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April 18, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:22
Banking Ban for Thought Crime! James O'Keefe and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Sven Molnar here with James O'Keefe.
He's the head of Project Veritas and he has some pretty gripping stuff to talk about today.
But first, thanks James for taking the time.
Tell us a little bit about Project Veritas, its mission, its goal, its achievements.
Well, Project Veritas is a non-profit organization that exposes waste, fraud, abuse, corruption, dishonesty.
We've done about 200 investigations over the last decade.
Uncovering videotaped irrefutable evidence of graft, corruption, hypocrisy in many sacred cow organizations, acorned Planned Parenthood, voter fraud, the 2016 election Hillary Clinton campaign, undercover inside the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Twitter, Facebook, You name it, we go there.
We go to the location we're reporting on, and we don't really espouse opinions and conjecture.
We're mostly focused on facts.
Facts that are transgressions, that kind of provoke moral outrage and indignation at their being found out.
Yeah, so generally, I mean, myself and other people accept that if the shadow of James O'Keefe crosses your doorway, your day may not be improving enormously, but the world will be improving enormously, I believe.
So let's start with what to me is the most startling in terms of revelations, but not surprising in terms of revelations that has come out, which is the chase political targeting of banking customers.
Yes, yes.
This is just something I released a couple hours before I'm coming on your show.
And to me, if you haven't seen the video, it shows a Chase Banker person who does not know that he is being recorded by us, although he himself records the phone for quality and insurance purposes.
And he says to our undercover journalist, he says, well, we take moral character into play when making determinations about accounts.
He also says we don't associate with those people.
Now, those people, it's not clear exactly What he's referring to, but we believe he's referring to alt-right people because he says it.
He mentioned Steve Bannon and some people like that.
So what's interesting about this is not that the bank is removing people's accounts.
It's that they're lying about why they are doing it.
Because they told Enrique, one of the guys, chairman of Proud Boys, whose account was taken down, they told him he was taken down for administrative reasons, that it was sort of this glitch.
And then privately, they say something differently to a customer who calls the bank on the pretense of being someone who doesn't want those people to have accounts.
So this is a sort of the new frontier of how they're going to come after individuals in this country.
They're going to take away not only their social media platforms, but all manners of their being able to conduct any business at all.
And I think that this is happening to some people on the perimeter of speech, but it's going to happen to poor people who have more moderate views eventually.
Well, I mean, we've seen that, that the escalation of the definition of who is considered absolutely unsavory and unadmissible to society keeps expanding.
And from this one, I mean, the audio that I was listening to, I don't know if it was you or someone in your organization who was talking to the person at the bank, talking about the Trump supporters, the MAGA people, There's quite a lot of those in America.
In fact, if I remember correctly, it's Trump who gave the state of the union.
So, is it really going to be their business plan that they're going to start excluding up to half the population?
I mean, if I were a shareholder, I'd be kind of concerned about that.
Well, then they're a publicly traded company and they have the sorts of pressures that My organization doesn't even have, or they would like to subject me to the same sorts of pressures, because people have called up donors and foundations supporting me, saying, how could you support that evil monster?
But Chase, it's a different paradigm for them.
And I'm not sure they want any controversy or any problems.
So they're kind of caught between these two conflicting values that are, I think, coming to play in our society in a very serious way right here and right now.
With this Assange issue, I got subpoenaed this week for doing journalism, and that is the conflict between they don't want to cause any flak by serving these people that the media tells you has naughty views, but also not behaving in such a manner as to discriminate against people with views.
And I think that this country, I mean, everyone's talking about the value conflicts that we have, but where it gets quite interesting It's how these value conflicts are actually leading to people getting arrested and subpoenaed.
And that's what I think we're going to talk about a little bit here is the Assange issue and some of the issues that Veritas is facing, which are extraordinary, that you would put in an indictment and an affidavit cultivating sources.
The fact that the government is putting that in an affidavit.
And I have it in front of me here.
And many in the press are, not everyone, but maybe half of the people in the press, are happy that that is occurring, simply because of whose ox is being gored.
And that's un-American.
It's anathema to the First Amendment.
It's anathema to the idea of freedom of the press.
But increasingly, freedom of the press is becoming something that just gives these corporate media companies a cover to produce their synthetic commodity.
It has nothing to do with fact-finding or journalistic activities.
So there's a lot to talk about here, but I think all these issues are interrelated.
Because it comes down to a conflict of visions and a conflict of values that we have in our society.
And no one is willing to stand up for these people.
No one in the press, it seems to me, willing to stand up.
Nobody seems to care.
So how do we make them care?
And I think the interesting thing about the Chase Bank story is that they lied about it.
They said one thing in public and they said another thing over the phone to our undercover reporter in private.
Well, I mean, I can't even imagine the ramifications of banking institutions deciding who was allowable and who was not based upon perfectly legal belief systems.
I mean, this is not people who are inciting violence.
These are not crying out fire in a crowded theater.
These are fairly mainstream.
In fact, if they're talking about Trump supporters, very much mainstream political opinions.
And it seems like quite a donation to the Democrats To target right-leaning people for financial exclusion.
And of course, one does wonder if they go after Antifa and the other places and so on, or other groups, which could have questionable ethics, to put it mildly, or if it is just a one-sided aspersion.
And the interesting thing is that they don't, again, this is so important, they're not transparent about it.
Even the Washington Post, which has become this sort of, you know, Jeff Bezos' personal propaganda rag, At least on the editorial page, you know where it stands.
I think Facebook took some stances in the recent weeks, whether you agree or disagree with what they've done.
They've said, OK, we're going to ban nationalists or white nationalists from the platform.
What is that?
How do you define that?
But at least they're taking a stance.
The issue that I have, if I'm trying to provoke outrage about these issues, is that No one disagrees that it's not a good idea to lie under oath.
