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June 14, 2021 - Viva & Barnes

01:57:46

Sidebar with Project Veritas' James O'Keefe! Viva & Barnes LIVE

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	We're live.
	We're live and I don't see anyone yet in the backstage, which is probably just as well.
	We'll give everyone a chance to get notified if YouTube is still doing that and trickle in slowly.
	Yes, we have the standard F's in the house.
	Let's see what else we got.
	F. Wow, a lot of people waiting already.
	Good.
	This is going to be amazing.
	Tonight, as you all know, it's James O 'Keefe from Project Veritas.
	And we're going to talk about a lot of stuff.
	These are the types of moments that are unique, at least for me in the sense that I'm getting to, hopefully, they're going to be here and I'm going to bring them in soon, but talk to someone.
	I've been following Project Veritas for a while.
	I've been watching James O 'Keefe for years.
	Not since the Acorn thing, more recently than that, but easily since 2016.
	I've been covering some of the stories going way back, you know, two, three, four years.
	And it's only been recently covering the New York Times defamation lawsuit.
	What was the other one?
	The Twitter defamation lawsuit, which is James O 'Keefe versus Twitter.
	Going to talk about all this.
	But that he picked up on some of the videos.
	They made their way into some of his videos.
	And then...
	You know, the digital connection was made where I forget how it happened.
	I think it was a tweet.
	No, it was email.
	And we said, we're going to do it.
	Because I've got questions.
	You know, the internet is a place of information and misinformation at times.
	With certain people, you know that the way they are described by, say, Wikipedia, mainstream media, Forbes, may or may not be entirely accurate.
	And we're going to get to...
	No, meet James O 'Keefe.
	For those of you who don't know him, we're going to delve into some of the legal conundrums, what it's like to do what he does in the world in which he does it, and it's going to be glorious.
	Now, standard disclaimers.
	I see James O 'Keefe in on my side, so we're going to wait for them to get set up while everyone continues to trickle in.
	Standard disclaimers.
	Hold on, I saw...
	I saw a comment.
	Nice to hear you jumping into the political arena, Dave.
	A great guest for the show would be Tim Mohan, leader of the Libertarian Party of Canada.
	Cheers, Eva.
	News will be coming out soon, people.
	Although I've mentioned it, but standard disclaimers.
	No legal advice.
	So we talk about law stuff.
	Anybody taking legal advice from a stream should not be doing that.
	Consult a lawyer if you ever have any legal questions.
	Jurisdiction, facts, everything is relevant.
	Lawyer in your jurisdiction.
	Entertainment.
	Educational, no law advice.
	Second thing, I'm going to thank you all in advance for Super Chats support.
	You should know YouTube takes 30% of the Super Chats.
	So if that shocks the conscience of any of you out there, and I can understand that it might, there are other ways to support us.
	I have a Patreon and Subscribestar account, which I only created because people are asking, but the main place, Robert Barnes and I are on Locals, vivabarneslaw.locals.com, which is effectively...
	It's a Facebook, Twitter-like community behind a paywall which sort of filters out some of the chatter, some of the trolls.
	Amazing exclusive content.
	Sneak peeks to all of my vlogs, YouTube stuff.
	And all of the stuff that we still do remains public on YouTube.
	And Rumble.
	Incidentally, we are streaming live on Rumble right now.
	So you can check us out there as well.
	And Locals, by the way, if I didn't misunderstand something that Dave Rubin said today...
	Now is live stream capable.
	So the world is changing and it's an amazing thing.
	Okay, so where was I?
	30% goes to YouTube.
	If you don't want to support YouTube, there's other ways to support us.
	The super chats are not a right of entry into the conversation.
	I may or may not get to them.
	And if I don't get to them and I don't bring them up and you're going to be miffed or feel rooked, don't give it.
	I don't like people feeling miffed or rooked.
	With that said, I see a bunch of super chats.
	Oh, and by the way, incidentally, tonight I may bring up more or less of the super chats because I don't want to...
	Be too distracting from the discussion.
	And I can already see that I've messed.
	Tailex does the best memes.
	You can possibly imagine on Locals, and we share them on Twitter as well.
	Been looking forward to this.
	Okay, and I see everyone's in the house right now, so let's see if this party started, because it's going to be great.
	This might be the best sidebar yet.
	Ask him about trying to get people after Coyote's on the border.
	We're going to get to questions, by the way, so don't worry about that, but, man, we're going to get to some discussion first.
	In a court of public opinion, more need to point to James' stories on democracy partners and Omar campaign to show election stuff may be real.
	Don't want to get into trouble before the stream starts.
	When will James expose UFOs?
	Well, I think they're doing that already.
	Okay, so with that said, I now own VivaSong, Preston Park.
	Thank you.
	$16 was not enough.
	Preston, I think we follow each other on Twitter as well.
	Okay, let's bring him in.
	We're going to bring in James O 'Keefe.
	Can you hear me?
	You might be...
	Hold on.
	Who's on mute?
	Unmute mic.
	You need to unmute your mic, James.
	And while you do that, I'm going to bring in...
	How are you?
	Good.
	Now, I was told that people like this format better, so maybe we're just going to do that this time so that when I bring up a chat...
	For example, like this, it will not block the face of the person on the bottom, and then we'll see for next time.
	I can't believe this is happening, James.
	How are you doing?
	It's great.
	I feel like, you know, we're very close in the spirit because, by the way, we've basically become a law firm at this point, Project Veritas.
	You know, to be a journalist, you have to, I guess, be a lawyer nowadays to stand for the First Amendment.
	So there's so much to discuss, I don't even know where to begin.
	Okay, we're going to make sure Robert's audio is good.
	Robert, your audio looks good and your video looks impeccably sharp tonight.
	Good, good.
	Okay, excellent.
	Okay, James, I'm going to start from the beginning.
	We won't spend too much time on it, but Robert and I, and maybe more me, I always get fixated on people's upbringing in order to understand how they got to where they are.
	You're the oldest of two siblings, or you're the oldest of two kids.
	Your dad was an engineer.
	Your mom is a...
	What does your mom do again?
	Physical therapist.
	She just retired.
	My dad was a carpenter, had a couple houses, rental properties.
	I grew up doing construction, roofing, plumbing, work with my hands with my father and grandfather.
	I'm James O 'Keefe III.
	He was junior, Irish family, but builders, essentially.
	Builders.
	And what was your childhood like growing up?
	Standard, normal, anything extraordinary?
	I think just resilience.
	My dad, you know, we, like, interesting.
	As a child, I would work weekends on the houses, mowing lawns, you know, putting up shingles and painting and priming these homes.
	And I don't know, one of the homes, there was a house fire and we had to do it all over again for two years.
	So I think that taught me never to give up.
	And also musical theater in high school and college.
	So kind of a thespian background.
	I think myself more of an artist than a political person.
	I approach things more artistically.
	And I think that's probably why we're more successful in what we do.
	When did your first interest in the journalistic or media or investigative reporting space begin?
	Good question.
	I think at an early age, I remember being a teenager.
	Like just sitting in my childhood bedroom watching the local...
	I'm from New Jersey, so this would be New York City market.
	Watching the local news and just being disgusted by how the news was presented.
	I just felt, this is wrong.
	I'm not getting the reality.
	And then in college, I was an introvert and I would just sit in the dining hall.
	This is at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
	And I would just read the New York Times front to back every day.
	I would read the New Jersey Star Ledger, the USA Today, which, by the way, now USA Today is a shell of itself.
	This is like when it was actually, you know, a larger paper.
	And I would read the New York Times, which is the subject of much of what we're going to be talking about.
	And I was, again, disgusted by what I was reading.
	I felt it didn't accurately reflect reality.
	And, you know, I sort of read Saul Linsky and George Orwell, and I was a philosophy major, and I just sort of realized I needed to do something about it.
	By the way, that's my motto, be brave, do something.
	And I started a college newspaper I called The Centurion, and I started doing local reporting.
	You know, I tried to ban Lucky Charms because it was racist against the Irish.
	This was sort of a Borat meets 60 Minutes.
	And this is in 2005.
	So that was the beginning for me.
	And then I went in to investigate Planned Parenthood.
	But I think it was the genesis was being sort of contemptuous of the mainstream media not reflecting reality.
	So for anybody who doesn't know, I guess not call it your claim to fame, but what really broke you into mainstream was the Acorn Exposé.
	Yes, that was the big one, as Andrew Breitbart would say.
	We took the...
	The elevator from the basement to the penthouse.
	That was the Daily Show covered it.
	Congress defunded Acorn.
	For those of you who are not familiar, I went in with a young woman.
	I was then 25. She was 20. And we were a prostitution business.
	She was dressed like a hooker.
	We went to all these offices called Acorn, funded by government money.
	And Congress defunded Acorn because these workers were on tape telling me how to...
	Break the law.
	Classify the prostitution as a performing artist on the tax returns.
	It was hidden camera journalism.
	And most people don't do hidden camera stuff anymore, partially because of the 1992 Food Lion case with ABC News.
	ABC News got sued.
	It's very expensive to defend yourself in all these lawsuits.
	And that's the reason why people don't do it.
	I just decided to go ahead and do it.
	And have been sued many times as a result of the work that we've done.
	Yeah, I was actually tangentially connected to the Food Lion case.
	I was a young intern at the AFL-CIO.
	I mean, it was an education to me because I thought media did their own investigative reporting.
	I didn't realize that, like in that particular case, the AFL-CIO did all the undercover work and then spoon-fed it to ABC because they were trying to unionize Food Lion.
	So it was kind of an economic punishment to Food Lion to expose their other bad habits through undercover reporting.
	And so it's fascinating to see how that came about.
	But in that context, I mean, there is sort of across the country a wave of cases, many of which you're involved in at one level or another, or Project Veritas is involved in, where there's a real war on undercover reporting.
	I mean, the Planned Parenthood-related issues out of California, where a wide range of groups have filed amicus briefs before the Ninth Circuit.
	There's the case pending in D.C., cases pending in Michigan, cases pending all over the place, where they're trying to effectively criminalize or at least treat it as such a civil tort that they will bankrupt anybody who does expose reporting.
	Even though expose reporting goes back to the New York Tribune, 1850s, on undercovering slavery and some of its most egregious abuses was solely because of undercover reporting.
	The same, I mean, Upton Sinclair is famous, the jungle that led to major reform in the food industry solely because he went undercover and lied.
	I mean, you have to lie by definition to be undercover.
	And so the...
	When did you first think about doing undercover reporting, and to what extent do you think, why do you think it is institutional media?
	You mentioned the ABC case, that there's so little of it these days of consequence.
	These are profound questions.
	The subject of a forthcoming book, which I talk about privacy, I talk about deception.
	The history is replete with people.
	In the 20th century who did undercover reporting.
	But this is when there were newspapers, not the digital era.
	So you had William Gaines posed as a janitor go into the Chicago hospitals and won the Pulitzer Prize.
	You had the legendary series called The Mirage, where the Chicago sometimes posed as bartenders.
	And something happened in the 1970s and 80s where I think journalism after Watergate became rather pretentious.
	And they wanted their Pulitzer Prizes.
	They won their trophies.
	And there became this interesting series of events where journalism became less muckrakey and, I guess, more aligned, simpatico with the establishment.
	And now you have this perversion of journalism where CNN is putting all the crooked people that resign on the air, you know, like the FBI people.
	And James Clapper, the people that I would be investigating, though, they're the ones who are giving us the information.
	So I think that people become slave to access.
	So undercover work is the opposite of slave to access.
	It allows me to get information where one party is consenting to a conversation where they don't know they're being videotaped.
	And sometimes that's when people are the most honest.
	And I believe it's ethical and moral as long as, again, one party is present, knows they're being recorded.
