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Sept. 27, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:02:05
How James O'Keefe Became the Enemy of the State | The TRUTH Podcast #39
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Time Text
The FBI arrested me.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I spent two nights in a federal prison cell.
I was arraigned working for Pfizer and talking about Jordan Tristan Walker was his name.
I'm kind of terrified.
This guy then assaults my cameraman.
Don't let anybody hold you back.
Amen.
Just do it.
Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
We should not be apologetic to stand up and speak for the truth.
Let's talk truth.
Man, I've been looking forward to meeting in person for a long time.
Great to be with you.
James O'Keefe, you know, the slogan of my campaign is truth.
And you're a guy who I know has gone to great lengths to get to the truth on some things that people didn't really want the public knowing the truth about.
Is that a fair description of you?
Yeah, I think that's a fair description of the role of a truth seeker, which is to expose things that people do not want published.
So tell me about your journey a little bit.
I'm familiar with what I read, but you know what?
Sometimes it's best to get it from the original source.
What led you up to the point of founding Project Veritas?
I mean, that takes quite motivation to do.
What's the backstory of how you got to that point?
And I think we're the same, similar age.
You're 38, I'm 39 or so.
Yeah, yeah.
And not to ask you the question, but weren't you some type of, in Harvard, weren't you like an artistic, or you rapped, or you did some poetry?
Yeah, I mean, I did all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, I did spoken.
We have that a little bit in common.
I was a thespian in high school, so for me it was like a desire to show people things in an artistic way, and I wanted to perform and produce this material so people could wake up.
9-11 was my senior year.
September 11th in high school.
I remember just reading the paper every day, reading the New York Times every day in college, and that really brought out something in me.
I thought that the news was not being honest.
There were coloring information.
There were packaging information.
I felt differently than it should be.
So I became a columnist at my Rutgers paper called The Targum when I was 18. And then they removed me as columnist.
I wrote a column that they didn't like.
So I started a little newspaper called The Centurion when I was 19. What was it about?
Do you remember?
The column, The Targum, was about the ratio of voting Democrats to Republicans amongst the professor staff.
It was like 104 to 1 is the ratio.
Factual.
Factual, FEC data.
And I wrote this column.
I think it was called like the conservative manifesto or something like that.
And I wasn't really even that right wing or conservative.
I just felt there was an imbalance and I needed to change it to become more balanced.
Yeah.
And they didn't like that.
Apparently not.
So they told you to leave?
They didn't renew the column.
They didn't renew it.
Although, if I did a hidden camera behind the scenes, maybe they would tell the truth about why they removed it.
Anyway, so you went and you did your own thing.
I did my own thing.
Started my own little newspaper with $500 and we produced this sort of monthly newspaper magazine called The Centurion.
Cool.
And you did that through your college years?
I did that until I was senior in college, and it was some of the best years of my life.
I went to Rutgers, sprawling like Ohio State, although it's not called New Jersey State.
It's the only state university just called Rutgers.
And I had a little staff, and I grew it into kind of a local muckraking newspaper where we were looking into things, you know, and doing gonzo journalism.
And then what happened after that?
Path from there to Project Veritas.
Senior year, I was 21. I graduated and I worked for a non-profit.
We're going around the country helping them with their student newspapers.
I did that for a year.
Then I went to law school, dropped out.
Then I went to business school and dropped out.
And then I did a story on Acorn when I was 24. And that became a national sensation.
Right.
Oh, in the interim, I did do some stories on Planned Parenthood with a girl named Lila Rose.
But you got to know Andrew Bightbart, I think, personally, right?
Very well.
Not a lot of people today, you know, remember him as a person.
I never met him.
Heard a lot about him.
What was your relationship with him like and what did you take away from that guy?
First of all, that guy was a force of nature.
He knew everyone.
I can't tell you how many people I meet.
I was his best friend.
So maybe that's so.
But we did speak every day.
He was a force of nature.
I met him September 2009. He died March 1st, 2012. When he died, I thought it was a joke.
I got a call from The Daily Call.
It's like, Andrew Bipart's dead.
I thought it was a practical joke.
He was only 42 years old.
He was a young guy, yeah.
42, 43 years old.
He was so enmeshed in the media ecosystem.
In 2011, it was a different world.
Nowadays, we're Manichaean, we're so polarized that the Washington Post thinks of me as the other.
But back in the day, Someone like Dave Weigel, we'd actually tweet back and forth.
So Andrew lived in that twilight of reality where you still could be friends with reporters but also hold them accountable.
And what he taught me, he was an editor of the Drudge Report.
In fact, when I went to his house, he was actually editing Drudge Report.
It was wild to see.
He had the HTML up on his screen.
He was just a guy who knew how to play the media and how to choreograph the media and get covered by the media.
And he was a force of nature.
He tweeted hundreds of times a day while running his company.
I don't know how he did it.
And he was quite an intellectual, it seemed to me, as well.
Yeah, yes.
He was a great writer.
He went to Tulane.
Yeah.
Clarence Thomas was the thing that really inspired him.
And him and I were very different people, so I was more introverted.
He was more extroverted.
And you picked up some of what you put out.
That story about Acorn was probably the big one, huh?
Yeah.
I went to, I knocked on his door.
I went down to his basement.
I opened up my laptop and I showed him the video of this Baltimore Acorn woman telling me I disguised this illicit prostitution money.
I'm undercover as a pimp and I'm telling this lady, hey, I've got all these underage girls and This ACORN official is like, oh, don't put that on the tax forms or disguise this on your tax forms.
I mean, I've heard of it.
I know this predecessor group to a lot of the groups today, but what is ACORN? ACORN was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and they helped with housing and loan opportunities for low-income people.
They also did voter registration drives, so they got out the vote.
It was founded by a guy named Wade Rathke in Arkansas.
And there were allegations that they were embezzling money and doing improper things.
So we did a sting to try to see if ACORN would go along with an illicit, immoral, illegal thing.
And they did.
And it was wildly entertaining.
The camera was in a tie.
And it was a wire going, I sell them on my website, a button camera goes into your pocket, a little SD chip.
So I get all these videos and I show the first to Andrew and I say, now there's another one.
And I show him the one in New York where they tell me to disguise the money in a tin can to get away from the pimp.
And then I show the one in DC where the Acorn official says, we're not going to tell the police this.
And Andrew says, I've seen enough.
And then he takes a step back and his whole complexion changes and he goes, This is going to embarrass the mainstream media like you can never believe.
And I said, what do you mean?