Twitter is doing it, in a congressional testimony Mark Zuckerberg is doing it, or Chase Bank is doing it.
It's not okay for them to lie to their customers and to the public at large.
So I think what made the story that we released today was them telling Enrique Tarrio, them telling him, well, you know, you didn't have this, your t-shirt website didn't comply with this thing or that thing because of some administrative snafu.
And then privately, the other guy goes, well, you know, those alt-right people, those sorts of people with moral character deficiencies, we don't want to do business for those people.
And I'm saying, good, I like that that is your opinion.
Hardly, Please, please, Jamie Dimon, please tell the American people that's your opinion, or that's your policy.
That's all we request at Project Veritas.
Because there is an increasing difference between how people project themselves to the masses, And and how people project themselves actually with each other privately.
And that's that that gap is what Project Veritas seeks to reduce, to shrink.
We just want people to be transparent.
And at the very least, if we don't agree on the values and we don't agree on politics, that's fine.
But we can all agree that lying to the masses is not OK.
So that's what we think that where the main story is.
And we hope we get a response from Chase Bank.
Well, let's swap over to the Assange indictment, which I've read through, you've read through.
Now, the devil's advocate position is, well, okay, cultivating sources is one thing, but Assange seems to be helping Chelsea Manning crack passwords, and thus he is an accomplice, and thus he's helping her break into computer systems.
So, those two issues, I mean, at least in the document that I read, appeared to be pretty separate.
Right.
Well, they're intermixed and they just unsealed the affidavit.
I read it this morning.
And I just wanted to share with you a couple words from this affidavit, which seemed troubling to me.
Because, listen, I think it's a question of fact.
It seems to me pretty, if you read the indictment and the affidavit, it seems to me the government's reaching a little bit here with circumstantial evidence.
And I'm just going to read this.
This is part seven on page four of this affidavit.
The affidavit is The thing that gives the government the ability to issue the indictment.
And it says cracking the password, quote, would have, would have allowed Manning to log onto the computers while it remains unknown whether Manning and Assange were successful in cracking the password.
A follow up message from Assange to Manning on March of 2010 reflects that Assange was actively trying to crack the password.
circumstantial evidence reflects that Assange and Manning intended to crack the password, but there isn't anything in here about actually doing the activity in question.
There's another bit that says investigators have not recovered a response by Manning to Assange's question, and there is, quote, no evidence as to what Assange did, if anything, with respect to the password.
So I suspect that the government, the Eastern District of Virginia, was unable to do an Espionage Act charge, because that would be, I mean, for someone to publish information and then be charged with the Espionage Act, that would be in violate with New York Times versus United States, that would be in violate with New York Times versus United States, which is the Pentagon I think publishing is well established in America that as long as you didn't steal the information, you can release it to the wild.
Yes, that's protected Legally protected, but I don't know the facts and I don't know if I should even speculate as to the fact, but this is an issue of fact.
Did he actually hack a password on a Department of Defense computer?
I don't know the answer to that.
I'm reading this affidavit and my perspective as someone who has indeed been charged with a felony for trying to maliciously interfere with government property, what I went through, and I can only speak from experience, Is that the FBI tends to use certain poetic license, and I'm reading this affidavit comparing it to what I went through, and I'm saying to myself, I don't see any actual evidence that he actually did it.
So, listen, who knows?
And I guess we'll find out.
I think it comes down to whether Assange, if he does come to the United States, does he have the cojones to plead not guilty and see this thing through in the Eastern District of Virginia with a judge that I believe has the prosecutorial discretion to basically, you know, he's guilty until proven innocent.
And that's the issue that I faced in Louisiana when I was arrested when I went after Mary Landrieu, is that I was in what my lawyer told me was a kangaroo court.
And he said, just plead guilty to a misdemeanor.
Even though I didn't do the felony, and the facts would come out that I didn't do the felony.
So, that's my looking at the affidavit and my opinion on the matter.
Yeah, because, I mean, it seems odd to me.
Like, if they had proof, then it would be right here.
You know, here's how he got in, and here's the trail, and so on.
And I think that the Obama DOJ looked into this.
This stuff has been known for Quite a long time.
They looked into this, what, six years ago and didn't find enough to prosecute.
And it is sort of an interesting question that if you aim to break into someone's house, but you can't get over the wall, in other words, if you try to commit a crime, but you can't get there, is that, you know, where does that stand legally?
I don't know, because it's all very complicated.
Well, that does actually blend together with this whole idea of nudging and inducing sources, like the Bernicke case, which is something This is a 2001 Supreme Court case that filed on New York Times versus U.S.
This is all about how far you can go in nudging or conspiring with a source.
I mean, journalists conspire with sources all the time, you must know that, although fewer and fewer investigative reporters actually exist these days, so I don't know to what extent they even do this, or to your point, are these anonymous sources sock puppets that they're just conjuring up?
But the truth is that, you know, let me actually talk about my affidavit from 2010, because this is interesting, because the government charged me, as your audience may know, with a felony to try to, quote, interfere with a telephone system operated by the government.
Now, I never did that.
I pose as all types of things, pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, longshoremen, you know, telephone technicians, in order to elicit information.
from the people that I am talking to.
I never intend to actually start a brothel with child whores.
I say that I'm going to do that in order to, you know, in order to build a rapport with the criminal, in order to get some footage of them admitting things.
So the government said, well, aha!
He tried to manipulate a phone.
Now, you know what the facts actually were in that case?
My colleague actually went over the phone and touched the phone receiver.
He actually touched the telephone.
So the government said that we, quote, manipulated it.
And here's another bit from the affidavit.
He said there was a man in the car down the street with a, quote, listening device.
Do you know what the listening device actually was in the affidavit?
It was an iPhone.