	And James, when I grew up with the news, I grew up with Undercover News Exposé 60 Minutes.
	I mean, I remember this.
	They would have a camera in the briefcase.
	There would be cameras in rooms that they would go into.
	To some extent, Borat was doing it as well.
	And it really seems it became uncool when media began working with corporations and with politicians in tandem such that nobody wanted to rat the other out.
	And on the issue of, like, you know, mainstream media hiring the corrupt people, you get Donna Brazile on Fox News now, which are confirmed bad people of the media being hired by the media now in order to inform the general public.
	I don't know how they do it without thinking they lose all credibility, but it seems that they do.
	And your most recent piece on Fox News kind of confirms as much.
	Well, I mean, it's...
	Journalism is broken, and there's nowhere else for people to go except for us, and it's not easy.
	I mean, we could take this in so many different directions, but just the sheer amount of money that we've had to spend to stand up for the First Amendment.
	I mean, I believe...
	You know, hidden camera work, you know, there's a great quote by Don Hewitt, who is an executive producer for 60 Minutes, and he would always get attacked for using hidden cameras.
	He's, where are we going to attack Upton Sinclair for smuggling his pencil into the jungle?
	We believe that recording something, surely society would not consider a reasonable expectation of privacy, which would want a less accurate of the events in question.
	So if it's fully legal to write what someone says down.
	Of course we believe it's legal.
	It should be legal in all 50 jurisdictions to record them.
	We want a more accurate depiction as long as someone knows that they're being spoken with.
	And we have gone all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
	We have a petition for writ of certiorari on this case in Massachusetts, where are you allowed to record someone in Boston Square?
	And we have asked the Supreme Court to be the First Circuit Court of Appeals in that case because we believe that one party consent.
	And by the way, we believe these two-party consent statutes that prohibit us from recording in a public place in Massachusetts, we believe they indemnify the guilty.
	And a lot of these antiquated laws that prohibit what I do are aimed to give them a way out, to get them to say, I didn't say that when in fact they did.
	So I think that the hidden camera issue is really central to the First Amendment.
	Well, I mean, federal law recognizes one-party consent, and there's always a law enforcement exception that provides one-party consent, so I don't see why it shouldn't apply in the First Amendment analogous context as well, and at least in many of the slaughterhouse cases where the agricultural industry has gone in and tried to put a gag on those,
	those laws have been overturned on the grounds that it violates First Amendment rights, because a lot of the critical exposés of what happened within the slaughterhouse industry only came about by people doing undercover It's not like they're
	suing for defamation.
	They're suing because the information is honest and accurate that it impacted their reputation.
	Now, in that capacity, the other part of the legal system you had an early introduction to, and the first time I heard about you was when some friends, mutual friends, asked me about the case.
	Most people go into and experience the sort of criminal justice process, and that most people come in, particularly from the political right, but most Americans are very naive about that process.
	And I'm curious about the whole sort of mindset going in, in terms of you're going down to Louisiana.
	Not exactly, you know, there's a lot of folks who went Louisiana fishing down in Louisiana.
	You're going to expose a basic expose of just a person not really taking phone calls and pretending the phones don't work, but of a political family that goes back a century of political corruption in Louisiana.
	First of all, did you even think of the possibility they could try to criminally punish you for trying to expose a corrupt political family in Louisiana?
	I wrote another book about this called Breakthrough.
	My experience in Louisiana, I mean, it was insane.
	I was arrested for walking into a federal building with an iPhone and a notebook.
	But because I'm James O 'Keefe, they detained me.
	And when they realized that I did the Acorn story, and this is the Eastern District of Louisiana, I was arrested by the FBI.
	People say, why did the FBI?
	Because I was in a federal building, they had jurisdiction.
	And it was sort of this thing where these federal agents were like, oh, you're the boy who did the Acorn story.
	And I bragged about this thinking, yes, that's exactly who I am.
	No, no, no, no, that was a bad idea.
	Then, oh, we're going to have to keep you overnight, boy.
	And I was shackled and they interrogated me and I signed away my Miranda rights.
	Now you might be thinking, why would someone as intelligent or as learned as O 'Keefe do that?
	Well, when you're in shackles and you're being interrogated and you've done nothing wrong, you think, I know, I'll just tell them I'm making a YouTube video, but you know and I know that you never want to actually talk to the FBI or anybody like that.
	I learned a lesson, and they charged me with something I did not do, which was tampering with federal equipment.
	And then the media said I was wiretapping a senator.
	And before I could even talk about the actual misdemeanor crime, entry by false pretense, they'd already charged me with a felony.
	I was cleared of that felony, and the prosecutors in that case all resigned in disgrace.
	Jim Letton, Jan Mann, were blogging anonymously about me.
	On the New Orleans Times-Picun website, which is a huge prosecutorial no-no.
	They teach it in ethics classes.
	That's what they were doing when they were prosecuting.
	It was so corrupt.
	My lawyer actually said, of all the places for you to get arrested, you chose the Eastern District of Louisiana, perhaps the most corrupt place.
	But there's a lot of corruption.
	I think people are more awake to the corruption now than they were 10 years ago.
	But the lesson I have learned in the criminal justice system, in the civil courts, I've been deposed so many times.
	I've learned a lot about litigation.
	And I think litigation is unfortunately central to telling the truth.
	And I think it's the reason why people don't tell the truth and don't do investigative reporting because they have to face that experience of being deposed, of going to trial, of risking it all.
	But I do think that you can be vindicated if you're not settling, if you don't compromise, if you take them all the way to the end.
	The mistake I made in Louisiana is I pled guilty to a misdemeanor.
	I should not have done that.
	I should have gone to trial and taken the risk because I'm an innocent man.
	Now, James, I'm going to ask you the question that's always plaguing my mind when I correspond with reporters or people who do the big breaking stuff where you're making...
	Serious enemies and serious enemies in high places.
	How are you afraid for what you do?
	Do you have any element of fear for what you do?
	You see the internet memes about journalists and someone had information on Hillary Clinton, yada, yada, yada.
	You're in the thick of it, though.
	You're going to Louisiana.
	I wouldn't feel comfortable getting arrested in Louisiana.
	I wouldn't feel comfortable getting arrested anywhere.
	But this is what you do.
	And when it goes wrong, you get arrested.
	But when it goes right, you release an expose that makes very powerful people look very bad.
	Do you not have an element of fear inside it?
	Well, this is a very interesting point.
	I mean, I think at the time I went through, you could say, a bit of trauma after the incarceration and three and a half years of federal probation for ostensibly a crime I did not commit, a Class B misdemeanor where even the judge said there's no evidence that there was any intention to commit a felony.
	And, you know, there's a great line in the movie The Insider with Al Pacino where he says, The more true it gets, the worse it gets.
	The more true it gets, the worse it gets.
	So there's a perverse incentive in society to not tell the truth.
	Because if you do tell the truth, you'll be punished.
	And if you tell falsehoods, you'll be rewarded with a speaking slot unseen and maybe also a position on the New York Times book review.
	But I think the answer to your question is twofold.
	When you're so passionate about something, when you actually believe in it, you don't think about the secondary effects of what you do.
	You just...
	You're just so driven.
	And I think that everyone at Project ERTOS is that way, certainly our whistleblowers.
	And the second thing is about fear is I think I'm probably a little afraid now, more so than I ever was, particularly with this New York Times lawsuit.
	We're going to talk about this here, but they actually threatened our lawyers, and we'll get to that.
	And some things that are happening in my life and the front page hit piece they did upon me, which was totally, totally false.
	You better believe a little part of me.
	Is afraid because I'm not as naive as I used to be.
	However, I say this all the time.
	I try not to let fear govern the decision-making process because there's a lot of people out there who they have nowhere else to go.
	I mean, there's just no other forum except for Veritas.
	So it's important for me to, you know, for the people, millions of them out there, for us to stay together.
	To not let my fear govern the decision-making process.
	You talked about reversing the lawfare back on those that have been waging it selectively upon a wide range of people across the country.
	You've been one of the primary targets of a wide range of crazy lawsuits.
	People don't even fully know the scale of or the scope of, but it was intended.
	I mean, the criminal prosecution was intended to send you a message, but you have a bit of a New Jersey backbone, so I guess it didn't work as they intended.
	But you are now sort of going back in terms of going in the New York Times.
	I've talked to very powerful people with deep pockets.
	Who didn't want to sue the New York Times because of their reputation in New York.
	I think it's been 50 years since they've been successfully sued into the discovery stage in New York.
	Last I knew, their reputation, people can understand.
	If you're a judge in New York, do you really want to rule against the New York Times, the most powerful media publication in your area?
	What was your thought process that you thought, no, it's time to expose the New York Times?
	Great questions, guys.
	I never thought I'd go on offense.
	I've always been on defense in litigation.
	We've won every lawsuit.
	So what these people did, Bob Kramer, Democracy Partners case, a woman named Lauren Windsor, is they went out and organized plaintiffs to sue me for various absurd causes of action, like in these different cases, which we all won on summary judgment.
	They sued me.
	I kept winning.
	And I realized with this New York Times issue in Minnesota, we went undercover.
	And exposed ballots.
	You're very familiar with the facts now.
	This is the Minneapolis ballot harvester.
	And the New York Times ran this story.
	I'll never forget.
	I was in an airport, and I opened my phone.
	It was a New York Times alert, and it said that James O 'Keefe, Project Veritas, part of a coordinated disinformation campaign making claims without evidence.
	And I sort of fell to my knees.
	And I said, are you?
	Effing kidding?
	I could not believe that the paper of record had taken an incontrovertible video recording that he himself recorded and called it a disinformation campaign with no evidence when you could see his face.
	And I remember sitting with my lawyer at Project Veritas, Jared, and I looked at Jared and Sir Jared and I looked at each other and I said, we're going to go ahead and sue the New York Times.
	It was so obvious that that was the only choice I had.
	Choiceless choice.
	In other words, I don't want to do it, but circumstances can arise where it's less wrong than any other possible choice, including doing nothing.
	So they left me no option.
	And again, just to understand the magnitude of expense, it costs us about $300,000 just to get to the motion to dismiss phase of litigation.
	And by the way, you're gambling, because if you lose, you might have to pay some of their fees.
	So, for me, it was a choiceless choice.
	The defamation was so awful and so unconscionable that it seemed to me self-evident as something I had to do.
	And it was the first offensive lawsuit.
	We've also sued Twitter, and we've sued CNN, and winning on the motion to dismiss.
	I just want to say one more thing about this.
	When I won the Shirley Teeter case in a verdict in federal court...
	It was probably the sweetest moment of my life, because when you win, there's not always justice in the justice system, but sometimes, in rare occasion, there actually is.
	And when that federal judge, Article 3, constitutionally appointed federal judge, gaveled the case and said, case dismissed, directed verdict, and looked at the plaintiff and said, if you had sued Mike Wallace for the reasons you're suing James O 'Keefe, everyone would laugh at you.
	That's what the federal judge said.
	And to hear those words, by the way, as part of the federal court record, it was the sweetest victory of my life, much better than any undercover investigation that I had done.
	So I do think there can be some really big rewards in the administration of justice.
	One thing that's amazing, you know, they say suing is one step, and even if you lose, you've exposed the New York Times, but you're going after the big W, not the little W. But the little w for the time being is what's been revealed through this lawsuit, through their defense, speaking of you suing the New York Times, that they run a hit piece which is factually incorrect based on a misrepresentation of the law, a misrepresentation of the facts.
	They then become the fact-checking sources for the independent third-party fact-checkers who then run fact-checks on you to say that you've been confirmed, debunked, and you have this incestuous circle.
	of fake news that is purporting to be the fact checkers, if nothing else, for anybody who's paying attention, this has already been exposed.