And they said, because we're going to put out the first tape and say nothing and they're going to call it an isolated incident.
And then we're going to put out the second tape catching CNN and The New York Times in their lives.
Calling it an isolated incident.
And lo and behold, just a month later, we did this.
And and after all was said and done, The New York Times printed an apology.
This is extraordinary.
That is good.
You don't see that anymore.
Clark Hoyt, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, published a column saying we were too slow to tune in and admitted that they should have covered the story.
In fact, Congress voted to defund Acorn before the New York Times even assigned a reporter on the story.
Wow.
It was Democrats voted to defund Acorn.
So they were getting public funding.
Yeah.
They were going to get billions.
Unbelievable.
They were going to get billions.
They were receiving, I think, $100 million in public money.
Unbelievable.
Yeah.
So this was just two kids from the cast of High School Musical 3 with the video camera and the grandmother's chinchilla coat.
So it was an it was an indictment on everything.
So then you started taking this approach to...
Well, everyone before that thought I was crazy and stupid, and I had shared this vision with people, and they thought I was nuts.
And then everyone thought, this is the best thing ever.
Suddenly, everyone believed in it.
And then I was arrested just a few months later for being in a senator's office.
I was asking Mary Landrieu, then-Senator Mary Landrieu, some questions, her staff some questions.
And they realized who I was and they sort of charged me with a crime I didn't commit.
Oh really?
What was the crime?
Tampering with phones.
So I was there to ask about the phones.
What phones?
The phones belonging to then U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu because this was during the so-called Louisiana Purchase with Obamacare.
So apparently Landrieu was a moderate Democrat and she voted for Obamacare in exchange for some goodies.
Okay.
So the constituents were lighting up her phones and sources were telling me that she had disconnected her phone so that the constituents could not reach her.
So I thought it would be funny if me and a bunch of guys were in there dressed as telephone repairmen.
Saying, hey, do you need help fixing your phones?
Oh, clearly we're not there to do anything.
We were just making a funny YouTube video.
The FBI arrested me.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I wrote a book about it.
It's kind of funny that 15 years later, no one remembers this.
And at the time, this was like, I thought it was the end of my life.
I spent two nights in a federal prison cell.
I was arraigned.
And then they gave me a misdemeanor for entry by false pretenses.
I see.
For a journalist.
Even though there was no false pretense, I showed my driver's license.
But I pled guilty to a misdemeanor and spent three years on federal probation.
How was that?
I couldn't travel without permission from a probation officer and a judge.
I thought it wasn't going to be as bad as it was.
Three years?
Three years.
Well, three and a half years if you include pretrial release.
And so were you able to continue your journalism during those three years?
Well, that's a very interesting question.
It's under federal surveillance.
It's kind of an interesting form of journalism.
I thought probation was just don't break the law.
But I'm an enemy of the state.
So my probation, they would come up to my house.
And we did a story in New Hampshire, actually, in January of 2012. And I couldn't go to New Hampshire.
The probation officer told me strangely, and I think the probation officer is a fan of mine, this guy named Pat Hattersley out of Patterson, New Jersey, which is not the best place to be.
He goes, listen, you can do your work, but it has to be in New Jersey.
I'm like, what?
That's a violation of the first...
I mean, it's just so, like, Stalinist.
Yeah, but nobody cared.
Nobody supported me.
There was no money at the time.
I was sort of my office was in this sort of carriage house, makeshift sort of halfway carriage house sort of structure.
And I kept going and and my little team went around this country and we And that's how Veritas began.
Veritas was started while I was on probation.
Oh, that's fascinating.
So I know what it's like to have nothing.
I know what it's like to have no money.
I know what it's like to have everyone think that you're a failure and you'll never succeed.
So there's been these sort of ups and downs in my life.
And all that really matters is you keep putting out stories.
Yeah.
That's your motivation.
Yes.
Clearly not making money.
I mean, you're not running a business on this stuff.
No.
It's interesting.
You have this whole conservative media ecosystem.
For some people in this podcasting world, it's proven to be a profitable line of business.
Well, they tend to project their own biases and motivations onto you because if they're all about money, they're going to say that you're all about money because that's what they're all about.
For me, it was like – I was thinking back to those days in the Carriage House.
Okay, I have nothing.
But in order to get this laptop, I have to get the money.
So I have to go ask them, oh, now I need an attorney because they're suing me.
And I realized I had to be...
I had...
And you're like in your 20s now?
We're talking like early 30s?
I was 25. 25?
So one donor became 10, became 200, became 1,000.
And what are the profile of these donors and like what kind of money are they putting up?
You know, it's interesting.
First of all, you know, I paraphrase Howard Rourke from The Fountainhead.
I don't have, don't do things in order to get donors.
I get the donors in order to do things.
Yes.
And I do things the way that I want to do them.
So if a donor isn't...
You should teach the politicians, actually.
That'd be pretty nice.
I don't know if there's any saving those people.
Yeah.
But in order to, I would never let a donor tell me what to do.
So if a donor tries to do that, I'm like, I'm walking out.
And the donors, eventually, the people that wanted to support me did.
In the very beginning, it was very few people.
I mean, I think it was maybe a handful of people.
And then the first year, I want to say 2011, I think we maybe raised $200,000, which covered a few salaries and whatnot.
And then the next year, it was $600,000.
And the next year, it was $1 million.
And the following year, it was $2 million.
It was almost linear progression, 50% each year.
Um, but it was never about that.
It was about, I need to do as much as I can in the limited amount of time that I can do it.
And time was always, um, I know that you're a busy man.
Your schedule is insane.
So for you, it's about maximizing time and getting as much investigative journalism.
Investigative journalism is hard.
Oh yeah.
You never know what you're going to find something that's interesting.
And you get, sometimes you get nothing.
So you spend a million dollars and get nothing.
I know that feeling.
I mean, it actually was actually one of the things I was going to ask you about is it reminds me weirdly of my first career where you would never draw this analogy, but was actually drug hunting, right?
Developing medicines.
You never know in advance which one's actually going to be the one that works, which means for everyone that works, you need, there's like a whole footprint of like multiples more behind it that nobody ever sees.
And I've got to imagine that's what your life was actually like, and all of them require courage.
You're taking risks, and my line of work is more capital risk, but you're taking deep personal risk, which is even more significant.
In the beginning, there was one thing we did in New Hampshire where the attorney general, or I don't remember, it was the associate attorney general, I think he raided or came to the home of the reporter who did the story, and his name was...
You can't make this stuff up.