So the government argued that my colleague who just was sitting in a car on the street with an iPhone in his pocket had a listening device.
And that fact, that piece of propaganda written by the FBI agents, led to all these crazy media articles in the Washington Post and the Columbia Journalism Review that I had wiretapped a United States senator.
All of that turned out to be fake, they had to print retractions, but people have to realize that you can't necessarily trust what's in these affidavits.
I'm not saying that he didn't do some hacking activity, but what I'm reading here so parallels the sorts of experiences that my colleagues go through.
And I just ask people to practice some suspicion and hesitate before jumping to conclusions.
Let's see this thing litigated.
I think it'd be interesting to be litigated in open court.
I hope it does get litigated in a trial.
Well, and it's interesting because in reading through, I mean, a very serious document with very serious charges, they also include him saying to To Chelsea Manning, something like, you know, well, thirsty eyeballs are never satisfied in my opinion.
So he's like, yeah, it would be great if you got more information.
And why that would be in some kind of charging document is kind of bewildering to me.
Yes, he wanted more information because he's a reporter.
I couldn't agree more.
I'm glad you brought that up.
I think it was something like thirsty eyes or never stop being curious.
I mean, this is what journalists do.
This is the Pentagon Papers.
But listen to this.
This is included in the affidavit.
This is outrageous.
Outrageous that the U.S.
government would put these facts in a charging document.
Listen to this.
As shown, quote, the conspirators took elaborate measures to conceal their communications, mask their identities, and destroy any trace of their conduct using, for example, encryption and anonymous techniques.
Did you know that is what the Washington Post and New York Times do, allegedly, with their anonymous sources?
I do that over Signal.
I mean, everyone does that with sources.
They would put in a charging document That people use measures to conceal their communications and mask their identities.
And by the way, you might go, well, where are all these journalists outraged?
I think, to be honest with you, and I've tried to read all these papers and it hurts me to do so because they really upset me reading the opinion pages of the New York Times.
And I see a tension in their soul.
Because on one hand, they want to stand up for press freedom.
But on the other hand, we don't like the fact that he gored Hillary Clinton's ox in the election.
He was a puppet for the Russians.
And it's like, that doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters is whether the information you are publishing is indeed true.
From a legal perspective, from a journalistic perspective, if you are publishing information, it doesn't matter whose ox you're goring, it doesn't matter whose puppet you are perceived or not perceived to be, what matters is truth.
That is what matters.
And that seems to be lost upon the people who consider me to be their enemy.
That considers to be lost upon the editors of the New York Times.
It really is coming down to the substance of what you're doing.
They have a very complicated relationship with Assange and this issue because when Assange was publishing stuff that harmed the Bush administration, I mean, he was their moral hero, you know?
He was like the household uncle upstairs who just teaches you all about the world and life and all of that.
So they loved him then.
Then, of course, they really disliked him with the publication of the emails from the DNC and so on.
And the other thing, too, there's got to be a little bit of professional contempt there, or fear, because they've never disproven anything that WikiLeaks has published.
They have a 100% accuracy rate, and when the media, the mainstream media, the corporate media, is coming right off two plus years of pushing this mad Mueller-Russia collusion conspiracy theory, and then here's a guy who never got anything wrong, it's tough, because if you're going to defend that guy, you might want to say, well, why is he doing what we're not doing, which is being accurate?
That's the most important thing.
That's investigative.
And also coming off the heels, not just of the Russia conspiracy theories, but also of Jeff Zucker tweeting out, or was it Brian Stelter tweeting out, that we are not investigators at CNN.
That's what Jeff Zucker, the CEO, actually said, that we're not investigators.
Now maybe he meant to say that in a literal sense, like we're not private investigators, but journalism by its very nature is an investigative thing.
Because if you don't, and this is what we should talk about a little bit as well as talking about the subpoena that we've been served, is that if you're not doing investigative reporting, and what does that mean?
What does it mean to be an investigative journalist?
If you're not What it really means is that you're pursuing the truth.
It just means that you're getting to the bottom of things.
Because here's the problem.
If your sources in the intelligence community tell you something, And you just publish it.
So let's say you call up Mr. Clapper or whoever.
I don't know who they're calling, but Clapper et al.
Clapper, Comey.
Who's the other guy?
The guy that lied under oath.
Clapper was the guy that lied under oath in Congress when he said the NSA wasn't spying on people.
Brennan, John Brennan.
So all of these, this cabal of individuals.
And you say, hey, tell me what's going on.
And that source tells them.
And you publish that information without verifying.
Whether there's any truth to it, you are not a journalist.
You are a branch of government.
You are a branch of the intelligence agency, is what you are.
You are a spokesman and a publicist for the intelligence community.
And I'm not saying that's a bad thing.
I'm just saying, call a spade a spade.
So when Jeff Zucker said, we're not investigators, what he's basically saying is that we are a branch of, and we have a symbiotic relationship with the United States government, and we publish whatever they tell us.
And that is not investigative journalism.
There's no responsible definition of journalism that that meets, because that's what Daniel Boorstin calls a pseudo-event.
The leak, that is the government agent giving information to CNN, and without any documents, at least Julian Assange gives us documents, and then CNN publishing that information without questioning That is a pseudo-event.
That is a form of propaganda, and I agree with you.
I think there's some professional jealousy happening in the branches of the Fourth Estate.
Well, I'm going to tweak what you said a little bit there, James, because you say that they publish what the government tells them, and it's like, no, they publish what Democrats in the government tell them, without pushback.
If they get something from who they consider the right-leaning enemy of whatever humanity that they come up with, They push back mighty hard to the point even of outright fabrication, right?
Like so there's this thing floating around about, there's a lie about how Donald Trump said that the white supremacists were good people and it's like he did not say that at all.
