Part One: James O'Keefe: The Patron Saint of News Grifters

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hmm, what's grifftin my mainstream media infrastructure. I'm Robert Evans
hosted Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you
everything you don't know about the very worst people in
all of history. And every week I also try an
introduction that is, you know, some variant of on topic.
This week was more on topic than the others because

(00:22):
I'm trying to look extra good in front of my boss, uh,
the inimitable Jack O'Brian inimitable, So don't to imitate me. Yeah,
I only use that phrase to describe you and Jamie,
I think. So congratulation that is that is incredibly high praise.

(00:44):
I'm thrilled to be back, Robert. I've been listening to
your show quite a bit lately. The series that you
explained as though it were like you slacking off, where
you read your audio book to Katie and Cody was
especially good. Thank you, Yeah, good work. Thank you for
not firing me for throwing dangerous items around the recording room. Yeah,

(01:08):
we've abandoned that, but we'll wait until is the talk
about how good it is? Yep? Yeah, all right, Well
could they be harder and sharper objects? Yes, I've used
company funds to buy throwing knives, which which I think
I'm going to hybridize with a case of Perier and

(01:31):
see how that works. Hey, you're a guy who's into weapons.
Are throwing stars a thing that would ever be dangerous?
I mean, yeah, there's sharp things that you can throw
it people, I would say, in the grand scheme of
things that you can buy in America to hurt people
with their pretty low on the list, right, that is

(01:51):
a very grand scheme. Yeah, alright, well, good to know.
I guess the ones that I've used in my life
have all been toy through wrong stars and they don't
have much weight to them. But I'd imagine the actually
weaponized throwing stars have a little bit more heft. Yeah,
And you know what's even what's scarier than the throwing stars?

(02:11):
And I think it's like kind of maybe close. I
don't know enough about the history of throwing stars, but
like cow trips are what kind of scare me which
are essentially like Jack's like the toy but like heavier
duty and more dangerous. And there's some people that have
built like drone rigs that you can just dump hundreds
of these on like a street corner, and just really
tear up people's feet or vehicle tires. Oh you put

(02:33):
them in explosive No, you don't even have to. You
could just drop them on the ground and you have
a bunch of Then suddenly people have to clear all
of these sharp, dangerous objects off of a street. And
it's like you could you know, in like a civil
unrest situation and a protest and like war in an
urban environment, it's a it's a force multiplier that that
concerns me more than throwing stars, which I think should

(02:54):
be mandatory. I know in my household they are my
three year old and my one year older, both well
versed in the throwing star arts. Yeah. We we were
talking before this episode about your dislike of eyes, so
that that scans Yes, yeah, exactly. Most parents are like
watch out or you'll put your eye out, and I'm like, uh,

(03:17):
you'll put your eye out, And that's what we're after, son,
That's that is the goal. I'm a good I'm a
good parent. Speaking of people who are good at things,
today we're talking about the patron saint of what I
call news grifters. Yeah, a little fella you may have
heard of named James O'Keefe. What do you know about Jimmy, Jimmy,

(03:44):
Jamie Keith. What was Jimmy saying the other day? Jimmy
was saying the funniest thing. Now, James O'Keefe is a
he he wants to be a journalist, I think, um,
and he's right, and he like does stunts. Um, and
he got acorn shutdown for a thing that I don't know.

(04:08):
Doesn't seem great, doesn't seem like it was totally fair
to me. Um, But I'm sure you'll tell me about
that maybe. Yeah, I I suspect like what you've just
laid out is kind of what most people going into
this are going to know about James O'Keeffe. And that's
a fair enough, uh sort of like broad picture of
the guy. But today, as we do on this show,

(04:29):
we are going to get deep into the nitty gritty.
So yeah, let's start at the beginning. James Edward O'Keefe,
the third, which is uh uh, speaking of things, you
want to throw throwing stars at that name? Would be
want to throw that name across the room? Yeah? Uh.
He was born in Bergen County in New Jersey on

(04:52):
June four. His father James O'Keeffe the second was an engineer,
and his mother, Deborah, was a physical therapist. James was
oldest of two children. His father had a difficult time
getting along in the business world and eventually left corporate
life behind to become a landlord. He spent much of
his career buying, restoring, and renting out old houses, so O'Keefe's.

(05:12):
James O'Keefe's upbringing was described by his father as conservative,
but not rigidly so. He helped his dad out rebuilding homes,
but during school he leaned distinctly more towards the arts
than jockey endeavors. His favorite classes were theater and art,
and he loved to write from an early age. He
came to hate construction work with his father and frequently
day dreamed about performing on Broadway. Oh so he's like

(05:34):
a blocked creative. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He once wanted to
be an artist and then didn't have the Well yeah,
his dad kept yellow. No, you gotta hammer more nails
into walls. J O three, Daddy, Yeah, I want yeah.
J O three also a contemporary in a number of
ways of our mutual friend Daniel O'Brien um, which which

(05:59):
we're about to get here. Yeah. I heard that they
had a lot of schoolyard battles and they said that
this town isn't big enough for two oh last named people.
Ye like the rap battles. That was actually all chronicled
in the documentary eight Mile, which is about Daniel O'Brien. Yeah. Now,

(06:21):
when he entered New Jersey's Westwood High School, James O'Keeffe
pursued his passions, starring in musicals and learning modern dance.
He was an Avid Boy Scout and eventually reached the
rank of Eagle Scout. But in spite of his dreams
of success on the stage, James took a different route
when it came time for college. He enrolled in Rutgers
University as a philosophy major. Uh and I always feel

(06:44):
a little, uh, I don't know, bad when philosophy majors
end up being shit humans, but it happens. Yeah, It's
one of those things. This is one of the first
things I don't understand about James O'Keefe. He has these dreams,
Like it's not weird for someone to have dreams of
like making it in the arts and then picking a
more practical you know, what is traditionally considered a practical

(07:08):
major in college. It's weird to be like, No, my
dreams of theater are silly. I'm going to become a
philosophy What was the job he was angling for? I
wanted to be a philosophy professor. Maybe. Yeah, if you're
gonna go for something where it's you know, clearly more
about the learning than about, you know, setting yourself up

(07:28):
for a specific career path, why not go into theater.
I don't know either way. Philosophy is a fine degree program.
You don't see too many great, uh people who I
would agree with whose backgrounds are boy Scouts and philosophy major.
I bet that's a that's a gruesome twosome. Well what's
what's well? Yeah, yeah, you're probably right. Actually I was

(07:50):
going to defend the boy Scouts, But then I remember
the last ten years, so maybe I won't do that. Um. Yeah.
For a time, it seemed that James O'Keefe would be
more or less in a political person, or at least
that's how most write ups of O'Keefe's biography describe him.
Politico long form article about him, which is probably the
most detailed biography of James that I've found notes that quote.

(08:12):
When he first became eligible to vote in a presidential
election in two thousand four as a college sophomore, he
stayed home um, which, given the nature of that election,
you could have some pretty strong beliefs and still have
been like then. I mean, that was w W E.
Event man Kerry, what a electric personality. The unstoppable force

(08:38):
meets the immovable object was really the most titanic of struggles. Now,
O'Keefe's real political convictions do seem to have evolved less
out of his childhood upbringing than his status as a
habitual contrarian. When he started taking history in policy courses
at Rutgers, James O'Keeffe found himself surrounded by professors and

(08:58):
students with very liberal political bents. He's claimed in most
interviews that he's done since that their bias against conservatives
infuriated and radicalized him. He also claims that some of
his professors were Marxists and even Stalinists. Judging by the
level of truth telling a parent and the rest of
his career, I have some doubts that his teachers came
out to him as Stalinists with any kind of regularity,

(09:20):
but you don't tend to meet too many of them
in the wild, although it does happen. So pro murder
right in the right circumstances, Well, well we'll support millions
and millions of people being murdered. Yep. Um, I mean
you run into those people on Twitter. But uh, professors, yeah, yeah,

(09:40):
not as often. O'Keefe felt drawn towards journalism while he
was new in college, and he applied for and received
a bi weekly column at the Daily Targum, a student newspaper,
while he was still a freshman. Now, the fact that
this young conservative was able to get a column in
his student newspaper during his freshman year might be seen
as evidence that the campus culture was less biased than

(10:01):
he presents it. Either way, here's yeah, like I wrote
for a school paper in my freshman year of well,
my sophomore year of college, and I didn't get a column,
like because they didn't do that for people. They try
to teach you how to do actual journalism. But yeah,
it seems yeah, so he gets this column a good
lesson about the world at large, and that uh, they're like,

(10:23):
oh my god, we found a conservative who can write.
You guys, everybody over here give him a column. Uh,
and he probably learned a valuable lesson that day that
he's probably not willing to admit to himself even that
he learned. That is the feeling one gets. So I
found a New Jersey dot Com article that wrote up

(10:43):
about sort of his early political writings for The Daily Targum. Uh.
It notes quote his political writings tended to mix two flavors,
biting and lofty. One installment of his column, Feathers of Steel,
railed against what O'Keeffe perceived as a campus culture stacked
against conservatives. Yeah, Feathers of Deal brutal um. Yeah, yeah,
that was his Yeah. So Politico writes that his column