The Attorney General's name is Richard W. Head, a.k.a.
Dickhead.
This is New Hampshire.
And he sent this guy with photos and sort of terrorizing the family.
You have to remember how surreal the circumstances are.
He's terrorizing the family of the mother and the sisters of the journalist who did that story, who resides in New Hampshire.
Who is part of your group?
Working for me.
Part of my group.
And what story was he doing exactly?
This was a story involving...
We had gone to the poll locations of people who were dead, deceased voters.
And say, hey, do you have Susan Jones there, who's a deceased voter?
And the poll worker goes, oh, here you go.
Here's Susan.
Here's your ballot.
They were giving out the ballots.
And it was all on video.
And this was like a lightning rod issue.
And not that it matters, but like this guy could either be a Republican or Democrat.
But I'm just curious if this is a partisan.
The videographer?
No, no, no.
Both.
They were giving out Republican ballots and Democrat ballots.
The Attorney General was a Democrat.
Okay, got it.
Richard Head is his name.
Yeah.
So you have to understand, like, the circumstances are I'm on federal probation.
I've got virtually no money.
No lawyer wants to work for me because they all want $600 an hour at the time.
Now it's $1,200 an hour.
And, you know, you're living on a prayer.
You have no safety net, right?
It's all risk.
And that's been my life, basically, since I started.
Even to this day, even the Pfizer story, when I confronted that guy, the cops came, the NYPD came.
That was the recent one, right?
That was the one in February where I confront this guy, and it's me.
This is like the guy who's working for Pfizer and talking about...
Jordan Tristan Walker was his name, and he was the mRNA scientific planning guy.
Like Chris Hansen or Mike Wallace, I usually confront these people with the footage.
And what happened was he called the NYPD. Now we don't, we probably should, we don't cloud the footage while we're recording.
So I'm coming from a context where people destroy my recordings and then falsely accuse me of crimes.
So I'm kind of terrified.
This guy then assaults my cameraman.
He starts going nuts.
Have you seen this video?
Yeah, I did see this.
He's on the floor.
He's grabbing the ankles.
I mean, these are the leaders that decide public policy in this country.
On the floor, it's salting.
And I'm backing up because I've seen this rodeo in Louisiana.
They destroyed my SD chips.
So I'm like, we have to get this SD chip out of here.
So you're always on the frontier.
You're always just one step away from The abyss.
You took risks in the capital markets.
I take risks.
Much more personal risk you're taking.
In a different way.
And so that was the one that ultimately then got you booted from your own organization that you founded.
Is that nominally what happened?
The timing is a matter of fact.
People don't like it when I say this.
I don't know.
I mean, it's just factually the case that we broke that story on January 27th, I believe, give or take a day.
Of this year, right?
Yeah.
Of this year.
And there was a board meeting on February 6th, and I was removed on February 10th.
So the timing was at least really stupid.
On their part, yeah.
And that's what people were so outraged by.
It's like, why would they do that?
I was responsible for raising about $25 million a year.
We had a bare bones development team.
My expense account was $200,000.
I had to travel around in an SUV, you know, because I'm on the phone with sources, and I'm on the phone with donors, and you have to protect those people's identity.
So it was really bizarre, the timing.
And I'm not so sure that someone was bribed or something like that.
I don't know that.
I don't have any evidence.
I know that one board member liked to say, we don't need James O'Keefe anymore in this organization.
I don't think they've done too well without you, it doesn't seem so far.
Well, when I left, they had about $8 million cash on hand or so, $10 million cash on hand, and they spent all of it in the last six months.
Interesting.
And I was running around the country raising money to make sure all these people got paid.
Yeah.
And it was almost an impossibility.
You're the face of the company.
You're running around.
I mean, you run around the country.
I think you have a private plane, though.
Yeah, it makes it easier.
I'm on jet flights until midnight.
I'm dizzy from the lack of sleep.
But I think the Pfizer story, it was a big deal.
Yes.
It was probably the biggest story.
Oh, I remember that.
Yeah.
It affected people.
And the funny thing is that story exploded in part because only a small handful of people who had reach in conventional media actually picked it up, right?
I mean, I saw it on Tucker.
Tucker was all over it.
He did a phenomenal job.
He did a great piece.
That was amazing.
He did a phenomenal job.
One of the things I love about him is he doesn't view himself as competitive with other journalists doing good work.
He actually gives them a chance to elevate what they do.
We'll dive into the story in a minute.
But again, it wasn't so much that I have evidence or information that someone paid someone off.
It was that the story was such a big deal.
Yes.
And it elevated Veritas and my name to heights, never seen before, that there was a board member who said, this is our opportunity to get rid of James O'Keefe.
I mean, what is going on in that person's brain?
I'm not a psychologist.
Right, but I think you should ask that person that question.
Just a basic business judgment or organizational judgment to say that, okay, we usually want to double down on success, not to take the legs out from under it.
Well, seven years ago- It's amazing.
The same thing happens in corporate America, by the way, all the time.
I've heard that.
Yeah, it's kind of fascinating.
With these people, I just don't get them.
I got calls from people saying, this guy is telling us that James O'Keefe had nothing to do with the success of the story.
And one of my board members, you know, had me over his house in Connecticut, and I said, where are you getting that from?
And he goes, well, that's what this guy told me.
I'm like, so if this guy told you to jump off a bridge, you'd do that?
Yeah, maybe, maybe he would.
And I said, this is me in the video.
What do you mean I have nothing to do with the story?
He's like, well, you're not the one who recorded it.
You're the leader of the organization.
But I'm the leader.
I'm taking all the risks.
I'm being raided by the feds.
I'm being sued personally.
I have to raise $20 million to pay all these people.
The logic was so...
This is the thing that kind of frustrates me at times, even in the conservative movement, is stuff doesn't get off the ground that much because of all of the BS of the infighting and whatever, where...
You know, people on the left have mastered Their capture of universities, corporate America, Hollywood, and otherwise.
And there are always this bright-eyed conservative vision that will start on day one.
And very few things are able to actually get the traction to hit critical velocity because of stupid stuff like this.
There'll be some sort of animus of a battle between personalities.
And I think part of it, I don't know if this is true in your situation, but part of it is that when your actual principal motivation is to make money, right, there's pros and cons to that, right?
But a lot of people in the ESG movement or otherwise, their motive is to make money.
And they're using the smokescreen of caring about some sort of social agenda and cause is just like woke smoke to deflect from the fact that, look, at the end of the day, we're in this to make an extra buck.