He said that there were lots of people, he condemned the white supremacists and the Nazis but he said there were good people at Charlottesville as well.
So, not only do they not investigate what the left says, they will even fabricate what the right says.
And that, to me, is the way that you need to understand journalism these days, is does it help the left gain power?
Does it harm the interests of the right?
It's pure agiprop.
It's got nothing to do with the pursuit of truth.
It's the pursuit of power that motivates them, I believe.
And to lead off of what you're saying there, I think that I've seen this in my own life and viewing the internet for the last five years.
I think there's more value placed upon conjecture and opinion in the media these days.
I think you see less fact-finding done in journalism.
And the facts that you do see are all anonymously sourced quotes.
The New York Times and the Washington Post won Pulitzer Prizes off the Russia reporting.
And listen, maybe that some of that journalism was well done.
I don't know because I can't verify the raw data behind it.
But the fact that all of the Pulitzer Prizes that are being given out have to do with an issue that turned out not to even be a veniality, there's no actual transgression as it relates to the Russians and Trump.
So what's happening, Tim, from my perspective in journalism is that it's all about opinion and conjecture.
That's the thing that's being rewarded.
And when you do find facts, when you do show what Assange showed, when you do upset a very powerful entity like the military industrial complex, when you do show things occurring with that helicopter footage that he released, and that upset a lot of people on the right.
And that type of – that was positive.
Publishing that information was the purest form of journalism.
It was much more powerful than if someone had written an article about it and minced words and redacted certain things.
You could see the intonation in those pilots, you could hear the lack of empathy they had for those people.
Whether you think that's justified or not, whether you think that meets a compelling public interest, weighing the harm done to the people in the military, that's a question, an ethical debate that we can have.
But that was journalism because it endeavored to show that those transgressions were in fact anathema to the principles of the United States military.
And he was the tip of – Assange, the tip of the spear.
So I think what is happening in our media landscape is that the people who are the tip of the spear, who do put themselves out there, who do put their neck on the line, those people are being attacked, subpoenaed, indicted, arrested with frequency.
And the people in the corporate media are themselves getting closer and closer in proximity to that power nexus.
The intelligence community, the powers that be.
You can't question the narrative.
You can't question the narrative.
Because if you do, we are going to come after you.
And if they do indict, if they do, if he does, if this affidavit, if it does end up He's guilty over what is a thinly veiled attempt to criminalize press freedom.
I think it's going to make fewer and fewer people having the will to go after and do these stories.
I'm seeing it in my own life.
It's very troubling to me.
But I think it comes down to that issue of opinion versus fact, and I see a lot less fact these days than I do conjecture, interpretation, and opinion.
Well, and there's such a monolithic, uniparty domination of the corporate media that, I mean, with the, until recently, somewhat exception of Fox News, although they seem to be crumbling pretty hard these days, but it is Foolish for your career to push back against leftist tropes in the corporate media because, I mean, you probably would never be hired, you have to have your bona fides, you have to parrot all the right nonsense.
And I think those meetings are, you know, where they say, what should we work on?
It's all just big giant echo chambers.
Where the moral landscape is considered absolutely clear, although we are in a very ferocious moral debate between individualism and collectivism, between voluntarism and coercion, between freedom and security.
It's a very powerful debate.
This is not like, hey, this guy wants to bring back slavery.
Well, of course he's a bad guy.
It's like, well, yeah, that would be a bad guy.
But there's a lot of nuance.
in the debates that are happening at the moment but I don't think those debates are happening anywhere in the mainstream media.
I think it's all just taken for granted.
These are the enemies of civilization.
These are the people we're going to protect and there's not one dissenting voice I can imagine around any of those conference tables and that is a very dangerous situation because truth is a very complicated and elusive thing and you need a lot of robust debate to even approach it.
Yeah, you know, one of the things I read recently was that the power to determine what is newsworthy is, because this is a question you had asked me one of the times I was on your show, you said, well, can investigative journalism be objective, right?
How is that possible?
And that's actually a pretty complicated, that's a very complicated question, it's a very deep Philosophical question because it has to do with whether you can separate facts from values, whether you can separate individual truth, false statements from values.
And the bottom line is there for every value there is some for every fact there is a little bit of value in that fact.
But I think the power in media is to determine what is what is important, because that's what really what what these guys are doing.
They're sitting down a table saying, what is important today?
Well, you know what's important?
The Trump Russia collusion.
And listen, there may be some degree of some minuscule fact, like someone sent a message to Don Trump Jr.
and said, hey, are you interested in this information?
Which, by the way, happens a hundred times in every newsroom across the country.
But the media, it's not that they're lying.
It's not that they're lying.
It's that they're placing so much emphasis on this tiny little fact and giving it a thousand times of importance.
The media has been able to do this extraordinary thing, which is to propagandize the people without really lying.
If they do lie, then I suppose we can catch them in a lie, and we've caught them in hundreds of lies and retractions.
Posted on our wall of shame here at headquarters, but they've been able to and I really have meditated about how they do it.
And I said, well, that's the issue.
They're increasing the importance of things that are not important because they're ascribing moral values to those things that themselves don't have moral value.
And people need to realize, and I know that I'm talking a lot about journalism ethics and getting in the weeds here, but the media is more powerful than government.
I think people need to, Thomas Jefferson said that he'd rather have a robust newspapers without government than, you know, than government without the newspapers.
Media has become the most powerful organ of information in this country.
And, but they don't have any responsibility.
They have no duties.
So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm conflicted because I want press freedom, but I also want them to practice a lot of responsibility and, and you can't have, you can't have one way out the other.
So it's very, and I think this is all coming to a head with what's happening with the Assange, uh, issue as well as frankly, my project Veritas, the situation in New Hampshire this past week.
Where we have been issued criminal grand jury subpoenas for filming a man confessing to committing a felony.