	But you're going for the big W. You're not settling for anything else other than a judgment on the merits on this.
	That's correct.
	And I think, yes, we're not going to settle.
	And they know that.
	And in any other case, they'd be offering me money.
	They offered Nick Sandman money.
	That's the kid who sued the Washington Post for defamation.
	I don't know why he took the money.
	The whole critical thing about litigation is discovery.
	That's why they sued me and they didn't get anything.
	In other words, think of this for a second.
	My team has been deposed.
	My reporters have been deposed.
	They got nothing.
	In all these lawsuits, they realize that we do run our operation with integrity.
	And I think the key distinction between us and them is, and this is a quote that I often read to my team, is that the work in undercover work has to be done with such a degree of integrity.
	In the law and the ethics, you have to behave like there's a jury always watching you.
	They don't behave like there's juries always watching.
	They try to keep things secret.
	So in the discovery phase of a libel lawsuit, we're going to learn a lot about them and how they operate.
	We've already learned about things.
	Perhaps the greatest thing we've learned thus far is in the answer that they were required to file in court.
	The New York Times admitted that they got their facts wrong.
	Ballot law was, quote, suspended.
	It wasn't.
	And in court, in the answer, they admit, no, the law wasn't suspended.
	Yet, the New York Times hasn't printed a retraction.
	So they're admitting in documents in a lawsuit that they're wrong, but the article remains uncorrected.
	It's the simple, it's the law of non-contradiction.
	If I did that, I'd be crucified, rightfully.
	But yet they do it and they get away with it because of the New York Times.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	They haven't printed a retraction about Brian Sicknick yet that I know of.
	You still find that original article about Brian Sicknick's death and the inflammatory headline that they slapped on it.
	It's still up there.
	For what you do, undercover stuff, and you know that you're always watching other people, you conduct yourself in a way that presumably...
	You assume you're always being watched.
	You might have someone working in Project Veritas who's looking for a video of you doing what Zucker did at CNN.
	And so you conduct yourself not more secretly, but more transparently.
	And it's an amazing perspective that people don't have.
	I think everything secret...
	What was the...
	I can't remember who said this from the 18th century, but something to the effect of everything secret degenerates.
	Everything secret degenerates.
	And I think it would be anathema to what we stand for if I try to ultimately keep secrets.
	And I've learned in litigation, you asked a question, what was the one thing I've learned?
	In litigation, nothing is secret.
	When you're in a deposition room for 14 hours or however many hours and they go through binders of your emails, you quickly realize that you cannot keep real secrets.
	The only thing I can really protect are the names of our whistleblowers and the names of our donors.
	But I think from a moral perspective, The secrecy of muckraking operations must be limited to very few issues that are morally indispensable and necessary for the completion of an undercover investigation.
	This is the number one thing I've learned that makes us different from us and the people that we are now suing, is that they do not want to be deposed.
	Because, I mean, we are going to find things in these New York Times deposition tapes that will shock the conscience.
	And that's why this David McGraw, General Counselor for the New York Times, threatened my lawyer, which we can talk about when you're ready.
	We'll get there.
	Actually, let's get there now, actually.
	So anybody who hasn't seen the vlog from yesterday, in the context of this New York Times lawsuit, we don't need to go over it.
	The bottom line, it would seem that...
	Project Veritas wants to use correspondence among counsel, which is not privileged unless it's privileged according to law in the context of the lawsuit.
	And so lawyers make the mistake of thinking, well, if I slap without prejudice or privilege and confidential on email, they can't use it against me, which is not right unless it's right in another jurisdiction.
	It's borderline idiotic because you can say whatever you want after that and think it's privileged.
	Project Veritas is using correspondence among counsel that's relevant to the file.
	New York Times doesn't like that and now says, well, since you're using something that we slapped a header on of privileged and confidential in this file, we're going to go ahead and maybe make public some other stuff that you've said in other files, not related to this at all, as some sort of threat, although I don't think it's much of a threat.
	And in doing it, incidentally, they do not write this email to your attorney of record.
	They go to her senior partner, I imagine, in sort of what they think is an attempt to intimidate her indirectly.
	Yeah, this is the general counsel of New York Times sent a letter to the partner, the older male colleague of Libby Lock, his name is Tom Clare, and said that they're going to publish their other clients' letters.
	If we go ahead and publish this email stemming from more defamation of the New York Times, they refuse to correct these issues.
	They say that I was behind this McMaster's thing.
	And then they write in their article, it's unclear.
	And they go on television and they say, I'm behind it.
	So we want to publish this back and forth.
	And they say, well, we're going to go ahead and publish all of your other clients' settlement letters.
	So it's just, why would they talk to him as opposed to our own lawyer, except to intimidate us?
	It really seems like it's like the mafia.
	We're going after such a powerful organ.
	And I think, to quote you, you said the New York Times does not want to be deposed.
	And they're using all means necessary to prevent us from getting to discovery in this case.
	When they said in their memorandum that there's no risk of spoliation of evidence or witnesses not being available, bam, that is an admission right there.
	There's risk of spoliation of evidence.
	They're probably wiping some dry...
	I won't make any inflammatory accusations, but that is...
	It's possible.
	I've seen things come out in depositions that are literally admissions that they're just using litigation to hurt me or a referendum on Donald Trump.
	Nothing to do with the facts and the law.
	So it's possible.
	But the great thing about depositions is even if they claim reporter privilege and even if they deleted all the drives, they still...
	They still have to be under oath on videotape.
	They don't want to give me the satisfaction of deposing them, I think.
	In that context, throughout all of your experience in the criminal cases, civil cases, one of the most common tactics is to attack the lawyer, to deter lawyers from being involved in these kind of cases, to being on the underdog side of the equation, to pay a personal, professional price.
	For advocating for, quote-unquote, the wrong client, wrong case, wrong cause.
	And this happens in a broad scale.
	What's been your experience?
	Because, I mean, for most people, they're kind of naive, idealistic about how lawyers are supposed to act, how the legal system is supposed to act, it's supposed to be professional and so forth.
	I mean, it sounds like this is not new for you, but it's new.
	I think it would be new for most people.
	I don't think you can...
	I mean, I had a year of law school under my belt, so I know some issue, rule analysis, conclusion, but you have to live it.
	You have to go through it.
	I mean, I've been, and I've published on YouTube some of my deposition moments.
	I think the most amazing moment for me and the most telling moment was when I was deposed and I was cross-examined.
	The guy goes, and I said, I would never disclose my source.
	That's a Supreme Court precedent.
	And a New York Times reporter, an NBC News reporter would never disclose the source.
	And their lawyer goes, The difference between you and them, Mr. O 'Keefe, they would never compare themselves to you.
	And that moment meant so much because their whole argument rests upon relying upon their own reputation.
	There's no law or facts in this motion to stay discovery.
	In New York State, the New York anti-slap law existed for over 30 years and not a single case was granted a stay of discovery.
	That they don't care about the law or the facts.
	This judge in Westchester County granted or rather denied their motion to dismiss, which is historic.
	And they didn't care.
	They ignored everything he said.
	And they're just trying to look.
	They've never been held accountable in their life.
	And all their argument rests upon this Orwellian notion of double think.
	To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them.
	To forget any fact that has become inconvenient.
	And when it becomes necessary.
	To draw it back from oblivion just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality, to quote George Orwell.
	That's what these people do.
	When I was in the deposition chair, the guy goes, well, you should never compare yourself to them.
	And I said, well, but the behavior is the same.
	I'm doing reporting.
	I'm protected under the First Amendment not to disclose my source.
	And you're just saying, well, because I'm not the New York Times, I should disclose my source.
	So increasingly, their arguments rest upon no logic.
	It just rests upon, well, I'm the New York Times.
	It's intimidation.
	It's degradation.
	It's sort of abuse of a witness.
	That's the tactic.
	It's disgusting.
	I'm sure you love your lawyers, but I'm sure you hate lawyers in general because this is what you see.
	I think the legal profession is, and I'm generalizing here, but I think a lot of it is a racket.
	I mean, it's a rich man's business.
	I was going to ask you, because you're suing Twitter.
	You're suing CNN.
	You file a 990, so our tax returns are public information.
	So let's say out of the $15, $20 million budget, we're spending $3, $4, $5 million a year on litigation.
	Most of that's been on defense, and we do get a tiny fraction back after we win, but that takes years.
	Litigation is a tough thing because...
	And I would say to you that the real win is not the judgment at jury verdict because that's just financial.
	No, no.
	The real win is discovery.
	And that's what Jack Dorsey fears at Twitter.
	That's what Anna Cabrera and Brian Stelter fears at CNN.
	We are going to get past motion to dismiss like Dershowitz did.
	Our facts are so apparent in that case.
	And in the New York Times case, the real win is not the $100 million judgment at jury verdict.
	No, no.
	The real win in the New York Times case is deposing the executive editor, Dean Baquet and Maggie Astor.
	That will be the biggest, mark my words, that will be one of the biggest things to happen in journalism in 50 years, because I guarantee you the content that will be inherent in those depositions will be stronger than any content that I've ever gotten in any of my undercover investigations.
	In that context, when you were sort of...
	Preparing for this litigation, were you confident you could get past a motion to dismiss at the beginning, or what were your thought process?
	I wasn't fully versed in the odds of winning or not.
	I was, again, having that moment of a choiceless choice.
	They had left me no other option.
	My back was against the wall.
	I just want to revisit the facts.
	The New York Times reported in their A News section, That the video was deceptive and that I was part of a coordinated disinformation campaign for publishing what someone videotaped himself breaking the law.
	And I didn't know what else to do.
	It didn't even occur to me to do a calculation, frankly.
	I think I may have spoken to my colleagues about it.
	Some of that's attorney-client privilege.
	But I just, again, when you're so driven and passionate about something, you don't think about the secondary effects.
	You just know it's the right thing to do.
	And I guess we've won.
	To the New York Times, the ends justify the means.
	And it was so shocking that Facebook would ban our video based upon what the New York Times wrote.
	And millions of people got a notification saying that I'm doing false information, according to that reporting from the New York Times.
	And the implications, the staggering implications for society at large.
	When the New York Times can just make shit up and Facebook can ban people based upon the shit that they're making up, I just didn't see any other option.
	There's no other way to hold them accountable at the courts.
	I've got to ask you one thing because you know there's a lot of negative coverage of you on the internet.
	You go look it up.
	Wikipedia is nasty.
	There's hit piece after hit piece in Forbes, wherever.
	The one thing that I couldn't understand, there was an accusation, going back to the Acorn video, that in the actual undercover footage, you were not wearing the classic 80s pimp outfit, and one accusation was that you spliced in that video in the undercover footage, and that's where, call it the genesis of accusing you of deceptive video editing came from.
	What was the truth of the Acorn video and the 80s pimp versus the suit-wearing pimp?
	Hannah Giles, the young woman playing the role of the prostitute in that undercover, she did dress up like a Miami, Florida prostitute.
	I was wearing a silk tie with a hidden camera in it and trousers.
	In some of the offices we brought in the fur coat, in some of the offices we did not.
	It was a sort of theatrical bumper as part of this episodic content.
	But that's another deposition moment from the ACORN lawsuit when I was asked, could you define pimp protocol?
	And I said, well, where did you learn your definition of pimpery?
	And I said, common sense.
	I don't know.
	But pimp protocol doesn't, and this is a New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning ombudsman named Clark Hoyt wrote, because I was being attacked for editing.
	The New York Times went through the raw acorn tapes and said it was fully in context.
	So pimp protocol doesn't require the wearing of a chinchilla fur to be a pimp.
	You can simply represent the fact that you whore out underage girls, in which case that's what I was saying.
