“I’d go with it,” said Lewandowski.
When Trump turned back to me, the whole tone of the conversation changed. He was no longer the friendly fan. He was the serious candidate. He asked us how much in earned media we thought he had netted so far, a month or so into the campaign. Stephen and I both estimated about $100 million. He thought that about right. He knew how the game was played. He asked a few more questions and then made his decision.
“Let’s wait until after the primaries.”
Trump said this with such conviction that I did not feel as if he were blowing me off. I could sense he was planning ahead, keeping the video on reserve until the time was right to go after Hillary. He and his three-person campaign staff were going to win the Republican nomination. That was a given. He certainly believed it. Lewandowski believed it. And John McEntee did not just believe it, he guaranteed it—100 percent.
I would see Trump one more time before the presidential debate in Las Vegas. It was January 2016. We were doing an investigation into Common Core in New Hampshire, and Trump was to make a speech in nearby Burlington, his one and only visit to Bernie Sanders’s Vermont. Hoping to get Lewandowski interested in our Common Core videos, I decided to check the event out.
The rally was a blast. Trump spoke at the jam-packed Flynn Theater. These were the Vermonters, I guessed, who didn’t quite feel the Bern. They were, to say the least, energized. Afterward a Trump aide took me backstage. There Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller noticed me and tugged on Trump’s sleeve to get his attention. Trump turned.
“Hey, there’s O’Keefe,” Trump shouted across the room. “They call me the wild man. He’s the real wild man. He crossed the Rio Grande as Osama bin Laden.”
I guess the Border Patrol brass were not the only ones who noticed.
Recognizing Propaganda
These early meetings with Trump convinced me he understood the media better than working journalists. I could appreciate that. I have been a student of the media since my Rutgers days, maybe before.
When I started at Rutgers, it had been almost sixty years since F. A. Hayek, an Austrian-British economist, wrote the political classic, The Road to Serfdom. His analysis works better for contemporary America than George Orwell’s does, I believe, for one simple reason: we have not yet arrived at 1984. We are, however, well on “the road to” that unholy destination.
In a section aptly titled, “The End of Truth,” Hayek describes the mind-set of the aspiring totalitarian: “The whole apparatus for spreading knowledge—the schools and the press, radio and motion picture—will be used to spread those views which, whether true or false, will strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority; and all information that might cause doubt or hesitation will be withheld.”1
If Hayek spoke against such comprehensive propaganda, others spoke on its behalf, none more influentially than Edward Bernays. Like Hayek, Bernays was born in Austria but moved to the United States as a boy. In his 1928 classic Propaganda, Bernays argued that even literate citizens are incapable of making their own decisions in that they are guided by “herd instincts and mere prejudice.”2 Bernays, who is Sigmund Freud’s nephew, made the case for an “invisible government,” one that would filter and explain complicated data in such a way that people would come to the conclusions the elite wanted them to.
The forces behind this invisible government—what we call the “deep state”—know better than to share this worldview with the public. It wars with the self-image Americans have of being a free people capable of making their own decisions. At Project Veritas, we believe that as long as they have the raw information made available to them, Americans can and will make good decisions. In fact, this idea is incorporated in the Veritas Vision Statement.
Sometimes, the elite’s real feelings just slip out. In February 2017, the cohosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe TV show, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, were expressing their frustration that President Trump was not allowing the major media to filter and explain what he was thinking. Instead, he was appealing directly to the American people. This troubled both of them, Brzezinski most notably.
“He is trying to undermine the media and trying to make up his own facts,” she told Scarborough. “And it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsens, he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think. And that, that is our job.”3 This kind of gaffe is common enough in the political-media complex that it has its own name, a “Kinsley gaffe,” in honor of journalist Michael Kinsley, who first identified the phenomenon.
Aware that she had inadvertently said out loud what she was thinking, Brzezinski tried to control the damage via Twitter, the very medium she and others criticized the president for using. Today I said it’s the media’s job to keep President Trump from making up his own facts, tweeted Brzezinski, NOT that it’s our job to control what people think.4 In an era before the internet, before citizens could review what broadcasters actually said, Brzezinski might have gotten away with denying the obvious. In 2017, people saw the denial for what it was: another textbook example of how the major media operate in their war against a threat like Donald Trump.
The investigative journalist working for the public interest is the propagandist’s natural enemy. The media, as communications guru Elihu Katz famously noted, can “construct reality and impose their construction on defenseless minds.”5 The independent journalist can deconstruct that “reality” and give citizens the information needed to make up their own minds.
On the one end of the journalist spectrum are the propagandists. For a politician, shading the truth comes with the job description. Journalists who do the same betray their craft. For the statist, Hayek reminded us, “Every activity must derive its justification from a conscious social purpose.”6 Journalists who yoke themselves to that “purpose” become, in effect, propagandists. They tend to avoid reporting that might subvert the social agenda of the cultural elites and, by default, allow waste, fraud, and abuse to fester in politically protected organizations.
