I have to create my own HT, you know, But this is it.
This is the last place.
Like Reagan said, you can't leave America.
So that's why this stuff is so important.
And unfortunately, we're just on the tip of the iceberg here, but there's a lot more coming.
And this is, to me, I just sort of want to make this final point and get your thoughts, James.
The frustrating thing to me, and I guess it's kind of inevitable, is, look, if I'm making arguments that are wrong, and I get corrected, you know, I make little course corrections all the time, I'm not ever going to be infallible, but if we're putting out information that's bad or arguments that are fallacious or whatever, then make better videos.
That's what I invite. If you disagree with me, I'm sure if you disagree with James too, Create better citizen journalists.
Send your people into organizations that you disagree with and try and find stuff where they're not meeting their ideals.
If you disagree with me, make better videos.
Prove me wrong. Compete with me in the open marketplace of ideas.
I think if you wanna be a boxer, strap on your gloves, put on your shorts, and get in the ring.
What I don't like Is, you know, being the boxer who has a funny-tasting coffee and then gets disoriented and knocked out that way.
I don't like the cheating.
And to me, in the battle of ideas, don't manipulate results.
That's a confession of intellectual impotence.
Don't launch frivolous lawsuits.
That is a confession of intellectual impotence.
You can't win against the arguments.
You can't win against the evidence.
You can't win against the skill and expertise and eloquence.
Therefore, you have to start...
Slipping things into people's coffee, you have to start tilting the playing field, you have to have your thumb on the scale, you have to start manipulating the numbers.
And that to me is so cowardly and unfair.
Meet us in open combat, we'll both emerge better, whoever's proven wrong.
It's unearned moral authority, and they've created this playing field where there's evil, there's good and evil, and And we're evil.
But it's also, as Andrew Breitbart told me when I worked for him seven years ago, one of the first things he said was, James, they're going to hold you to a higher standard than the Pulitzer Prize winners.
And I guess I got what he meant, but he said that that advice was forged by years of editing Drudge and seeing the landscape.
Now it's been magnified.
We are held, and this is the thing I always say inside myself when I'm going through this, we're held to a higher standard, a ridiculously high standard, and we have to abide by that.
And I see that as evidenced by the fact that mainstream media gets sued all the time.
Katie Couric got sued. She literally doctored out a response by these gun owners.
If I ever did that, I would be—I mean, they say that I do that.
I've never done that. And you have to live up to this standard, and that's the sort of—to put it in, I guess, a Christian way— That's the cross that we have to bear in doing the work that we do.
And I think the good news is it makes us better human beings.
It makes us more integrity.
I think Project Veritas, I told this to my team.
We had a big all-hands-on meeting yesterday, and I said, guys, I'm proud of you because we all here we have integrity.
And that just doesn't mean not breaking the law and not lying and doing what you say you're going to do, but we have integrity.
We pursue stories that no one else will.
Whatever the cost is to us, whatever the cost is to us professionally and personally and reputationally, we go places where no one else will go.
So when Andrew Breitbart said, James, they're going to hold you to a higher standard, he meant that in a very deep way, that we have to Bear that burden and bear that cost in a way that nobody else will.
And it's really not fair.
But it makes us better people.
It makes us more challenged.
It makes us tested.
Most people are too afraid to be tested.
But at the end of the day, we can sleep well at night knowing that we do the right thing.
Well, if you have a really talented athlete, you're going to keep upping the scale.
You're going to have to hold that athlete to a higher standard because they have such excellence.
You get held to a higher standard because you already embody a higher standard.
So you don't expect the same serve when you're teaching a six-year-old how to play tennis than when you're teaching Andre Agassi in his prime.
You hold him to a higher standard because he already embodies that higher standard.
Now, I wanted to just ask, and I know it's a delicate matter to tease what's coming next, but...
What is coming down the pipeline?
Because I do find myself getting a little flutter of girly glee when this stuff is coming down the pipeline.
What is coming down that is going to be the coda to what's come out recently?
Well, I will say this, and I'm pulling up this tweet from this managing editor at the New York Times.
His name is Clifford Levy.
And again, his response was very serious.
The deputy managing editor of the New York Times said, quote, it appears that a recent hire in a junior position violated our ethical standards and misrepresented his role.