	I was playing the role of a pimp, albeit not dressed like one.
	But everything the people said on tape was fully in context.
	And don't quote me on that.
	Quote Clark Hoyt, Pulitzer Prize winner, who reviewed the raw tapes.
	Yeah, sure, they'll say I selectively edit, but not out of context, I don't.
	And they can never actually name a specific edit.
	They can only name the pimp costume from 2009.
	Well, that's one of the things I find fascinating is this really Orwellian use of language.
	Because by definition, any edit is selective.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It infers something that's totally false innuendo.
	So what they'll say, and Attorney General Jerry Brown in 2010 will go, well, the footage was selectively edited.
	Well, that's a tautology because all words are edited into sentences, and you might think, well, that's just too tautological.
	No, that's actually what these people do.
	They create these absurd insinuations like, well...
	Attorney General found it was selectively edited, which is cross-cited by another newspaper.
	And before you know it, the first paragraph of my Wikipedia page has like 18 citations from experts calling the videos deceptive.
	It's nuts in the sense that unless you run the entire unedited footage, the hours that you have, it will be by definition selectively edited.
	And then even if you do run the unedited footage...
	In context, they'll say, we need more context, or it's taken out of context, or we didn't see what happened before and after.
	They create the impossibility where, short of actually living the experience from the first minute to the last minute, which never happens, if they want to call it selectively edited, they will.
	And when they want to do it themselves, they're going to say, well, we edited because we have to and we forgive ourselves for that which we judge of others.
	It's even worse than that.
	If I placate them, which I've attempted to do, I did it in the NPR investigation.
	I had to redact one five.
	I gave them the raw.
	I said, okay, world, here's the raw.
	By the way, 60 Minutes never gives you the raw.
	And when they do, you find that they're deceptively editing.
	The New York Times gives you the raw.
	You find that they're deceptively editing.
	So it's a little bit of hashtag confession through projection, which is what you always say on your channel.
	But in 2011, I did, in fact, indeed give them the full raw on the NPR story.
	And there was one moment that I had to redact because the...
	I covertly recorded the NPR vice president, and he was mentioning a reporter in Libya.
	And it would be unethical for me to leave that unredacted.
	I would be compromising his source.
	So I redacted it, and I was viciously attacked for selective editing.
	Another example was in Virginia, an undercover investigation of Patrick Moran.
	They had called me.
	This is, again, I'm investigating a congressman's son who resigned.
	And I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't, because the detective in Arlington, Virginia asked me for the raw.
	I gave it, and he goes, well, how do I know this is the raw raw?
	How do I know you didn't turn the camera on and go back into the building?
	And I said, well, sir, that's tautological.
	Like, I can't win with you.
	He said, how do I know you didn't go back into the place after you left the place?
	Oh, you're lying.
	It's literally impossible, okay?
	I am not exaggerating.
	This is a post-truth Orwellian Wikipedia, Google.
	These are Orwellian mediums.
	It's not a conspiracy theory.
	I have the facts to back it up.
	And again, if you want to ask me, just name the edit.
	I'll give you $10,000 cash.
	If anyone in your comments section can point out one specific, specific edit that I have done that is a deceptive...
	And by the way, I have one on summary judgment in federal court in all these places because these federal judges look at the tapes and they go, there's no editing here.
	What's extraordinary, how much were you surprised by the media's reaction in the sense of...
	Demonizing historically the most celebrated form of journalism, which has been undercover investigative journalism, but now demonizing its tactics and techniques as somehow inherently suspicious or doubtful.
	And just the whole approach they've taken to demonizing everything that you've done in the sense that they're mostly demonizing what used to be the best of their profession, what used to be the ideal of their profession.
	I mean, I think that goes back to the whole, you know, the more true it gets.
	The worst it gets, you know, argument.
	It's, you know, I think it was Washington Post legendary editor Ben Bradley that deprived the Chicago Sun-Times of that beloved Pulitzer Prize.
	And these days, it's all pseudo-events, as to quote Dan Boorstin, former librarian of Congress.
	It's about...
	They've become a slave to their sources.
	They've become beat reporters, reliant, wholly reliant on the hand that feeds them.
	That's not a right-wing sentiment.
	You can read Noam Chomsky's manufacturing consent.
	I mean, it's probably more of a left-of-center argument that there's a symbiotic relationship between, there's a reciprocity of interest between these sources in the government.
	And these media organizations.
	Now, I'm not a beat reporter.
	I'm an investigative reporter.
	I'm an investigative reporter because I'm not a slave to my sources.
	I will covertly record my sources if the public has the right to know what they're telling me.
	So I think it's become completely inverted, and it's gotten much worse with the tech companies preferring the New York Times in their algorithms.
	Twitter has banned me.
	I mean, I want you to understand the absurdity of the situation.
	I quote the CNN guy, Charlie Chester.
	Charlie Chester says, I want more people to die so we can get more COVID deaths, so we can get more ratings.
	We lie to the people.
	We don't care.
	I quote him, Twitter bans me.
	I prefer CNN.
	Twitter prefers CNN, but bans me for quoting what the CNN guy said.
	You can't make this shit up.
	They do the same thing with Gad Saad.
	For anybody who doesn't know, the Montreal, he teaches at Concordia.
	He posts negative, I'm going to call them negative for lack of a better word, comments he gets.
	He comments on the nasty things other people say and in repeating the statements that others have said for which they have not been banned from social media.
	He gets banned or suspended from Facebook.
	It's mostly on Facebook, not Twitter, but it is the...
	I think Steven Crowder had the same problem with...
	Who's the guy that he had the fight with?
	Raza?
	Basically, you get punished for repeating the statements of the other, but...
	Yes.
	But I think the real issue is that if they want to be honest about things, I think they can attack the hidden camera aspect.
	They say it's not part of the journalism code of ethics.
	But I think it's become so awful in the sense that they've become so reliant on their sources feeding them, anonymous sources.
	We don't even know who these people are, what they've said.
	And the use of a concealed tape recorder, like in the case of Charlie Chester, we don't believe it's the moral quandary that our opponents think it is.
	It's not an invasion of privacy as long as you know you're speaking to a stranger.
	It's not a form of eavesdropping.
	It's not entrapment to record someone.
	I think it's a more precise representation of events.
	But I think the Twitter ban of that CNN guy, Chester, and what he said, we were just trying to get Biden elected.
	We don't want people to know that that's what we were doing.
	I think that was a shot across the bow for most people.
	They were so disgusted.
	It actually helped us.
	Every story we've done has been trending on Twitter since we were banned on Twitter because I think people will share our stories more.
	Were you surprised by that, or was it something you were anticipating that big tech was going to wage war on you at some point?
	No, I feel like I've waged war on big tech.
	I feel like I've made enemies with the most powerful.
	I mean, the New York Times, CNN, Twitter, Facebook, and Google, they all consider me an enemy of theirs.
	Is it surprising to me?
	I think that, I mean...
	I don't know if it's surprising to me.
	I think these organizations have more power than all three branches of government and deserve to be investigated like government is.
	Actually, you remind me of one thing.
	First of all, I had never thought of the idea that the two-party consent state legislation could have, in theory, been designed to protect certain interests and not privacy, for example.
	I had never thought about the idea that in those states, basically investigative journalism is...
	In two-party consensus, it's effectively illegal, unless there's an exemption that I don't know about or an exception.
	Yeah.
	Robert, maybe you field this one also.
	Going back to the New York Times, a lot of people are saying that the lawyer's threat to publish previous or prior correspondence in other files is extortion, yada, yada, yada.
	It's criminal.
	My understanding is that it's not technically criminal.
	It might be unethical, potentially, but it might just be dirty warfare.
	Robert, I mean, is it potentially illegal to threaten to release correspondence in other files as a reprisor?
	Well, I mean, I've dealt with a lot of corrupt lawyers, but to be honest with you, that's a first.
	As a case, Flately versus, I just got this note from my attorney, Flately versus Morrow in California makes this potentially extortion.
	If you want to check out Flately versus Morrow.
	Because, I mean, what happened was, I mean, Marty Singer ended up getting tied up in this because they said a settlement letter under certain circumstances could be extortion in California.
	So, you know, it depends on the nature of it.
	It's definitely, I mean, it's very similar to what they did to some of the Trump lawyers during the election cases.
	I mean, there's always been variations of it.
	The federal government's much better at it.
	I mean, they just come at you and tell you that they'll put you under criminal investigation for the privilege of representing your client.
	And they got a little more power, a little more juice to try to back that up.
	But it's a sign of the corporate legal establishment modus operandi, and it's just become more weaponized and more popular.
	All the attempts to disbar Rudy Giuliani just for representing Trump.
	These kind of things of weaponizing the state bar, weaponizing lawyer access, weaponizing...
	I mean, I've dealt with it for 20 years, so it's not new, though this particular method is new, a protocol.
	And it's really only potentially effective...
	On lawyers that have some degree of reputation within a certain space.
	You can't use it against everybody.
	But it's a disturbing technique.
	And we'll see.
	I mean, I would hope that the judge there, who has shown real independence and backbone...
	Which has been unfortunately a little rare in the state of New York when it comes to big media defendants.
	That he disciplines this out of the gate.
	Because otherwise this will get out of hand very quickly by New York Times type lawyers using intimidation tactics and unprofessional conduct to try to coerce an outcome.
	And it's definitely borderline extortion depending on where you're at.
	It's funny.
	My experience in law would be a judge is going to say, don't bring in your lawyer fights to the courtroom.
	Leave it out of the proceedings.
	It is relevant in the sense that, James, you're alleging that this is part and parcel of the retaliation for what you're doing.
	My experience, they don't want to get involved.
	Just leave it with someone else.
	Just so that your audience knows, we did, in fact, put that what could arguably be considered extortion in our response to the New York Times requesting a stay for We put that right in that motion.
	It's relevant here where they're saying a multi-year stay.
	That means to say we don't want to be deposed for two years until the appeals court hears this.
	It won't have any harm on us while they're printing hit pieces on the front page of the New York Times and they're threatening our lawyers.
	That was another question, actually.
	What have your lawyers experienced in all of this?
	Are they eager for the battle or are they realizing how dirty this actually gets?
	I think the challenge for me has always been to find people eager for the battle.
	I think that the legal profession is not used to the nature of what we do at Project Veritas.
	And it takes an enormous person of character.
	And Libby, to her credit, has gotten us past motion to dismiss.
	I think the challenge for any lawyers to represent us is...
	Realizing our battles are not fought cleanly by our opponents.
	They play dirty.
	They play nasty.
	I've learned this in my depositions to approach them.
	I actually quite enjoy being deposed now because I have nothing to hide.
	And you asked a question about fear.
	I want to make this clear.
	They are far more afraid of us right now.
	Then I am afraid of them because I have literally nothing to hide and they have everything to hide.
	So I just produced a video about this threat and I'll put this video out tomorrow.
	And this is a public document now so people can read it.
	And I think they fear the videos that we're doing about this case.
	You use common sense and just bring it to the public and tell people the facts of what's going on.
	I think they don't want the publicity associated with the case.
	So I have to find lawyers who understand that, for sure.
	I think it's a critical part of what you're aware of that a lot of people often aren't, which is making sure the court of public opinion is part of any of these cases.
	Because so few people understand how the system really operates.
	Andrew Breitbart actually said to me, Andrew Breitbart, the late Andrew Breitbart, he used to get in fights with my then lawyer.
	And Andrew would say, the media is everything.
	And, of course, the lawyer never understands this.
	The lawyer's like, no, no, no, no, no.
	It's all about the judge.
	But look at what happened in Louisiana.
	The United States federal prosecutors were blogging anonymously on an article about me.
	And Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, I don't want to try cases in the press.