And I'm going to be disciplined because that's the metric that matters.
Whereas what I see in a lot of the so-called alt economy, and I know yours was nonprofit, but it's a similar mentality is they'll tell themselves that their motivation was actually that they're business people and they want to make money.
But actually, their motivation was actually.
Self-regard.
I guess.
So you're saying this guy wasn't a donor or something like this to you.
It's not like money was his motivation.
I'm sure he's watching this right now and he'll tweet about it.
But it's like self-esteem.
I don't even know who this guy is.
It's not a personal thing.
It's a system.
I hate to even talk about it because what I've found in my life, I've been called a fraud for 20 years.
This is not new.
I've been through worse than this.
Defamation that makes you question your own sense of reality.
Gaslighting, jail, raids, lawsuits.
It almost doesn't matter who the individual is.
But I am going to talk about it because I think you're right.
I think it's the issue at hand that it was that seven years ago or so, a board member Who got off the board.
Great guy.
Still talk to him.
He's an advisor of mine.
I won't say his name because people have a freedom of association right under the First Amendment to associate freely with a nonprofit without being doxxed.
But this guy gave half a million dollars to Veritas and he pulled me aside.
It's a lot of money.
It's a lot of money.
It was a lot of money.
We had a few people that gave that much.
Half of our budget came from $100 donors, $50 donors.
This guy pulled me aside and said, you've got to get this guy off your board.
I said, why?
Oh, he said, this guy who gave you $500,000, the guy who's actually writing the check, says the guy who's not writing the check, you might want to watch out for him.
I said, why?
He said, because he's envious of you.
He said, because he wants to be you.
And ultimately, he'll work to replace you.
And nobody can be you.
Nobody can be you.
We're all our own person.
That's right.
And I found that there was some of that.
And I don't look at the world that way.
I guess I've never been much of a jealous person.
When I look at my heroes or people, that inspires me.
I remember seeing Little Shop of Horrors in high school.
I saw Seymour.
I'm like, that's amazing.
I want to be in a musical.
It's not so there was that and I and it was inconceivable to me when I when that guy told me that it was so outside my experience that I did nothing with the information.
And in other words, I didn't take the I didn't take the warning seriously.
And then when the Pfizer story broke, it was like, here's our chance to get rid of O'Keefe.
And it was so painful.
I went through so much pain the first week, I don't think I ate any food.
I think we've all been there in life once or twice.
But I realized as soon as it happened, no use crying over spilled milk.
Bizarrely, I had more DMs and more people reaching out to me.
Debbie Bernal was this Pfizer whistleblower who provided some of the documents inside Pfizer that corroborated Jordan Walker.
She was previously unwilling to go public, and then after what happened, she was inspired to go public.
So it strangely helped me journalistically, and that more people kind of trusted me when you go through these sorts of trials and tribulations.
That's pretty interesting.
Now, the only problem is you don't have the infrastructure to capture all of the inbound.
So you build again.
So you build it again.
So how have you been funding that?
How by funding the rebuild?
Well, it's OMG. More donors, I suppose.
OMG is not a non-profit.
OMG is the new thing.
We do not have a board.
Just a company.
I question the efficacy of these sorts of boards.
Yeah, I seriously question the efficacy of these sorts of boards.
When I interview you, I'm going to ask you about that because I want to hear your take.
Sure.
It seems to me there was a piece by Dr. Robert Malone who wrote a great piece about this called The Institutional Pathology That Removed James O'Keefe.
And it's all about sort of churches and hospitals and boards who don't necessarily own the company.
And they question when you are successful, they seem to go back and question the success.
They take a backward-looking focus.
Why do we take all these risks in the first place?
I could have done this differently.
And it's like, are you nuts?
Why don't you go out and do it?
Why don't you go out and build it?
It's very hard to build things.
Oh, it is.
It's very easy to destroy things.
It's very easy to sit on a board.
It's a very passive verb for a reason.
You're right about that.
Sit.
And I hired this Goldman Sachs guy who is part of the so-called managerial class who you speak about.
No offense to investment bankers, but I'm probably never going to hire an investment banker again as a manager.
And I learned a lot.
And I think that what I take from this experience is that I think it's a blessing because I I made some mistakes.
I put some people on my board I should not have.
Okay.
And I learned from this.
You own that.
Accountability.
I learned it.
I like that.
And next time, I hope to not make that mistake.
So the new thing is set up more as a company.
Yeah, it's a company.
I think it's better.
Yeah, we have subscriptions.
We sell the cameras now.
We don't just give them away.
And there's four cameras that we use.
We sell them.
We sell a class, which I'm going to do a shameless plug for the O'Keefe masterclass.
There's five hour-long masterclasses on journalism, and we're charging for them.
We've already sold 1,000 of them.
Good for you.
And if we sell 4,000, we break even on the air.
Oh good.
That seems doable.
Given that you just got started.
Yes.
And we put out the stories and we're putting out a lot of school board stories right now and eventually hope to monetize that.
Well, I mean, that's just the mechanics.
Your passion is what you want to do.
You've got another plumbing for how you set it up.
You can't save the world unless you can pay the rent to your point.
Yeah, of course.
You've got to be practical.
But my passion is always the story.
Like, the only thing that keeps me going is, oh, man, I've got to expose that guy.
I can't wait to go.
I can see that in you.
And, you know, that's the Howard Rourke in you.
I mean, for him, it was designing buildings.
For you, it's designing and telling the story.
You know, for me, it's a different motivation.
But...
You're not looking for unsolicited advice, but friendly reaction is, I think you need someone who can do the plumbing for you so you're not focused on it.
I think that there's...
In the early stages, I wouldn't necessarily say that's necessary on day one.
You kind of want to have the architecture set up.
But the only thing is, when I see a rare...
Talent is an understatement, but a rare...
Soul, like you, who has a calling.
I don't know if you're religious.
Are you religious?
Okay.
I mean, God puts you here for a reason.
That's my view.
And so pursue the purpose for which God put you here.
Not something else that takes away even an iota of time from that.
But it's a hard thing to do because get that wrong and you ruin...
Get that wrong and you ruin your company.
You ruin the whole thing, right?
And so it's a hard thing.
I've been there.
It's a tough balance.
And there's an element, I will say this on a positive side, this is probably the stage you're in now, where in the early phase of building the plumbing, I've made this mistake in other settings before, Is you fall into the trap of thinking that like, okay, there's the plumbing and there's the substance, right?
You're bringing the fluid and somebody else needs to build the piping.
