American Pravda
My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News
James O’Keefe
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Dedicated to the memory of James E. O’Keefe Sr.
who built things out of nothing,
who was told,
“it can’t be done,”
but who did it anyway.
And Jeffrey Wigand, who’s out on a limb, does he go on television and tell the truth? Yes. Is it newsworthy? Yes. Are we going to air it? Of course not. Why? Because he’s not telling the truth? No. Because he is telling the truth. That’s why we’re not going to air it. And the more truth he tells, the worse it gets.
—Al Pacino as 60 Minutes producerLowell Bergman in The Insider, 1999
The press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary. And one would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harvard commencement address, 1978
Meeting Citizen Trump
Mr. Trump will see you now,” said a secretary, one of several moving around the outer office, each better looking than the last. I was ushered in. The view of Central Park beyond was pretty overwhelming, especially for an everyday guy like me from New Jersey. Trump smiled and stood to greet me.
“That pimp and hooker thing you did, wow!” said Trump. “That was incredible.” He turned to Sam Nunberg, the Republican consultant who arranged the meeting, “They shut down ACORN!” I was flattered that he took our work seriously, but he did not agree to this meeting to sing my praises. He was a man with a plan. In 2011, Trump generated a lot of publicity—or, what they call in the business, “earned media”—when he challenged President Obama’s birth certificate. Although virtually all of the press was negative, Trump positioned himself in the public eye as the president’s equal, someone Obama had to take seriously. When I saw this play out, I could see in Trump a kindred spirit, someone who understood the media establishment and knew how to play it against itself. In 2012, Trump flirted with a presidential run but did not pursue it.
In 2013, Obama still interested him. From what I gathered that day, Trump was not a “birther,” never was. He was confident Obama was born in the United States, but he suspected Obama had presented himself as a foreign student on application materials to ease his way into New York’s Columbia University, maybe even Harvard too, and perhaps picked up a few scholarships along the way. Trump had reason to believe Obama was capable of this kind of mischief. In May 2012, Breitbart News unearthed a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Obama’s literary agency at the time, Acton & Dystel. In the booklet, Obama claimed to have been “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”1
“This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me—an agency assistant at the time,” said agent Miriam Goderich in response. “There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii.”2 Indeed, Goderich admitted to writing the sentence about Kenya but never stated where she got the idea in the first place. Beyond America’s newsrooms, people doubted Goderich’s explanation, but those newsrooms aborted the story in the womb. They did that often. In 2013, Obama’s Columbia records remained sealed. Trump was hoping my colleagues and I might take an interest in finding out what mysteries those records held.
“Nobody else can get this information. Do you think you could get inside Columbia?” As I explained, that was not exactly our line of work. We were journalists, not private eyes. But Trump does not give up easily. For at least half an hour, even though there were others in the room more important—Citizens United’s David Bossie among them—he spoke to me as if Project Veritas were the only thing in the world worth talking about. I have heard the same said of Bill Clinton, but I can vouch for Trump’s charisma.
Trump has a thing for magazine covers. Framed covers lined the office walls, and stacks of magazines with his image on them piled up on his desk. Yes, this was a man who knew a thing or two about earned media. Trump would ride that media, good and bad, as far as it could take him, earning by some estimates as much as $5 billion in free publicity during the election.3 His advisors told him he could not win on earned media, and he proved them wrong. “Media is everything,” Andrew Breitbart often reminded me, and Trump would prove him right.
At the end of our discussion, Trump shook my hand, encouraged me to keep up the good work, and half-whispered, “Do Columbia.” He then posed for a photo with me in front of a framed copy of a Playboy magazine from 1990. I had earlier shown him a Playboy from 2011 in which my name was mentioned on the cover: “The Dirty Tricks of James O’Keefe.” Trump one-upped me. As he told me, he was “the rare guy whose picture had been on the cover.” It was that cover we posed in front of.
Trump had Keith Schiller, a tall, tough-looking guy with close-cropped white hair, escort me out. A former NYPD detective and Trump’s security director at the time, Schiller would follow Trump to the White House. It was Schiller who got the nod to go to LA and fire FBI honcho James Comey. If you met Schiller, you would understand why Trump sent him. He is pure, understated Alpha. Picture the character Mike in Breaking Bad. His instruction this time was to take me to the Trump store and give me however many ties I wanted to take away. Ties were apparently the currency of the realm. On leaving Trump Tower with my booty of ties, it never crossed my mind that one day Trump would be president. I did think, however, he could make one hell of an ally.