	But all they ever do is try cases in the press.
	The New York Times is just a front-page hit piece on me.
	Arguably to influence the jury pool, to foment controversy about me in a case where I'm suing them.
	I don't think lawyers get this.
	I mean, I really don't think lawyers understand it.
	I think lawyers are designed to eliminate risk.
	And I just don't.
	And that's why no one does this, because if there's a 95% chance of success, but there's a 5% chance that you're not.
	They'll be afraid of that 5%.
	And that's not how I live my life.
	I do the right thing.
	And in these cases, when we get this information, you better believe we're going to let the public know what the New York Times is doing.
	And I think that that's sometimes what lawyers don't understand.
	The hypocrisy here knows no limit and principles mean absolutely nothing to these people.
	So we have to show them the truth.
	And it goes back to core constitutional rights.
	I mean, it's the reason why there's a constitutional right to public access to the courts, because some of the most important truth-developing events take place in those courts, whether it's in discovery, whether it's in litigation, whether it's at a trial.
	And that's why public participation in the court of public opinion is critical to protecting constitutional liberty in general.
	And I think what you're doing in that regard is fantastic.
	I was going to say, the issue is...
	You know, the strategic people know you need to wage the war on social media, which is precisely why they look for any fabricated excuse to take your voice away on Twitter, to take your voice away on YouTube, or to suppress it on YouTube through demonetization and whatever, and makes it harder to wage the war on social media because New York Times remains unscathed despite all of their egregious over-the-top misconduct in general, not just in this case, and then you get muzzled, which is where community...
	I see crowdsourcing the sharing of information becomes important.
	Actually, let's go over some of the lawsuits.
	I think we've done the New York Times for the time being.
	We'll see when there's news on that.
	But you're suing Twitter because when they suspended you...
	Sorry, not suspended.
	When they permanently suspended you...
	I hate that.
	That's Orwellian.
	Or Kafka.
	I don't know what it is.
	When they permanently suspended you, they said it's because you were operating multiple accounts.
	Or gaming the system for views or for spreading, I don't know, for shares.
	So the reason they gave is arguably defamatory.
	You're suing Twitter.
	You're suing CNN for their reporting on the reason for which you were banned from Twitter because of things Cabrera said.
	CNN, as far as I understand, filed a motion to dismiss.
	What's the status of your lawsuit against CNN?
	And what's the status of it against Twitter?
	So Twitter made it clear it was about the so-called fake accounts of which I operate none.
	So while the Section 230 protects Twitter from statements that others make on their platform, they don't protect Twitter from statements that their own people make about me.
	So I sued them for defamation.
	And there was just a hearing, actually, in New York City today.
	Twitter removed to federal court from New York State court to try to game the system.
	We asked the court to send it back down to New York State Court.
	That hearing was today.
	The court seemed to be very favorable to sending it back down to state court.
	Of course, Twitter probably, I'm guessing, wants to move it to federal court so they can get to the Ninth Circuit, a friendly jurisdiction in California where all these companies are located.
	But they've given Twitter until Friday to consent to send back down to New York State Court.
	Interesting.
	They probably want you to get out of...
	The New York State Court where you've had the favorable ruling on the New York Times.
	Oh yeah, you better believe that that win on motion to dismiss was a shot across the bow.
	A shot heard around the world.
	CNN just filed the motion to dismiss and we are preparing an opposition to that.
	In that case, for those of you who are not familiar with our CNN lawsuit, this is when Anna Cabrera, who's a host on CNN, went on and said, this is my...
	Project Veritas' Twitter ban, not mine personally, but Project Veritas was banned from Twitter in February.
	Ana Cabrera saying on the air, it's a part of an effort to crack down on accounts that are, quote, promoting misinformation.
	Ana Cabrera had said on Twitter days previously that we were banned for privacy violations by recording people in the street.
	These two things are mutually exclusive.
	The facts of the case clearly indicate possible for malice, and we're pretty confident we're going to get beyond motion to dismiss the CNN lawsuit.
	So with all of that going on, you're still going forward on all the investigative reporting.
	How many projects do you have going on on the investigative reporting side?
	Oh my goodness.
	Well, did you guys see what happened this week with the Fox 26 reporter?
	Yeah, I just brought up, you posted today, the 50-second video, she got suspended.
	First of all, going live on air to announce that you're going to out your employer is, I mean, that's awesome in an entertainment perspective, but the expose for anybody who didn't see it yesterday, it's corporate corruption, for lack of a better word, but it's basically...
	Just evidence that these, what's the word I'm looking for?
	MSM, but the ones, the prime time ones, what are they called?
	There's a word for it.
	I forget the word.
	They're driven by profits.
	Everybody knows that.
	And basically, Fox News is saying, we pick and choose what we cover based on what we think our audience wants to watch, what we think is going to be relevant, what we think we want to cover, what we think the CEOs and the CMOs and whatever's of the company want to watch.
	It's kind of like what Veritas does is, you know, people say we confirm suspicions.
	None of this is really shocking, but what is amazing is the boss, this is Fox 26, which is a local affiliate, Fox Corporation local affiliate in Houston, Texas.
	And Susan, the boss, says, you know, it's about what our CEO reads.
	It's not about what the viewers.
	And then she says, like, you know, she says black people don't care about Bitcoin.
	Something to that effect.
	And, you know, it's not really, I mean, there's an audience there that, She's trying to speak in a corporate way, but I think Ivory was so frustrated by the network telling her to cease and desist reporting about hydroxychloroquine.
	This is a few months ago.
	And she felt the viewers had a right to know that, and the corporation refused her.
	So this is a tale as old as time, but what's remarkable is that her deed of losing her career.
	To do this, and the way she did it on the air was like, she just went back to reporting on the heat wave right after it.
	They didn't cut the feed.
	There should be someone back here ready to cut the feed because that was obvious where it was going after 10 seconds.
	Most of these people, these networks, I have people that have come to me since Ivory has done this, and I can't disclose who, but your mouth would drop if I did.
	The majority of people support what she did.
	People are so upset.
	At the media.
	But a lot of those people are making a million dollars a year and they don't want to give it up.
	They don't want to give it up.
	It's gravy train for them.
	And that's what makes the heroism of someone like Ivory and the others who will follow in our footsteps that much more.
	Their passion.
	For what they're doing exceeds whatever marginal benefit they're getting from what they're doing.
	And I think that ratio is getting bigger.
	I think because society is, the center cannot hold, things are falling apart.
	We are entering a Civil War era level of division and disgust and people's value they're placing on politics is greater than ever before.
	So you're going to see more in a movement of people, I think.
	Kind of coming out of the woodwork.
	And there's obviously no place for them to go except for Project Theratoss.
	So I think you're probably going to see another local news reporter come out in the next week, I would say, to do what Ivory did.
	Did you set up a GoFundMe for Ivory?
	Or it was a pay, the other one.
	I don't know what the other platform is.
	We set up a GiveSendGo, which is a Christian version of GoFundMe.
	Whenever we do the GoFundMe, GoFundMe shuts it down.
	I mean, what's that about?
	I don't know.
	Like I said, is it Orwellian or is it Kafkaesque?
	I don't know exactly how to describe or characterize the absurdity of this, but it is what it is.
	Yeah, I mean, Alison Morrow, who was a longtime reporter, environmental reporter, Seattle reporter across the country, she left, started her own independent channel, doing her own thing, and just describes in general this sort of...
	Generational shift that, you know, over the past decade or so, a lot of the corporate media has got rid of people who are the local, on the real true beat reporters who actually wanted to be old school reporters, replaced them with a bunch of kids and interns, and they're all sort of wokesters and politically minded.
	And the last legacy journalists that are left...
	I mean, when you can't just cover whether or not a therapeutic is good for somebody or not, whether we're really on a pandemic.
	Bitcoin, which is one of the most popular topics, can't cover it because somebody has a racially prejudicial definition of their audience and because they have this corporatized mindset that completely skips.
	It's not about truth.
	It's not about information.
	It's not about honesty.
	It's about...
	Partisan politics.
	Again, this is a Noam Chomsky argument, which is reiterated by one of the ABC producers that we had covertly recorded.
	It's amazing what people will say when they're off the air.
	And it's about sustaining the commercial imperative.
	In politics and in media, it's about buy my books, buy our advertisers' products, sponsor our conferences, read our white papers.
	This is not the most effective means of persuasion or truth-telling.
	And to some degree, it's been said by, I think his name was David Wright at ABC News.
	He said to one of our undercover reporters, the commercial imperative is incompatible with truth-telling.
	Which is an extraordinary statement, but I actually agree with that.
	I'm a nonprofit organization.
	We don't generate any profit.
	I don't chase profit.
	I don't make any revenue off litigation.
	In fact, I'm in the rears.
	I have unfunded liabilities in the seven figures to not settle these cases.
	And one could argue you have to be a complete masochist to do what I'm doing, to be defamed and targeted and jailed.
	And I'm not a victim, but I do think there is an incentive not to do it.
	And the commercial imperative is incompatible with reporting the news.
	And that's what Ivory ostensibly recorded her colleagues saying.
	It's not shocking.
	I don't think these are bad people by any stretch.
	I don't think they're bad people at all.
	I think they're doing a job.
	And it used to be the case in the 1970s, I would say, from my reading, that it was a lost leader on a company's balance sheet.
	That investigative reporting was expensive and there were leaders that said that's okay because it's the right thing to do.
	I don't think they do that anymore.
	I don't think people care.
	I don't know what motivates them.
	I'm not sure politics is what motivates these people as much as power and kind of going along to get along.
	When you decided to go the non-profit route, what were your thoughts?
	Because you could have taken a lot of different angles.
	What led you to that path?
	Again, I didn't sit down when I was 36. When I was 24 and I was broke and did the Acorn story, I didn't think, here's what I'm going to do, create a company and be the CEO of this company.
	I didn't have that foresight.
	I did what I had to do.
	To do the journalism I wanted to do.
	So it was sort of like, okay, I need to go out and make a video.
	Oh, in order to make a video, I need to buy a microphone.
	Oh, I made the video and now I'm getting sued.
	I need to get a lawyer.
	Oh, but I settled the lawsuit.
	So in order to not settle the lawsuit, I have to raise money.
	Oh, to raise money, I need to get a team of fundraising people.
	And it just, you grow and now we've got 75 people working here and over 20 reporters.
	But what drove...
	What drove my decision-making to create a 501c3 was that it afforded me a level of independence.
	And I told Ivory, I think she raised $100,000 on Give, Send, Go, and she's got 2,000 donors.
	And those people will support your work and you have your own audience.
	And no pressures, no advertising pressures.
	We don't have any advertisers here at Project Veritas.
	Nobody tells us what to do.
	Nobody applies favoritism or fear.
	So this is the idea of without fear or favor.
	You're doing reporting without fear or favor, which is what the New York Times slogan was, of course, manifestly different than what they actually do.
	What I think might actually happen is the Ivories of the world are going to find, they might not, I don't know what she was making at the affiliate, but the ones who are making the millions of dollars, first of all, there's only so much money you need in life if you keep your life under control.
	People are going to find that you might not make millions, and you might not be in the big skyscrapers, but you'll make enough to be comfortable, to pay your bills, to rely on your future.
	But live with integrity, and you're going to find out that by respecting integrity, there's going to be a lot of people out there who are going to want to support you for making those decisions.
	So Ivory, I suspect, will have a net benefit in the long run from this, even though it's going to be a tumultuous short term.
	That's not the way most people look at it.
	They often look at people like that with an alien with three heads.
	I agree with you.
	I think there's a benefit to truth-telling and following your conscience.
	But I think the barriers to entry for people to do this are very difficult.
	David Daleiden has been jailed and charged with felonies.