In the early stages of getting any new thing off the ground, those two are actually inextricably linked.
That's right.
But then there comes a point in time when you have to say that, okay...
The fluid is different from the piping.
Well said.
You're probably not there yet in this journey because this is so recent.
This is so on point.
You're the only person who's actually said it in the way that you have.
I've lived it.
I'd like to ask you about that.
My mind goes right to, for example, managing lawyers.
I get sued so much, and in your book you write about LLCs and liability.
I'm named personally in investigations that I had nothing to do with.
I'm only the leader of the company, and they sued me.
They didn't even sue the reporter.
Unbelievable.
They sued me.
So now I'm still having to indemnify myself.
But the point I'm thinking about as you went there is I'm like, I realized early on in my life that if I want to do the right thing, I have to be the chief decision maker.
I have to be the ultimate decision maker.
I think Steve Jobs said something like that.
Like, I have to be the person in charge.
Not because I want power.
It's because in order for me to do my art, I can't settle that lawsuit.
I can't bear false witness.
And if I work for somebody else, the system will make me bear false witness.
It'll make me compromise on my ethics.
And if I compromise on my ethics, to borrow the Howard Rourke metaphor, then I have to destroy the building because it's not the building I want to build.
Which he did.
Which he did.
He blew it up.
So that's the tough part in my deal.
And I think there are certain people that wanted me to be the gopher.
Oh, you just go raise that $30 million and you just do your art.
Well, it doesn't work that way.
You can't give me all of the responsibility but none of the authority.
Mm-hmm.
I have to have the authority in order to...
Separation of responsibility and authority is a funny thing.
Yes.
Actually.
I'm still learning that.
Maybe you can give me some pointers.
I'll give you my two cents.
It's not the same for every person, but I'm just making an observation of what I see in you.
I think the number one question for you is, you know why God put you here.
You know what your purpose is, what your calling and your passion is.
First of all, let's just pause on that for a second.
That's a beautiful thing to know.
When you're young, you know, we're similar age category, but most people our age, most people any age are lucky to ever figure that out for themselves.
You figured that out at a much younger age, right?
Like over a decade ago.
So you already got a head start.
Let's just start on the really positive side here.
I mean, what a head start to have at a relatively young age in your 20s already to know this is your calling.
This is what self-realization looks like.
Well, boy, is that a head start.
Now everything we're going to talk about is like easy by comparison, right?
Like that's the hard question.
Who am I? I mean, that's a hard freaking question to get to the answer to.
I think most people never get there over the course of their entire life.
Let alone over the course of, you know, middle age.
You're there at a young age.
So, like, let's just put things in context here.
Notwithstanding all the trial and tribulation you've been through, I'm saying this, you don't need my pep talk, but I'm saying this for the people who are watching to see, right?
Because there's a version of looking at your story that can leave.
I mean, there's part of me that feels this way sad to see what a guy like you has gone through and what our country does.
Censor, silent, jail, arrest.
Kick out of organization.
It's the same managerial class doing the same thing in different ways.
There's a sad version of that story, but let's not do that one.
Let's do that.
Let's do the version where this is a talent that was put on this earth to do this thing that needs to be done.
Uncover things, stories that weren't told and just tell them literally without a filter with like directly just by putting up the footage that he gathered directly and allow you to see it.
Cool place to be.
Now it's just the implementation question, right?
And so we could, I could give you my two cents on the implementation and how to think about that, but it might At least for me as an observer, I don't know for you, but it takes the pressure off to see that you've got like seven tenths of it already under your belt.
That's a good point.
It's an astute observation.
I definitely know the why.
I've got the why down.
You definitely know the why.
And some people are not driven by that and motivated by that.
Or don't know it even.
Or don't even understand.
Like you say, in the political world, which I'm very curious to ask you about this when I interview you, but it's just like...
People are projecting onto you all of their demons.
Exactly.
So you really have to be confident in your constitution.
Yes.
And you can't trust anybody.
That's the other thing.
In the journalism business, you have to trust.
You have to open your heart to people to get them to trust you.
Trust is a two-way relationship.
It is.
But what I've also learned is, wow, it's hard to trust anybody.
And everyone always asks me, how do you, James O'Keefe, they say, aren't you worried someone's going to infiltrate you?
And I would always say, no, I'm not worried because there's nothing that I'm doing.
Yeah, but that's not how they see the world.
Because they've got a million things to hide.
They've got skeletons in their closet up the wazoo.
Or, in a more demonic way, they'll falsely accuse you of things.
So let's say there is no camera recording your encounter.
They'll just make something up about you.
Yeah.
Which is why I always told my staff, please do record me.
Right.
Because the recording, I want the recording versus the...
The artificial telling.
Yes.
The artificial telling is far worse than the recording.
See, it's interesting you say that.
Embarrassment is a choice, actually.
I think that that's kind of one of the many lessons that I learned from watching your professional journey.
One of the morals that I take away from that story is that what happens happens.
What's true is true.
How you feel about it is a choice, right?
And so I think that people view you as somebody who embarrasses other people by showing things they've done behind closed doors that they wouldn't do behind doing public.
But even that Pfizer guy or whoever it was, The act of being embarrassed and humiliated, like that's a choice by what you said.
Own it, right?
And I think that what you're calling out is an element of our human nature that's fundamentally fallen, insecure, to say that there are things that I'm willing to do That I don't want to acknowledge that I'm willing to do or things I'm willing to say that I don't want to acknowledge that I'm willing to say.
And that gap, that doesn't fall on you.
It doesn't fall on the camera.
It falls within each of us as a human being.
And I think because you're in the position you're in, You've realized that, hey, tape everything you do, and that's the way you would live your life.
Something to the effect of democracy, health of a democracy is determined whether people can say the quiet part out loud.
Yes, yes.
Just speak, say in public what you will say in private.
And we would be so much more united as a country, by the way, if everybody did that.
But the reason you'd be more united as a country, and I loved your earlier use of the word constitution, right?
You referred to your personal constitution.
But there's an analogy to a nation that's insecure at a similar level, too.
You got to know who you are.
Then you don't need to apologize for it at the individual level, at the level of a nation.
But today, the reason why we're as divided as we are, I think, is because people don't feel free to say in public what they'll otherwise say in private.
And that's a loss of self-confidence that we need to somehow rediscover.
I guess my question, I got a question for you is, this is a hard question, so I mean it in a challenging way.
I'm not sure what my bias is on this.
Do you think in the mode you've chosen to do this, right?