All right, so let's talk about that because I've certainly heard rumblings and rumors, James, that if the left believes that they may not win in 2020 because, you know, maybe they just can't get into demographics where they want to or they can't gerrymander where they want to, if they feel that they're going to lose, there are people who have significant concerns that they're just going to escalate voter fraud in order to try and take the election.
Right.
And whether that's true from a data perspective, a lot of people have done data analysis, 80,000 registered voters in Texas who themselves have the ability to double vote or non-citizens voting.
What we do out is we go out and show irrefutable incontrovertible evidence of people who have voted twice.
By the way, just so that you know, if you vote twice in the state of New Hampshire and say Florida, which is what this guy Robert Bell did, it's a class B felony in New Hampshire, it's a felony in Florida, and it's a felony federally.
And we're not talking speeding ticket, we're not talking, I mean, it can carry multiple years in jail, multi-thousand dollar fines, I mean, it's a very, very serious deal.
Yeah, and this guy we exposed in New Hampshire was a Republican.
I mean, there have been some Democrats that we've exposed, but more or less we've been very bipartisan.
I mean, the issue is that the left says that voter fraud does not happen, that it's not even possible to happen.
It doesn't occur.
And what's happening in New Hampshire, which is very much in the weeds, it's a state story, but it's interesting nationally in this sense.
That the Justice Department of New Hampshire, the Attorney General's Office, issued a criminal grand jury subpoena to me for filming this man.
I had a camera out in the open.
It was on my shoulder.
It was a big television camera.
We do that intentionally because we want there to be no distinction between the activities of what I do and those CNN people and those broadcasters.
So we go to the guy's house, he opens the door, gets angry, goes back in, comes back out, which is consent.
He comes back out to engage with us.
We publish the video, makes the front page of the New Hampshire papers.
I go to the attorney general's office, I sit in the lobby and it was a ruse.
They wanted to talk to me about the video.
They said, come back, come back to our office.
So I go into the lobby with my iPad, and they already had the subpoena ready to give to me.
They had no interest in listening to the contents of the videotape where the man confesses to voting twice.
And then they handed me the criminal grand jury subpoena that said, we are investigating the operations of Project Veritas.
And what this is, let me be clear, Is this an attempt to use the justice system and the law as a weapon to settle some petty political dispute?
Because I have the audacity to show that voter fraud is indeed happening.
This is irrefutable proof.
This man confessed it to me and he also confessed it to the paper when they published the story.
So this is unbelievable, Stefan.
This is like, I mean, what are they going to do?
Put me in jail?
I mean, what is the purpose of the subpoena?
If not to intimidate, harass, jail me?
They ask me, what are the names of your undercover people?
I'm not going to give them the names.
I'm not going to give them those.
So what is the purpose of the subpoena?
No self-respecting journalist would ever cooperate with a subpoena by the government asking to fork over notebooks and materials.
So it's really fascinating what's happening, and it's fascinating to see what happens as it plays out.
Well, of course.
I was ascribed to Chairman Mao, though I don't know if it's true.
Punish one person, instruct a thousand.
And so the goal, of course, is to keep anybody else from perhaps following in your footsteps and trying to reveal this voter fraud, which I believe is quite chronic across the West as a whole.
And in America, I think in 2020, people are going to need to keep a very sharp eye out for it.
They want to keep people away from this area because I would assume that some people feel that it can give them more flexibility in getting votes double counted.
I think that that is correct.
I think that this is not the first time.
This was years ago in 2012.
There was a video showing ballots offered out in the names of the dead.
We just went to the polls and said, do you have this person on your list?
And they handed us these ballots.
I mean, it was unbelievable videotape.
It shocked the conscience.
It shifted the Overton window in New Hampshire.
People actually changed the laws as a result of those videos.
And that governor, who was a Democrat, He tried to prosecute me.
He tried to prosecute me.
Why?
Why?
Because we broke the law?
We didn't break the law.
Was it newsworthy?
Yes, it was extraordinarily newsworthy.
It showed that it was possible to commit voter fraud.
They changed the law as a result of these videos, and apparently what is happening is that the people who are holdovers from a previous administration in the Attorney General's office in New Hampshire are upset that we did that.
They literally have egg on their face, and they're going to try To make an example out of individual citizens who have done this.
Now, what is the issue?
Well, the issue is who is a journalist in the United States?
What is journalism?
Glenn Greenwald said it is an activity.
It is not a priesthood-protected class of people.
You can call me Spongebob Squarepants.
You can call me Captain Kangaroo.
You can call me a florist.
What matters is the activity in question.
And there is no distinction.
There is zero distinction.
between the activities of Julian Assange and Washington Post reporters and the activities between Project Veritas and the Concord Monitor.
But that is lost upon the government, which seeks to weaponize, weaponize the government to settle petty political disputes about whether voter fraud is possible.
This man, Robert Bell, voted twice.
It is a felony.
Bernie Sanders' campaign brought Australians to New Hampshire.
We filmed them on hidden camera assisting the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Bernie Sanders paid a fine to the Federal Election Commission.
Were they prosecuted by the state of New Hampshire?
Nope.
New Hampshire came after us.
And increasingly, Stefan, I'm seeing people not care.
I'm seeing people in this country, it's all about whose ox is being gored.
It's all about which particular policies are being helped.
And that concerns me.
That's un-American.
And I don't know how we're going to outrage people.
Maybe it's going to take me going to jail, my colleagues going to jail, before people's eyebrows actually raise, before the blue checkmarks on Twitter actually go, You know, I don't know about this, but something's going to have to happen because this is really scary stuff to get a criminal grand jury subpoena, to have agents with unlimited power, even in the state government, not to mention the federal deep state, do this sort of thing.
And we'll have to see how it plays out.