	And I think that the reputational attacks that you face, I mean, I hope Ivory doesn't mind me saying this.
	She's been doing interviews about this, too.
	It was really hard on her when Fox26 put out a statement saying that she selectively edited her footage and she's a disgruntled employee.
	First of all, she's not a former disgruntled employee when she did what she did.
	She was a current employee.
	But she was in tears.
	And I was with her.
	And I've, too, been in tears.
	When your Wikipedia page says what it says, and to be hated like you are, it's not an easy thing.
	Some have written that that form of courage, that what Ivory did, the moral courage, is greater than any other type of courage because your reputation is being attacked by a lot of powerful people who can write a lot of things about you for perpetuity.
	And it's tough.
	It's not an easy thing to do.
	Go for it, Robert.
	Well, what are some of the worst threats that you've had to deal with being in this industry?
	You know, the number one question I've been asked recently is, do I fear for my life?
	I've had a couple death threats and calls, but it hasn't been physical threats.
	We have security, and I can't get into specifically what type of security we have, but I think it's more that our opponents use a kind of cloward pivot strategy.
	Let me give you a few examples of how that works.
	The people that are against me will impersonate my current employees and then talk to my employees.
	So they'll try to extract information, compromise our investigations, which is racketeering.
	You can't do that.
	We're suing them for it.
	Another example is, here's a thing they did.
	Is this a threat?
	It's more of like a threat to what we're doing.
	They'll donate $50,000 and then refund the transaction so that we can incur a $1,000 fee and they'll keep doing that to rack up the fees.
	They'll do these sort of I don't know how else to put it, but sort of communist things to us, Machiavellian things to try to hurt us and scare us.
	The New York Times will threaten our lawyers.
	The New York Times will write a front page story.
	I got a call from the alcohol, tobacco and firearms inquiring as to why I legally purchased a shotgun.
	I mean, just harassment.
	And that kind of instills in you a sense of trepidation and hesitation.
	Maybe I shouldn't be doing this, right?
	And I think that's where they get you.
	They don't get you physically.
	They kind of try to break your will.
	And at first it was the lawsuits, and then they couldn't do that.
	So now I do realize what I'm up against, and I try to apply a little bit of jujitsu.
	On them.
	And that's what we intend to do.
	But so far, not many physical threats.
	There was one time they spray-painted our building here in New York.
	They wrote fake news headquarters on it.
	And we had security footage of the assailant who did that.
	But there's more where that came from.
	But certainly, they don't have any rules.
	All means are justifiable to our opponents.
	Being spray-painted with fake news might be a badge of honor.
	Coming from, you know, where that's coming from.
	And I saw you were on Tim Pool a few months ago and you actually talked about this, about the idea of being hated and the idea of being hated by people who you once thought that you wanted to love you.
	Whereas I don't think it makes a difference if you hate people being hated and being demonized and having terrible things said about you in the media, sort of like smearing your identity and who you are.
	It doesn't matter if you have thick skin and it doesn't matter if you should get used to it because of the domain in which you're operating.
	It still hurts, and you're still a human with a stomach like anybody else.
	And going to Ivory, you know, the same thing.
	She knows she's going to get hate, but once you start getting it, then you sort of feel it in a different way.
	And then it becomes a question of, you get shattered to a little bit where you rebuild yourself, and you're sort of stronger than you were before you got shattered.
	And I'm sure you've gotten to that point, and Ivory is probably on her way very quickly to that point.
	Yeah, Ivory shared something with me in my interview with her.
	I've never heard it put this way.
	Or should I start living like I was dying?
	And it sounds sort of corny or too poetic, but I really think it's true.
	I think you start living like you're dying.
	A muckraker understands in his heart or her heart that the path to truth will necessarily involve suffering and sacrifice.
	To a certain extent, life is pain, each of us.
	We experience this pain in different ways, and it affects us differently, but suffering brings about wisdom.
	I'll give you a specific example.
	When I was in Louisiana, I spent three and a half years incarcerated.
	It could have been much worse.
	I didn't spend that much time in jail, but I was supervised.
	I couldn't travel.
	I couldn't work.
	I had disclosed to the federal government every penny that I spent, and it was unjust.
	I was an innocent man.
	You have this moment where you're thinking, why have you forsaken me?
	But it helped me because I learned so much about myself and about what I'm up against.
	So I think to a certain extent, I think the army of truth-tellers that this mission requires, it's important to understand.
	That suffering is inherent in truth-telling.
	I think Ivory gets that.
	I think a lot of other people get it too, increasingly, in numbers.
	That there's more important things in life than being praised by the New York Times.
	Or having your book reviewed by the New York Times.
	Or having these people like you.
	I say this all the time.
	Rush Limbaugh told me, and he said this publicly, that being hated is the most difficult thing to psychologically accept because you don't...
	You don't do this to be hated.
	But you begin to realize that it's a sign of respect.
	And when Fox26 attacked her and said, you're just a disgruntled employee who doctored footage, I told Ivory, listen, it's a sign of respect.
	It's all a sign.
	The New York Times threatening, going full circle here, the New York Times general counsel threatening Libby Locke, my lawyer, like a mobster, which is arguably extortion in certain jurisdictions.
	What more badge of honor?
	I should probably frame this and put it in my bathroom here at headquarters.
	What more of a badge of honor could you have when you look at the world this way, which is a difficult way to approach life and approach journalism, you begin to realize the way things really are.
	As they say in Arkansas, only a stuck pig squeals.
	And so the more they squeal, the more you realize you have stuck them successfully.
	And the other principle that you point out, I mean, as Medgar Evers famously said, most men die a thousand deaths every day.
	He was only going to die once.
	And there's a certain mindset that the more people realize that that empowerment will bring more empowerment, that the more people who step out and step up and expose the corruption of our institutions, the better and safer our system will be, but also the better and safer their lives will ultimately be for the things that really matter to them.
	Now, in that capacity...
	What kind of steps have you had to take to try to protect whistleblower information, protect your IT security?
	Have you been subject to hacking attempts and things like that?
	Oh, that's probably the most.
	I can't really get into the specifics because that would be anathema to the security issue.
	But we take it very seriously.
	And we have security guards.
	We have IT professionals.
	The information we try to protect is the name of our...
	Insiders, we use techniques.
	We use code names, for example.
	We don't put things in writing.
	We have the one thing that I protect, and I will go to jail to protect a source of this nature, that is to say an insider who's recording or leaking to us, not like what they do, which is anonymously sourced.
	I'm talking about actual recordings.
	We'll appeal to the Supreme Court, and like muckraker Jack Anderson wrote in his 1970s Autobiography.
	If the Supreme Court were to order that I reveal my source, I would say, your honor is an error, and I would go to jail.
	I'd be held in contempt of court.
	That's what we have to do to protect those people.
	But in terms of our IT infrastructure, we have techniques we use to protect them.
	I think the suffering thing is very important.
	It's actually a chapter of the book that I'm...
	And I think it's really about the pursuit of happiness versus the pursuit of meaning and how those things work together.
	Because I have to say, but there's great joy in fighting too.
	There's great joy in fighting.
	And I go back to that moment in the federal case, Teeter versus Project Veritas action, where we won at federal court.
	There were tears streaming down our faces when we won at jury verdict.
	And you should have seen the look on the plaintiff's faces when those six or seven lawyers got a scolding from the federal judge.
	So sometimes there is an administration of justice, and you do have those moments here.
	They're not reported widely, but they do exist.
	And apparently Ivory is on Timcast right now, and we're in the realm where we actually have to coordinate our streams among the internet creators.
	This is the thing about the hate, is that the hate is predictable.
	So you know...
	Whatever Ivory does, if you record a meeting with your employer, someone's going to call you a disgruntled employee.
	They're going to call you an untrustworthy employee.
	They're going to say, you can never be hired again because you might do this to your future employer.
	You know that when people look at you, they're going to say, you spend so much on lawyers.
	It's sort of a scheme.
	Your lawyers are benefiting from this and it's yada, yada, yada.
	You know what the haters are going to say.
	It bothers you to some extent because you might feel There's some sort of plausible element of truth to it, even if it's not true.
	But tell the world, I mean, how do you digest the hate?
	And does the love that you get from the legions of people who are learning, becoming exposed, becoming awakened because of what you're doing, does that make up for the incessant hate that comes from the people who are going to incessantly hate?
	These are really good questions.
	I have to hand it to you.
	You guys are stating these questions in a way so different than questions I've been asked.
	There's such a bifurcation because they either worship you or they just viscerally hate you.
	I worry about that Manichaean polarization of our society.
	There's so little consensus.
	How do I deal with it?
	When people thank me, I don't know why they're thanking me.
	Personally, psychologically, I thank you so much.
	I'm not done yet.
	I say, I've got so much left to do.
	We don't want to rest on our laurels at Project Veritas.
	We have more to do.
	We have a vision of a thousand of these whistleblowers.
	And, you know, I did a lot of research for this forthcoming book.
	And one of the things I read was a book called The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair.
	People don't know that Upton Sinclair was at war with the media, and they attacked him for his jungle that he wrote.
	Now, he didn't use hidden cameras.
	He did use some undercover techniques, but he rushed back to his room and wrote everything down.
	But he writes in the Brass Check, this book that he wrote about the media, that he's been fighting the media for 14 years, suffering daily wounds from his foe.
	And what Sinclair...
	What I guess I've learned to some degree is that you just can't stop, is that they want you to not release the next story.
	David Daleiden, a friend of mine, he's gotten lawyered up and he just released another investigation in Pennsylvania.
	And I told him, the problem with all these lawsuits is that you end up spending all of your time in the courts.
	You can't only spend time in the courts.
	You've got to keep doing your investigative reporting.
	No matter how hard it gets, you've got to keep releasing those stories.
	So the thing about being hated and being attacked and being loved, it's indifferent.
	You can be loved and thanked, but you've got to keep releasing more stories.
	You can be hated and sued and incarcerated, you've still got to be putting out more stories.
	Was there anybody from an investigative reporting perspective, cinematically, literary, historical, that you sort of looked up to or wanted to model?
	There is one guy.
	I actually have this book on my desk because I was just telling my colleagues about this guy.
	His name is Gunter Walroth.
	He was a legendary German undercover reporter.
	He wrote a book called The Undesirable Journalist.
	And in this book, these guys were very left of center, usually socialists or even self-described communists.
	And Gunther Wallhoff writes about his infiltration of the German newspaper called The Bild.
	This was in Europe in the 1970s.
	And he writes here, and I'm going to quote him, he says that a new truth on top of the truth revealed in his reports emerges in the reactions of those who he has investigated, the media, the law.
	And those reactions become the story.
	Amazing.
	Because I found this to be true.
	It's not so much the Minnesota story we did.
	It's the reaction of the New York Times, which itself becomes a story.
	And Gunter Wallerf writes, the hunter becomes the hunted.
	The hunter becomes the quarry.
	And it sort of plays out in this play act.
	And so this guy named Gunter Wallerf...
	As an example, some of these old muckraking journalists from the 1960s, 1970s, Abbie Hoffman, Saul Alinsky, you know, these are the sorts of artists who get people on tape being who they are, right?
	So you don't have to explain it.
	You're the first person observing it, and it's sort of direct cinema, or in that case, there are newspaper reporters, but these are the sorts of people that inspire me.
	Have you thought about putting together some of your work projects into a documentary format?
	Good idea.
	We're doing a behind-the-scenes, I think, on some of the things we're doing.
	I'm so busy doing the things that it's hard for me to make documentaries about what I'm doing.
	But we'll get to it one day.
	Someone had asked Project Veritas.
	I imagine it comes from just a truth-telling project.
	The origins of the name, how did you get to it?