(11:05):
started out as benign but grew more aggressively conservative and
anti left over the months of his first semester. By
the end of that semester, he had been inspired to
write a column titled, pompously enough, the Conservative Manifesto. Uh.
He argued that Rutgers Yeah wow, I can't believe the
entire movement left it up to a college freshman to

(11:26):
right their manifesto. But yeah, it's It's worth noting that
the only other nineteen year old manifesto writers. I'm aware
of shot ups schools and malls. That's uh. In his manifesto,
O'Keefe argued that Rutgers promoted an intellectual imbalance by not
giving conservatism. It's fair do in lessons quote, as a

(11:48):
citizen of this country, it is my right to have
a balanced education. Attention is not focused on the imbalance,
but rather that it's stubborn for people like me to
still remain conservative. Conservative reason is viewed is intrinsically wrong.
This logic is beyond flawed. It's pathetic. Students can't defend
its reason because their fundamental way of being taught is skewed. Yeah, yeah,
so that was that was That was That's kind of

(12:09):
the tenor of his of his articles. It's unfair that
people aren't giving the things I believe equal um weight
in all of the classes that I take right because
every Yeah, that that's very um that that whole like
conservatism should be taught just as much as liberalism is
very uh uh. What's it called relativistic? Morally relativistic. Yeah,

(12:33):
one of those things they're supposed to be mad at,
isn't it. They only support moral relativism when it includes
their beliefs, but not things that they do. Yeah, which
we'll we'll touch on that a little bit in just
a minute here. Um. So Yeah, for reasons that are
still not certain, O'Keeffe's column did not return for a
second semester. He claimed in a political interview that it

(12:55):
was simply not renewed. A Talking Points Memo article I
found on him suggest that he was a stead fired,
but the link they post his back up for that
story does not work. It is unclear exactly what happened.
What is clear is that in two thousand four, James
O'Keefe founded an alternative newspaper of his own titled or
named The Centurion. The political article that i've referenced, which

(13:17):
is critical of O'Keeffe, but in many ways presents the
sympathetic look at the man, describes the creation of The
Centurion as the end result of a long period of
intellectual soul searching by O'Keefe after he lost his column. Quote. Dejected,
he found refuge in journalism, sitting alone for hours each
day in a cafeteria and reading three newspapers, The New
York Times, USA Today, and Newark Star Ledger front to back.

(13:38):
More consequentially, he discovered Rules for Radicals, the nineteen seventy
one book by liberal activists Saul Olynsky, which is required
reading for new hires at Project Veritas. O'Keeffe and true
Olynskey fashion started his own alternative newspaper, The Centurion. It
almost didn't get off the ground. The newspaper needed a
faculty visor to receive school funds, and nobody would sponsor O'Keeffe. Finally,
a history professor in Free Speed absolutist James Livingston agreed

(14:02):
on the condition he'd be given a column. I'm a Marxist,
a socialist, a feminist, and a pragmatic postmodernist. Livingston wrote
in the November two thousand four debut edition. So that
sounds good, right. James O'Keeffe started his own, but he's
willing to let this guy we very much disagrees with
Wright a column, because like he's an open minded dude.
And even though he disagrees with this guy, he appreciates
the help he receives and he's just about free speech.

(14:25):
That's how Politico presents the start of The Centurion. Talking
points memo article I found, which actually interviewed Professor Livingston,
paints a very different story. Quote. Oh yeah, after the
second column, O'Keefe started running a rejoinder right next to
it or below it, he tells us. Unhappy, Livingstone complained,
I thought they had violated our contract. So I said, hey,

(14:47):
you people are conservatives. You people should believe in contracts.
At that point, O'Keefe angrily fired Livingston. By this time,
they had begun to receive funding from various right wing organizations.
He says, we've reported that the Leadership Institute, which fosters
the growth of con servative student media and later employed O'Keefe,
awarded the Centurion a five Balance in Media grant. So
so he fires to keep it going without Livingstone's patronage. Well,

(15:11):
he'd gotten the patronage, which is what he needed to
get it off the ground with funding. So he was
able to dump Livingston and Renege on the contract that
they had made. Uh. And as a reward for kicking
off the only dissenting voice on his newspaper, he received
a Balance in Media award from this conservative Leadership Institute. Yeah,
free speech advocate James O'Keefe. Yeah, So, while he ran

(15:35):
his propaganda magazine, O'Keefe began to realize in two thousand
five that print media was not the future of journalism,
which is a bold stance to have taken. Uh did
you get this intel? I don't know, it's a deep
or something. Yeah, Uh, you know. I I still I
still feel like paper news letters are going to come back.

(15:57):
I bought a printing press the other day. I really
think once this podcasting game collapses, we've got to get
back into the yellow journalism field or transcribing every one
of your episodes and putting it on Well. I have
some hot takes about the sinking of the U. S S.
Missouri that I really um so yeah. O'Keefe started experimenting

(16:20):
with producing video, and the specific kind of video he
wanted to produce was one that would let him indulge
in his growing ambition as a journalist while also exercising
his buried passion for theater. In his junior year, James
O'Keeffe organized a meeting with the Rutger's official where he
pretended with an accomplice to be an Irish American activist
fighting against the stereotyping of his people. O'Keeffe complained that

(16:41):
the school selling lucky charms in the cafeteria was offensive.
In the end of the serial was not removed from campus,
and no effort was undertaken to do so. But the
official O'Keefe taped didn't laugh him out of the room,
and the fact that he took James seriously rather than
mocking him was seen by conservatives as an example of
a school official being preposter reously sensitive. Um The video

(17:02):
gained tens of thousands of yews on YouTube, back at
a time when the site was new enough that those
numbers were impressive. O'keep's partner at the time, Ben wetmore,
said this of James, his background in theater is a
big part of his story. He was fearless. O'Keefe would
go on to claim to this day that Rutgers pulled
Lucky Charms from the shelves after his stunt, even though
that's not true. So that's this is james first undercover

(17:22):
deal is like, so this guy doesn't did that mean
that he got to go undercover with an Irish accent?
I'm gonna guess he really hammed up the Irish accent.
I mean the last name O'Keefe provides some back up there,
But yeah, this all seems like one long excuse for
him to attempt acting in a way that doesn't make

(17:45):
his dad uh look askance at him. Yeah, and where
he can't be criticized for actually being bad at it
because like it didn't. Yeah, whatever happened when he went
into that meeting was going to be at work out
for O'Keeffe wanted, because like, no school official, even receiving
a stupid, like completely inane visit from a student like this,

(18:07):
no school official is going to be like, you're a
dumb ship, like funk off out of my office, kid, Yeah,
that's just not how it works. They're going to be
polite and like listen to your complaints even though they're silly.
And like if the guy through some fluke listened to
O'Keeffe and pulled lucky charms, then he had a huge story.
But if the guy just sat there and took him seriously,

(18:29):
he still had a story that would go viral. So,
like you see, O'Keefe, like from this early age, clearly
understands the kind of developing online right wing media ecosystem
at a like a pretty gut level. So after he
graduated in two thousand six, James O'Keeffe grew mildly infamous
among Rutger students for refusing to leave the school. The

(18:50):
year after he graduated. In two thousand seven, he attended
a student government meeting when it became time for the
members to go into a closed session to elect a
new member of the student government. Every other guest in
the room left, as was tradition and considered polite and decent.
But O'Keefe, who was no longer a student at the school, quote,
refused to leave the room and took out a video
camera videotaping our attempts to have him leave the room.

(19:12):
This person or the person who said this, yeah, claims
that James refused to leaven quote. Ultimately campus police had
to escort him out of the building. So he's basically
trying to like drum up, like, look, I'm being oppressed
as a conservative for being kicked out of this meeting.
Even I was like, no, dude, you don't go here anymore.
That is oh man just refuses to move on. In

(19:34):
many ways, I think that's actually sadder than somebody like
in their mid twenties who still shows up at frat
parties with a case of natty ice, Like at least
that guy is trying to get drunk. Uh, and then
that guy doesn't when people are like, man, maybe you
should move on, take out his camera and be like
they're trying to oppress me. Yeah. Yeah, And I mean

(19:55):
actually that guy probably does get escorted off campus by
security on a number of occasions. It's less sad now. So.
By two thousand nine, James O'Keeffe had finally found a
target that was not on the Rutgers campus Planned Parenthood.
He worked with Lila Rose, a history major from u
c l A with a voice that sounded like a

(20:16):
much younger woman, a girl. In fact, Lila would call
sundry Planned Parenthood offices pretending to be thirteen years old
and saying that she had gotten pregnant with her thirty
one year old boyfriend. Now, obviously, a sexual relationship between
a thirteen year old and thirty one year old is illegal.
It's statutory rape on behalf of the thirty one year old,
and legally, the person at Planned Parenthood on the phone