Well, I sympathize enormously, James, and I also want to point out that people's perception that the justice system has been weaponized is really growing, at least from what I can see and from what I can read.
If you look at the efforts being paid to get Assange versus letting Hillary off, The hook by making up this magical standard called intent, which is specifically denied as far as I understand it in classified control laws and so on.
This idea that, well, if they don't like you, then they'll use the law against you, and if they do like you, eh, you know, no biggie, we'll just brush it under the carpet.
That is a very dangerous situation because if Society as a whole starts to believe that the law is a mere instrument of dominance and power, rather than an admittedly imperfect reflection of some higher ideal of justice.
Then it simply becomes a game of cat and mouse.
People no longer feel a moral responsibility to obey the law.
And in fact, it can be very quickly, it can become the case that people who do obey the law are considered fools, are considered chumps.
Stephan, this is the issue at hand.
What you just said is the most important thing.
I mean, voter fraud, we can talk about voter fraud.
It's an issue, it's a matter of fact, it's a matter of policy.
Frankly, I'm not even a policy guy.
I try not to comment about policies because I believe in the power of free people.
That if they're given these facts, these irrefutable, incontrovertible video evidence, that they'll make the right, they'll come up with the right, maybe that's the libertarian in me and you.
We believe in the power of free people.
Give them the facts.
Yeah, my answer to the policy is just more freedom.
I just want more freedom.
That's always my answer to policy.
Exactly.
The public policy solutions become self-evident when people are equipped with facts.
But what's, yes, and what happens in the extreme case is that that Gulag Archipelago book that Solzhenitsyn wrote, which is eventually what you have is people selling their brothers and sisters out to the state to save their own asses.
That's what eventually, that's it eventually happens, that these people had so much power.
And you might think New Hampshire live free or die state.
I don't know anything about that place, but it happens everywhere.
It happens anywhere you have The power to arbitrarily use the system of law to target people just because you don't like them.
Listen, I don't care if they want to target me and prosecute the Washington Post, by all means, please, please do that.
Please do prosecute the Concord Monitor, the New Hampshire Union Leader, CNN, Washington Post, and WMUR, and also James O'Keefe.
But when you only, when you only, Prosecute James O'Keefe simply because you do not like the facts that he is reporting.
Nothing to do with the methods.
And by the way, that is the truth.
That is the truth.
That's why they're doing this.
If that is the world that we live in, what is going to happen next is that free people are going to get scared.
They're going to realize this fact and they're going to care more about saving their own asses than standing up for their fellow brothers and sisters.
That they're going to sell themselves out to the state such that this does not happen to them.
That is what is going to happen next.
And I've seen it.
I've seen it amongst people in the media.
I've seen it amongst people that I thought would stand up for free.
They go, Oh, he got a subpoena.
He must've done something wrong.
I better not publish that information because if I publish that information, maybe they're going to issue me.
Uh, some type of affidavit alleging that I was prompting and promoting and I've had people tell me privately that they're scared to be part of some conspiracy to publish the information that I found.
And, and what eventually happens is this becomes a domino effect.
It's already happening.
It's it, that the corporate press certainly won't do the job.
of reporting these things because they themselves have a symbiotic relationship with those in power.
And eventually what you have is nobody is willing to has the balls to put themselves out there.
There's no currency in putting yourself out.
There's certainly no profit in it.
You can't make an economic profit, but there's no social currency in it either.
And then you have the death of Journalism as we know it and a fear that a nation of feckless moral cowards.
So that is what is at stake in the live free or die state with the state of New Hampshire versus Project Veritas.
Well, and when the free press dies, government power expands unchallenged.
And we all know where that leads.
The earlier book you mentioned is one extreme case of that.
And I am also troubled, of course, by this constant escalation.
And, of course, that's what appeasement is supposed to, you know, the old saying, it's the hope that the crocodile will eat you last.
Because this escalation that is occurring seems to be without end, like to the point where, okay, people get demonetized, and then they get deplatformed, and then their bank accounts get taken away, and there's these dominoes that are actually, I think, going to end up creating the very extremism that the left claims that they're fighting.
And that is my major concern.
You take away people's source of income, you take away their capacity to participate in the economic life of society.
You really back them into a corner and, well, it's going to radicalize a lot of people.
And it's so far outside the way that I grew up.
I mean, I grew up debating with friends from my early teens onwards and the idea that you would To respond to a challenge to a position of yours by cutting up someone's credit cards would be the act of a psycho.
Like, hey man, you proved me wrong, I'm going to burn your car, I'm going to get you fired.
That would be the act of somebody completely unhinged, but it's becoming more and more of a mainstream response to arguments that people feel they can't answer.
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head just now about how this breakdown of these social institutions and banks, and it's creating the problem they're fighting.
I think that you're on to something there.
And for me, and it goes back to this term righteous indignation, right, which is a term that Andrew Breitbart, it was the title of his book, but it was also a term that Ida Tarbell, the famous muckraker from a hundred years ago, people have to remember that there's nothing new under the sun, that the muckrakers have been doing this sort of muckrakety stuff for
a generation since the newspapers of the 1800s, which were partisan papers mostly, and to think that Joseph Pulitzer's paper, News of the World, was extraordinarily partisan and yellow journalism, make Project Veritas look extremely bland by comparison.
But how do you create righteous indignation in a society that is so divided and there's no consensus, and I think that that is the priority.
How do we get people to realize that this is wrong?
I think the solution is to measure them against their own standards, to judge the exposed against their own story, And that's determined empirically by the reporter so if chase bank says one thing in public they say.
For example that we don't do this we don't take political opinions into account and then and then you just simply juxtapose the bit from the executive in new york saying we do take their opinions into account.
I think what you what you've done is you appeal to the most fundamental of human emotions which is.
Don't say one thing and say the exact opposite in the next minute, right?