	The origins of the name?
	At Rutgers, I had a newspaper called The Centurion, which motto was Veritas vos libera beat, which is Latin for the truth shall set you free.
	So when I got started, my YouTube channel was Veritas Visuals.
	It still is.
	By the way, we have almost a million subscribers.
	We're a couple thousand away from a million subscribers.
	Google will not want to send me that gold plaque.
	I think we'll be banned at 999,000 subscribers.
	That's my prediction.
	So Veritas Vos Liberabit.
	And at first I thought about calling it, you know, just Veritas Visuals, but someone said Project Veritas.
	And then we got our IRS exempt letter from the nonprofit 501c3 in the United States.
	And the IRS actually stamped the approval on the name Project Veritas.
	And people say, how come Lois Lerner?
	The woman who was auditing all of the right-wing groups gave you your approval.
	And I joke, perhaps she thought she was approving a Latin book discussion club.
	She didn't know what she was approving exactly, but Project Veritas was born in 2011.
	Now, here's my idea for the retraction wall.
	So many stories.
	The retracto alpaca was Andrew Breitbart and Alex Marlow's idea.
	They're from the Breitbart website.
	I was arrested in New Orleans and all these people were lying about me and saying I'd wiretapped a senator, which was false.
	So Andrew and his team, this is, God, I was February of 2010.
	I'm in a hotel room.
	It's 11 o 'clock at night.
	And Andrew Breitbart calls me and says, James, we got to start asking for retractions.
	And he goes, but I got this idea.
	How about we have a mascot?
	We'll call it the retracto alpaca.
	And I don't know why.
	Maybe it was because I was sleep-deprived and gone through a lot.
	But we literally laughed until we cried.
	And that was how the alpaca was born.
	And we've had 350 retractions about me.
	All of them are framed at our headquarters.
	Now, here's my question, James.
	It might be a tough one.
	Do you have any regrets?
	And is there one...
	Item that you produced, one story that you produced, that in retrospect, you have ill feelings about or don't feel totally, you know, good about?
	You know, the question of regret is an interesting philosophical question because we're all the product, I think we're all the product of the best decisions we made at the time we made them, right?
	So we are where we are because of the decisions that we made.
	I don't know if I exactly believe in the concept of regret.
	However, let's assume that, you know, I could go back in time knowing now what I know.
	I think bearing false witness in Louisiana was a bad idea.
	In other words, pleading to a misdemeanor I did not commit.
	I get asked about that all the time.
	And my lawyer said if I go to a trial, right, they would have indicted me on a bullshit felony, which I certainly didn't commit.
	So that's what the feds do.
	They pinch you and then they basically, you know, Blackmail you into pleading to a lesser offense, for lack of a better word.
	So I regret pleading guilty to a misdemeanor.
	But I also, I'm not sure what would have happened if I didn't do that.
	What I do know is I will never bear false witness ever again.
	I will never plead guilty to something I didn't do.
	I'll never cop a plea or compromise on my sense of ethics because I don't think I can live with myself.
	And the other thing is, you know, I think that's the big one.
	I don't know if we've made many mistakes, editorially speaking.
	I think I should have called for comment on some of these stories.
	I think in the Shirley Teeter case, I would have gone back and called for comment.
	Not to say I have to, but I think moving forward, I will give everyone a chance to comment before I publish a story.
	Amazing.
	Let me bring up this super chat because it's a good one.
	I mean, it's a good question.
	Election Wizard James, what advice or encouragement do you have for those worried about speaking out because they believe they'll be fired or banned?
	I mean, I would quote the Pinterest engineer Eric Cochran, who's our director of whistleblowing, who said, you know, one day you're all going to be ashes.
	One day, you know, what's the point?
	What's the point of our existence?
	I know that sounds very metaphysical, but he's right.
	I mean, One day we're all going to die, and I think there's a lot of satisfaction in doing the right thing.
	You're a free man.
	So many of these people that I'm talking to, you'll see it come out next week.
	Whatever marginal benefit there is to their cushy salary and job, there's another benefit to truth-telling.
	They feel a big weight lifted off their shoulder.
	I will protect you.
	I'll pay your legal bills.
	So far, none of our whistleblowers have been sued.
	I don't believe any of our whistleblowers have been sued because the companies that they've blown the whistle on don't want to draw any publicity through the things that they're saying, and litigation is essentially publicity.
	So we'll raise money for you.
	We'll protect you.
	We'll pay your bills.
	My advice to you is follow your conscience, and if the organization has betrayed you to such a degree, Then it's within your right to be a whistleblower.
	Now, how does your mom take all of this?
	In other words, the notoriety, the love and the hate, the combination.
	What's her sense of all this?
	My parents, I'm very blessed to have, I think, pretty, I don't know how to describe.
	They're just good, decent people.
	They're just wonderful.
	I wouldn't say they're extraordinary or not extraordinary.
	They're just people with common sense and work ethic, I would say.
	My parents were really upset about what happened in Louisiana.
	The probation officers would come to my house and harass my dad.
	And at some point, there was one day, this is years ago, this is now 2012.
	I'm sitting in basically my childhood bedroom.
	I can't leave.
	I can't go anywhere.
	And I'm breaking all these stories because I'm sending other people.
	So the feds show up to my house one day.
	And they knock on my door.
	My mother and father answer the door.
	And there's like a whole course, an SUV filled with men.
	Like, forget the drug dealers and rapists and people on Wall Street.
	No, no.
	We have to go after the misdemeanant in New Jersey who entered a federal building under false pretenses.
	And they're harassing my dad and they're harassing my mom.
	And my dad, who's very mellow and never...
	He goes, what the hell is wrong with you people?
	Why would you harass my son?
	Where's your son?
	My son's upstairs in his room.
	He has not left his room.
	But he's breaking a story in New Hampshire.
	Yes, he's upstairs.
	You guys get the hell off my property.
	That's what he said.
	And they left.
	They left.
	My parents are good people who are frustrated and worried about...
	The things that happened to me as any parent would be.
	They've seen specifically what the courts have done and what happened in Louisiana.
	I'm very blessed to have great parents who have my back and understand just how awful it has been at times.
	I will say in the beginning, I did rely upon them.
	Now I have more of a support system and a team around me.
	So I'm very grateful for their love and support.
	Interesting thing.
	I've asked the same question publicly and privately to other people.
	The answer is always the same.
	Why do you do what you do when you could do something else that's less risky and less exposure and less public ridicule, less public hate?
	And the answer is typically the same among those people.
	I'm going to die someday.
	It may as well be a life well-lived and a life of purpose as opposed to, I don't know, you're going to get either the same life or a few extra years and it might be a little bit better with, you know, the job at the big...
	I think the word, the language I use, it's choiceless choice.
	I don't have the book in front of me, but there's another great book that talks about whistleblowing.
	And you know what?
	I tried to live a normal life.
	I tried.
	I went to law school.
	I would just sneak out of the law school and start making videos.
	Even, I mean, this is what I desire to do.
	And I can't do anything but this.
	So that's how I feel about it.
	And I think a lot of people didn't know they could do this until somebody else did it.
	Ivory did it.
	And now there's like 12 TV news anchors talking to me saying, hey, I want to do that too.
	So oftentimes you don't know it's an option to you, right?
	Until it becomes one.
	So that's the best way I can articulate it.
	One lawsuit that I wasn't aware of, Robert sent me the link.
	It was a motion but not a judgment.
	It was the AFT in Michigan where you were being sued and apparently there was an order issued.
	I don't want to confuse it.
	But a judgment was rendered whereby the Michigan Supreme Court was not going to review a case that might otherwise have outlawed the one-party consent state versus requiring two-party consent.
	And because the court didn't rule by overturning an old precedent, you have now petitioned for the dismissal of a certain aspect of the claim, which I presume relates to whether or not the one-party consent recording was unlawful.
	Does that ring a bell?
	It certainly rings a bell.
	I'm living it.
	All these things.
	We have a lot of lawyers, but I was deposed in the AFT case.
	That was the case where the lawyer for American Federation of Teachers said, you're comparing yourself to the New York Times, O 'Keefe, and you're a disgrace, O 'Keefe.
	The guy lost his cool in the deposition room.
	I subpoenaed Randy Weingarten, the head of the teachers' union.
	What happened there was the Michigan Supreme Court decided not to review.
	The two-party consent issue.
	And the result is, I'm just looking at my notes here on this case.
	So we're asking our court to reconsider the two-party consent status in our case.
	We're confident it will be reversed.
	And the court will do what every other court in Michigan will do and hold Michigan as a one-party consent state.
	But it's not understood whether it is or isn't a one-party state.
	And the case has been delayed.
	Now, we're going back to 2017 was when I was sued.
	Just so your audience understands, I had recorded one of my reporters was invited into an office of the teachers' union and obtained a document showing That they had paid off $50,000 to a teacher who was accused of sexually assaulting a student.
	They just paid the guy off rather than investigate.
	And I reported that and I was sued for, I believe, and I'll double check the facts on this, is fraudulent misrepresentation or was it a breach of fiduciary duty?
	How I had a fiduciary duty to the teachers union.
	I'm a reporter, by the way.
	And again, this goes back to the federal judge in the Teeter case.
	He said, if you sued Mike Wallace for this, people would laugh.
	If they sued 60 Minutes for breaching a fiduciary duty, everyone would say, well, that's a bunch of bullshit.
	But of course, because according to their logic, I'm not 60 Minutes, how dare I compare myself to them?
	When, according to Aristotle, we're all governed by our own behaviors.
	I mean, we are what we repeatedly do.
	So if I operate as a reporter...
	I should be, the law should apply equally.
	So, of course, this is a frivolous case, and we intend to win it, but the issue here is the consent law, which they're reviewing, and we're going to go to the deposition phase of that case soon as well.
	Now, do you think the Massachusetts case, I mean, there's obviously all the cases out of California that you referenced earlier that are raising it before the Ninth Circuit, but do you think that, because it seems to me there needs to be Supreme Court clarity.
	That one-party consent has to be the rule in a First Amendment context.
	That if it's a First Amendment context, there can't be a two-party requirement.
	Because what that does is criminalize undercover journalism and investigative journalism.
	And do you think that that case presents the best opportunity?
	And do you think the Supreme Court will ultimately take this up the next several years because it's becoming...
	It's increasingly critically important to not criminalize an entire means of undercover investigative report.
	Right.
	The issue of one-party consent.
	We filed a petition for certiorari.
	And again, I feel like all these Latin phrases, I feel like I can take the bar exam.
	Of course, we're hopeful that the Supreme Court will take this issue in our Massachusetts case and rule on...
	We won at the federal district court in Massachusetts.
	They overturned part of the statute, but they didn't overturn it as fully as we wanted them to.
	So this is the Project Veritas action versus Rollins.
	We sued.
	And we have a whole bunch of amicus briefs in that case.
	So we have a lot of friendly things.
	But I think...
	Going back to the expectation of privacy, I mean, false friends existed before the advent of technology.
	And I think the whole idea of recording being somehow more of a violation of your privacy than just talking to someone, they can just shout your comments from the rooftops.
	And I think a lot of these other laws are just simply antiquated.
	They're designed to indemnify the guilty, as I said before.
	And, you know, in the Michigan case, the Michigan Attorney General...
	They filed a brief in support of our position, and we understand was going to argue in the Supreme Court in our favor.
	So the ACLU in the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, this was last year I was in the First Circuit Court of Appeals, the ACLU was a co-plaintiff in our case.
	By the way, I don't even think those people wanted to talk to me in the hallway, which is ironic, but they threw them with us.
	I think that history is, we're on the right side of history here.
	It's just sometimes the arc of the moral universe takes a while to bend.