As the events of 2016 proved, Trump and I had something fundamental in common, not so much a shared ideology as a shared adversary. At Project Veritas, we take no real position on issues beyond free speech and honest government, and in 2016, let alone in 2013, who even knew what Trump’s ideology was. Historian Victor Davis Hanson accurately describes President Trump as “a reflection of, not a catalyst for,” the widespread anti-statist, anti-globalist resentment that got him elected.4 The adversary we shared was a powerful one, what might well be called the deep state–media complex. Although the media could exist without the deep state, the deep state could not exist without the media. By exposing the waste, fraud, and abuse of the administrative state, we inevitably disrupt the media’s relationship with government and organizations that work with government. Like Trump, Project Veritas is a disruptor. If we have an ideology, it is less “conservative” than anti-statist, anti–status quo.
In their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky anticipated a showdown like the one that played out in the campaign of 2016. By 1988, the dominant mass-media outlets were all large, powerful corporations. Although restricted in some ways by their own ideological blinders, the authors made some useful observations, accurately describing the establishment media “as effectiv
e and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship and without overt coercion.”5 If Chomsky and Herman erred, it was in thinking that the deep state would inevitably skew right. It has not.
In the way of evidence, Donald Trump pulled just 4 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia. In the more affluent neighborhoods—those home to the lobbyists, journalists, contractors, intelligence officers, and high-level bureaucrats who comprise the deep state—Trump fared scarcely better than he had in the poorer ones. In no precinct, not even the most posh, did he secure more than 15 percent of the vote.6
Some say that the real difference between the dominant American media and the old Soviet Pravda is that the Russian people knew they were being lied to. The fact that Pravda is the Russian word for “truth” fooled almost no one. When Russians heard the word Pravda, they heard “power.” They had little choice but to go along with the lies at least publicly, but privately they rejected them and, very privately, they joked about them.
Pravda was allowed to deceive because no force in the Soviet Union could stop it. The New York Times and its media allies and imitators continue to mislead or deceive their audiences for much the same reason. Up until November 2016, no force could stop them either. In the months since, they have done everything in their power to prove that 2016 was a mistake. Indeed, they openly seek to reverse it, and they may yet succeed.
To be sure, there are profound differences between Pravda and the major media: the former was denied any freedom; the latter gave theirs away. Famed Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn experienced both. “Nothing is forbidden,” he observed of the American media in his provocative 1978 speech at Harvard, “but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.” In 1978, fatalist that he was, Solzhenitsyn could not have anticipated how self-censorship for the sake of fashion would harden into statist dogma.
Inevitably, there will be a gap between the way the world is and the way the journalist presents that world. Human nature intrudes. What is not inevitable is that the gap should widen. With the introduction of the internet and new recording technology, the gap between the real and the reported ought to be narrowing. As all parties agree, it is not. The new technologies have democratized news reporting, but the major media, panicked by their loss of control, reject or simply ignore sources that challenge their desired narrative. Having chosen a narrative, they will pound away at it even if it seems to be leading nowhere, believed by few, laughed at by many, as CNN has done with its Russia reporting. If need be, the media and their deep state allies will punish those who thwart their largely shared agenda.
Innocence of Muslims producer Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, now known as Mark Basseley Youssef, can attest to the consequences of countering the deep state narrative. His was the amateurish video that allegedly prompted the assault on the American consulate in Benghazi. Although he was a citizen exercising his First Amendment rights, Obama officials buried Youssef in a Texas prison on a hastily processed parole violation to help sell their lie. The media said nary a word in protest.
In cases like Benghazi, when the major media narrative does not reflect reality, citizens find themselves yelling at their TV sets or giving up on mainstream news altogether. Ultimately, they are forced to choose between what the major media report or what their experience shows them. This is where the new alternative media come into play. These media have been accused of indoctrinating their audience or even deceiving them, but that is not how they succeed.
The alternative media succeed by clarifying and confirming the audience’s reality. With the help of alternative journalists, many of them without establishment credentials, citizens can see more of the world more clearly than they ever could before. They have had enough of the major media’s misrepresentations, omissions, lies, and journalistic agenda to appreciate the truth when they see it. Importantly too, when they see the truth, the internet gives them the wherewithal to confront the lies. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil,” Edmund Burke reportedly said, “is for good men to do nothing.” In the age of the internet, there is no excuse for doing nothing.