That's not a political thing.
That's not a partisan thing.
That's a left Democrat, Republican.
So maybe what we need to do is try to do that as it applies to all these cases.
If Twitter wants to say that they're banning people because they don't like them, then say it under oath.
Or catch Mark Zuckerberg in an inconsistency.
I'm trying to get at that.
How do we create the indignation?
I think the indignation is to come down to some basic, fundamental things that we all agree as well.
Like lying.
Like lying.
So, that's what we have to, I think that's what we have to focus on.
Not that whether or not, and I know that maybe your audience won't like me saying this, but not whether or not that it's a transgression to debank or deplatform somebody.
But that it's a transgression to lie about it.
Let's focus on the thing that's going to get 80% of Americans to agree.
Because it's going to show that these people don't have any integrity, by the way.
It's going to show these people are committing perjury.
Um, maybe the private attorney general guy in New Hampshire in his office saying, let's go get those people because I don't like them because they exposed voter fraud.
That would create, Stefan, righteous indignation.
That would create moral indignation.
That would bring people together, even in the state of New Hampshire, which is a divided place.
The state legislator is controlled by Democrats.
The governor is a Republican.
So how do we breed moral consensus by appealing to the things that we still have in common?
I think that's the mission at hand.
Well, and the consequences of us failing to reason together is open conflict.
Like blood in the streets, open conflict.
Historically, that has been the case.
Wars are fought over worldviews.
And if you can, Pied Piper-like, through the corporate media, lead people into a worldview where there are Nazis everywhere and Trump is lying on a bed in Russia being peed on by hookers and Hillary Clinton has never done anything wrong.
If you can lead people into that world where it becomes like a real, it's more than a bubble because a bubble can be popped.
It becomes like an isolation tank or a cyst of some kind.
And other people are going in some other direction.
There's no way to negotiate and live together if you live not just in different truths but in different realities.
Yes.
And the only way that we can mediate this is so to go back to your philosophy degree.
But the only way we can mediate this is we can agree to reasonable standards of contact like telling the truth.
This is kind of an important one.
That's exactly right.
And we have to agree that reason and evidence are how we're going to negotiate these disputes.
And if one group is trying to use reason and evidence and another group, and the left has openly stated many times that they will try to gain power by any means necessary, that they have no particular ethics, just the expediency of the moment, these two worldviews cannot Coexist.
Because when one people want to gain power through manipulation, propaganda, coercion over another group, that is a win-lose.
And society, a particular country, you can have win-lose separate countries for a while, but if it's in the same country...
Things become unstable and unsustainable very, very quickly and the play out, the fallout from that is beyond our imagining.
Well, I'm biased because I believe that what we do here with the investigative journalism stuff is the solution.
I think that government is downstream from media, or politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from data.
In other words, big tech informs culture, culture informs media, and media informs government.
This is not the way that most people see the world, but investigative journalism is an ironic exercise, because it shows that the reality that you see is not, in fact, reality.
Like part of the Cernovich movie, where you talk about the Plato, the cave, And you're led out of the cave, the metaphor of the Plato's Republic, and you see the world and you go, wait a second, this is a beautiful world.
This is not the world I saw in the cave.
I think, frankly, investigative work does that.
Someone once said, I think that investigative journalism is the fiercest of indignation, the fiercest of indignation fused.
with the hardest of fact, the fiercest of indignation.
Now, let's break that down into two separate things.
We got the indignation part.
I think we got that down in society.
What about the hardest of fact part?
I mean, how much fact finding are you seeing on cable news these days?
I think all they do is aggregate a bunch of gobbledygook and opinion.
So when you fuse indignation with fact, fact being walking out of the cave and seeing the sunlight and going, this is not what I saw on that cave.
I saw a bunch of stencils.
The trees are much more beautiful than the stencils of the trees.
And in many ways it's very ironic because irony seeks to correct the, Naive.
Irony seeks to correct the naive expectations that we have about our world.
So I'm biased.
I believe the solution to all of our problems is simply to investigate and go on a fact-finding expedition and show people all these amazing facts.
Facts of government officials and private saying the opposite of what they say in public.
I mean, can you imagine?
Can you imagine?
The private conversations that Brennan and Comey and Clapper have had.
Do you have any idea?
I actually believe that if people saw those conversations, I'm not saying that I can get them lawfully.
I don't even know if that's a possibility.
Perhaps I could.
But can you imagine if you were on the fly on the wall in the office of James Clapper?
The former NSA guy who scratched his head under oath.
We do not.
We do not spy on the people.
I mean, you don't have to be an intelligence officer to see that there was some deception there.
I mean, can you imagine?
So for me, that is the mission.
That is the mission.
But increasingly.
And this is what your audience needs to know.
They are trying to criminalize that mission.
And if they can't criminalize it, they're going to use the power of the press to defame any citizen who seeks to do it.
They're going to belittle them, and they're going to money the waters with any blue checkmark who seeks to share that information.
So the very thing that we have to do is being criminalized, and it's being ostracized in polite society.
And that's the fight.
That's the issue at hand right there.
Uh, that we are facing, uh, frankly, quite personally with our situation with the criminal grand jury subpoena in New Hampshire.
And by the way, I'm not stopping.
I'm not, I'm not going to quit.
Uh, if they want to put me in jail, then, you know, that's the, I understand that that's a risk inherent in the work that we do.
Uh, not that I broke the law, but it's just a by-product of a corrupt system, a corrupt regime.
But I think, by the way, I think the, another solution for, if I would, to give some advice to Assange, it's never plead guilty.
Never, never, if you didn't do anything illegal, do not settle.
That's a mistake that I made with ACORN.
I settled a lawsuit, a privacy lawsuit I shouldn't have settled, and I pled guilty to a crime that I did not commit.