(20:36):
was required to report this situation to CPS. During the calls,
Lyla Rose maid, she would refuse to give her boyfriend's
name on the grounds that she thought he would get
in trouble. In the videos that like O'Keeffe and Lyla made,
the planned parent had representatives would usually like pause for
a long time, and in some cases they eventually suggested
that like, basically, it seems like the planned parenthood representatives

(20:56):
felt sorry for this girl. A few of them would
make suggestions like maybe just don't specify the age of
the person who got you pregnant so you can get healthcare. Um.
But in other cases, like they would tell her things
like you know, you you should really tell your mother,
or like we have to follow the law, and we
actually like we we need to know the name of
this person so we can report it. So basically they

(21:17):
uncovered a mix of things. A couple of planned parenthood
representatives who did not do what they would legally required
to do. An other planned parent had representatives who absolutely
did UM. In all cases, you know, those people were
kind of reacting by the fact that a young girl
claiming to be in crisis was coming to them for healthcare. UM.
It's like baiting, baiting an animal trap with empathy. It's like, Yeah,

(21:40):
these stupid humans in their empathy, let's use that to
make them technically violate a law. Yeah, that baiting an
animal trap with empathy is a really good way to
describe the only thing James O'Keeffe actually knows how to do.
Like that's his whole career and we could actually in
the episode there, um but there's that. There's a lot

(22:00):
more frustra Yeah yeah, but like that's that's the basic
tactic is like you you bait the trap with with empathy,
and like when people show a human reaction that violates
the law technically, then you've got them. And you know
they had them, and staffers got fired at Planned Parenthood
even though no actual services were ever rendered or like

(22:24):
like seriously attempted to be rendered. Um, this was pretty
damning and like cut about a million dollars in funding
out of Planned Parenthood from a couple of different states
in total. Um, so they did a significant amount of
damage to Planned Parenthood through these videos. Uh yeah yeah,
so you know Leilah's partner in this and unserved underserved

(22:46):
people seeking here, that's what you get for trying to
help a teenager in crisis. Uh and maybe not yet
dotting all of the eyes and the tease because you're
worried about this person seeking a back Alley abortion. And
it also could have been a situation where you are
just kind of working with them for now because you
know they need the help, and planning on finding a
way to get them help for the fact that they're

(23:09):
being sexually abused later like it doesn't I don't know.
And that's definitely how it seems from like the the
extended conversations, like there were some of the people were
maybe trying to work with her for a little while
to build up enough trust to get the information out
of her. Um. Yeah, it just seems like one of
those things where you can't ever have the complete picture

(23:32):
of like what these people were planning on doing, what
was going on behind the scenes of the phone call. Um.
So it's just very easy to paint a picture that
makes the people look bad. Yeah, especially makes the people
look bad to people who already assume these folks are monsters,
like that's a key part of the story. Yeah, they're not. Yeah.

(23:52):
So anyway, that's James O'Keeffe's first big success. And speaking
of big successes, Jack, you know what doesn't strip hundreds
of thousands of dollars in funding from contraceptive care sponsors. Yep,
The people who sponsor our show. Yeah, unless it's coke Industries,

(24:14):
in which case they don't think are culpable. Um, yeah,
maybe Coke Industries they just uh, they're down a man,
so they may not be putting out ads with as
much frequencies anymore. Yeah, r I P are our primary
sponsor products. And we're back, and we're talking about James

(24:42):
O'Keefe and his crusade to destroy Planned parenthood with Lilo Rose. Um. So,
as a result of their successful uh grifft con whatever
you want to call it, investigative journalism, uh Lila secured
fifty dollars in funding for an anti abortion charity. The
Los Angeles Times article I found on the matter credits

(25:03):
this escapade to O'Keeffe's love of Slo Lensky's Rules for Radicals. Quote.
Among Olynsky's most famous admonitions is one that O'Keeffe said
he and Rose took to heart. Make the enemy live
up to its own book of rules. O'Keefe twenty four
said he and Rose have received criticism from some of
their associates for using deception. It's a pretty complicated ethical issue,
he said, but we believe there is a genocide and
nobody cares, and you can use these tactics and it's justified.

(25:26):
Rosen O'Keeffe visited their first clinic u c l A.
S Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center in two
thousand six. They videotaped an employee telling them some quote
pretty bad things, said O'Keefe, including that the fetus is
a collection of cells. That's what set us in motion.
These videos, O'Keefe added, are not supposed to necessarily show
people breaking laws. They're supposed to change hearts and minds.
M hmm yeah, so uh, subscribing a fetus as a

(25:52):
collection of cells, Yeah, it's the sad thing. Was a
was a bad thing. Was a genocide. I remember when
you know Adolf Hitler uh described defetus as a collection
of cells. How that was the inciting inside of the
Holocaust or the first sign? Yeah, and how the Bosnian

(26:15):
genocide launched was launched at a Planned Parenthood in Sarajevo. Yes, uh,
yeah they didn't the founder of Planned Parenthood have some
really problematic Oh, absolutely absolutely, I think it was what
was it was Margaret Margaret Singer. Um, yeah, she was.
She was not a good person. I mean and it's
one of those things. Like it's the same thing if
you look back at a lot of abolitionists, they were

(26:36):
unbelievably racist and a significant number of them just wanted
all the black people to go back to Africa. Doesn't
mean they were wrong in the main thing they were
crusading for. It just means that like people were worse
back then, like by and large, which doesn't you know,
excuse the bad stuff, but play Parenthood is not a

(26:57):
eugenicist organization in the Year of Our Lord twenty nine now, um,
this particular scam was not a pure win for James O'Keeffe.
At the time, he'd been working for the Leadership Institute,
that conservative organization that had been formed to see the
world with right ring grifters like James. They invested time
into him when he was in college, and now he
was traveling around the country helping them find more recruits.

(27:19):
That's how he'd met Lila Rose. But there was fallout
from the planned Parenthood video see California law requires both
parties to be aware of a recording, and since O'Keefe
hadn't followed the law during that U c l l
A caper, he got slapped with a cease and assist
and the original video was taken down. Now, this didn't
stop it from spreading or stop the damage that was
done to Planned Parenthood, but it looked bad enough that

(27:41):
the Leadership Institute fired James O'Keefe from his cushy gig. Fortunately,
James quickly found a new focus for his time and attention,
a journalism student from Florida International University named Hannah Giles.
Now Politico again paints a pretty sanitized view of Giles.
It describes her as just a simple journalism major who
spu at an ACORN office during a jog, saw school

(28:03):
kids waiting for a bus next to a bunch of
prostitutes that were in front of the office, and became
disturbed by that. ACORN is, of course, the Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now, or at least was, as
that name would suggest, They were an alliance of grassroots
organizations working for greater social and economic justice. ACORN became
something of a conservative bug bear in two thousand eight

(28:24):
when several employees were caught filing fake voter applications during
voter registration drives. Now, these employees were caught and fired
and there's no evidence that any fake people actually voted,
just that the voters were registered essentially as part of
a scheme by the workers to make themselves look more effective. Uh,
the offending employees were again fired, but this didn't stop
a narrative from developing that Acorn had gotten Obama elected

(28:46):
via massive voter fraud. Now, in fairness to the right,
there was also a scandal when the Acorn's founder embezzled
nearly a million dollars. So I'm not going to pretend
that the organization was spotless. There were reasons to eye them,
but in the wake of our first black president's election,
they became escapegoat for the refusal of certain Republicans to
believe that most of America did not want to McCain
Palin presidency. So that's kind of the background here. So

(29:09):
Hannah Giles is running past the Acorn office and she
sees all this depravity around and she claims that it
inspired her to launch a scheme. She decided to dress
up like a prostitute and ask for help getting public
housing so she could run a brothel. Public housing assistance
was another thing that Acorn did, and it's something that
received federal funds for so if she was able to
actually capture them helping her to try to do this,

(29:31):
she'd be able to claim that Acorn was using government
funds to help and prostitution. But Giles was nervous. She'd
never done anything like this in her life, and she
wasn't sure what would happen if she got caught. She
told some of her friends about her idea, and one
of them suggested that she reach out to James O'Keefe.
It should turned out that Giles sort of knew James already.
A year earlier, he'd sent her an unsolicited Facebook message

(29:53):
saying you're pretty cute. Too bad you live in Florida. Um. Yeah. Now,
she hadn't been down to Fox for some reason, but
she had kept up an occasional it didn't it didn't work,
yeah that line. She didn't respond, I don't need to
live in Florida, which would have been probably what he
was hoping for. Yeah, yeah, I think that's what he
was hoping for. Um. But she did keep up a

(30:15):
correspondence with her uh, and so she had his contact
information and reached out to him in June of two
thousand nine to pitch him her idea. I'm gonna quote
now from Politico. When he arrived in Washington a month
later to pick her up and commence the operation, Giles
came outside to meet O'Keeffe but found him frazzled unable
to extract his credit card from a parking meter. He's
definitely unique. I've not met many people like him. Giles laughs. Yeah,