	Apparently I missed a Jeff Zucker superchat, which I didn't see.
	I don't think it's the real Jeff Zucker, but I missed a few superchats.
	Drew Fornan, he says, Biden is such a rock spider.
	How isn't he in prison?
	Morgan Grossman had a superchat.
	Russell Wallace says, profitable, scary stories from insurance companies or stock market manipulation going way back.
	Okay, I missed a bunch of Super Chats.
	My apologies, guys.
	But if Jeff Zucker's in the house, Jeff, come in and say hi.
	We can have a sidebar with Jeff Zucker one day.
	That would be glorious.
	Now, James, this is another serious business strategic question.
	Do you get nervous?
	Not of getting pigeonholed, but rather getting bogged down with only becoming a litigation journalist type thing?
	Like, this taking up too much of your time where you actually don't...
	Do as much investigative journalism as you'd like.
	I mentioned this earlier.
	I try to say that we want to limit the litigation to a substantial minority of what we're doing, not all of what we're doing, but it is central to what we do, right?
	Litigation is central to being a citizen reporter.
	Otherwise, in order to not settle the lawsuit, I have to be a litigator.
	In order to fight for my First Amendment rights under the Constitution, As a non-profit, then freedom of association, I can't disclose donors.
	Litigation is so central, but I say to my team, rule of thumb is 35%, maybe 45% of what we're doing, but certainly not more than 50%.
	But I might submit to you that this New York Times case might very well indeed be our legacy.
	Every day, every day, people are lied about.
	Every day.
	And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I'm willing to...
	I bet you gentlemen have been lied about in the press.
	Every day.
	And everyone relates to this.
	And frankly, that's the reason why people get into this is because of how corrupt and false the reporting is in places like the New York Times.
	So I've had people tell me that this motion to dismiss Wynn and our potential discovery in this lawsuit might very well be My personal legacy and Veritas' legacy, because of the discovery, because of those videotaped depositions of Maggie Astor, can you imagine?
	Can you imagine the things the executive editor of the New York Times is going to say under oath on...
	This is videotaped, guys, so you all know.
	Have they ever been told?
	Has this ever happened in history?
	By the way, I'll be there.
	I'll be sitting six feet away from him next to my attorney.
	I'll write the damn question.
	We'll crowdsource the questions to your audience.
	It'll be like the 4th of July.
	So that's why I think litigation is important, because they have to be held accountable.
	They've never been held accountable to anybody, so they have to stand before a judge under oath, and when you're under oath, circumstances change, and you can be a little less Kafkaesque and Orwellian when you're perjuring yourself.
	Now, when you're not immersed, either in litigation or investigative reporting, what do you like to do?
	Well, geez, I know that my opponents will be watching this, learning all about my family and my personal life, but this is public.
	I like to go sailing.
	I've got a sailboat.
	I do a lot of outdoor activities like hiking and stuff and work out, but I enjoy this so much.
	It's hard to take my mind away from it, but I certainly try to take a couple hours a day too.
	Get my mind doing physical activities.
	Not a sarcastic tongue-in-cheek question, how many hours a night do you sleep and what does your daily schedule look like for anybody who ever asked that question?
	The schedule changes every day.
	I'm traveling all the time and I try to do it that way.
	One of the things about security is you don't want a routine.
	I'm not a person who's very routine-oriented, but I do take about Maybe two hours a day to exercise, clear my head, and that's where I do my best thinking, where my most creative thinking.
	Maybe my storyboards, I'll have an epiphany, is during exercise.
	I listen to audiobooks and try to read in the evening.
	It helps me fall asleep.
	I'm also a thespian, and I will be playing the lead in a musical called Oklahoma.
	In August, off-Broadway, I'll be playing the lead Curly.
	So I was the lead of Bobby Child and Gershon's Crazy for You, so I can sing and dance and all that.
	So that's another hobby that I have.
	Is that where the Michael Jackson moon dance came from?
	That's from my high school days, and I learned how to moonwalk, and I've been doing it ever since.
	Now, any particular industry you're thinking about going after next?
	What industry aren't we going after?
	I would say our whistleblowers are now in the order of magnitude of hundreds of people that have come to me in various parts of the pecking order.
	You name it, they've come to me.
	Government, state government, media, tech.
	Increasingly with this vaccine COVID issue, that seems to be a central theme with a lot of them.
	You name the organization or the topic and they've come to us.
	I don't pick our targets anymore.
	Do you notice any sort of a change in the trend of these institutions or do you notice that they're just doubling down and those who are invested are just doubling down on everything as opposed to saying it might be cracking and it might be about to shatter because of what we see you doing?
	Do you see it going further in that direction, or do you see there being something of an internal reckoning among those involved?
	Ah, these are good questions.
	I think they're more afraid of me than they used to be.
	When the Ivory thing happened, there was a visible...
	I could smell it.
	They were very afraid of what...
	I'm capable of.
	Because jailing me didn't stop me.
	Suing me a dozen times didn't stop me.
	Throwing, you know, nasty...
	So I guess they're...
	I guess they are afraid and they're trying to not get caught doing the deed.
	Rather than reform the behavior, the concern is always the exposure of the corruption is worse than the corruption itself.
	So in many regards, that's even better because In the case of Facebook, for example, the recent whistleblower, Morgan Common was his name.
	Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, went on a Zoom call with his vice president and said, we've got to stop these leaks to Project Veritas, which itself was leaked to Project Veritas.
	So it's like the reaction becomes the action ad infinitum.
	It's like that thing that Saul Alinsky said, the reaction to the action becomes essential for the success of an operation.
	So every time I do these things, they talk about, Stop the leaks.
	And I just say stop the bad behavior because invariably there's going to be another leak.
	And that goes back to my original hypotheses, which is that unless you're behaving ethically in society, your unethical behavior will be made manifest with the advent of streaming technology and hidden cameras and Instagram and the 21st century.
	So why don't we all just start behaving more ethically, everyone, rather than trying to suppress?
	You know, that really is a tale as old as time, and it could all be, you know, changed at once, as Dostoevsky has written.
	It could all be changed in New York Minute if we just did the right thing.
	But if you don't do the right thing, Project Veritas is watching you.
	All right.
	What do you say, Robin?
	We don't want to go too long.
	I want to make sure we got all the questions.
	If anyone has any questions in the chat that we didn't get to, throw them in.
	We'll see if we can get there.
	One question I suspect people are asking.
	Let me just read this.
	The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel.
	I can't recommend it more.
	David Nafton, all right.
	Thank you very much.
	Any potential plans in the long run, maybe you don't know, you can't see this far ahead yet, of running for office?
	Any position in politics?
	Oh, I will.
	You have never.
	I don't ever want to do that.
	That's a terrible idea.
	First of all, I'm not sure anyone would want me to run for office, but I would never do that.
	There's no power in being a congressman.
	I think it's almost like the illusion of power.
	The power comes from the media and the culture.
	That's where the real power lies.
	Politics is downstream from arts and culture and exposing things.
	I think that I would be completely impotent as a politician.
	And I could never, I'm not, that's not me.
	I can't go around and, you know, pretend to be something I'm not, which is what you essentially, ostensibly have to do.
	But I think the future is whistleblowers.
	You know, someone just messaged, how can I help?
	I think the way you can help is by tweeting our videos.
	We're banned on Twitter.
	You've done that a lot, and I appreciate that.
	I'm not on Twitter yet, or you guys keep pushing this stuff out.
	Another way you can help is figure out who you know in your life who may have access to fraud and maybe someone who can help us tell stories.
	Even if you're a meteorologist at a TV station, I've had those people reach out to me.
	Anybody.
	Contact me.
	You can see behind me, it says, be brave, do something.
	There's our website, right?
	www.projectveritas.com slash brave.
	You can go there and there's a portal.
	You can apply to be a journalist.
	We're hiring all the time.
	You can either donate to Project Veritas.
	You can be an employee of Project Veritas.
	You can spread our work or you can find someone who is an insider that we can work with.
	On this sort of adventure from Lucky Charms to taking down the New York Times, sort of a three-part question, what has surprised you the most, what has disappointed you the most, and what has inspired you the most?
	What has surprised me the most, disappointed me the most, and inspired me the most?
	Hmm.
	I'm not surprised by the...
	By the deceit and the corruption.
	I think I've been most disappointed with the people in politics.
	I kind of had a Mr. Smith go to Washington thing with the acorn.
	I went to visit Daryl Ice's guys at the time.
	I think we're all so naive, but I'm so disillusioned with politics.
	I can't emphasize this enough.
	It's such bullshit.
	And I guess I thought, I know, I'll go to Congress and talk to...
	No, no, no.
	There's no...
	It's totally broken.
	It's totally broken.
	I don't know what the solution is to the sclerosis that pervades the House and Senate in the United States.
	So that has been the most disappointing thing for me.
	I think also...
	The lack of balls.
	People have thrown me under the bus.
	I've quickly learned who my friends are and who they aren't and how self-interested people are.
	I'll give you an example.
	I come out with a big story and everyone is competing with each other over ratings.
	You can't go on this other guy's show.
	If you go on his show, the other guy's show won't have you on.
	It's like, dude, don't we care about getting the story out?
	You ostensibly...
	You call yourself a newsman and you only care about his ratings.
	And again, none of this is surprising, but you go in, you want to believe in people and you want to believe in doing the right thing.
	And the people in media and politics are the exact opposite of what the people ought to be.
	And that's why people are so pissed.
	At the same time, what has given me so much hope...
	Is there are so many good people out there.
	They're just not in politics and media.
	They're a janitor or a schoolteacher or a nurse.
	They're anonymous heroes of society.
	And in this world of illusion and quasi-illusion, they alone, I guess, bring me hope.
	I don't like to associate myself with people in politics.
	The people I associate, I'm in New York State, upstate New York.
	And I try to associate myself with those people.
	And I think there's so many good people out there, millions of them.
	We just need 0.001% of them to have tremendous courage.
	And that is what I think, to answer your question, what has disappointed me and what has been rewarding about this whole experience.
	All right, and that might be the perfect time.
	Keep it under two hours, and we can save some material for the next time, James, because it would be not to book in advance, but it would be good to periodically do updates in the multiple lawsuits you're filing.
	I'll be doing them on my own, and Robert and I will be discussing them anyhow, but there's nothing like a good conversation to go over things in more detail.
	But look, thank you for your services, this chat right here, and everybody's saying it, and I know you hear it a lot.
	And the bizarre nature of hate on the internet is one negative comment can sort of take more mental real estate than 99 beautiful comments.
	But I've seen it, James.
	People love what you're doing.
	They appreciate what you're doing.
	They respect what you're doing and the world needs what you're doing.
	So thank you for doing it and thank you for coming on and talking with us.
	And please do continue to report on the New York Times lawsuit.
	They're going to rule on that by the end of the month, the stay.
	We'll know whether we go straight to discovery or whether it's delayed by two years.
	All right, excellent.
	And hopefully the court does the right thing.
	I think it will continue, unless the New York Court of Appeals, which can always be a different animal, steps in.
	But what should happen is that case should go forward.
	And again, congratulations on not only winning a critical win, but it's a win that matters for everybody.
	If we're going to have any degree of honest reporting in the media, whether it's the undercover reporting aspects of the legal cases you're involved in or holding The New York Times to account, it's critical and essential to core constitutional freedoms, the work you're doing.
	It was Sullivan versus New York Times, 67. It might be Veritas versus New York Times, 2022.
	Who knows?
	That would be sweet justice.
	Stay tuned.
	Okay, stick around, James.
	Stick around, Robert.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you very much.
	Share the video.
	I'm going to pin in the pinned comment.
	Where you can support, find Project Veritas.
	I think all of you know already anyhow, but it'll be there.

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