I have no doubt you're doing useful service for the, you've done a useful service for the country, opening people like my eyes, who've seen the things you've exposed, I can speak to that personally, that you're doing a value for the external world.
But for that person, or for the person who's on the receiving end of it, Do you think you're making it more or less likely for them to live the rest of their life afterwards in the direction that You strive to live your own life.
Do you think that guy from Pfizer is more likely to be even more embarrassed the next time that thing happens?
Or do you think that having gone through this experience, he's now at the level of an individual on the other side of that?
I don't know if you have a view on that.
That's an interesting question.
That question seems to cut to the very heart of what the First Amendment stands for.
I go back to the, because you say, because I think you mean Like hidden camera exposing someone who's behind closed doors.
Yeah.
He wasn't behind closed doors.
He's in a public restaurant, but nevertheless, he doesn't know that he's being recorded.
Yeah.
But that really speaks to, I mean, before hidden cameras, there was pencil and paper.
Like Upton Sinclair, when he infiltrated the jungle, he didn't record it, but he, you know, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt quips, you know, are we going to get upset at Upton Sinclair for smuggling his pencil in?
Yeah.
So there are written accounts, submersion journalism, newspaper journalism, muckraking of 100 years ago.
But the camera is more telling, isn't it?
It picks up on things that the pencil does not, right?
Yeah.
It almost damages someone's dignity.
More.
Dignity.
People feel violated because their dignity.
But this is the paradigm that we're entering.
And as Scott McNeely once famously said, you've lost your expectation of privacy a long time ago.
So it really cuts to the heart of the First Amendment and why it exists, to inform the people.
People have a, you know, this is a cliche, but a right to know certain things.
And I don't think I would use these cameras in certain places.
For example, I've never gone into someone's bedroom.
I've redacted very private things about things that we've recorded.
Out of respect for the subject.
Yeah.
Like there was a story on NPR we did where an NPR official brought up the name of a Libyan reporter in their newsroom, and I redacted that.
And then people attack me for doctoring footage.
It's like, I can't win!
But it's a judgment that you make, right?
It's a judgment and that's the most important part of being a journalist.
It's the judgment.
It's the discernment and the ethics.
People follow people.
I've always said content is king, which means the story is big enough.
But what I learned recently, I learned this in the last year, is actually content Content isn't king.
People follow people.
People trust people.
And a lot of people trust me because of what I've been through.
I thought the jail and the defamation and the harassment.
That feels closer to the flame to me.
Because you do hear this content is king thing.
It always kind of lands flat with me.
I think you're right.
The Viacom founder once said that.
But I said that because in the beginning of my trajectory, I mean, and the reason I'm saying this to you, you might say, let's focus on the positive.
But I think it's important to focus on the suffering a little bit.
Also, it's both part of the truth.
Because it was...
Because it makes an ordinary man question his sense of reality.
When you are, when you're Wikipedia, and I know your Wikipedia page, all the Wikipedia pages are pretty nasty, but like, it is so bad.
It is like he doctors tapes, he's a felon.
I'm not a felony.
Like he rapes women.
I mean, just like he hates black people.
I remember reading that as a 25-year-old.
I mean, nothing...
That's not me.
It's unrecognizable.
It's almost like combat.
Yeah.
It's PTSD. Oh, but it's literally like combat.
I mean, I can tell you even in a political campaign or whatever.
Yeah.
Like, people, I mean, much less derisive, but just to the level of inaccuracy, stuff will show up saying that I was born in India, has the wrong last name of my wife.
I mean, it's just people who can just...
You know, edit and say anything, that's fine.
The answer to, I don't think that we should have a systematic suppression engine of that.
But what it does do to the level of a person, I think, is interesting.
And it sounds like it's worn on you a little bit.
And I bring that up because I think that is why it is so important to use hidden cameras in certain contexts.
And I write in my book, American Muckraker, it's a question of relative deception.
We have a Washington Post, to borrow an example, who did a front page story in 2009 when the Acorn story came out.
And they said, James O'Keefe went after Acorn because he doesn't like black people that vote.
She just made it up.
It's like the headline.
She won the Pulitzer Prize and then she had to print a front page retraction because I never said that.
Unbelievable.
Can you imagine if I did that or you did that?
No chance.
We would rightfully be crucified.
So when you live in a world where that happens on a daily, and by the way, that's just the stuff that I called out, happens a hundred times a day and they get away with it.
When you live in that world, it's not just morally permissible to record people without them knowing.
It's a necessity.
And, you know, that's the world that we have to live in.
Now, what effect that has, if you want to live in a different country or a different world, which does not place a primary emphasis on the First Amendment, then go live in that country.
Yeah, they exist.
Most countries are that way.
Most of them are that way.
I think our Article III courts still, generally speaking, protect the First Amendment, which is why I'm still here and not in prison.
Thank God.
Thank God.
Although, who knows what will happen, and I think over the next five years we'll find out.
That's part of why I'm in this game.
We're going to keep it that way.
Yeah.
And the Article III courts generally protect the First Amendment because the same journalists that want to point a gun on me, like when the FBI raided us, they were like, whoa.
Yep.
They're like, whoa, we don't want to be raided by the...
It's self-preservation.
That's right.
The ACLU is defending or filing amicus in my case because the FBI raided me and they never released the probable cause.
And the law stipulates that if you want to raid journalists and point guns at them and take their notes, Society needs to see what the probable cause is.
Absolutely.
So that currently sits on the federal judge's desk, and she has to rule on it.
I think she'll come...
I mean, most federal judges, I think, were still at a place where they will come out on the right side of this, and if not, the Supreme Court will.
The current Supreme Court understands this.
It's sad that we have to...
But that's the last bastion, and it's a thin line of defense.
It's sad that we have to say who's the judge or who appointed the judge.
Yeah, but it is where we are.
It is where we are now.
So what is...
Your view on our way out, or do you have one?
So I was an extreme.
I am an optimist.
I was an extreme optimist for the last 14 years, almost to the point where everyone else would be a doomsayer to me.
And they would say, you know, the country's done.
It's over.
And I would always be, no, there's hope.
What happened to me at Veritas was extremely disheartening.
And if you're not careful, you can get twisted pretty fast.
Because it's one thing, you're taking arrows from the front.
Like, imagine you're in a battlefield, to borrow an old metaphor, and you're getting arrows thrown at you and swords thrown at you.
But imagine the people behind you start shooting arrows in your back.
It's just dizzying.
You can get twisted.
Yeah.