(30:40):
this is something you run into a lot with stories
about O'Keefe from his colleagues and friends that they'll repeatedly
note that he has a kind of a nearly pathological
inability to handle normal daily living tasks, like he lived
with his parents into his late twenties, which I don't
want to shame, but in this particular case, again sat
on the things his friends say, it seems like he

(31:02):
never kind of learned how to be an adult. Yeah,
he just I'm just figuring him just like being stuck
on a on a parking meter for just like yanking
on it. Uh, poor James. Yeah, he figured out how
to grift early on and uh and never learned how
to do his laundry. Like that's the kind of guy

(31:23):
we're talking about. Uh. So we'll talk a little bit
more about that later. Because it it becomes more relevant.
In a bit, I'm gonna quote again from Politico's coverage
of the Acorn caper. Over the next two months, O'Keefe
and Giles visited Acorn offices in eight cities. The script
was the same. The pimp and prostitute would ask for
housing to run a brothel, then push the line of
questioning into the absurd and blatantly illegal, then wait for

(31:45):
Acorn officials to take debait. Plenty of them did. O'Keefe's
most effective gambit, claiming he would be housing under age
El Salvadoran girls in Baltimore and employees said he could
claim them as in his dependence and get a child
tax credit. In San Bernardino, California, and an employee said
they could categorize the brothel as a group home to
stay off law enforcements radar. In other offices, Giles was
instructed on how to falsify tax forms. So O'Keeffe went

(32:07):
live with highly edited videos showcasing this behavior, and it
hit Acorn like an atom bomb. Their federal funding was
cut and the bad publicity effectively killed the organization in
the United States. Now, this much is beyond arguing O'Keefe
and Giles absolutely ignited a media firestorm that wiped out
the organization, but the question of how much malfeasance they
actually uncovered with an Acorn is very much up for debate.

(32:30):
Politico's article takes the tax that they were basically correct
in their claims, although they exaggerated things somewhat. They cite
Clark Hoite, public editor for the New York Times, who
viewed the unedited footage. White wrote, quote, the sequence of
some conversations was changed. Some workers seemed concerned for Giles
when advising her to get legal help. In two cities,
Acorn workers called the police. But the most damning words

(32:50):
matched the transcripts and the audio and do not seem
out of context now. Politico notes that O'Keeffe and Giles
were slapped with various lawsuits and that James had to
settle for a hun a thousand dollars with one San
Diego employee who was fired for his remarks on camera,
even though he called the police after the group left
the office. Um, but yeah. Politico's coverage of the controversy
basically fits to a trend within centrist and liberal media

(33:13):
of writing about O'Keeffe, They go out of their way
to be fair to him and usually wind up deciding
to validate or at least partly validate what he's reported on. Now,
that's what I mean, only so we keep coming back
to Politico describing him, and I feel like Politico explicitly
like their mission statement as we want to be the
espn of politics. Right, yeah, I think that's basically the goal.

(33:37):
And so that that idea, that mission statement is premised
on the idea that politics is a contest with two
equal sides and yes, so uh yeah, that I don't
know that that's just it's that centrist bias that ends
up having a right wing bias because it forces them

(34:00):
to give the right the benefit of the doubt in
all cases, so that like they're seen as a legitimate foil.
That's exactly what keeps happening, and particularly happened to O'Keeffe
and his early career and the political article I do
need to keep quoting because it's got some of the
best background on O'Keeffe's early life and personality that you're

(34:21):
going to run into. But it is it's very much
contains this problem. Now in a little bit of fairness
to Politico, They're not the only people who report that way.
The New York Times magazine also published a big piece
on O'Keefe a few years back, and they all they
do the same thing Politico did. The writer Zev chaff Its,
glosses over very important facts. And I'm gonna quote now
from a write up in The Atlantic that criticizes both pieces.

(34:43):
Quote the mortal sin that O'Keeffe commits in the Acorn
videos is misleading the audience. His videos are presented to
the public in less than honest ways that go beyond
normal selectivity. Instead of quoting a former New York Times
public editor who wrote two columns about the Acorn controversy
as his expert source, chaff Its should have consulted the
report from the California Attorney General's office. The staffers who
wrote it, interviewed everyone involved, saw all the raw video footage,

(35:06):
and issued a lengthy accounting with detailed descriptions of the
misleading edits O'Keeffe made. Now. One of those misleading edits
was mentioned briefly in the Political article. It's the story
of Juan Carlos Vera, an employee at Acorn San Diego,
office and the guy who successfully sued James for a
hundred thousand dollars quote in the Acorn videos that appears
that Vera is willing to be an accomplice in the

(35:27):
made up smuggling plot. O'keith may well have thought so
at the time. According to the California Attorney General's investigation. However,
Vera did not know what to make of the parrot.
First tried to elicit as much information as possible from
them so that he could contact law enforcement, and called
his cousin, a police officer as soon as they left.
Phone records confirmed the call to his cousin, and Vera
was soon directed to a San Diego police officer who

(35:47):
specializes in human smuggling. He spoke to that police officer too.
As Vera was cooperating with police, the Acorn sting videos
began to appear, portraying him as a willing child smuggler.
He was fired from Acorn during the pr fallout and
has since lilt a lawsuit against O'Keefe and Giles. And
this gets to the core of the issues around O'Keefe.
He absolutely found some evidence of bad behavior in Acorn,

(36:08):
but it wasn't nearly enough to confirm his preconceived notions
about systemic abuses in the organization. So he lied to
present that image. And even when he didn't lie, he
exhibited terrible journalistic practices when you when you do something
like this, when you get an undercover recording of someone
that seems to show them breaking the law in this way.
Once you've gotten the recording, the next thing you do,
if you're a real journalist, is you confront them and

(36:30):
the organization with the evidence. And if O'Keeffe had done
that before going public, then they would have been able
to say, no, actually, he was just trying to get information.
Here's the evidence that he followed the law and was
actually trying to stop this um. But James didn't do
that because he's not a real journalist, because the truth
isn't on his side as much as he wants it

(36:50):
to be, and also because he's a a failed actor
theater kid who he like dressed in a like shitty
Halloween in pimp costume. No, that's a lie. So he
dressed when he went to Acorn actually with Hannah jo
or with Giles, he was dressed in a suit. He
did pretend to be a pimp, but he was dressed

(37:11):
in a like a normal person suit. But when he
showed up in media appearances on Fox News and the like,
he wore a flamboyant pimp costume. And he claimed that
that's what he'd been wearing when he walked into Acorn's offices.
But that was just a lie. Um, Yeah, because he's
a liar. Yeah, yeah, he's a liar who wishes he
had been good at theater and could could dress up

(37:33):
for a living. Yeah. Yeah. Uh so obviously, you know,
in spite of the rampant journalistic malpractice that this is
evidence of Uh, this whole scam you know, launched James
O'Keeffe into the stratosphere of the conservative media. Uh. He
was suddenly one of the most popular people on the right. Uh,

(37:55):
and you know it made his career now. O'Keefe told
Politico that all this attend shin made him deeply uncomfortable
because he was a quote lifelong introvert. But when Politico
interviewed Hannah Giles, she had different recollections. Quote he ate
it up. I actually became pretty repulsed and disgusted by
the conservative movement. I saw a lot of hypocrisy. They
thought because I exposed Acorn that I must be some

(38:16):
right wing fan girl. But I dropped off, I stopped going.
James couldn't stop. So that makes Hannah seem like maybe
a decent person who just got caught up in this.
I should point out that the Politico article uh did
not go into any detail about who Hannah Giles is.
But Hannah is a news grifter as well. Up until

(38:36):
two thousand seventeen, she was the front woman for the
American Phoenix Foundation, an organization aimed at doing the same
sort of shady undercover journalism that O'Keeffe engages in. They
accrued eight hundred hours of recordings of Texas state legislators
in the hopes of finding some dirt. It failed to
get anything meaningful. Then they were sued after several of
their top donors complained that the APF had not informed
them that its whole purpose was to secretly record lawmakers.