When the COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, emailed Clinton campaign chair John Podesta that she “wants Hillary to win badly” and that “I am still here to help as I can,” she conceded that the social purpose of her powerful media enterprise was the same as Team Hillary’s.7 When the managing director of politics for CBS digital, Will Rahn, said of his media colleagues, “We were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer,”8 he acknowledged that the network’s primary purpose in 2016 was not to report the facts but to elect Hillary Clinton. Journalists did not have to “lie” to be with her. They simply had to suppress stories that worked against her interest and elevate those that worked on her behalf. The fact that essentially all of them were pulling in the same direction represented a collective giant step on the road to serfdom. As it turned out, our stories at Project Veritas did not work on “her” behalf. In fact, our stories threatened the propagandists’ control of the narrative, and, as expected, they retaliated.
Authoritarians prefer that ordinary citizens, especially citizen journalists, not speak up or speak out. They fear, as Hayek warned, that unfiltered information “might produce results which cannot be foreseen and for which the plan does not provide. It might produce something new, undreamt of in the philosophy of the planner.”9
We will not be silenced. At the heart of our mission, as mentioned, is veritas, the Latin word for “truth” and one of the three generally recognized “transcendentals,” the other two being goodness and beauty. These correspond respectively with science (the true), religion (the good), and the arts (the beautiful). In a state drifting leftward, as Hayek observed, authorities begin to question any activity within these fields if done for their own sake and “without ulterior purpose.” Truth, however, is not something that can be bent or broken. Truth is the way things are, not the way journalists wish the
y were.
One of the twentieth century’s great heroes, and mine as well, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, spoke to this issue in his memorable 1978 Harvard commencement address. “Harvard’s motto is veritas,” he reminded the graduates. “Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on its pursuit.”10 Solzhenitsyn’s knowledge came firsthand. The Gulag Archipelago author witnessed the workings of a totalitarian state up close, including from the inside of a prison camp.
What discouraged Solzhenitsyn, who had been living in the United States for several years, was the media’s indifference to truth and their unwillingness to pursue it. “One gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole,” he said. “It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment; there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification.”11 As he saw it, the media were squandering their freedom.
For a journalist, the overriding goal should not be to serve some transitory purpose but to pursue the truth, as Solzhenitsyn said, “totally.” Yes, we would all like to better the human condition, but to accomplish that we have to understand our present circumstances, and we can only achieve understanding through truth.
The postmodernists make this pursuit difficult. If Solzhenitsyn believed that truth was rooted “in man’s sense of responsibility to God,” the postmodernist rejects such absolutes out of hand. To the postmodernist, Solzhenitsyn’s ordered moral universe would seem quaint if not downright bigoted. As David Ernst argued in an insightful article on Trump and the postmodernists, the latter operate “according to just one moral imperative: discredit anything that other people presume to stand for goodness, because the belief that anything is superior to anything else inevitably results in prejudice, interpersonal strife, and inequality.”12
The postmodernist thinks nothing of dismissing or denying real information in order to help craft a political identity or form an agenda. If all truth is relative and personal, why not advance a “truth” that enhances power and facilitates social control? Fueling that advance is the postmodernist’s most potent energy source, political correctness. We dismiss the postmodern embrace of this phenomenon at our own risk. This is identity politics waged as war against the truth, against fact, against reason, ironically even against science.
As Hayek observed fifty years before anyone worried about climate change, “A pseudo-scientific theory becomes part of the official creed which to a greater or lesser degree directs everybody’s action.”13 Accepted orthodoxy on a wide range of subjects—the true, the good, and the beautiful—are all, said Hayek, “necessarily based on particular views about facts which are then elaborated into scientific theories in order to justify a preconceived opinion.”
More than a few pundits have observed that we are now past the point where citizens can agree on facts. The filter of political correctness makes serious conversations about jobs and economics impossible when one camp is employing the filter and the other is not. As to why any sane person would rely on such willful distortion, Ernst traces the answer to the oldest of human impulses, the need to acknowledge and punish sin, real or imagined. The more fault I find in thee, the holier I am than thou, the more power I should have over you and yours. The irony, of course, is rich. The postmodernists begin by tearing down a value system crafted and refined over the millennia and end up replacing it with a jerry-rigged monstrosity that is altogether more punitive.
The postmodern state does not have to flex its muscles. It need only whisper in the public’s ear. The fear of being shamed is far greater on the right than the fear of being arrested or censured. Elected Republicans in particular cringe at the thought of being called out by the press. The media have long insisted that Republicans are heartless. Today, they insist Republicans are also homophobic, sexist, racist, classist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, even “anti-science.” Anxious about being branded, surrounded in capital cities by press propagandists eager to do the branding, congressional Republicans would rather do nothing than risk a scarlet letter.