His role at the Times, quote, we are reviewing the situation now.
So I don't know if that means he's going to get fired, he's going to get a promotion.
I can say that what is the Times' hiring guidelines here with this so-called junior hire?
And by the way- And who was managing him?
You know, either he had no idea what the standards were, or whoever hired him didn't review his work.
Or like, I mean, to me, it doesn't just like, oh, well, he was just a recent hire.
Well, who hired him? And who was managing him?
And who was responsible for inculcating that culture?
And who reviewed his work? Anyway, sorry.
To me, that doesn't answer anything.
This guy named John Michael at the New York Times is the guy that worked with him.
This guy, John Michael, has suspended his accounts now.
He used to be online.
Now he's gone. And this guy, John Michael, this Nick Dudek at the New York Times says, John Michael has, quote, no idea, unquote, about my various conflicts of interest.
So either Nick Dudek is under a psychosis and making up elaborate stories about conflicts of interest.
Why is he doing that? Or a lot of this information is true.
What's next? Well, I'll tell you this.
Many of you remember about six years ago we did a story on national public radio.
We got the chief development officer and the COO of NPR on tape talking to members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It was an incredibly damning video.
Everyone resigned. They were saying their distaste for the citizenry, they were saying like, this is a direct quote from NPR, white, middle America, gun-toting, racist people.
This sort of chardonnay, the guy was literally swirling chardonnay in the video when Jon Stewart made fun of- Taxpayer dollars perhaps, too.
Taxpayer dollars. And I would say that what's coming is very much along those lines.
It's high-level brass at the New York Times.
And the best part about it is, it's all off the record.
This is not the stuff we do.
It's really getting into who these people are, what they believe, and what agenda they serve.
Remember, The paper of record has an ethical policy.
It's in their guideline, guideline 6-2.
It says the Times editors can't do anything to compromise their, quote, professional neutrality.
So what you're about to see probably early next week is, bam, a really strong window into their soul.
And it's definitely the strongest one yet.
It takes it up to a higher position.
And they're going to have to react to it.
I believe that a lot of them inside the Times know it's coming, which is one of the reasons they have not fired Nick Dudik yet, because I guess they realize what my M.O. is and they know that they're in a lose-lose situation.
Well, it's funny because we get held to these imaginary perfection standards, whereas all you're doing is trying to hold people to their own published standards, which I think is a bit different.
That's right. So I really want to thank you, of course, for your time today.
I want to really, really strongly urge people not just to visit projectveritas.com and follow James at twitter.com forward slash James O'Keefe, I-I-I, no apostrophe, don't even think about it.
But also he is of course running an organization that is doing very important work and does take donations.
I wonder if you could tell people a little bit about the money that you need and why and the use it's going to be put to.
Well, you can always make a $10 or $50 donation at projectveritas.com.
That's projectveritas.com.
But I also want to make a slightly different request today.
I did so at the end of the YouTube video.
We can't do this work without people on the inside of these organizations informing us.
People might not know what that means.
We don't strap a button camera to you and send you inside Google.
That's not how it works.
It really is methodology based from the intelligence community.
We just want a meeting with you.
If you're watching this, and I know that there are hundreds of people that are watching this inside of either a media corporation, a Silicon Valley conglomerate, or the deep state.
I know it. I'd like you to send me an email at veritastipsatprotonmail.com.
Veritastipsatprotonmail.com. We'll take it offline right away and show me where the bodies are buried.
Have a confidential conversation.
Your security is my priority and we'll protect you.
I've been to jail.
I know what it's like. I'll go to jail to protect you too.
But that's really what we need.
Even as much as a donation is people on the inside of the deep state to counsel us on where to go to find this.
We're the only ones who do it. So that would be my request today, Stephan.
Everybody has a part to play in this most essential combat that has occurred within at least three generations.
So I strongly urge people to step up and take their part in the culture war.
It is one of the easiest and frankly often the most fun war that has ever been fought in the history of mankind.
We're not facing Miletus dragging us in front of the Athenian democracy and ending up with a A drink laced with hemlock.
All we risk is some negative feedback, but we have to win the world itself.
So thanks so much, James. I really appreciate your time today.
I'm sure we'll talk again soon, and I will keep my eyes peeled to Project Veritas on YouTube to see what's coming next week.