(39:00):
I should also note that Hannah's dad is Doug Giles,
a conservative pundit who writes columns for the website town
Hall with titles like w w j D who would
Jesus torture? That article takes the angle that actually torture
is awesome. H He also has a major penchant for
writing lurid articles about black on white crime. Um. So again,
Hannah Giles is not as Politico presented her. However, the

(39:23):
fact that she has dissociated herself from James O'Keeffe and
the present day ought to be evidence of the fact
that he has fallen from grace. So let's talk about
how that happened. UM. In January a few thousand ten,
James O'Keeffe decided to go after Senator Mary Landrew of Louisiana.
The apparent larger plan was to stop the Affordable Care
Act from passing in Congress, and it's unclear how they

(39:46):
plan to do that, but one of O'Keefe's colleagues at
the time claims that he made a spur of the
moment decision to prank Senator Landrew instead. The tea party
years who lived in her district had complained that she
was blocking their calls, so O'Keefe hatched a plan to
see if that was true by having his men dress
up as telephone repairman. None of them actually brought tools
to the office, and they were busted immediately O'Keefe and

(40:07):
his men were charged with entering a federal building under
false pretenses, jailed and convicted. They spent three years under probation. Yeah,
he is a convicted criminal. Yes. Uh, here's what Politico
wrote about this in two thousand eighteen. What O'Keeffe does
not regret as the sting itself, He says, the entire
episode being jailed, having a judge discard video footage that

(40:28):
could have exonerated them in the three years probation enlightened
him to the corrupt regime we all live under. Yes,
the colluptor corrupt regime where a humble journalist isn't allowed
to pretend to be a telephone repair man and enter
an office under false pretenses. I thought that's how all
journalism was conducted, isn't that. Yeah, it's it's something addressing

(40:53):
or something and then yeah, I mean, to be entirely fair,
some very important undercover journalism has been carry it out
by journalists who lied about who they were in order
to enter and be able to record things like factory
farms and other like like, like criminal endeavors and stuff
like that. That absolutely good journalism has been done by

(41:14):
people who have um entered situations under false pretenses. Um, so,
I don't want to claim that's never been justified in
the history of journalism, just that O'Keeffe didn't have any
sort of clear uh, like they see if she was
blocking his calls, So he wanted to see if she

(41:34):
was Yeah, if he was blocking tea party years calls. Yeah,
so he Yeah, it was a dumb scale yeah. Um yeah.
So it does seem that O'Keeffe didn't learn anything from
the punishment he received for that. Later in two thousand ten,
CN and correspondent Abbie Boudreau reached out to James O'Keeffe

(41:54):
to interview him. Now, by this point, he created the
nonprofit organization Project Veritas, which is dedicated to carrying out
more of the kind of skullduggery he had enacted upon Acorn.
The success of the Acorn project had flushed Project Veritas
with donor cash, and James and his new team were
eager to spend it. So, rather than just giving an
interview like a normal person, he decided to use Abby

(42:15):
Boudreau's visit as an excuse to take down the fake
news CNN. He and his team hatched a scheme to
usher Boudreau onto a boat and into the presence of
James O'Keeffe, who would be waiting below decks with a
hidden camera. Planning documents obtained by CNN stated that James
would be surrounded by quote, a condom, jar, dildo's posters,
paintings of naked women, and fuzzy handcuffs. That sounds like

(42:37):
real journalism, yea. His plan was to lure a CNN
reporter to who just wanted to interview around a bunch
of like dildos, and yeah, he would. He wanted to
lure her, want her onto a boat where he would
be waiting with sex gear, presumably to try and uh
seduce her or something, or at least just make her

(42:58):
look awkward and bad in a video. So his his
plan to uncover the mainstream media's bias was to sexually
harass somebody who was a member of the mainstream media
and just yea, and who was trying to do her
job and let him talk about his beliefs and his activities.
Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's pretty gross. I've understood what his

(43:22):
plot was up to this point and all the all
his grifts, but that that was very confusing. You run
into this with O'Keefe. His grifts are a mix of like, Okay,
well maybe I think that's unethical, but I see why
you went after that person or tried that, and then
and ship like this where it's like, what the funck
was the best case scenario here? Right? Yeah, I feel

(43:45):
like sexually assaulted woman. He's not good at taking down
the mainstream media. Like that's where he gets in trouble
because he's like, his his idea of how you do
journalism is so dumb that he just assumes that those
of the rules everybody's playing by. And yeah, yeah, he's
he's actually taken the opposite lesson out of Salo Lensky's

(44:08):
rules for radicals. You know, Lynsky says, make the make
the essentially like make the people you're fighting play by
their own rules. Um, But he assumes the media plays
by the rules that he plays by. Yeah, it's like, no,
we're like, that's not how things work. Play by the
rules of a nineteen thirties Warner Brothers cartoon. I feel

(44:31):
like that's those are the rules he plays by. Yes, yes,
we're gonna talk more about this. Uh, this scheme and
some schemes that make this look downright well planned. But
you know what is really well planned? Jack, oh man,
I can't even begin to imagine. It's the products and
services that support this show. Yeah, they are. They're the

(44:51):
most well planned. They are very incidable planning products. We're back, Jesus,
where did we go? We? Uh that we went to
the place that all podcasters go and during ads at
the dark Void, where we we spend most of our

(45:14):
time suspend most animation. Yep, most listeners don't really realize
the horrible price we pay for the uh, the wonder
of being able to cast pods. Mhm alright, A question
for you. So my last name is O'Brien, and that's
because I am uh that my ancestors were followers of

(45:39):
a king named Brian Burrew. So we were you know,
of Brian O'Brien and Keief is uh weed crystals do
you think? Yeah? So do you think his like his
ancestors were stoners And if so, shouldn't he be cooler?
They were followers of Chief Keith? Yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah,

(46:00):
so shouldn't Key be cooler? You would think so. But
you know, even stoner king's need a brutal exploitative enforcers,
and that's what the O'Keeffe clan has historically done. Yeah,
it's tragic, but if you do, I will tell listeners,
if you scrape a pipe against his skin, you will

(46:20):
get a full bowl of dank crystals. So give it
a shot, if you if you would counter James O'Keeffe
in the wild, chief that yeah, Chief that keif so. Uh,
we're talking about James's attempt to lure a female journalist
into a sex vote for unclear reasons that do not

(46:41):
seem to meet the definition of journalism. I I you know,
I'm not an expert on what journey. I never went
to j school. Um, but I don't think this is journalism. Yeah,
that's what they teach the Atlantic Further rights of this
incident quote. O'Keefe later claimed he didn't approve of such
props in any case. Once he got her down there alone,
he planned to make her uncomfortable by attempting to seduce her.

(47:03):
Then he'd somehow humiliate Boudreau and embarrassed CNN by releasing
footage of the bizarre incident. It was averted at the
last minute when a female member of O'Keeffe's team became
uncomfortable with the plan and tipped off the reporter to
what was intended. So it is nice to note that
people with souls occasionally do work with James O'Keeffe. But
I was assuming she like became uncomfortable and raised the

(47:26):
raised a like logical point of view with him. No,
she like had to She was like, well, there's no
way I'm convincing him that this is a just banana
funck idea, like we should I I have to like
just blow it up. Yeah, And that that is made
very clear by later things we're going to talk about.
You don't question James O'Keeffe when you work for him.

(47:49):
I really do suspect that this woman's only option to
stop this horror from happening was to like go to
the hurtist and say, you're actually in danger. Has he
ever tried had to seduce Bill Clinton by dressing up
and like putting lipstick on and like the way bugs Bunny,
like girl Bugs Bunny is used to seduce. You know,

(48:09):
I would actually respect him if he tried to do
that that that would be legitimately funny, wouldn't still would
not be journalism, but would be very funny, but it
seems like it's in the same universe, the same logic.
I think the difference is that Bill Clinton is a
powerful person who would be able to strike back at him,
and he thought that Abby wouldn't that like seeing and

(48:32):
would or under the bus the way everyone throws people
under the bus. Who O'Keefe goes after. Um, And I
don't think O'Keefe O'Keefe never punches up really. Um. Yeah,
he tends to punch people that he knows don't won't
really be able to defend themselves in a meaningful way.
So he's a hero. Yeah, so he's a hero. Yeah,

(48:53):
like all of our heroes. We we remember when Superman
who was famous for beating up and murder during people
weaker than him. Um, that's why he's a hero. Batman
who actually, that is what Batman is, all right, Yeah, yeah,
he's he's a bit like Batman. Um. By two thousand

(49:17):
and ten, James O'Keeffe was firmly under the wing of
a fellow named Andrew Brightbart, who was a right wing
journalist and founder of brightbart dot com and also a
massive cocaine addict, which I state because it's funny not
because it's any mark against him. You know, you're not
a bad person just because you like cocaine. Um. Although
Andrew Brightbart was a bad person. Um. Yeah. Now, Andrew

(49:41):
was a major force in publicizing O'Keeffe's early work and
legitimizing him in conservative media. But even he had to
partly disavow James O'Keeffe after this incident, saying, quote from
what I've read about this script, though not executed, it
is patently gross and offensive. It's not his detractors to
whom he owes this public airing, it's to his legion
of support, which I would argue that maybe the person

(50:03):
James odin or an apology to the most was Abby Boudreau,
but just his conservative followers, just just his conservative fuck.
Fuck Abby Boudreau for her un ethical crime of trying
to interview him and treat him like a serious person. Um,
how dare she so? Over the next several years, James
O'Keefe would carry out numerous other schemes. Most of them

(50:26):
were complete flops, like his attempt to seduce Boudreaux. Others
were more successful, like Project Veritas is expose a of
bias at NPR. The basic story is that in two
thousand eleven, several Project Veritas employees pretending to be Muslim
activists managed to wangle a meeting with the CEO of NPR,
Ron Schiller. The edited version of the video made it
look as if Schiller was expressing dismissive disgust with conservatives,

(50:49):
and includes a clip of him saying that liberals might
be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives. But like
every Project Veritas video, it's selectively edited out context and
the full version of the clip. Immediately after saying that,
Ron Schiller had added that he used to be a
Republican and was proud of his past as a Republican.
The edited video includes clips of Schiller saying that the