I started out as one those citizens yelling at the news, in my case the New York Times. As a student at Rutgers University in the early years of this century, I was particularly troubled by the way the Times filtered information through the prism of political correctness, a phenomenon that Professor Angelo Codevilla sees as no less than a “war against nature’s law and its limits.”7 In nature, I would argue, we receive information by way of our senses. The gift of reason enables us to filter this information through our own experiences and the collective wisdom of our past, which together constitute common sense.
Victor Davis Hanson describes the resulting “truth” as “empirical, hushed and accepted informally by ordinary people from what they see and hear on the ground.”8 The competing truth, Hanson argues, the one “voiced on the news and by the government,” is “often abstract and theoretical.” Too often the media today ask us to disregard our senses, reject reason, and accept a theoretical construct of events that defies common sense and conforms to a prewritten script. Unfortunately, as I came to see, where the Times goes, the other media almost inevitably follow.
To compensate, I started my own newspaper, the Centurion. When the PC prism distorted reality, my goal was to straighten it out. Having been born in 1984—prophetic, huh?—I came along just at the time newspapers were losing traction and video was taking hold. It was at Rutgers that I first sensed the power of undercover video. One of my guiding lights, at least in terms of strategy, was Saul Alinsky, celebrated author of Rules for Radicals. Troubled by Rutgers speech codes, my pals and I decided to pull an Alinsky on the administrators and force them to “live up to their own book of rules.”
“Ancestry” was one of the sensitivities protected by the speech codes. Given my Irish roots, I felt I had as much right to be microaggressed as anyone else on campus. So on St. Patrick’s Day 2005, I and my coconspirators arranged a sit-down with the hapless Rutgers dining hall administrator, video discreetly rolling throughout our meeting.
The fellow serving as our “personal advisor” informed the woman that we “had some unpleasant and uncomfortable experiences in the dining halls.” What made me uncomfortable, I explained, was that “the dining halls here at Rutgers serve Lucky Charms.” I showed the poor woman the box and recounted my personal angst over “the negative stereotypes of Irish Americans” reflected in the leprechaun imagery. How we managed to do this with straight faces I still don’t know.
For the flak catchers at Rutgers it was pure lose-lose: either they slight the feelings of a “marginalized” ethnic minority or they ban Lucky Charms from the dining hall. The administrators chose the safer of the two options. They got rid of the Lucky Charms. We posted the video on YouTube and watched the counter go nuts. I saw immediately that video had a viral power that print simply did not have.
This book will document the transformation in the media, in part through my observations of the world at large and in my part through my own struggles, occasionally brutal, with the forces of media and government. As I hope to make clear, the deep state–media complex and its supporters still have not come to grips with this transformation. As a case in point, in early 2017 they helped push 1984 to the top of the bestseller list as therapy, as a way of making sense of Trump’s ascension. What they failed to understand was that Orwell was writing about them. “They” are the “Party,” the ones who deny that reality is something “objective, external, existing in its own right,” the ones who insist others remain equally blind. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” observed protagonist Winston Smith. “It was their final, most essential command.”9
Consider, for instance, the case of my friend
David Daleiden. He and his group, Center for Medical Progress, spent more than a year recording undercover video at Planned Parenthood clinics across the country. In perhaps his most shocking video, a young clinician picks through a tray of body parts pulled from a “fetal cadaver”—a heart, a lung, a brain—and discusses the market value of each.10 Daleiden recorded this during a long unedited segment. The images were so shocking and shifted the public consciousness so much they prompted Hillary Clinton to concede, “I have seen the pictures from them and obviously find them disturbing.”11 Admitted Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta in a leaked email, “The tapes do hurt.”12
The major media, however, refused to show the videos. Planned Parenthood took advantage of the void and redefined the contents of the videos for those who failed to watch them online. Since faked criminal videos hit, politicians in 24 states have tried to cut patients’ access to Planned Parenthood, Planned Parenthood tweeted.13 That was the official party line, and they were sticking to it: Daleiden’s videos, like ours, they said, were “faked.” Friendly prosecutors in California and Texas saw to it that they were “criminal” as well, arresting Daleiden under various pretenses. Hillary quickly rejected the evidence of her eyes and ears. And the media chose to ignore what millions of ordinary Americans had undeniably seen.
Undercover video has enabled citizens to reopen their eyes and ears. We prove visually—cinema verité—that the statist narratives citizens are fed are often false. Our visuals pressure the media and political class to realign their selectively edited narrative with the inarguable reality we present. Technology is facilitating a sea change in the consciousness of America. We take the filters off. An educated, free people do not need them. We have enough faith in our fellow citizens to believe that once exposed to veritas they can make sound decisions for a great, lasting, and moral society.
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