This is a misdemeanor.
Class B misdemeanor.
Entry by false pretense.
I showed my driver's license when I entered the federal building.
Don't plead guilty to a crime you don't commit.
I wouldn't I wouldn't go so far as to say resist.
I wouldn't resist arrest, for example.
That's just me.
But do not bear false witness.
Do not bear false witness.
If you don't bear false witness, that scares them.
They did not expect me to not settle all these lawsuits against me.
And they've in fact had to pay for it.
So I had a little bit of advice there for people who find themselves in these sorts of unbelievable situations.
For heaven's sakes, we've got to stop letting the moral discourse of society be dictated by those who've abandoned morality in their own statements.
So let's talk just a minute or two about your book and how people can help what it is that you do.
Well, the book is called American Pravda.
I've been on your show before to talk about it.
American Pravda is the book and, you know, all the proceeds go to Project Veritas to fund our work.
We are launching a new program at Veritas.
It's called the Be Brave Campaign.
I know right now that one of the people watching this program is on the inside of an institution like Google or Facebook or tech companies or CNN.
Or who knows what?
Government entity or media propaganda organ.
And you're on the inside, and you go to work every day, and you're depressed.
Maybe you work for the IRS, and you see something.
Well, this is the inverse of the TSA's, if you see something, say something.
If you see something, we want you to film something.
And I will hire you, and I have hired people who work inside these companies, like an individual who worked for Facebook, and she saw them shadow boosting videos, de-boosting people's videos, videos such as your own.
I will say that your name has come up in some of these memorandums inside these tech companies.
I'm quite flattered.
It's a badge of honor, right?
So my call to action is actually a little bit different than previous ones.
There may be 100, 200, 300,000 people watching this video right now.
I would say that two of you have the willingness to contact me.
through ProtonMail.
You can go to our website, projectveritas.com.
It is encrypted.
I've never burned a source.
I've never exposed any of these individuals.
Send me a note.
Talk to me.
Meet with me, and I will give you a camera.
This is not anonymously sourced journalism.
We will film you.
You may be asking, well, what happens if I get sued or fired?
And I would say that there are things that we can do to help you.
We may pay for your legal bills, and I may just hire you, and you may have a better life.
Full time as an investigative reporter doing this sort of work so my call to action is one of you out there be brave do something our heroes are anonymous.
They don't have to be celebrities they can be the honest cop the honest school teacher the honest engineer working for a facebook company these are the people.
Excellent.
who I think are gonna help inform the public in the United States and I wish to equip you.
So please contact me at projectveritas.com. - Excellent.
And to people who want to support your organization financially?
Same website.
It's tax-deductible.
We have our tax exemption, unbelievably as it may sound.
We are under the jurisdiction of the government.
They're regulating us, but we are a tax-exempt non-profit organization.
Please go to our website, projectfortoss.com, and make a donation to fund this critical work.
Now, let's just close real briefly with a statement, if you don't mind, James.
Because, I mean, for the people out there in the tech companies, I want a peaceful world.
You want a peaceful world.
We want reason and evidence to dominate the discourse.
I'm not motivated by hatred.
I know you're not motivated by hatred of lies, but love.
of the truth and for those who are out there who may have a finger on a button for this video or other things, we are the reasonable people.
We bring data, we bring experts, we bring science, we bring facts, we bring moral philosophy to what it is that we do and you push that button and you take us off the map, it won't end the conversation.
It just means that there are fewer reasonable people trying to negotiate between two increasing extremes.
This is the most important thing.
Let me say this.
That there is nothing more important than this issue.
Nothing.
I mean, the government is downstream.
Public policy is downstream from ideas and the public acquiescence of government.
The American experiment, we learned this in third grade, is based upon the idea of informed consent.
That you have to have an informed consent, not a manufactured consent.
And journalism has been so corrupted Now we have these tech companies that have a virtual monopoly on information, and even the big media, the powers that be, CBS, NBC, New York Times, they disseminate their information through the tech portals on the timelines.
So if you work And by the way, it's just a mathematical certainty.
There are people watching your show right now, watching you and I talk, that do work there.
And they're probably thinking as I speak, should I do this?
Should I do this?
They're thinking this right now.
Do it!
Do it!
And here's what I'm going to say to you.
There is nothing more important than life.
There are some things more important in life than security and safety and a nine to five gig where you shave your face every morning and get on a bus and go to Menlo Park.
There are some things more important like virtue and honor and informing the American people.
There is nothing more important in life than that.
So I would ask you to practice some introspection.
What matters more to you?
And some people, they just want to live their lives and be salt of the earth people.
And that's fine.
We need people like that.
But there's 0.01% of you.
watching it, which is actually quite a few people watching this program right now, who actually may do something about it.
Be brave.
I will equip you.
I will pay your legal bills.
I will take the arrows.
And I may just hire you.
Contact me at projectveritas.com.
Excellent.
That's very, very well said.
And it is a small number of people who move the moral progress of mankind forward.
And it does seem daunting at times.
But I tell you this, man, And I regret nothing that I have said.
I regret none of the facts I have brought to bear on the public discourse.
I regret none of the arguments that I have put forward.
I have always spoken with honor and with integrity and with my greatest commitment to the truth And if that is what ends up causing huge problems, well, the problem then society has is not with me, but with the truth.
And for those who can't get up and look in the mirror and not see an honorable man and an honorable woman standing back, contact James.
Your life will improve.
And yeah, it may be tough for a while, but your conformity will Give you pleasure in the moment, but it will give you great regret down the road because you look back when things get worse and say, damn it, I should have acted when I had a chance because now it's a hell of a lot harder.
Well said.
I can't say it any better than that.
Well said.
Well, thank you very much, James.
Always a great pleasure to chat and I look forward to your next expose.
All right.
Talk soon.
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