(51:10):
Republican Party has been hijacked by the Tea Party and
made it look as if he called Tea Party r's racist,
But the full video makes it clear that Schiller was
in fact not describing his own views, but talking about
the way several of his wealthy Republican friends thought about
the Tea Party. Um so again, it's yeah, completely cutting
out the context now, despite the things that he's being

(51:31):
accused of saying are accurate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah, sure, yeah.
Despite the deceptive editing, Ron Schiller was forced to resign
from his post at NPR, but James O'Keeffe suffered some
blowback to when it was discovered how dishonest the editing
had been. Glennbeck had been a major backer of James O'Keeffe,

(51:52):
blew up on him and disavowed him. Over the next
near decade, most of James O'Keefe's successes have followed this
basic pattern. He puts out a video purporting to show
something damning. It provokes a backlash, which brings a conservative
rage mob down on James's target. Damage is done, and
then it's later revealed that large portions of what Project
Veritas claimed were lies or distortions. Um James had a

(52:13):
string of notable successes. In the two thousand twelve election,
One of his reporters managed to push Senator Patrick morn
into joking about forging documents to vote in the name
of dead people. Moran resigned as a result of Project
Veritas's coverage. O'Keeffe also caused a sensation in the right
wing media when he and several of his reporters were
able to get the ballots of other people in states
with no voter id laws, no one actually voted with

(52:36):
fraudulent ballots, but Project Veritas succeeded in getting a couple
of Democratic staffers to say things that they later had
to resign. Over All of these schemes had the same
problem as every James O'Keeffe operation, but they were undoubtedly
effective at pushing a narrative in the right wing media. Now,
the fact that so many of his schemes do damage
has kept Project Veritas and O'Keeffe very well funded. In

(52:57):
two thousand seventeen, the year before that Politico Are to
Coal was published, he raised more than seven million dollars.
In January of two eighteen, he's turned his sights to
Twitter to release an undercover investigation of the sites purported
bias against conservatives. According to Politico Quote, the substance was intriguing,
if not explosive. One former employee touted the practice of
shadow banning accounts based on ideological content, while a higher

(53:20):
ranking current official admitted that employees perused the erotic images
exchanged by users. And yet the mere fact that O'Keeffe's
outfit had infiltrated the social media giant was caused for
celebration on the right. So nothing O'Keeffe found was evidence
of systemic bias against conservatives, but that didn't actually matter.
Project veritas is reporting fueled the almost religious belief among
the American right that they're being persecuted by someone. Um. Yeah. Now,

(53:46):
as you'd expect, James has had more missus than hits
over the years. Most of these misses disappear quickly and
without much fanfare, but in the fall of two thousand seventeen,
he and his team suffered a particularly delightful funk up.
A Project Veritas undercover report, Jamie Phillips reached out to
The Washington Post and claimed falsely that Alabama Senate candidate
Roy Moore had statutorily raped her as a teenager and

(54:08):
then forced her to have an abortion. The goal of
this lie was to discredit all the other women who
had reached out about Moore's tendency to assault teenage girls,
but Jamie Phillips forgot to clean up her digital footprint
well enough before going to the Washington Post, and the
Post reporters, being actual journalists, did some basic googling and
found a go fund Me campaign she'd set up to
raise money to help her move to New York and

(54:30):
quote work in the conservative media movement to combat the
lies and deceit of the liberal MSN. Ms M. Yeah, yeah,
they're bad at this. The Post subsequently published several articles
about what a bunch of bullshitty, bullshitters James O'Keeffe and
his band of reporters were. O'Keefe lashed back at The
Washington Post in public publishing a video titled Breaking Undercover

(54:50):
Video Exposes Washington Posts Hidden Agenda. All they actually had
was a recording of a Post reporter admitting that articles
about President Trump got lots of readers, which is not
exactly damn it. Wow, yeah, it's basically what they get.
Caught him saying that objectively true thing that is yeah, okay, yes,
they caught the Post admitting that the president of the

(55:12):
United States was a popular topic for their political articles.
Wasn't there also like a thing where they were like
videotaping each other, like doing a video taping. You want
videotaping you like a standoff thing. I don't think a
standoff occurred, but they like they both purported to have
the goods on the other. Only one of them actually

(55:32):
got anything, which was the post because again all the posts. Yeah,
it's it was frustrating. Um, and it looked bad for
James O'Keefe. It was something he was legitimately unable to spin.
According to Politico quote, he took it hard. Friends described
the New Jersey native as manically driven an extremely sensitive
to criticism, and several said the botched post job was

(55:52):
the lowest they'd seen him, lower even than his two
thousand ten incarceration following the failed attempt to discover telephonic
misdeeds in Louisiana office of then Senator Mary Landrew So
must being this is the saddest we've ever seen him. Yeah,
he was down in Yeah, he was. They did I

(56:13):
didn't succeed in making women complaining about their sexual assault
at the hands of an adult when they were children.
Uh look incredible lying. Uh boo hoo, poor me. Yeah,
that's that's what his lowest point is is his failure to,
uh discredit victims of sexual assault. What do you think

(56:35):
are sorry you you mentioned that they make seven million
dollars or they get seven million dollars, So their budget
is like seven million dollars a year. Yeah, yeah, And
O'Keefe reportedly gets somewhere at least at least in two
thousand seventeen, he was getting around three hundred thousand dollars
a year is a salary. Oh well, that's fair. I mean, yeah,
I learned. I mean, look at what he's done. But

(56:56):
like we've run editorial institutions before like that, there's no
how is he spending that much money on nothing? They
have a lot of failures and they have a very
expensive office. Wow. I mean, like it is one of
those things where it's like if I had uh seventy

(57:17):
thousand dollars in funding a year for journalism, like I
could do seven or eight trips to places like Syria
in a year and put out stuff Like I don't
know where they spend this money. But that's my general
issue with so much of like these media. It's like
what do you do? What do you use that fucking
money for? Like they're just trying to hammer the reality

(57:39):
into the truth that they want to exist and it's
just not working, and they pay themselves like kings to
do it. I Mean, the problem is it does work,
it just isn't journalism. But it's it's really frustrated to
me because like one of the stories that came out
this year that like obviously didn't get any play. Is
that a great French for and correspondent who'd done a

(58:01):
lot of great conflict journalism killed himself this year because
he couldn't get work and couldn't do the job that
he loved doing anymore. Um, And like across the world,
a lot of really good foreign correspondence and conflict journalists
have like quit or gone into pr or like moved
state side and had to stop doing the job they
love to do some sort of you know, essentially less

(58:23):
valuable work. Um, because there's just no money in it. Meanwhile,
James O'Keeffe has seven million dollars to attempt to sexually
assault CNN reporters. Yeah, it's frustrating that. I mean, it's
how it seems to be, how how the country works.
Yeah uh quote. The Post debacle also might have marked

(58:45):
a point of no return and keeps relationship with the media.
A self described journalist, O'Keefe looks in the mirror and
sees a muckraker in the mold of Upton, Sinclair or
Nelly bly taking bold, unconventional steps to expose what no
mainstream reporter ever could and he's apparently obsessed with good
undercover journalism, like the bathrooms and Project Veritas are covered
with like news like headlines and stuff from like a

(59:08):
centuries worth of great undercover expose a s of like
you know, like Upton Sinclair's work and whatnot. So he
really does seem to have a deep love of that
kind of journalism, but no idea of what made the
people who were actually good at it and actually doing
good using those tactics good. Um yeah yeah uh. In

(59:32):
a related note, James O'Keeffe is also a big fan
of frequent Bastards pod side character Alex Jones. H He's
been on Info Wars a number of times, and info
Wars regularly has people who have been Project Veritas interview
subjects on as guests. When Politico pressed James O'Keeffe about this,
he insisted, I'm not going to say a negative word

(59:52):
about Alex Jones. This was because, you know o'keep's words,
the rules of engagement are different when you're an insurgent.
We're insurgents who have an existential threat against us by
the government, the system which seeks to shut us down,
and a complacent and corrupt media, and that world. We
retain the right as Veritas to hold the side accountable
that won't hold itself accountable, and we consider Alex Jones
an ally in that fight. O'Keefe significant impact on American

(01:00:16):
politics and the millions of dollars he's received to fund
his operations have led to a consequent explosion in his ego,
and that Politico interview he describes Project Veritas as one
third CIA, one third James Bond, and one third Mike Wallace. Yeah,
that's that's frustrating to hear. Uh. He goes out of
his way to make a good impression on interviewers and

(01:00:36):
in his Fox appearances, but it's also clear to observers,
and backed up by former employees, that James O'Keeffe is
a monstrous dick and a nightmare to work with. Quote
from Politico. During my time with O'Keefe and his fresh
faced posse, I never once witnessed any of them challenge him.
O'Keefe is known to be brutal on his employees. They
are by and large a collection of young yesmen. So
that's cool, Yeah, and I think all men. After the

(01:01:00):
one woman he hired, uh exposed his scheme to again
sexually harass a journalist. Now, James views himself as a
real reporter, a trailblazing muck raker in the mold of
Upton Sinclair. He's furious that mainstream reporters have not recognized
his brilliance. This desire has been stymied by the fact that,
in some ways James O'Keefe is a very, very dumb man.