So I think you have to surround yourself with strong people, discerning people, good people.
You have to be very careful if you're going to do this work Who you have on your team.
But I am an optimist.
I think miracles can happen.
Tides can turn.
And I think that what I've seen in the work that we've done, I'm a bias towards the work that I'm doing.
Most recently in New Jersey this past week, we did a few stories on school boards.
Every mother in every municipality is contacting me and wants me to go to her school and give a hidden camera.
And I think that's a really beautiful thing.
I think that's a hopeful thing.
It is.
And I think more people than would admit agree with someone like you and what you're saying, but they're afraid to say it.
Yes.
So it's like the Soviet Union.
Are we going to just cow down in our homes and be afraid to say the truth and lie to our children so that we can survive at any price?
Or are we going to be brave?
And being brave means sacrifice.
It means the founders said lives, fortune, sacred honor to each other.
More people agree with us than don't.
They're just afraid to admit it.
And that still keeps me as an optimist and keeps me as a hopeful person.
and i think the tide can turn if people know what's going on if they know what's happening at the irs and the fbi if people could see what's happening inside schools inside government bureaus and and how they talk about you the taxpayer if they could see that for themselves it would change people's whole perceptions and it would save the country i think I think so, too.
And I think the reason it would save the country is that 80 percent of people or more in this country would have the same reaction, which is not what we're taught to believe.
Right.
You know, we're taught to believe we live in a divided partisan time and, you know, somebody, you know, 50 percent of the country is going to agree with one thing and 50 percent another.
I don't see it that way.
Not in the kinds of questions that you're putting your finger on the pulse of, which is just straight-up corruption, lying, dishonesty.
I mean, I don't know whether you're Democrat or Republican or left-wing or right-wing or what you thought in the Iraq war or high taxes or low taxes, but you want to know the truth about what Pfizer is or isn't saying about the vaccine.
You want to know the truth about what you're saying.
Media is or is not telling you about an organization that's getting boatloads of federal funding in the name of promoting civil rights in the form of the ACORN example.
I think that when it comes to the basic values, free speech, honesty in government, self-governance as opposed to elite aristocracy, most Americans agree on the basic rules of the road.
They might be divided on abortion or whether corporate tax rates should be high or low.
Those are questions that people might want to debate vigorously, but that's not the Kind of thing you're putting your finger on the pulse of.
I think it'd be difficult for you to find my political views anywhere on the internet.
I don't, I don't never...
I'm not sure I know what they are.
I don't espouse a public...
I believe in reality.
Yeah, but is that...
You're allowed to have political beliefs, but it's irrelevant to it.
But do we even agree on that?
In other words, are you entitled to more than one truth?
That's what's on the table.
Because that's my belief.
That's what's on the table.
I believe that two plus two equals four, and that we're sitting...
Or two plus two equals four is racist.
Those are the questions.
And this is a microphone and this is a cup of coffee.
I'm not actually sure that as Americans we can agree on that.
So that's my baseline.
Well, here's what I would say.
Here's my view on this.
Because I do have a strong view on this.
Maybe you'll disagree with me on this.
This comes from traveling the country, not through the filters that were fed through cameras and social media algorithms and otherwise.
But that is what I'm doing right now is traveling the country with roomfuls of people from tents in Wisconsin to farmers in Iowa to people in New Hampshire or whatever it is.
I believe that most people in this country, like the overwhelming majority, easily over 80% of this country, can agree on those things.
That that is a mug of coffee.
80%?
At least 80% can agree on those things.
That's still relatively low, but it starts somewhere.
No, it is.
It is.
But I'm just telling you what I see.
I mean, it's sad that it's only 80. But it's not 50%, right, as we're taught to believe.
It's easily over 80%.
And half of the 20, half of the 20, are people younger than you and I Who never learned the tools of discernment in the first place.
Right?
You and I were both in latter half of high school when those two planes hit the Twin Towers.
When I gave the commencement address at my high school two years ago, that was the first year where not a single one of those kids was born on the date that those two planes hit the Twin Towers.
And so I think half the people never really learned what those values, most importantly, the tools of discernment to get to truth, were in the first place.
Who we can bring along to agree with us.
Not in corporate tax rates being high or low, but that's a cup of coffee, right?
For lack of a better description, just grounded on certain things that are true in the world, agreeing that what your camera capture really happened.
What went wrong, you know?
Well, I think that...
Well, this gets into a deeper discussion.
I think that we as human beings, especially young people, need to be grounded by something.
Because we need to be able to believe in something bigger than ourselves.
I believe this, at least.
I think we need to be able to believe in something bigger than ourselves to see what is true in front of us.
I see.
And so there's a role played by faith.
There's a role played by family or hard work.
I think it can play a role here too.
You don't need all those things, but you need like one of them.
I would say faith, family, hard work, patriotism, pick two.
And then you have enough grounding in your sense of self to say that, okay, I am me and I can recognize that to be true.
But when those things all go missing...
Then you're lost, right?
You're a vacuum.
You have a vacuum in your heart.
Then you're going to just believe you're going to believe anything because you have a vacuum and something's going to fill the void.
If it's not the true thing, it'll be the fake thing.
And so that's a much longer discussion.
But to bring back to where we are right now as a country, I share some elements of your pessimism, but I do think that 80 plus percent, and it could be half the remaining 20 coming along with us too after we fill that void and bring them along, generally people younger than you and I, I don't think that we're actually as divided on the basic questions of truth as we're taught to believe.
And the way we call the bluff on that is by Frankly, people like you, man, doing what you're doing, right?
Let people react to it and close that gap between what people are willing to say in public and what they're willing to say in private.
That calls the bluff on a division that I think is mostly manufactured.
There was a recent, just real quick, there was a recent example last week of a story we did.
It wasn't an undercover journalist.
It was a police officer at Body Cambridge.
Body camera footage.
And the school board officials called the police on citizens and myself.
And I did a FOIA request.
I got the body camera footage.
And the cop was talking to the superintendent.
And you could see the psychology of these people and what they actually believed.
That woke up.
I encourage your audience to watch that.
That was not a big story.
It's a municipal story.
But it was fascinating.
Because one of the superintendents goes, let's scan the license plates.
It was like a little mini tyrant in action.
And the superintendent was like, They're citizens and they've come from all over the place and they're here.
Where's the cops?
It was like a sketch comedy of what these people are actually like behind closed doors.
And I think more things like that revealing real human nature because human nature is pretty nasty.
So we need to expose it and understand the truth.