Report on fraud at the polls, and you want to bring back Jim Crow. Report on insecurity at the border, and you want to break up families. Report on refugee fraud, and you don’t care if dead babies wash up on beaches. Report on abuses inside the teachers unions, and you oppose civil rights and public education. Too often elected officials avoid public shame, no matter how unfounded, by abandoning common sense or withdrawing from the arena altogether. If these examples sound “partisan,” it is only because they fall outside the boundaries of an Overton window framed by a nearly monolithic media in their support of a shared, if ever shifting, “social purpose.”
No sooner do citizens yield to some new and artificial norm than the statists create a new norm with which to shame them. Who, for instance, could have predicted just three years ago that Bruce Springsteen would boycott the State of North Carolina “to show solidarity for those freedom fighters”? Without intending, Springsteen made Hayek’s case that the totalitarian-minded deform the language of virtue to serve their own ends. Here, Springsteen, the “Boss,” coopts a term once used to describe those fighting and dying to oppose tyranny to describe those lobbying with impunity for extra bathrooms. Progressives have been degrading the language for years in their push for marriage equality, economic freedom, social justice, and, of course, choice.
In the 2016 NFL season, the larger social purpose shifted dramatically when some NFL players openly began to sit or kneel during the national anthem, an unthinkable gesture just a year or two earlier. During the 2017 season, President Trump wished out loud that the players would be fired.14 Writing for the Sporting News, Michael McCarthy observed that the networks used their production capabilities at the televised NFL games “as a golden opportunity to demonstrate unity among players, coaches, and owners—and opposition to Trump’s comments.” To accomplish this, they instructed their cameramen to avoid crowd shots lest they show protesting fans. “By covering one of the most significant days in NFL history with rose-colored glasses,” reported McCarthy, “the networks cheated viewers. We got an incomplete picture of what really happened in stadiums on Sunday and Monday.”15 Unfortunately for the networks, citizens with cell phone cameras were capturing the truth, and many of their videos went viral. In the internet age, content that runs against the monolithic grain will almost inevitably appear “partisan.” Whether the networks can bend the majority of football fans to their will remains to be seen.
“The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends,” said Hayek.16 Those who could not be lulled into throwing off, say, the Judeo-Christian concept of marriage or the will to defend the nation against Islamic terrorism or respect for the flag could be shamed into doing it. These new norms do not emerge organically through trial and error over long periods of time as is true of more traditional norms. No, they are manufactured in the nation’s political and media centers and used as weapons to subdue the nation’s reluctant citizens. In the midst of these centers, only slightly more real than the outlandish “Capital” of The Hunger Games, even good citizens lose their way.
“In spite of the abundance of information, or maybe because of it,” said Solzhenitsyn forty years ago, “the West has difficulties in understanding reality such as it is.”17 In our own humble way at Project Veritas, we strive to improve that understanding.
Meeting Alan Schulkin
A month after meeting the prize-winning phys ed teacher Robert Klein at an Atlantic City teachers convention, Project Veritas journalist Laura Loomer found a little more Veritas magic upon meeting Alan Schulkin at a United Federation of Teachers holiday party in New York City.
Like Klein, Schulkin is one of those frumpy middle-aged guys who c
annot resist sharing his soul with a twenty-three-year-old blonde. Always opportunistic, Laura got a break here. She got a break by being ready to pursue a new angle when one presented itself—again, controlled discovery. Schulkin wasn’t a teacher or an administrator. He was the Manhattan Democratic representative on the city’s Board of Elections. Introducing herself as a political consultant, Laura wasted no time getting to the heart of the issue once she realized what Schulkin did for a living.
As Laura was aware, fraudulent voting had been one of our more consistent targets over the last several years. Although we had not finalized anything, we were well along in our plans to investigate election fraud of all sorts in the 2016 election. As tempting as it was to release the video Laura captured right away, I thought it would work better with what would prove to be our “Rigging the Election” series, so we held it until October 10, 2016, just four weeks before the presidential election.
“You think they should have voter ID in New York?” Laura asked Schulkin.1
“Yeah, they should ask for your ID,” said Schulkin. “You go into a building, you have to show them your ID. I think there is a lot of voter fraud.” He elaborated, “People don’t realize, certain neighborhoods in particular they bus people around to vote.” When Laura asked which neighborhoods, Schulkin affirmed her suggestion about black and Hispanic neighborhoods, adding, “and Chinese too.”
Laura prodded the commissioner about Muslims wearing burkas. “They detonate bombs in the public schools, which we are using. That could disrupt the whole election,” Schulkin responded, now hypothetically. “Your vote doesn’t even count, because they can go in there with a burka and you don’t know if they are a voter.” Nor did Schulkin have much faith in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ID program.
“He gave out ID cards, de Blasio,” said Schulkin. “That’s in lieu of a driver’s license, but you can use it for anything. But they didn’t vet people to see who they really are. Anybody can go in there and say, ‘I am Joe Smith, I want an ID card.’ ”
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