(01:01:22):
I mentioned, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm glad you just
came out and kind of said it. Yeah, we're about
to give the best evidence of that, even better evidence
than not being able to work a parking meter, Like,
because so he was picking her up at the train station,

(01:01:44):
so that suggests that she was, you know, in there
waiting for him and then like I had to leave
and find him outside, just stuck there and unable to
operate the parking meter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she might have
gotten where she was going faster if she'd just taken

(01:02:04):
the bus um. So yeah. In two sixteen, James O'Keefe
attempted to take down George Soros. On March sixteenth, he
and some colleagues placed a call to Yeah, oh, it's
even better than you're thinking it's gonna be on March sixteenth,
he and some colleagues placed to call to Dana Garratti
of the Open Society Foundation. She didn't pick up, so

(01:02:27):
they left her a voicemail, a seven minute voicemail. I'm
gonna quote from remember I'm gonna quote from the New
Yorker's coverage. Now quote Hey, Dana. A voice began. The
color sounded to her like an older American male. My
name is Victor Kesh. I'm a Hungarian. I'm a Hungary Victory. Yeah,

(01:02:51):
I'm a Hungarian American who represents a foundation that would
like to get involved with you and aid what you
do in fighting for um European values. He asked Garates
for the name of someone he could talk to about
supporting you guys and coordinating with you or on some
of your efforts. Requesting a callback, he left a phone
number with a nine four area code Westchester County. She
heard a click, a pause, and then a second male voice.

(01:03:14):
The person who had introduced himself as Kesh, said, don't
say anything before I hang up the phone, and then
the voicemail continued for several minutes. Kesh, who was actually O'Keefe,
could be clearly heard talking to his subordinates. What needs
to happen, he said, is for someone other than me
to make a hundred phone calls like that to Sorrows,
to his employees, and to the Democracy Alliance, a club
of wealthy liberal political donors that Sorrows helped to found,

(01:03:36):
which is expected to play a large role in financing
this year's campaigns. Kesh described sending into the Suros office
as an undercover agent who could talk the talk with
Open Society executives. Kesh's goal wasn't fully spelled out in
the recording, but the gist was that an operative posing
as a potential donor could penetrate Soros's operation and make
secret videos exposing embarrassing activities. Sorrows, he assured the Others

(01:03:58):
has thousands of organizations on the left and league with him.
Kesh said that the name of the project was discovered
the networks. Again, this is all on the voicemail that
he left George Sources employee. Uh yeah, it continues. The
money that would be offered, Kesh said, wouldn't couldn't go
somebody that tries to interrupt him. He's like, wait, wait, wait,

(01:04:19):
wait wait, don't you dare interrupt me? Ingenious secret plan.
It's so dumb. The money that would be offered, Kesh said,
couldn't come from offstore British Virgin Island companies because soros
Is people don't want to take money from a group
like that. He claimed that Bill Clinton would take the
suspect cast cash, and Hillary Clinton would and Chelsea would.

(01:04:40):
This all continued for much longer than it should have.
At one point, O'Keefe and his reporters tried to find
Garat on LinkedIn so they could check her resume and
find ways to manipulate her into giving them entry into
what he called the Sorrows octopus quote. One member of
the team suggested to Kesh that he knew someone who
could infiltrate the Sorrows network, an English orthopedic surgeon with
a real heavy British accent who was in the US

(01:05:00):
and was more than happy to do anything he can
for us. The surgeon was sophisticated about technology and would
not have any problem with the cameras. The team members said,
he's a very talented guy, so I mean he'll be
able to pull it off. As Kesh mapped out the
covert attack, however, he had no idea that the only
person he was stinging was himself. She's probably going to
call me back, and if she doesn't, I can create
other points of entry. At that point, he like, while

(01:05:22):
still on the voicemail recording, James O'Keeffe looked up her
LinkedIn page and found out that he had revealed himself
to her, because when you look at someone on LinkedIn
while logged in on LinkedIn, it shows them that you've
looked at her profile, which he did, ask James O'Keefe,
and also on the fucking voicemail, because he got to
hear him realize that he had yoked himself over while

(01:05:46):
fucking himself over himself over. Yeah, and his his subordinates
are the one that realized he's done this, and they
like warn him of this, and it's recorded him like
frantically logging out, oh my god, it's so bad. What
a genius. Yeah, And then the next thing I'm assuming

(01:06:06):
you're going to tell me is that he then gets
his foot stuck in a bucket and yeah, falls down
a bunch of uh steps, and his hand headlands in
a trash bag, his headlines in a trash bag, and
then he farts for a minute and a half on
care right. Uh so, yeah, it's it's embarrassing and James

(01:06:27):
O'Keeffe is dumb, but he's still done a lot of damage.
So I don't want that, Like, I don't want his
incompetence to overshadow his his danger um. Now, I should
note that the only Republican of note that Project Veritas
has ever gone after was a guy named Mike Ellis,
Wisconsin State Senate president. They caught him on video talking
about setting up in a legal pack, something virtually all

(01:06:49):
politicians do, but most are smart enough not to talk
about directly. Project Veritas was paid fifty dollars to go
after Ellis, or at least it's presumed that he was
paid this money to go after Ellis. He was paid
by a guy named Erick O'Keeffe who's not related to him,
but Eric is the director of the Wisconsin Club for
Growth and he hated Ellis, so many people basically suspect
that he bribed Project Veritas to go after him. This

(01:07:10):
is again, the only meaningful case of Veritas ever going
after a Republican. Most of their money comes from bribes
larger than fifty thou dollars. They're major funders are people
like Robert Mercer, who also poured money into Bright Barton News,
and Charles and David Coke, who are also major Project
Veritas donors, although I should say David Coke used to
be a major Project Veritas donor. Now he is a

(01:07:31):
noted dead person. The Angels. Yeah, he's he's he's paying
the Angels to run undercover camera operations on the other Angels. Now.
Another backer of Project Veritas was Donald Trump, who put
twenty thousand dollars into the group before the two thousand
sixteen election and met with O'Keeffe numerous times. One additional

(01:07:51):
person who helped Project Veritas out in the two thousand
sixteen election was Bloodthirsty Mercenary and another frequent Bastard pod
side character, Eric Prince. Yeah Echo, Papa gets in on
the story. Uh yeah, I'm gonna quote yeah, Echo Papa, Baby,
I'm gonna quote now from an article in the Intercept
on Prince called the Complete Mercenary Quote. In late two

(01:08:13):
thousand fifteen or early two thousand and sixteen, Prince arranged
for O'Keefe and Project Veritas received training and intelligence and
elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides
Rubio Jr. According to a former Trump White House official
who discussed the Veritas training with Rubio, the former special
operative quit after several weeks of training, complaining of the
Veritas group wasn't capable of learning. O my god. Yeah,

(01:08:36):
there's not a lot of detail there, but it just
sounds should not be allowed to hold loaded weapons. They
are very dumb, sir. And I think it was more
training on like how to interrogate and like get people
to reveal like stuff based on like, you know, his
his work is in military intel operative. But they were
just dumb. All they know how to do is dress

(01:08:57):
up in stupid costumes and try to carry out bad
schemes like they they couldn't win. An actual intelligence operative.
Was like, well, let's try to train these guys. He
found out that they were essentially untrainable. Just middle school
Halloween costume level. Uh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's
Project Veritas. Yeah. Now, James O'Keefe O course, went hard

(01:09:18):
after Hillary Clinton during the campaign. Some of his schemes
fell flat, like when Project Veritas connived to have an
American by a Hillary Clinton shirt from a Democratic staffer
for a Canadian Citizen Project Veritas framed, this is the
campaign accepting a legal donations from a foreigner. The first question, Yeah.
They through a press conference and the first question was basically,
are you shipping us like waiting the campaign? Yeah, it's

(01:09:44):
so dumb. The scandals that were coming out of the
Trump campaign just like just like falling out of them,
like just tondling out by accident. Yeah, it's it's it's sad.
I should note though, that later in the campaign they
had more significant successes. At one point, they recorded to
mid level staffers with the Clinton campaign discussing illegal tactics

(01:10:04):
like vote rigging and provoking fights at rallies. The unedited
versions of the videos make it clear that at least
in most cases, the men were talking about theoretical ideas
schemes for dirty tricks that someone might do, rather than
stuff they had actually done. Still, what was in there
was damning enough that both men resigned. Now, that's not nothing,
but it's not the kind of thing that sways elections either,
by the standards of past successful O'Keefe schemes. Two thousand

(01:10:27):
and sixteen was positively sad. That may have had something
to do with why in the years Since the election
of Project Veritas has switched its intentions almost entirely towards
trying to prove the existence of anti conservative bias in
Silicon Valley. Most of Veritas's expose a s on this
have been the lowest sort of O'Keefe, fair outright lies
of editing or exaggerations hyped up to hell and back.