And then I have an infinite faith in the power of the American people.
They can, if they elect you or whoever else they want to elect and Congress can You know, we have all these people in Congress are supposed to make decisions, but people don't have access to the information.
So that's my job.
I think there's a version of what you're doing that gives me some inspiration and ideas for how to do this in the federal government as well.
I mean, we're talking about taking on the deep state.
Okay.
What is that?
The managerial class, the administrative state, right?
The people who were never elected to be in a policymaking function that are functionally in a policymaking function, even though we say they're not.
I think exposition is a big part of the key to success.
It's at least the first step.
I think one of the things that Musk did at Twitter that I thought was pretty good, simple first step, is just publish the files of what the government actors pressured this one private company to do.
I think there's a version of this for what I'll call the state action files.
I want to do this pretty early on, is just anytime a government official in the federal government has pressured a private party or a private actor to do something that the government couldn't do directly, I think there are all kinds of ways in which that's illegal and we need to deliver accountability.
But let's just start with step one, just publish it.
Let's just see it.
You got to roll the log over, see what crawls out.
There's an element to this that I think is harder in certain settings than others.
Actually, maybe you've seen a version of this too, literally.
I think the way it works in the federal government, this is what I think happened to Trump a little bit, is you roll that log over, you see what crawls out.
You strike the swamp, the swamp strikes back.
So I think if you're going to roll the log over, you've got to be ready and willing to bring the pesticide.
I think that's the equivalent of quite literally the guy coming, beating up you and your staff, trying to, like, break your card.
They'll try to put you in jail.
Yeah, that's what they'll do.
Does that scare you?
You know, I think that at times the idea of an apparatus this deep, taking it on, can be daunting.
But less so over time, because no question is like, what's the alternative?
One of the things I think about is Let's just try the alternative like a set of clothes.
Let's roll that forward.
20 years from now, that's the generation our kids are going to grow up in anyway.
Right?
Not unique to my kids.
All of our kids.
And so, I guess it's like the instinct of...
I don't know.
I say this as somebody who's a parent of two sons.
God forbid there's a moment where there's like a car about to crash into your child.
You're just going to...
You're going to put your body in there and just get in the way, not because you know it isn't going to hurt them, but it's still your best chance of ensuring it.
You're doing it to protect your family, whereas it's counterintuitive because most people don't do it so that they could not be away from their family.
You're doing it to protect your family.
It's sort of, yeah, familial instinct.
It's not unique to my family, obviously, but if you think about...
Our relationship to one another, like our relationship to our family members, like that's the impulse for me is, are we taking some risk by going on the path that we're going on?
Like a lot of risk?
Absolutely.
But we're doing it at a time where the alternative...
There may not be a country in 10 years.
Is really, exactly.
And therefore your children.
That's my talking point.
When I meet with people and they're like, or talking point, it's what I've come to say.
Yeah.
But aren't you worried about your children?
It's like, you know, I'm talking about their children.
And I say, well, if you want to care about your children, you have to be involved.
Yeah.
Which alternative?
There's no country left.
Where your six-year-old live in 10 years from now.
Yeah.
I think that's where we are.
I think that's where we are right now.
And so that makes the choice a lot easier.
I think it's also why you see sometimes a positive change doesn't happen gradually.
I think negative decline often happens gradually, actually.
It's infinitesimally small pieces of a downward slide.
You don't see ascent happen in the same way.
You get to the depths of where you're at the precipice and then that just selects for either ultimate decline and then it's all gone and you're done and history relegated what was once good to the dustbin of history.
Or it selects for a quantum leap of just saying, okay, We're not going to gradually find our way out of this, but we will leap our way out of this.
And I think that's one of the moments we're in.
And you're one of the people who's lighting the match.
And the question is, do you combust a good kind of reaction where you cause a rocket ship to take off or doesn't it?
In which case, we're all done and that's the ballgame.
My team and I force people into these boxes where they're required to make a decision.
Like when I've been in court and federal court and the jury verdict, it forces all this hyperbole and innuendo melts away.
And it's like, do you want to live in a world where you...
And I've been in court many times, and I've won, all but one, where there's logic prevailed.
You force people into this, make this decision.
There was a case in North Carolina where logic prevailed.
The federal judge is like, I've watched the video, ma'am.
There's no edit.
She's like, but where's the edit, ma'am?
And she's like, okay, case dismissed.
I force people into that, as you say, you get down, down, down, down, and a miracle can happen.
You can turn the tide.
But you got to get people there where they're confronting the reality and there's no BS. That's right.
The media is filled with BS. That's why I use cameras, because I don't think the artificial intelligence is there quite yet.
I saw the Indiana Jones movie with Harrison Ford and I couldn't pay attention.
It's just not.
I'd rather not watch it.
Yeah.
I mean, is this what AI is supposed to be like?
His face looks mangled.
We're not there yet to create the paradigms and circumstances that my reporting does with police body cam footage and superintendents and people calling.
So I don't think AI is a threat to me yet.
But yeah, we force people into that moment you just described where they're required to grapple with the questions.
Yes.
And there is only one truth.
And when I say truth, I heard a joke recently.
And truth is beauty is truth.
Talent is truth.
Art is truth.
So like this Lizzo, this woman, you know, obese woman on the front of magazines.
She's so beautiful.
It's a joke.
If you want to upset your girlfriend, tell her she looks like Lizzo today.
There's a truth in each and every one of us.
And there's only one truth.
Yeah.
So we're trying to wake people up.
We're trying to shake people awake.
And I'm confident that we will do that.
But the First Amendment is under attack in this country.
It is.
In a serious way.
We still have it.
It is.
But not for long unless we do something about it.
The FBI still has my devices.
You know, three years ago.
It's one of the greatest violations of the First Amendment in the history of the United States for them to raid journalists' homes over a story I never even did.
Unbelievable.
So, shameless plug there.
Not shameless because I have to pay the legal bills of my journalists.
No, it's not shameless at all.
But Private Citizen is the 501c3.
It's tax deductible.
It helps fund our citizens' legal bills.
Private Citizen 501c3 if you want to support our First Amendment rights there.
James, I appreciate what you do.
I think you set an example for young people who, I think the most important moral of the story isn't any of the implications for the country, all of which is important, but for maybe a younger person watching this, at least being somebody who found his calling, who's pursuing it, who's doing it without apology.
A modern-day Howard Rourke and his discipline.
And I mean that as high praise.
Thank you.
And I hope you take it that way.
Thank you very much for having me.
Appreciate you being here, man.
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