(01:10:48):
At one point, they recorded Jin and I, head of
responsible Innovation at Google, talking about Google's attempts to avoid
the same kind of foreign interference in the election that
had happened in two thousand and sixteen. Veritas edited her
to make it look like she was claiming Google plan
to influence the election. The video they posted was pulled
from YouTube due to a privacy complaint and the fact
that Veritas hadn't actually received permission to record. In a

(01:11:11):
medium post, Jing and I wrote about the nightmarish backlash
she received after the video went live. She was on
a plane when it launched, and when it touched down
quote I turned on my phone, I received the shock
of my life. I had received an enormous collection of
threatening calls, voicemails, text messages and emails from people I've
never met. Someone wrote your ideology will be shredded to pieces.
Just moments before you get executed for treason. You were living,

(01:11:33):
lended time and joy till then there were planting more
threats like that. I've never been so fearful. Yeah. Yeah,
this is a story that will be repeated. This is
kind of what happens when that right wing rage machine
touches down on people. In August two thousand nineteen, James
O'Keeffe published a series of interviews and leaked documents from
Google whistleblower Zach Vorhees. Vorhees claimed in the video that

(01:11:56):
Google's algorithm was inherently biased. The tranche of documents he
provided backed this up utterly failed to do so. The
Daily Beast rights quote before his complains that Google doesn't
surface conspiracy theory websites like info wars in one of
its new search algorithms. He insists that his information is
so valuable that he is a credible fear that Google
could be trying to offer me. Some say that you're
a hero. Some are going to say that you have

(01:12:17):
extreme moral courage. O'Keeffe told the former Google or in
the video. I've always thought that when the time came
to do the right thing in a big way. I
would always be the one that stood up and did
the right thing before. He's replied. O'keeps reporting failed to
note that its source, Mr. Vorhees, was somewhat less than credible.
On his social media or he spread claims that the
US government was controlled by Zionists. He ranted about q
and on and Pizza Gate, and repeatedly warned that vaccines

(01:12:39):
cause autism. The most objectionable claims pushed by vorhes were
his rampant and repeated anti Semitic statements here's the Daily
Beast again. What o'keep's video leaves out, though, is that
his much typed insider is not as credible as he
claims on social media, for he's as an avid promoter
of anti Semitic accusations that banks, the media, and the
United States government are controlled by Zionists. He even alleges

(01:13:00):
that zionist killed conservative publisher and O'Keefe mentor Andrew Breitbart,
who died of heart failure in two thousand twelve. It's
very simple. Either you go along with the Zionists or
you end up like Andrew Breitbart, or He's wrote in
January in a may tweet or he's accused Israel carrying
out the nine eleven attacks, and encourage Twitter users to
look up nine eleven related conspiracy theory content providing no

(01:13:20):
evidence of his claims. When this story broke, James O'Keeffe
defended his source on Twitter by noting, not every source
is a perfect angel. Good journalists know that this is true. Wow, yeah,
that's pretty bad. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's again going
back to the thing of just that they expect to

(01:13:42):
be afforded equal footing as The New York Times because
they're the other ideological perspective, ignoring the fact that their
sources are people who are, you know, men totally not
all there. Yeah, well it's not even yeah, it's it's

(01:14:04):
it's in like this case, I don't even I'm gonna
say that. Like, the issue isn't that he's mentally not
all there. The issue is that this guy is anti Semitic,
and like his claims if you look at his other stuff,
his claims that about like the Jewish run media, like
what he's essentially saying to Project Veritas. He didn't mention
his anti Semitic beliefs in that interview, but if you like,

(01:14:25):
look at his whole body of I guess work, so
to speak. It's clear that he's alleging Google's part of
this Jewish conspiracy. Like, that's important context to evaluate the
sources legitimacy. He's doing an evaluation of the media in
this case, he is their source on how the media works,
and his other prominent theories on how the media works

(01:14:48):
involve the Jews. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure he doesn't pluralize it.
I'm sure he just says the Jew. I think he
uses Zionist more often. Um, he's he's from the polier
end of the anti Semitic spectrum. Yeah. I could go
through the documents here and Veritas released one by one
and compare them to the claims made by Project Veritas,

(01:15:10):
but that would be a waste of everyone's time. There's
a good article on the next Web titled Project Veritas
and Whistleblower published bullshit data leak to docs Google employees,
but tears the whole pile of nonsense apart very authoritatively
from now, I'm just going to quote from their analysis
of the documents Veritas claimed were evidence of censorship. Quote
here's the t ld R. It's almost certain that This
is just everything the whistle blower could find by doing

(01:15:32):
a quick search on the employee share drive for inclusion, diversity,
and bias. It's almost all just PowerPoint slides and papers
the kind you see it your own weekly corporate meetings.
You'll find more shocking information on Google by visiting its
official blog. This, in my opinion, is nothing more than
Project Veritas disguising an attempt to docs Google employees as
a leak. There are fifteen documents here. They appear to

(01:15:52):
be randomly selected from an email chain discussing deep prioritizing
bright Bart because it spreads hate speech. Interestingly, the documents
clearly show that Google is concerned about fake news. There's
even a chart saying the company trusts the Wall Street
journal the most, CNN and Fox News about the same,
and the Young Turk's only slightly more than Info Wars. Ironically,
there is nothing in the censorship folder that pertains to

(01:16:12):
censorship in any way, shape or form. Yeah, but of
course got him. Yeah nailed Google to the Wall there,
uh by Google for supporting famously left leaning news source
the Wall Street Journalists. Now, of course, none of this
stopped President Donald Trump from retweeting the story, or using

(01:16:32):
it as further evidence for his claims that conservatives are
being silenced on social media. A few media organizations are
better positioned for the post truth era than Project Veritas,
But it is also true that Veritas and O'Keeffe are
well passed their high water mark of influence. O'Keefe success
and the huge amount of money he's made pretending to
be an undercover reporter have provided inspiration for a whole
generation of news grifters. Most of them are not as

(01:16:55):
good or as influential as he was. We might include
Hannah Giles, his old partner, in that category. Another intrigue
could be Caitlin Bennett, the Kent State gun girl, who
has repeatedly failed together any worthwhile news by going undercover
among left wing activists at protests. But there is one man,
a native of Portland, Oregon, who seems like he might
truly be a worthwhile successor to James O'Keeffe. I'm talking

(01:17:16):
about Andy no, the man crusading to have Antifa declared
a domestic terrorist group, and Jack. In part two we're
going to talk about his story. But that's that's the episode.
We're done, all right, yep, yea yea, y'all O'Keefe's side. Now,
how do you feel? I feel uh inspired the fact

(01:17:39):
that he could get that much accomplished with merely seven
million dollars and military backing, uh and not knowing how
to use a credit card. But oh, what's the real
story of an underdog? Yeah? He I don't know how
he does it? You know. Yeah, he's he's a hero.

(01:18:02):
So are we doing part two now? Yeah, we're gonna
do part two now, but you gotta plug your plug
doubles first. I understand you. You cast a pod yourself, sir.
I do. I cast a pod daily, week daily. It's
called the Daily Zeitgeist. I do it with one Mr
Miles Gray. You can hear me there every day of
the week, and you can follow me on Twitter at

(01:18:24):
Jack Underscore O'Brien. Now. Now, fun bit of German language
trivia for the listeners. Zite means news and geist means ghost. So, um,
you you are the host of the Daily News Ghost. Yeah, yeah, ship,
that's pretty cool. Yeah. Had I known that, I would

(01:18:46):
have named our show the Daily News Ghost. There's still time, Jack,
There's still time. Yeah, alright, Well, Uh, I also host
a podcast. I have forgotten its name, but I'm sure
listeners are aware of it. Sophie, Come on on, Sophie
just seems like she's, you know, really overwhelmed by your
ability inability to remember the name of that podcast. She

(01:19:09):
has been over my ship for a very long time,
and that's that's why our relationship works. Yeah. Uh. You
can find this podcast online along with the sources for
this episode on Behind the Bastards dot com. You can
find us on Twitter and Instagram and at Bastards pod.
You can buy a T shirt at Tea Public by
looking up Behind the Bastards, and you can buy boat

(01:19:31):
cutters from a variety of stores. Uh, just make sure
you get good quality once the harbor freight ones tend
to break pretty easily, you know. Super cheap boat cutters
usually aren't worth it. You're you're wanting to spend you know,
in the range kind of minimum if you want something
that's gonna last. You've always said that, and I've always
said that. When we were interviewing you for the intern job,

(01:19:53):
you said that same thing. M I mean, interview is
a really charitable way to describe you breaking into your backyard. Uh,
so thank you for that, Jack, What are you having
your hands these These are heavy duty bolt cutters. Yeah,
all right, that's the episode. Go fucking hug a cat

(01:20:13):
h

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: James O'Keefe: The Patron Saint of News Grifters